Transcript
(lighthearted guitar music)
My name is Yvonne
Grissett, U.S. Army Veteran
and I was a 94 Bravo,
a cook.
I like to bake cakes from scratch.
Cakes mean love, home, peace,
family, togetherness.
I dream of owning my own cake restaurant.
I've always baked,
even in the years that I was lost.
(ominous music)
I went into the Army.
I was 19 years old,
right outta high school
looking for The American Dream
and I actually got The American Nightmare.
I married another soldier
who physically and sexually
assaulted me for two years.
It was humiliating, devastating,
it was vile, degrading, it
was the worst time of my life.
I would just drink.
Ultimately, I ended up
living under a bridge.
I had a cardboard box
that I had flattened out
and some bags of clothes,
and it was my life.
My alcoholism progressed to
full-fledged drug addiction.
I was resolved that I
had a moral deficiency
and this was my lot in life.
That was it.
I was diagnosed with PTSD in 2011.
It was like a weight was lifted
because some of the thoughts
and things that I did,
I could see how it resulted from the PTSD,
that I wasn't just
drinking myself to death,
I was self-medicating.
Then I started having panic attacks.
I saw my ex-husband on the train.
The next day I saw him again.
Then I started seeing
him in the grocery store
or on side streets.
My solution was, I'ma stay in the house,
I'm not goin' anywhere.
Seven or eight months
later, I was in my house
with knives stashed all around
my house to protect myself
and I knew that I needed help.
So I made myself get up
and get out and go to VA.
The first therapy that I
agreed to participate in
was CPT.
And I began to recognize
how the PTSD affected my thinking patterns
so that I could make different
choices behaviorally.
Then I took prolonged exposure twice
and it was a relief.
It was something but
I knew I had just scratched
the surface of my PTSD.
I knew I had more work to do.
I wanted to address the sexual assault
that I had experienced in the army.
My therapist suggested EMDR.
We would process some of
the hardest memories I had
of my trauma.
I was reluctant.
I didn't wanna talk about it
but I knew that
if I wanna get rid of it,
I gotta do the work.
And I agreed.
I would explain to her some
of the worst experiences
that I remember.
I remember one time,
I was laying in bed and
somebody punched me in my face
and was beating me.
I didn't know who it
was who was attacking me
but when I finally opened my eyes,
here it is my husband
attacking me and beating me
and he had this look like
a monster on his face.
We processed that with EMDR.
And Doctor Dor said some statements,
she asked me to repeat it.
She says that I'm okay, I'm strong,
and I repeated it.
And she said, I matter,
and when I said, I matter,
it came up out of the depths of me,
I matter.
I
matter.
I said it maybe 10 times
back to back to back
I matter.
I matter.
Yeah.
I matter.
I never even fathomed that I mattered.
It was just powerful.
It's powerful now.
(happy music)
And I walked out of that
session like a human begin
like powerful,
strong,
and like courageous,
like I went in the military.
And that's what EMDR did.
EMDR did that.
I think a person owes themself, you know,
to make a commitment to themselves
to do the best that you can for yourself,
especially if you're a veteran.
The responsibility is that you
learn about your diagnosis.
You learn about the treatment options
because you never know what can work.
My willingness to try something different
is what catapulted me to
the person that I am today.
And I don't think I'm marvelous.
I don't think I'm there yet. (laughs)
But when I opened the cake restaurant,
I'll be the best me that I can be.
That's my dream.