Screaming Chickens Inspire Meltdown

For the last month, I’ve pulled out of my ‘derealization’ weird feeling stage and finally begun to feel more normal and focused. I really like this whole ‘feeling okay’ thing and doing activities I enjoy and couldn’t do before: reading, watching more dramatic shows (still have some barriers on that, but my potential list has expanded considerably) playing adventure games, researching various topics, venturing out to explore, going on mini-adventures, socializing, etc.

So yesterday’s backslide was no picnic!

Cat has chickens, and I’ve been a chicken owner myself for years at this point, so I’m pretty fine with it and know how it all works. Goodly enough. However, lately one hen (an older one) is getting increasingly neurotic and the rooster is tormenting her and she’s acting out more and more. Today, she just went off, while alone and untouched, for over a half an hour of full-throated screaming. Not clucking– SCREECHING at the top of her lungs! Like the alarm call from a predator. When she went off, it set several other hens and the rooster off. A crowing rooster is nothing next to a screeching one! Its an unbelievably vile noise, not just loud, but it rips your eardrums like fingernails on a chalkboard– only WORSE!

Usually when the chickens go off, I just walk outside to make sure they’re okay, they’ll see me– and they shut up. If I look out the window and there is nothing to worry about, I saunter outside within a couple of minutes and quiet everyone down. It happens a couple of times of week usually, and its annoying, but solved easily and then I get on with life. No big.

However–! I went out maybe 9 times and NOTHING worked! She kept screaming. I tried to squirt her once even, but she just got more upset. Finally, I tried to grab her out of the coop to put her in the pen in the garage the rooster stays in (so he doesn’t wake the neighbors at 5 am) and she jumped away from me and shut up at long last.

But the effect on my psyche during that half hour to 45 minutes was something to see… I lost my shit, BIGTIME! I got frustrated, and then desperate, and then just had a full-blown meltdown. I was contemplating acts of chicken murder and wrote a note about killing this hen with a hammer to the head! (No, keeping livestock does NOT make you less prone to eating meat– rather the opposite…) Cat called me after it was over and I told her I couldn’t take another episode like that, and she agreed (happily) to cull this hen soon, because she is losing her tiny chicken brains apparently. Then Sharn came home and found my psycho note that I totally forgot I wrote because I apparently dissociated while writing it. As soon as she mentioned it, I recalled writing it– but I actually forgot enough that I didn’t go find it and toss it once everything (including me) calmed down!

Sharn was very understanding, luckily– however–! I felt terrible. I couldn’t believe how some stress, which would make anyone a little pissed off, could bring me to the brink of going completely off my corker! Here I’ve been writing about PTSD and abductees and all this stuff and I get an up close and personal reminder of just why this shit is so important to understand!

Meanwhile, I’ve finished the trauma book and am now tackling one called, Multiplicity by Rita Carter. Its about our capacity for multiple selves in normal people. I’m getting the research to help my IFS self-therapy work, as I intend to continue here very soon.