Complex PTSD Memoir for Vancouver: Dr. John A. King’s #dealwithit

#dealwithit is my complex PTSD memoir. It is not a clinical textbook. It is the story of what happened when the past came back all at once, and how I tried to rebuild after that.

Life is not chronological. Life is a collection of experiences, a tapestry woven over time. I find it impossible to tell this story starting at the chronological beginning, because what I want to convey doesn’t start there. So I begin at a middle-ish point, then head back, then move forward to the today I was writing in. That shape is deliberate. The book reads the way the years felt.

What the memoir covers

In 2008 the past returned without warning. Childhood sexual abuse I had not been carrying in daylight came back hard enough to flatten the life I had built. I named that collapse John-A-Geddon. What I was living with after that was complex PTSD, and it took the marriage, the career, and the health I thought I still had.

The pages that follow are my struggles and victories, the battles lost and the ones still in process. Some ground gets covered more than once on purpose. One part of PTSD can hit many rooms of a life, so I come at the same wound from different doors.

I am not writing as Dr FirstnameOnly with forty-seven tidy secrets. The voice is choppy and sarcastic on purpose. Read it as a work in progress, because that is what I was when I wrote it, and what I still am.

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Mel’s side of the same years

Melissa does not sit quietly in the margins. After each chapter she answers in Mel’s Turn, her own view of the same stretch of years. If you came for a complex PTSD memoir that includes the person who stayed, that is why those sections exist.

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This is for personal reflection, not medical or crisis advice. If you are in danger or crisis, contact emergency services or a crisis line in your area.