Isn't it time for you to write a happier ending for your own story?

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
December 15, 2022

When you are the protagonist in your own story, understand the ending is up to you. How do you want to write the next chapter of your own story? Can you rewrite your character? No, because your character is "you" but you can become the champion in your own story and write the next chapter your way.

Merriam-Webster defines the protagonist as this.

: the principal character in a literary work (such as a drama or story)

: the leading actor or principal character in a television show, movie, book, etc.

: an active participant in an event

: a leader, proponent, or supporter of a cause: CHAMPION

DID YOU KNOW?
Struggle, or conflict is central to drama. The protagonist or hero of a play, novel, or film is involved in a struggle of some kind, either against someone or something else or even against his or her own emotions. So the hero is the "first struggler", which is the literal meaning of the Greek word prōtagōnistēs. A character who opposes the hero is the antagonist, from a Greek verb that means literally "to struggle against".

CNN had a touching video tribute to Boss and within it were the thoughts we should all keep in our own minds.

“It’s heartbreaking to hear that someone who brought so much joy to a room, was hurting so much behind closed doors,” Justin Timberlake wrote in a tribute on Instagram. “I’ve known [Boss] for over 20 years through the dance community - he always lit everything and everyone up. You just never know what someone is going through.”

You don't know what someone is going through unless they tell you. You may guess something is wrong but not understand what's wrong. All too often human nature causes us to internalize it. We wonder what we did wrong. When they choose to leave us, instead of talking to us, again, we blame ourselves. The what "ifs" flood our brains and we drown in unanswerable questions only the one we knew could answer.

If you are the one going through dark times, keep that in mind because the chances are, the people in your life have no idea what you are going through unless you tell them. Maybe you don't want them to worry about you? They already are. Maybe you don't want them to think less of you because you need help when you are the one they always turn to to help them? They won't but they may be wondering why it's ok with you to help them but not trust them to help you when you need it. Whatever is stopping you from turning to the people in your life, understand that is the point of having people in your life, and not just people you know the names of.

Trust them enough to take a chance and open up. If they don't understand what it is, then they will at least know you're hurting and need to work through it. Don't settle for just waiting to get over it but search for those that can help you.

I have a lot of people in my life but I could be in a crowd and feel totally alone at times. When I needed help the people I love could not give, I turned to a therapist I could open up to and she's helping me work through it. My family knows I need more help than they can give and they ok with that because they want me to be happier than I was struggling.

I am the protagonist in my own story and it is up to me to write the next chapter filled with doubts and confusion and struggles, just as each one will contain victories. Isn't it time to take a chance at happiness?

A decade after Sandy Hook, grief remains but hope grows

Raised with trauma, Sandy Hook survivors send hope to Uvalde “I think what happened changed my entire life.”

Associated Press
By DAVE COLLINS and PAT EATON-ROBB
September 7, 2022

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — The survivors who were able to walk out of Sandy Hook Elementary School nearly a decade ago want to share a message of hope with the children of Uvalde, Texas: You will learn how to live with your trauma, pain and grief. And it will get better.

They know what’s ahead. There’s shock, followed by numbness. There are struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety. Survivor’s guilt. Anger that these shootings continue to happen in America. Reliving their trauma every time there’s another mass shooting.

They know it will be hard to say they are from Uvalde. That well-meaning adults will sometimes make the wrong decisions to protect you. That grief can be unpredictable, and different for everyone.

Children who survived the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have grown up reliving their trauma with each new mass shooting in the U.S. Emotions well up especially when the shooting involves another elementary school like in Uvalde, Texas. (Sept. 7) (AP Video: Joseph B. Frederick, Julia Nikhinson)

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But it wasn't just what happened at Sandy Hook that day. It was what came afterward that added to the agony.

Alex Jones trial: Sandy Hook parents have PTSD, live in terror, psychiatrist testifies

Austin American Statesman
Chuck Lindell
August 1, 2022

Criticized by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and confronted by some of his followers, the parents of 6-year-old Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis have developed post-traumatic stress disorder and live in constant anxiety and terror, a psychiatrist testified Monday.

Forensic psychiatrist Roy Lubit, a specialist in emotional trauma, said the parents' troubles were not caused by their son's violent death in the 2012 school shooting but by Jones' repeated portrayals of the attack as staged or faked on his InfoWars program.

"It's more than just interfering with healing, it has pushed them back ... into some of their earlier pain," Lubit said in a downtown Austin courtroom.

Later this week, a jury will be asked to determine how much Jones should pay to Jesse's parents, Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, for defamation and emotional distress after repeatedly portraying the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which killed 20 students and six educators, as a hoax meant to justify a government crackdown on gun rights,

Heslin has had bullets fired at his home and car, and people who deny that the Sandy Hook attack took place have made threatening phone calls and sent harassing emails to both parents, Lubit testified.
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But they will not let that defeat the hope that they will heal enough to make a difference in this world to others. That as they still grieve, they do something to make sure others do not grieve alone.

A decade after Sandy Hook, grief remains but hope grows

Associated Press
By DAVE COLLINS
December 13, 2022

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — They would have been 16 or 17 this year. High school juniors.

The children killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012 should have spent this year thinking about college, taking their SATs and getting their driver’s licenses. Maybe attending their first prom.

Instead, the families of the 20 students and six educators slain in the mass shooting will mark a decade without them Wednesday.

December is a difficult month for many in Newtown, the Connecticut suburb where holiday season joy is tempered by heartbreak around the anniversary of the nation’s worst grade school shooting.

For former Sandy Hook students who survived the massacre, guilt and anxiety can intensify. For the parents, it can mean renewed grief, even as they continue to fight on their lost children’s behalf.

In February, Sandy Hook families reached a $73 million settlement with the gunmaker Remington, which made the shooter’s rifle. Juries in Connecticut and Texas ordered the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $1.4 billion for promoting lies that the massacre was a hoax.
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Michigan Disabled Veteran in nursing home had money stolen--thief got probation?

Michigan woman gets probation for stealing $72K from disabled veteran

MLive
By Justine Lofton
December 13, 2022

She would deposit checks into her bank account and use the money for her own purposes. The victim was disabled and resided in nursing homes and hospitals. Risdon did not have power of attorney for the victim, nor serve as his guardian or conservator.

OAKLAND COUNTY, MI – A Michigan woman has been sentenced to probation for stealing more than $72,000 from a disabled veteran, authorities said.

Margaret Risdon, 62, of Bloomfield Hills, was convicted of embezzlement from a vulnerable adult between $50,000 and $100,000, a 15-year felony, according to a news release from the Michigan Department of Attorney General.

Judge David M. Cohen of the 6th Circuit Court recently sentenced her to three years of probation and 100 hours of community service. Risdon also must work a part-time job and was ordered to pay $72,843 in restitution to the victim’s estate. She is prohibited from violating any law or consuming drugs and alcohol.
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PTSD in Salem "It’s hard to make that diagnosis 300 years in the past."

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
December 12, 2022

If you listen to people talking about PTSD, you'll often hear the word "demon" used. It is almost as if the person has been invaded by something evil and what is good within them is battling it on a daily basis.

an evil spirit or devil, especially one thought to possess a person or act as a tormentor in hell.
a cruel, evil, or destructive person or thing.
reckless mischief; devilry.
a forceful, fierce, or skillful performer of a specified activity. (Oxford)

Since trauma has existed since the beginning of time, while the term PTSD is relatively new, what survivors dealt with afterward, is far from new. Considering what the people survived in the time of witchcraft trials, here, as well as in other parts of the world, it is easier to understand how they would not be able to grasp psychological reasoning, and jumped straight into possession and Satan,

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (Pivotal Moments in American History)

Historians have speculated on a web of possible causes for the witchcraft that stated in Salem and spread across the region-religious crisis, ergot poisoning, an encephalitis outbreak, frontier war hysteria--but most agree that there was no single factor. Rather, as Emerson Baker illustrates in this seminal new work, Salem was "a perfect storm": a unique convergence of conditions and events that produced something extraordinary throughout New England in 1692 and the following years, and which has haunted us ever since.

 

The theory that may explain what was tormenting the afflicted in Salem’s witch trials
Boston.com

Baker says it’s possible that a few of the accusers were purposefully faking their symptoms. However, he says that his ultimate conclusion after years of studying the events is that they were actually suffering from psychological ailments.

Foremost among them is something called mass conversion disorder, a psychogenic disorder that — ironically — made a suspected return to the Salem area more than 300 years later.

“People are in such mental anguish, for a variety of reasons, that literally their minds convert their anxieties to physical symptoms,” Baker told Boston.com.

“They’re not faking it,” he said. “They don’t know what’s going on. If it happens to people, they’re terrified that it’s even happening.”

From there, the “step from affliction to accusation was a short one,” Baker writes in his book about the trials, A Storm of Witchcraft. While societal scapegoats have evolved over time, he writes that “in 1692 the omnipresent threat was witchcraft.” And those identified in Salem were either marginalized members of the community or enemies of the powerful families leading the witch hunt.

Baker acknowledged that the conversion disorder — a term introduced by Sigmund Freud and otherwise known as mass hysteria — is “still kind of a controversial diagnosis today.”

“It’s hard to make that diagnosis 300 years in the past without the person right in front of you,” he said, adding that it’s possible that a combination of psychological elements played into the girls’ odd behavior.

When you think about what life was like back then, it is easy to think that the Puritans would have little knowledge of what trauma did to them, or what they were doing to others.

PTSD in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
Historic Ipswich
by Gordon Harris

From the founding of the colony, the Puritans were highly selective of who they allowed to live with them. In the first year of its settlement, the Freemen of the Ipswich established “for our own peace and comfort” the exclusive right to determine the privileges of citizenship in the new community, and gave formal notice that “no stranger coming among us” could have place or standing without their permission. Beginning in 1656, laws forbade any captain to land Quakers, and any individual of that sect was to be severely whipped on his or her entrance, and none were allowed to speak with them. Newcomers who were unable to support themselves and their families were “warned out.”

Think about what the survivors were dealing with.

In Salem Village in February 1692, two prepubescent girls Betty Parris (age nine) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11) began to have fits, complained of being pricked with pins and accused their neighbors of witchcraft. Some of the afflicted girls had been traumatized after losing one or both parents in King William’s War. The afflicted girls routinely described the Devil as a “dark man.”George Burroughs, the unpopular predecessor to Rev. Parris in Salem Village, had come from Maine, and returned there when the parish refused to pay him. Only five weeks before the accusations began, Indians had burned York Maine, 80 miles north of Salem, killing 48 people and taking 73 captives. When one of the accused confessed that the Devil had tempted her in Maine, Reverend Burroughs was arrested, charged with witchcraft and encouraging the Indians, and was hanged on Gallows Hill.

Think about what Reverend Burroughs went through. The arrest warrant was issued ten years after he left Salem Village and was in Maine. He lost everything, including his first wife, whom he couldn't afford to bury and had to borrow money. The villagers refused to pay his salary and he had to leave for the sake of his family. The hatred from the people of Salem Village was so powerful, they were out to get him no matter how long it took to do it.

The Witchcraft Trial of Reverend George Burroughs
History of Massachusetts
Burroughs encountered the same problems as his predecessor as well as hostility from Bayley’s friends and supporters, according to the book Salem Witchcraft by Charles W. Upham:

“Immediately upon calling to the village to reside, he encountered the hostility of those persons who, as the special friends of Mr. Bayley, allowed their prejudices to be concentrated upon his innocent successor. The unhappy animosities arising from this source entirely demoralized the Society, and, besides making it otherwise very uncomfortable to a minister, led to a neglect and derangement of all financial affairs. In September, 1681, Mr. Burrough’s wife died, and he had to run in debt for her funeral expenses. Rates were not collected, and his salary was in arrears.”

By now I hope you see that PTSD is not new. People accused others because they did not know what was causing everything they were dealing with.  Over the years, I've learned that those who claim PTSD is not real, have never survived something, or are under some delusion that they may also have it. I remember one veteran many years ago, attacking me for posting on PTSD and claiming that it was not real. It took him a while before I received an email apologizing and he admitted he had it but fought for years to bury what it was doing to him, instead of trying to recover and heal.

We cannot do anything to educate those who do not want to learn. We cannot do anything more than learn what we can so we can be happier in our own lives and then reach out to others fighting their own demons.

We live in a time when we know there are psychological as well as spiritual aspects to what makes us, us. No human is designed to endure trauma over and over again without paying some kind of price. We also know that the price does not have to take over our lives. It does not have to destroy us after we survived what caused it. We are survivors! Say that to yourself over and over again until you finally realize that and then, be empowered to heal so you can rejoice as one. 

Kathie Costos author of Ministers Of The Mystery Series.

Wake Up Call For Reporters With PTSD

They report on what causes PTSD in the rest of us. For us, all it takes to set off PTSD is the "one" time that was too many. Sometimes, that one time comes with the only time we survived. There is a growing number of reporters experiencing their "one too many" times and it is easy for us to understand that what they go through over and over again, can have a lasting impact. Stephanie Foo, Marcella Raymond, Colin Butler, Chris Cramer, and David Morris are just some joining the club no one wants to belong to.

I've talked to several reporters over the years and a few shared what they were going through. Now, they are not just reporting on the events that cause PTSD in the rest of us. They are talking about their own.

Alarming levels of stress among journalists a 'wake-up call'

Workers who keep Canadians up to date on the latest news of the day are suffering disturbingly high levels of work-related stress and injury.

Nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) of journalists and media workers are suffering from anxiety and 46 percent go through depression, according to the “Taking Care: a report on mental health, well-being, and trauma among Canadian media workers” report.

Another 15 percent have post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the report based on the survey of 1,251 news executives, desk editors, frontline reporters, and video journalists.

The Madness by Fergal Keane review – the BBC correspondent on conflict, fear, and PTSD
The Guardian
Emma Graham-Harrison
17 Nov 2022

For Keane, many of these memories are of Rwanda. Going to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which he saw as a moral duty, triggered another breakdown: “I dreamed vividly of the dead, horrible images that caused me to wake sweating, sometimes fighting in my sleep with arms flailing, knocking over my bedside lamp. I had experienced such symptoms immediately after the genocide but now they were accompanied by crippling anxiety. Panic attacks kept me in bed for days.”

Fergal Keane at the Ukrainian army frontline at Peski in Donbas, 2016. Photograph: Unknown/BBC/Fergal Keane A brutally honest exploration of the ethics and motivations of war reporters, and of Keane’s own demons

Journalists are unpopular, as a profession, but war correspondents get a rare pass. In films, books and the wider culture there is a dark glamour, a reckless heroism that attaches to people (mostly men) who head with laptop and camera towards battles that other civilians are fleeing.

Fergal Keane, one of the most celebrated faces of BBC news, embodied that myth. His new book The Madness, part memoir, part meditation, picks it apart. He explores with brutal honesty why he and many colleagues travel to conflict zones in the first place (it is different, of course, for journalists who have war break out on their doorstep), and keep going back when their mental health is fraying.

“Nobody forced me” begins his account of multiple journeys to see first hand the cruel things humans do to each other, from missile strikes to terror attacks and genocide by machete and club. He knew he was risking his mind amid the violence, as well as his life, but couldn’t stay away. That mixture of fear, vanity, inadequacy, driving ambition: this is as familiar to anyone who has spent time with a press pack in a war or at its margins as explosions, checkpoints and guns.

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