Living with PTSD: My story

By Dennis J. Freeman

My strategy during my childhood was survival. My brothers and my friends used to make out strategies on how navigate going through all of the gang territory in Long Beach where I lived. I had to fight off and maneuver around advances from my uncle’s live-in partner.

BUT the most difficult challenge

I faced was surviving my father’s constant tongue-lashings and beatings.

Sometimes I felt like my dad would beat me if I coughed the wrong way. This is not about just getting whippings as a kid for doing something wrong. I love my father, but my dad would beat first and ask questions later. Now how has all this impacted me? It impacted me a great deal.

I am in my 50s, and yet the trauma of my childhood has left me scarred. Several years ago, I was diagnosed with having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of the verbal and physical abuse I received in my childhood.

How bad was it? Well, one day as a broken teenager, I walked up to the top of the football stadium bleachers at Long Beach Millikan High School (the school I attended at the time) and contemplated tak- ing my life. The only thing that saved me that day was God.

I had gone to church all of my life. And at that moment, I just about gave up hope. The demoralizing taunting and beatings with wires, switches and extension cords were just too much. I felt worthless. My father constantly reminded me that I would never amount to anything.

Then again, my brothers would get the same treatment. My dad was an equal opportunity beater, except with me things were a bit extreme. I can vividly picture one specific night my dad beat me. I remember my mother putting Vaseline all over my body to heal the wounds I received as I screamed out in pain from the whipping I got.

Covering up things was almost a way of life in my household. Whenever I or one of my other 10 siblings would get a real good beating, my mom would write a note to the school excusing us from participating in physical education or gym class. And whenever my brothers and sisters and I would bring those notes, the ladies at the front desk would always have questions like they knew what was up. The straw that broke the camel’s back was one day with me was when my dad backslapped me, drug me by the legs from the front yard to the backyard, and proceeded to wrap me up in a 20-foot coiled wire, choking the life out of me. I knew things were bad