Healing Requires Triple Action
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 7, 2015
What is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in plain English?
Mayo Clinic answers it this way
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it.
How researchers started to understand what those events do happened this way according to
National Institute of Mental Health
PTSD was first brought to public attention in relation to war veterans, but it can result from a variety of traumatic incidents, such as mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes.
What causes it? Trauma. Plain, simple English. It hit you!
Who can suffer from PTSD? Basically anyone after stuff like this.
Risk factors for PTSD include:
Living through dangerous events and traumas
Having a history of mental illness
Getting hurt
Seeing people hurt or killed
Feeling horror, helplessness, or extreme fear
Having little or no social support after the event
Dealing with extra stress after the event, such as loss of a loved one, pain and injury, or loss of a job or home.
It isn't a "mental illness" and
PTSD is no longer considered to be an Anxiety Disorder. In other words, not something that is "wrong" with anyone but something that happened to them.
Furthermore, as a result of research-based changes to the diagnosis, PTSD is no longer categorized as an Anxiety Disorder. PTSD is now classified in a new category, Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders, in which the onset of every disorder has been preceded by exposure to a traumatic or otherwise adverse environmental event.
It hit you! It hit you because your emotional core is so strong you felt it more than others.
The Human Memory
The Limbic System and Basal Ganglia
Picture from How Stuff Works
The cerebral cortex plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language and consciousness. It is divided into four main regions or lobes, which cover both hemispheres: the frontal lobe (involved in conscious thought and higher mental functions such as decision-making, particularly in that part of the frontal lobe known as the prefrontal cortex, and plays an important part in processing short-term memories and retaining longer term memories which are not task-based); the parietal lobe (involved in integrating sensory information from the various senses, and in the manipulation of objects in determining spatial sense and navigation); the temporal lobe (involved with the senses of smell and sound, the processing of semantics in both speech and vision, including the processing of complex stimuli like faces and scenes, and plays a key role in the formation of long-term memory); and the occipital lobe (mainly involved with the sense of sight).
The amygdala also performs a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions and social and sexual behaviour, as well as regulating the sense of smell.
Ok, so now you know that anyone can be hit by PTSD. Now think of the reasons we know what it is and what it does. All the research came from veterans.
PTSD is by definition a wound and the word
"trauma" is Greek for "wound"
"a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury, as from violence or accident.
the condition produced by this; traumatism."
Do you think you can get past the idea that you were weak in anyway? Past the stupidity of others blaming you for it or expecting you to just get over it?
Since you know that anyone can get PTSD from 1 single event in their lives, acknowledge the fact that all the research came from veterans and for you, it wasn't just subjecting yourself to 1 event. It was being willing to experience many of them for the duration of your service. When it wasn't happening, you had to worry about something else happening.
PTSD is more like an infection.
Infection: The invasion and multiplication of microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites that are not normally present within the body. An infection may cause no symptoms and be subclinical, or it may cause symptoms and be clinically apparent. An infection may remain localized, or it may spread through the blood or lymphatic vessels to become systemic (bodywide).
What happens when you get a wound and don't treat it? Your body does the best it can to stop the bleeding and your
immune system kicks into overdrive to fight off infection. Sometimes it isn't able to fight alone and needs medical treatment. Left untreated, as seen above, it spreads out and claims more territory.
Between the time you got wounded and the time you added in medical treatment, the infection spread out and in that amount of time, left you with a scar.
'Scars remind us where we've been.
They don't have to dictate where we're going'
David Rossi, Criminal Minds
The earlier you treated the wound, the smaller the scar. The longer it took, the bigger the scar and it hit every part of your life.
The really great news is that it is never too late to apply the triple antibiotic and heal the wound you have carried all this time. Instead of "
Bacitracin, neomycin, and polymyxin B are antibiotics that kill bacteria on your skin" you need the triple medical for your mind, physical for your body and spiritual for your soul.
If you only get psychological treatment, usually with medications and talk therapy, it is only treating one part of the wound plus medications will usually just numb you so you don't feel the pain that is still there. Ever have Novocain that wasn't followed by another medical proceeder? Sure you stopped feeling the pain but as soon as it wore off the reason for the pain was still there.
Lets add in physical treatment to help shut off the
Adrenaline fueling the anger response. You may be able to control it a little better but that only works if nothing else happens to kick it into over drive again.
The basis for PTSD is emotional. Folks walk away from an event one of two ways. Either they were spared from divine intervention from God or another twist of fate, or it was done to them as punishment. Think God did it to you and it is really hard to ask for help from Him.
The most ridiculous response I heard was when a veteran was finally letting it all out and a pastor responded with "God only give us what we can handle." How stupid was that? He should have just said "stop whining because God sent all that pain and suffering knowing you could take it." The response should have been "All you need to heal is already within you" and then work with the veteran on the forgiveness thing.
Veterans need to forgive themselves for what you feel you did wrong as much as you need to forgive the enemies you had. Even tougher is forgiving your buddies for what they said or did. But the pastor's job was to sit, listen, help the veteran see things differently and spend as much time as he needed responding with compassion, understanding and an abundance of patience.
Then you also have to forgive your family and friends from walking away from you because as much as you didn't understand what was going on within you, they didn't either. They had no way of knowing what you couldn't tell them.
It isn't that they didn't love you. They just couldn't see you anymore behind all you had going on and the way you were acting. They didn't love what they saw you becoming because they didn't know the "you" they knew was still in there.
If you see a mental health professional that isn't helping you, find someone else.
For your body, anything that you are doing that is not easing your stress level, stop it. Do something else that is intended to calm like
Yoga,
Tai Chi Transcendental Meditation walking, swimming, writing, playing an instrument or anything else that works for you. Do something that isn't working then find something that does.
If you see a spiritual administrator that makes you feel worse, find someone else. With that said consider that doesn't mean giving up on them if you are experiencing the flood of emotions coming out as your emotional wall is being broken down. Often veterans think they are getting worse because they start to cry a lot. Find someone else if you feel as if they are not listening or you are uncomfortable talking to them. If they are good at their jobs, they'll understand and refer you to someone else.
That happens to me all the time. Some veterans are ok talking to to me even though I am not a veteran but sometimes I can hear them holding back on certain things because they don't think I will understand or they think it is too hard for me to hear. In those cases I suggest they talk to another veteran. I don't get into a contest to protect my pride by fighting them or trying to force them to open up. A good spiritual healer won't fight you either. The goal is to help you heal and that means whatever it takes to set you on your way.
Some of you are reaching out to groups online and most of them are good but beware of the hacks popping up all over the place seeking more to pick your pockets instead of helping you fight your battles. If you don't find them helpful, move on.
One last thing to consider is, even knowing you could die for someone else, you were still willing to do it, endure all the hardships that came along with "doing your job" and you are a survivor of all of it. Don't surrender now that the battles you have to fight for yourself need a support system behind you. After all, you had no problem calling in support when you were in combat so why not call in support because of what combat set in you?
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