Working with PTSD
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Unless you have experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder yourself, it’s difficult to describe how bizarre it feels. It’s like you are locked in fear. Your body unpredictably reacts to a threat that’s not there. The thinking part of your brain might tell you that you are perfectly safe, but your body reacts with fear, helplessness, and horror as if a threat is imminent. You become irritable and angry at the smallest provocation. Being around others becomes a chore. Distressing images and overwhelming physical sensations hijack your will.
People with PTSD relive events, avoid situations that are reminders of the events, feel constantly keyed up (hyperarousal), and develop negative feelings about themselves. PTSD can lead to depression, anxiety, distress, and deadening of the senses to the point you don’t feel fully alive. Agitation, irritability, hostility, hypervigilance, self-destructive behavior, and social isolation are common.
Other psychological symptoms include flashbacks, fear, and mistrust. Mood changes lead to loss of interest or pleasure in activities, guilt, loneliness, insomnia, nightmares, emotional detachment, and unwanted thoughts.
Another physical manifestation of PTSD: panic attacks. For no apparent reason, you suddenly experience a feeling of intense fear, which can be accompanied by shortness of breath, dizziness, sweating, nausea, and a racing heart. You may think you’re having a heart attack, but the ER doc says that you’re “only having anxiety.”
In other words, PTSD is unpredictable and markedly distressing and the visceral physical feelings induced by strong emotions can be unbearable. Frantic attempts to escape that pain may lead to isolation, self-harm, or even suicide attempts. Less obvious but more insidious are stress-related cardiovascular disease, divorce, and addiction. Your ability to cope is overwhelmed. To insulate yourself from additional trauma, you form a protective membrane around yourself. This keeps you from being able to feel love or a connection to family members and the world in general. You lose your purpose and the connections that previously sustained you. To summarize, PTSD can result in functional impairment, disruption in work and home life, and maladaptive coping strategies, including substance abuse, social isolation, breakdown of social support systems, damaged confidence and self-esteem, and suicidal thoughts or intentions.
You want to kick its ass.
The first thing to do is understand that you are not yourself. Something is wrong. Your spouse may complain, your kids may fear you, your boss may tell you to get your act together.
You deny and deny the problem until you can’t anymore. Breaking through the denial and accepting that you are injured and need help is perhaps the hardest part of the recovery process. You’re leaving your comfort zone and entering a place you’ve never been.
What can help is redefining the symptoms. PTSD is an injury that derives from horrific events outside of the realm of usual human experience. It can happen to anyone. There are no boundaries regarding age, gender, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Posttraumatic stress injury (PTSI) refers to the same set of symptoms as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but the difference is the conceptualization of what caused the symptoms. Whereas PTSD refers to a mental disorder, PTSI refers to an injury or trauma. Calling it a posttraumatic injury may be a little easier to grasp. It’s not your fault, it happened to you. You sprained your brain.
When I treat PTSI, determining a plan of action is essential. First responders aren’t known for their patience, but one strength is perseverance. You’ll need all of it you can muster. I’ll ask you to observe your symptoms and how you have changed. Then, determine who you want to be, where you want to be in every aspect of your life.
There are many therapy techniques to help people stuck in PTSI. I use EMDR, Brainspotting, Thought Field Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and other techniques. You are an individual and will respond in your unique way. I will adjust treatment as necessary.
The ultimate goals of therapy are to reduce the emotional punch of your PTSI symptoms, restore your relationships, clarify your goals regarding work, explore your life purpose, and help you rediscover your soul. Those who have the courage to move through Posttraumatic Stress find that they reach a new level of functioning, even better than before. They are psychologically stronger. They find deeper meaning and purpose in life; they feel reborn, they thrive. They are more than resilient; they have benefited from the trauma experience. Psychic wounds heal leaving a hard-won scar, a badge of heroism, representing a tougher, stronger, more aware sense of self.
