According to the National Institutes of Health website “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat.”
Signs and Symptoms of PTSD are grouped into three categories:
1. Re-experiencing symptoms:
• Flashbacks—reliving the trauma over and over, including physical symptoms like a racing heart or sweating
• Bad dreams
• Frightening thoughts.
Re-experiencing symptoms may cause problems in a person’s everyday routine. They can start from the person’s own thoughts and feelings. Words, objects, or situations that are reminders of the event can also trigger re-experiencing.
2. Avoidance symptoms:
• Staying away from places, events, or objects that are reminders of the experience
• Feeling emotionally numb
• Feeling strong guilt, depression, or worry
• Losing interest in activities that were enjoyable in the past
• Having trouble remembering the dangerous event.
Things that remind a person of the traumatic event can trigger avoidance symptoms. These symptoms may cause a person to change his or her personal routine. For example, after a bad car accident, a person who usually drives may avoid driving or riding in a car.
3. Hyperarousal symptoms:
• Being easily startled
• Feeling tense or “on edge”
• Having difficulty sleeping, and/or having angry outbursts.
Hyperarousal symptoms are usually constant, instead of being triggered by things that remind one of the traumatic event. They can make the person feel stressed and angry. These symptoms may make it hard to do daily tasks, such as sleeping, eating, or concentrating.
Unfortunately whenever a psychological experience is dubbed “a disorder” people get the impression that the person who has this experience is “defective” or “crazy” or of poor character. The thought that PTSD symptoms are related to some core defect in character/personality serves to further increase the sufferer’s anxiety and level of symptoms. Not wanting to consider any predisposing factors to these symptoms may also prevent a person from doing real soul searching.
There is one main reason to emphasize that PTSD symptoms constitute a disorder. That is that the symptoms greatly impair a person’s ability to function. They also rob people of love and well-being. Overwhelming anxiety is not conducive to well-being or loving relationships.
Because PTSD symptoms are debilitating we have to address them, face them and ultimately conquer them. That means acknowledging the other fears/concerns that go along with having these symptoms:
1. Am I crazy?
2. Am I defective?
3. Will I ever be normal again?
4. Why did this happen to me?
5. How can I prevent this from happening again?
6. Can I trust myself?
To start to recover, notice that if you reduce PTSD down to its core essence it is simply difficulty processing that the trauma was then and today is now. For people whose PTSD is related to an experience with a sociopath, the problem is that the sociopath may not be gone. The then and now is blurred. The worst things done by the sociopath are in the past and there may be protections in place but the sociopath is still around. Sometimes that source of trauma is the other parent of beloved children.
Recovery in such a context means having a clear head to really sort out what was then and what is now. Next week we will consider other roadblocks to distinguishing then from now.
Star:
It’s true…..no pain, no gain!
DAMN…just like excercise…..
We just never know when we will be triggered…..best to just clear the slate when it comes up and address it in ourselves….
Okay…..I think you should go out and get yourself some index cards and write out every pain you exerienced as a child in regards to your parents…..ON THOSE CARDS….
This may be what your dream meant? Keep those cards around, by the bed, desk, upstairs, downstairs, purse and car…..when you think of something…..write it down……
When you think you have it all covered………shred them all, throw them in a ditch, burn them in your fireplace….dispose of them monumentally……get rid of your childhood pain and poor memories……let it go in the fire or xx…….
Oh my feet hurt from the stelletos.
I’m a mountain girl….not used to those fancy shoes…..I should be, since I wore them for 3 years and in a awkward stance……the heel always seemed to be stuck up the S’s ass! It get’s hard to walk with one foot up an ass for that long…….
🙂
Make it a good night tonight!
XXOO
For those interested this blurb from a recent study stated:
For example, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has been shown to be the most effective treatment for PTSD and has the fewest side-effects, yet many psychologists do not use this method. Baker and colleagues cite one study in which only 30 percent of psychologists were trained to perform CBT for PTSD and only half of those psychologists elected to use it. That means that six of every seven sufferers were not getting the best care available from their clinicians. Furthermore, CBT shows both long-term and immediate benefits as a treatment for PTSD; whereas medications such as Paxil have shown 25 to 50 percent relapse rates.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2009/bakerpspi.cfm
Oxy this blurb (not mine) is for you in regards to your comment about the one person talking about talk therapy making it worse:
Our understanding of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. We now recognize that it is normal for people to experience psycho physiological changes following trauma. These can include disruptions in sleep, concentration difficulties, increased anxiety, sadness, anger, grief, irritability, hyper vigilance, disruptions in work or social functioning, avoidance of thoughts or situations associated with the trauma, and involuntary re-experiencing of traumatic events.
The normality of these reactions post trauma is reflected in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, which requires persistence of these symptoms four weeks or longer after the traumatic event before a diagnosis can be made. In fact, most people who experience these reactions post-trauma naturally recover without intervention. This empirical observation leads psychotherapists to be cautious about offering psychological interventions within the first month after a trauma. Such caution is warranted because some early interventions, such as critical incident stress debriefing (CISD), may be ineffective or even potentially harmful in some formats.
As for EMDR “Basically, the research says you can take the EM and the R out of EMDR,” Lohr said. “All that leaves is D – desensitization – and desensitization is the same sensible form of treatment that psychologists have been practicing for over 30 years – http://dailyheadlines.uark.edu/1372.htm
Basically it is therapy dressed up and marketed as something new by adding in pieces that dont fit the evidence. But it does work but it seems a tad dishonest to me.
Here is another recent piece about that talks about this as well:
Dr. Van Nuys asks Dr. Beckner about two trauma therapies which she has not mentioned, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Dr. Beckner notes that while she is aware that research has shown that EMDR is an effective therapy for PTSD, that there isn’t any good evidence to suggest that the active ingredient of that therapy is anything different than the active ingredient in basis exposure therapy. In other words, the bilateral stimulation which is the hallmark of EMDR may simply be window dressing for the hidden active ingredient (exposure therapy), and not actually anything useful in itself. – http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=28929&w=9&cn=0
Dear Blogger,
THANKS SO MUCH FOR THAT! Personally while I am CURIOUS about the WHYs, the thing that helped was IT WORKED! LOL
When I was in Africa I was witness to “Witch doctor” therapy that WORKED, and I am pretty sure it was the “placebo” effect, but “whatever works”!
From my days of practicing family medicine I am pretty sure that most of the things that people came to the clinic for would have healed up on their own, but the treatment being “blessed” by a medical practitioner in a “white coat” was the MOST active ingredient in the “cure.”
I do lbelieve in the huge ability of our bodies to heal themselves but it must be “believed” to work.
When I was a kid there were people in the community who could “witch away” warts with some “hoo-doo” and lo and behold medical science comes to the conclusions that there IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT to healing warts (they will usually go away in a couple of years on their own though). The necessary ingredient to them healing quicker though is BELIEF in the therapy to work.
The funny (odd) thing about the EMDR was I was very skeptical about it working because at the time it didn’t make any scientific “sense” to me. (still doesn’t entirely) I agree that the desensitization part makes sense. What was also interesting in my therapy too, was that while my EMDR focused ONLY on the aircraft crash trauma, it seemed to benefit the others as well. Maybe it was just that because I was not so traumatized about the plane crash, taht I was able to handle the others better—whatever, but in the over all scheme of things, I was definitely better, and definitely much quicker than I could have even hoped for.
The level of the language and ST memory deficits that remain is “interesting” to me because it does effect my ability to function professionally (not that I would go back to work if I could). If I was 32 or 42 or even 52 and had this much language and memory deficit, and was unable to function at a professional level (instead of the age I am) it would be much much more of a financial and career problem for someone with young children to support and their whole career ahead of them.
Thank you for the links and the information I am glad that there is someone lurking here who keeps up with the LATEST scientific research. (((hugs))))
Thanks Blogger! That is great information to have. I’m going to work harder on the CBT. I cured myself of a strong phobia, when a therapist (who was very good at other stuff) could not. He wanted me to do the desensitizing route, which was just too frightening and overwhelming for me at the time. So I did CBT on myself, challenging my beliefs, and also learned how to gain control of myself when a phobic reaction would start to hit (by going to the thinking side of my brain with math problems, which seemed to shut off the emotional part)…and now I can face what used to make me faint right on the spot, without any “tricks” or special thoughts….I’m simply over it. I think I need to apply that to the PTSD.
thank you!
I just have a second because my baby will wake from his nap soon. I will come back and write more and write back to all of you who gave me such great encouragement and some intersting thoughts to consider. Last night, I just ended up reading for a long time. It felt nice. I’m reading Middlemarch by Georgy Eliot. I used to be such a reader, but I find that I don’t read very much lately. So. . . I changed that last night. At first it was very difficult to keep my attention focused on the book, but I finally was able to. I think it lowered my stress. I know it lowered my heartrate. I felt calm and it was a much needed little break, or escape from reality for a few hours. I think I’ll try that at night more often. It helped me to sleep too. It’s funny that I stopped being a reader when all of this happend. I read a ton of pregnancy books while I was pregnant, but that was non-fiction. I’d never read non-fiction before that. I used to read all fiction. All of a sudden, I didn’t anymore. I think part of it is not having the time with a baby. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized this is just nonsense I tell myself. There’s always time to read. I might need to turn off the phone and unplug the computer, but there’s always time for me to take care of myself AND my needs and desires. I just have to be less lazy about it and get off my butt and do the things I enjoy.
Thank you all so much for taking so much time to help me with this. I really appreciate it. I’ll write more later.
Oh and I’m doing much better today. I don’t have panic.
Jill, you sound good!
Enjoy the day huh!
XXOO
Jill, I’m the same way. I have a degree in Literature, but I find that my memory is failing me, and I’m losing so much of what I learned. I have only recently started reading again, and when I finish a book, I like to go online and find essays and criticism, reading group questions, etc. It tests my savvy, and reminds me how to think critically. Hope you enjoy the book. Middlemarch is one I haven’t read. Tell me what you think, and I might.
Jill, I was just thinking of the authors that I really like, and I remembered,”The Angel in the House”, by Virginia Wolfe. It’s more of an essay than a short story, but is really good, and I think relevant to our plight here at LF. If you have a chance to read it, I think you would, not only enjoy it, but find a bit of yourself in it. I know I did. Happy reading.