Being Hunted while Being the Hunter: Life with PTSD
By Susanna Olmi
Susanna Olmi (she/her) is an Italian art historian and writer based in Haarlem, The Netherlands, with a BA in Conservation of Cultural Assets and an MA in History and Criticism of Art.
As someone diagnosed with PTSD, I am constantly hunted: by memories, flashbacks, nightmares.
PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is the consequence of the exposure to traumatic situations that irremediably change one’s mind, body, and life experience. Officially included in the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) since 1980, it has found its rightful place among recognized mental health conditions.
Receiving a diagnosis of PTSD means going over the last months or years of your life looking for those episodes you previously labelled as overreactions, that are actually neon-bright symptoms of unresolved traumatic stress.
I officially received my diagnosis of PTSD in 2023 —following, among other things, becoming half-deaf and undertaking emergency brain surgery— although I have been suffering from it since 2018, when I was involved in a bus accident I survived by chance. At the time, I didn’t know what PTSD was and, even though I realized I had experienced something that exceeded normality, I had no words to define what I felt. Nevertheless, that was when I started experiencing flashbacks and when I understood what being hunted really means.
The Oxford English Dictionary, under the voice ‘hunt,’ has the definition of ‘to search, seek (after or for anything), esp. with eagerness and exertion,’ and ‘to pursue with force, violence, or hostility.’ Suffering from PTSD, then, is being hunted: by thoughts, images, flashbacks; it is a constant hunting party against one’s self, conducted by your own memories and directed by your experiences. If being hunted means ‘to go eagerly in search of, search for, seek (esp. with desire and diligence),’ then living with PTSD means being the game’s prey and its hunter at the same time: running away from something (fear, memories, flashbacks) while chasing something else (safety, calm, relief); it means having no choice but to take part in the hunt while despising every moment of it, running from something you will never escape, as it comes from inside of you.
The hunt metaphor is popular among PTSD victims in describing our relationship with trauma, testifying how our experiences are similarly perceived, even though the events themselves differ. In the end, we all feel chased and drained because of what we saw, heard, and felt, that keeps coming back to hunt us in the form of uninvited images, robbing us of our sense of safety.
Not only this: another common experience of PTSD victims is what author and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk presents in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma: ‘when words fail, haunting images capture the experience and return as nightmares and flashbacks.’ Indeed the hunting metaphor is often accompanied by the haunting one, meaning ‘to visit frequently or habitually; to come up or present themselves as recurrent influences or impressions, esp. as causes of distraction or trouble; to pursue, molest.’ In The Body Keeps the Score, van der Kolk recounts the story of a couple who, having survived a car crash, were unable to fall asleep at night, as ‘they could not stop the images that were haunting them.’
Those ‘images’ are flashbacks, the quintessential symptom of PTSD: essentially our brains’ way of letting us know that the traumatic experiences we thought healed still have a tangible effect on our mental and physical health. Flashbacks are always triggered by something, as meaningful or inconsequential (some of my personal triggers have been: eating a plum; catching sight of my bare wrists; having warm feet while wearing my Dr. Martens boots). Once a flashback is triggered, there is no going back until it has run its course, and everything you can do in the meantime is scream your heart out and hope it will end quickly. Indeed, when experiencing flashbacks, our bodies react much earlier and faster than our minds, leaving us in painful fight-or-flight mode: ‘by the time we are fully aware of our situation, our body may already be on the move,’ reacting in ways we haven’t agreed to.
Having flashbacks related to PTSD, then, is being sent back in time to our physical and psychological state during the traumatic event. It is similar to coming to your senses in the middle of a hunting party with no knowledge of where you are, how you got there, and what is happening, only to suddenly realise that you are the prey and something is hunting you, so you better run, and fast. What exactly that ‘something’ chasing you is, it is not definable, disorientation being an essential part of the PTSD hunting game. Only once the tide of panic has subsided, the tears have been swept away, the screams died down, only then you get to come back to yourself, looking for —chasing— what was it that triggered a flashback.
Author Hanya Yanagihara has written painfully insightful passages about the long-lasting consequences of PTSD and C-PTSD in her novel A Little Life: when describing the main character Jude, struggling with flashbacks, Yanagihara writes that his brain was ‘vomiting memories, (...) flooding everything else,’ capturing the impossibility of stopping flashbacks’ merciless assault. In another passage, Yanagihara describes the first time Jude has suffered from flashbacks:
He was in his first year of law school when his life began appearing to him as memories. He would be doing something everyday (...) and suddenly, a scene would appear before him, a dumb show meant only for him. (…) his life coming back to him in pieces.
This experience of disjointedness is typical in trauma survivors. In The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization, the authors explore how, after being exposed to trauma, part of the victim’s personality attempts to go on with daily life, while ‘at least one and often several emotional parts of the personality remain stuck in an action pattern that was initiated at the time of trauma and was principally defensive in nature.’
Another typical schism caused by trauma is the perception of being separated from your own body, particularly common in medical-related PTSD. In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, author Gabrielle Zevin describes her main character Sam, who has a physical disability, writing that ‘this dissociation was something Sam has experienced many times— the feeling that your body, when it was sick, was no longer your own.’ Yanagihara expresses the same point about Jude: ‘(...) the unpredictability of this schedule —and his body, although it was his in name only, for he could control nothing of it— exhausted him.’
Having your own sense of self split by flashbacks is equal to being hunted. Through the narration of A Little Life, Yanagihara visually describes Jude’s traumatic memories as hyenas hunting him:
He felt sometimes as if his months with Caleb were a pack of hyenas, and every day they chased him, and every day he spent all his energy running from them, trying to escape being devoured by their snapping, foaming jaws.
Therefore, if hunting means ‘to follow (as a hound does); to track,’ living with PTSD means constantly being chased by details of your memories.
Memories hunt trauma survivors as maddening what if’s and perhaps’s: if I wouldn't have hopped on that bus in 2018, perhaps I wouldn't have had to undergo brain surgery two years later. If I would have had a better diet, perhaps I wouldn't have become partially deaf. If I would have pushed myself to eat, even though my anxiety was so strong it made food an impossible thought, perhaps I would still have my hearing intact. If I would have gone to a different doctor— if I would have listened to my body— if I would have fought more to be listened to— if, if, if: an endless nightmarish chant I singsong to myself in my worst moments, a hunting party specifically designed for myself, instructed to come and get me each time I fall into my own dark thoughts.
Lastly, an extensive part of cohabiting with PTSD is being hunted down by nightmares. These are both the common ones we have in our sleep, and the ones you make up in your own awake mind, driving yourself to desperation.
The sleeping kind of nightmares can nevertheless be horrifying. If it is true that everyone has nightmares, there is an essential difference between occasional nightmares and nightmares caused by traumatic events. In the first case, once you realize you are awake, a sense of relief washes over you: I am safe, I am here, I am me. Opposite to this, when the nightmare is trauma-induced, that essential step of bone-deep relief never comes. Instead, it is replaced by the horrendous awareness that you are still trapped in your nightmare, chased by fear and paranoia, and being awake does not prevent your mind from creating endless spirals of what if’s.
This being said, if living with PTSD is being chased, hunted, followed, trapped in, it also means the opposite: ‘to search (a place) thoroughly and keenly for something which one hopes to find there.’
Indeed, the only way I managed to deal with life while suffering from PTSD during the past seven years was by becoming the hunter myself, ‘seeking (after or for anything), esp. with eagerness and exertion’ something: clarity, peace of mind, stillness amidst chaos.
Ultimately, life with PTSD is a state of passivity that, to be dealt with, must become one of activity: from being hunted by flashbacks, to learning how to manage them; from letting memories follow you, to reaching the opposite way.
Adopting an active approach toward my trauma has helped me to first survive it and then learn how to live in its company. Through different therapists, countless books on the topic, many sessions of yoga and meditation, through moving abroad and building a new life here, I turned myself into the chaser: of life, as peaceful as I can get it.
Now, I am the one reaching for things, while yes, I am still being hunted: once trauma touches you, you never cease being the prey. But you can add something yours to it: ways to cope, tricks that make your dark moments a little easier to survive, acceptance of your new situation.
As trauma is something that splits lives, it seems only fitting that, as victims, we end up covering the roles of both hunter and prey, turning the what if game to our advantage: if I am still chased on the daily, then I am not standing still, waiting for memories to consume me; if I recognize the signs of it, then I know what to look out for; if I know what to be aware of, then I know how to move around it.
And if I repeat this mantra enough to myself, then I will believe it, eventually.
Bibliography
Black, Donald W., and Grant, Jon E. DSM-5® Guidebook : The Essential Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Vol. Fifth edition. American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2014. https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy.uba.uva.nl/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1610168&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Harris, Maxine. “The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization.” Psychiatric Services (Washington, D.C.) 58, no. 9 (2007): 1232–1232. doi:10.1176/ps.2007.58.9.1232.
van der Hart, Onno, Nijenhuis, Ellert. R. S., and Steele, Kathy. The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. W W Norton & Co, 2006.
van der Kolk. Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, Penguin Group, 2014. https://archive.org/details/the-body-keeps-the-score-pdf/page/n197/mode/2up.
Yanagihara, Hanya. A Little Life. Picador, 2015.
Zevin, Gabrielle. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Vintage, 2023.
The Oxford English Dictionary. “Haunt.” Accessed 10th February 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/haunt_v?tab=meaning_and_use#2131159.
The Oxford English Dictionary. “Hunt.” Accessed 10th February 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hunt_v?tab=meaning_and_use.