PTSD: What It Is and How to Recover - (continued)
Text of First Issue of
the Post-Traumatic Gazette
(May-June 1995)
©1995 by Patience H. C. Mason. All rights reserved, except that permission is hereby granted to freely reproduce and distribute this document, provided the text is reproduced unaltered and entire (including this notice)
and is distributed free of charge.
Once safety has been established, trauma work may begin. Rushing through trauma work is to be avoided. When you feel safe enough, you will remember. Some people use hypnosis to speed this up. Experienced therapists now prefer to let memories surface when they will.
Today in many communities, after a crisis all the rescue workers are debriefed. They get to talk about what happened, what they saw, smelled, heard, felt, what they wanted to have happen and how it all turned out. Debriefing is what trauma work is about. You don't have to know every detail or relive every moment of trauma. As you talk about what happened to you and feel the feelings you had to suppress to live, you will relearn the broad variety of human feelings, because they have all been suppressed along with the painful ones. Recovery will help you understand yourself and be understood. This is a very healing experience for people who have felt like no one could ever understand what they have been through.
Groups are particularly helpful in recovering from trauma. You are not alone. Others have been through similar pain. It helps to see others progress, to learn ways to grow yourself, and to help those who come after you.
Searching for the right help is important. You need to be comfortable enough with the therapist or group. On the other hand searching for the perfect group or a therapist who will never make a mistake can put off recovery for life. The therapist or group is not going to fix you. They (therapist, other group members) provide you with information and a variety of skills, and you do the work.
HELPFUL CONCEPTS
It is okay to hurt. As a survivor, you need to go through the process of mourning which takes about two years if your mother dies of old age in her bed at home and you were expecting it. Traumatic losses take longer.
Mourning has five stages:
**Denial: is screaming "No! No!' at the time of the trauma. It is also "Never Happened!" and "Didn't affect me!" People can get stuck in denial for years.
**Rage: People get stuck in the rage stage, too, screaming and lashing out at everyone around them, or coldly angry and unable to change.
**Bargaining: Stuck bargaining includes veterans who will only get well if the VA gets perfect or if Nixon or Fonda goes to jail, the child abuse survivor who will only get well when patriarchy is gone, or the survivor who will only get better when he or she finds a perfect therapist.
**Sadness: The sadness stage is very difficult for most survivors because of our feelgood culture. Being sad is practically illegal. Sadness refused leads me to deep depression, but today if I start to feel depressed, I ask myself what do I need to feel sad about. If I can identify and feel it, I don't get depressed. Sadness needs to be felt. What happened to you was sad, painful, grevious. The only way out is through. Those feelings won't kill you. It is okay to grieve. Grief is part of life.
**Acceptance: The final stage. Yes this did happen. It was bad and it has affected me. I have a scar, but I survived. In time, I may be able to use my experiences to help other survivors.
Recovery takes persistence and patience. "Progress not perfection" is a good motto. Recovery is not a smooth swift rise out of the depths of pain or numbness. It is a rough climb with many slips and lots of hanging on at new rough places in the climb.
"We recycle" is a slogan that will help you laugh when you slip. Acceptance of the slowness of the process is hard but it's reality. Since PTSD symptoms can come back with new stress, knowing that it is normal to recycle can help you continue to recover.
It takes what it takes and it takes as long as it takes. Human beings hardly ever change quickly except under extreme stress, so be easy on yourself. In response to the idea, I should be over this, remember this slogan (made up by yours truly) "Everything after the word should is bullsh*t."
H.O.W.? Honesty, openness, and willingness are characteristics that will help anyone recover. These things did happen and do affect us (honest). We can find help if we look (open). We try suggestions from others who have recovered or have worked with others who have recovered (willing). This is not to say that every idea or suggestion will work for you. Some won't. Some will be very uncomfortable, but will have a healing effect on your life, like getting sober
Yet. If those ideas scare you, the most healing word in the English language is yet, as in I can't do that yet... Someday you will when you are ready.
Willing to vs Wanting to: There is also a great deal of difference between the words "want" and "willing." Spelled differently. Mean different things. Willingness may mean I do things I don't want to do! If I wait till I want to do the things that will help me recover, I may never recover.
We heal by degrees. You don't have to heal perfectly or on someone else's schedule. People do this work in stages and have to take breaks from it.
Feelings are facts: you feel what you feel. It doesn't have to be reasonable, justified, or what other people feel. Feelings do not have brains. They are not logical! Part of recovery is learning what you do feel so you can take care of yourself. Trying to take care of yourself without knowing what you feel is like trying to budget without knowing your income.
Feelings are not facts: Emotional reasoning is a distorted way of thinking common in our society: I feel it therefore it is true. I feel hurt therefore he/ she meant to hurt me. I feel guilty therefore I am guilty. Many of us tend to feel hurt by or guilty about everything. It comes with our culture, but we don't have to believe it.
It is ok to feel more than one contradictory emotion at the same time.
Respect your emotions but don't necessarily believe them and don't act on them in old ways. People can change by acting in new ways until new feelings come. Waiting till they feel like changing is a dead end for most people!
When trauma survivors begin to get better it is very scary for family members. Underlying this is the fear that if you change you may not love them any more. You may wonder why they have problems since they weren't traumatized. Next month I'll talk more about the effects of living with PTSD, of seeing someone hurting and doing all you can to help and having it all be useless.
Don't compare: Compassion is something that develops in recovery. You will see that what each person has lived through is the worst thing he or she has been through. Remembering how you felt after the first firefight, the first beating, the first time someone in your neighborhood was gunned down, before you got so numb, will give you empathy for others.
Recovery leads to autonomy, the feeling of being whole, the ability to change when necessary and the ability to regulate yourself. These are important concepts to people who may feel they have lost great parts of themselves. You may not get all of yourself back, but you can get some of it back. For people who have been stuck in survivor skills, being able to change is freedom, and for people who could be blowing up one minute and numb as a stump the next, the ability to regulate these reactions is pure joy.
Recovery will bring back joy into your life. It will be mixed with pain because this is real life, but learning to feel the pain lets it pass and the periods between the pain will get longer and longer and better and better.
One final word, no matter what you did to survive, you do deserve to recover. Many survivors feel guilty for surviving or for not doing enough or for overreacting. During the recovery process, your feelings about this may change. If you find that some of your guilt has a realistic basis, you can make amends for your actions.
--Patience Mason
