Ed Ireland said it best:
“Broken…If You Read Just One Book…
…then it has to be Broken by Angela B. Chrysler. What Angela has done here, was to just very simply open her soul to the world to see. Every little flaw, and every little good…all filleted and presented raw and uncensored. She also shows why everything in her life is the way it is.
Broken is not for the feint of heart. It’s not for those that get squeamish at the thought of people being mishandled, misused and maligned. It’s definitely not for children. It’s not even for young adults. It’s for people that seek to understand what it takes to break down a human being and the long, hard struggle to put that broken psyche back together again.”
Broken is a memoir that reads like a psychological thriller.
Disassociation. I call it “Don Quixote Disease.” Sometimes you can’t escape the trauma, so your mind drifts allowing you to escape when the body can’t. You fashion a fictional realm or two and live there as an alternative to escape the horrors around you. I fashioned four realms. I miss my worlds.
When you are disconnected from reality, your perspective becomes so distorted you can’t see what’s really there. Sometimes, the trauma is prolonged or is so severe, you can’t turn it off. Sometimes, you go so far into those realms and are there for so long, you don’t recognize reality anymore. This isn’t schizophrenia. It’s disassociation. Psychologists call it PTSD.
I lived with constant trauma for the first twenty years of my life. Even when it was over, I didn’t know and stayed there for another ten years. This April, after thirty years, I found my way back. My perspective changed and I woke up from the realms I created. You should have seen me that first day. I was terrified of people, males, rooms, and doors. I was terrified of everything except the bedroom I lived in. “Nesting,” is what psychologists call it. I should write about that day some time. I remember how cold it was. So cold. And dark.
“Broken” was the road I took that led me to my “Awareness.” In psychology, awareness is the first and most important step. I think it’s all downhill from there. I hope, anyway. But getting to Awareness…many don’t make it that far. It requires a surreal change in perspective. Without knowing what it was I had done or was doing, I recorded this process as it happened. I wrote “Broken” while stumbling about in my mind and toggling between my four realms to better understand me. For two solid weeks, I relived every horrific event I suffered through and, at the end of it all, I found my way out of my mind.
Broken shows the mind of one who suffers from disassociation and the events that woke me up from my alternate worlds. In Broken, you enter the mind of PTSD and witness the fantasy falling apart as I woke up and realized what I am.
I am currently offering ARC’s for “Broken.” If you are interested, email me at angelabchrysler [at] yahoo [dot] com
Legal Disclaimer
Broken is a work of creative nonfiction. All events, opinions, and views are that of Angela B. Chrysler and are portrayed through subjective perspective based on the memory of Ms. Chrysler. While all the events are true, names, places, characteristics, and relationships have been altered and/or changed to protect the identity and privacy of the people involved. Some characters have been combined into one. Others have been divided into two, while some have been dramatized to better suit the story. The events themselves remained unaltered to the best of the author’s memory. The dialogue was composed to create the essence of conversations in an effort to recreate the scene and mood best to the author’s memory, and is not to be taken as verbatim quotes.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY > Personal Memoirs
PSYCHOLOGY > Psychopathology > Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
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