In the past year, I have begun letting all parts of me come together and I feel so blessed and grateful. I have three mental illnesses–alcoholism (recovery date Nov/ 24, 1976), depression (has been in remission since 1992), and now PTSD. I always knew that the addictions were the Band-Aid over the wound. But I thought the wound was depression. Instead I now know that the wound was PTSD.

I scan over 500 blogs in my Google Reader and am so thankful for the brave souls who write about their recovery experiences.

1. In her blog, Being Sober, Mary Christine writes: “June 7″ :

“It was 30 years ago that I was raped. If you would have told me then that I would still have this date engraved in my soul thirty years later, I would not have believed it. But my life was irrevocably changed that night. (I wrote about it in depth here.)”

“Two years ago I was suffering terribly from PTSD from the rape and underwent therapy for it. It was immensely helpful. And just sitting here tonight, about to go to bed, I am brought to tears remembering. I was asked to name a “safe place” before we began the therapy. I thought it was lame, but the best safe place I could come up with was my own bedroom. My own bed. In all of its glorious whiteness, the crisp white sheets, the white duvet, the white duvet cover, all bleached, ironed, and starched. The window open and the sheers floating on a warm breeze.”

“This is exactly the safe place that I get to fall into in a moment. This is no dream. This is my reality today. I have a safe place to lay my head.”

“And if you are an alcoholic woman, you may know what a miracle this is.”

“God has blessed me so abundantly. I am so grateful to be sober. I am so grateful for the beautiful life I have today.”

2.  In the LA Times, Steve Lopez writes about “ACLU’s lawsuit against the V is a step in vet’s recovery” :

“Combat veteran Greg Valentini slept in Wednesday morning in Hollywood, the day he sued the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Actually, Valentini didn’t file the suit himself, and he was only one of four plaintiffs in what could become a class-action case. The ACLU of Southern California argues in the suit that the VA has mismanaged and underutilized its sprawling West Los Angeles campus even as mentally impaired homeless vets sleep on the city’s streets.”

“If there’s money to wage two wars, there ought to be money to restore abandoned medical buildings at the VA and fill them with some of the estimated 8,200 homeless veterans in Greater Los Angeles, as well as provide them the rehab services they need. That’s how the ACLU’s Mark Rosenbaum described the thinking behind the lawsuit to me this week.”

“As the suit notes, the VA campus has enough space for private companies to store buses and rental cars and for a hotel laundry facility, but no permanent housing for veterans, even though the property was deeded to the government more than 100 years ago specifically to house veterans.

“As for Valentini, his involvement in the lawsuit came as a surprise to me, even though I’ve been shadowing him for several months in a series of columns about his efforts to rehabilitate himself. He told me he was sworn to secrecy until the suit was filed.”

“On Wednesday morning I visited him at the Hollywood rehab center where he has lived since last August along with a few dozen other veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Valentini, 33, hadn’t seen the lawsuit, so I delivered a copy.”

“Valentini, who grew up in Lakewood, wasn’t entirely comfortable being named in the suit. He doesn’t enjoy reviewing the harrowing details of his combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and his later descent into suicidal fantasies, homelessness and drug addiction. But he was willing if it would help others.”

3. A message of hope from one of the best PTSD survivors, Michele Rosenthal, on her blog Heal My PTSD writes about “PTSD Success Story: Finding the Window to Freedom” :

“A very exciting event occurred recently: One of my clients had his final session with me and is now off to live a life that is free of PTSD symptoms. That’s right, free.”

“The day any of us reaches the end of the healing part of our journey is a cause for celebration; this story particularly moves me because the psychiatrist and psychologist involved in this case said it couldn’t be done. They believed this client couldn’t heal based on their assessment of the fact that PTSD had set in at a very early age due to chronic and horrific child abuse. They had tried for years to help this client move forward, all to no avail. He was heading into middle age and they had told him just to learn to live with it.”

“While it may be true that C-PTSD is more of a challenge to heal, I never lost hope.  The journey was not easy but my client hung in there. We believed in each other and felt that together we could reach his PTSD recovery goals.”

“It has taken us almost 2 years to get to where we are today. Through a combination of coaching, hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming he has been able to:

• establish a sense of safety
• process and release grief
• resolve issues of anger
• integrate the trauma
• reconnect to himself in important and meaningful ways
• reclaim his identity as a worthy, lovable human being
• put in place necessary boundaries with family and friends
• reassess and reframe the past
• re-envision the present
• begin constructing the future
• stop all medications
• sleep through the night
• take back control of his life
• resolve all symptoms of posttraumatic stress
• feel happy, strong, empowered and good about himself

“I’m sharing this story with you for one reason: You must always have hope. Find someone you believe in to work with. Stay determined and committed to your ultimate recovery.”

“It’s easy to lose faith. The road to posttraumatic stress syndrome recovery is long and hard-fought, but it is worth it. You have enormous healing potential. The goal is learning to access it. Keep seeking that stairway that leads to your window of freedom.”

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Today I am writing a short post about the wonderful people I read who are interested in PTSD and/or who are recovering from PTSD, addiction, child abuse, sexual abuse, ACOA, and/or codependency.

1.  Susan Kingsley-Smith at A Journey….An amazing journey of hope, healing and self-discovery!

“The purpose of this blog then is to share the journey – the steps, the process, the path I have taken to identify a starting point of where I was in my journey, where I wanted to be, and the information, actions, insight and understanding that have moved me from dependance on external sources (other people places and things) for my solutions to that internal insight and awareness that offers those wonderful, life-changing “aha!” moments that are the beginning of lasting change.”

“Much of what I write here is part of the process that I have experienced as I walk this path.”

2.  Michelle Rosenthal at Heal My PTSD: Conquer the Past. Create the Future.

“In 1981 life really shocked me: I was 13 years old when I found myself struggling to survive Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, a freak allergy to a medication that turned me into a full-body burn patient almost overnight. None of my doctors had ever seen a case. By the time I was released from the hospital 3 weeks later I was a very different girl. The kid I had been was gone. The girl in her place was a complete stranger”

“It didn’t take long for insomnia, intrusive thoughts, nightmares and flashbacks to set in. I didn’t tell anyone. I was determined to go back to who I’d been before my illness, so I avoided all mention of my trauma, pretended the past was behind me and ran as fast as I could into the future.”

“Within 5 years I was a complete and total insomniac, anorexic, melt down mess. Over the years everyone thought I was a difficult teenager, and then a temperamental artist, and then just a really moody woman. The therapists my parents forced me to see didn’t recognize my classic symptoms of PTSD.”

“By my mid-twenties the stress of constant hypervigilance and hyperarousal, the lack of sleep, the unrelenting on-the-go lifestyle I lived so that I did not have to be alone with my thoughts began to entirely undermine my health. By the end of my twenties I was very ill: my hair was falling out, my liver, stomach and small intestines were in various stages of dysfunction. I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, and possible liver cancer (both of which turned out to be false, psychosomatic symptoms). By my mid-thirties I had developed advanced osteoporosis because, unable to get the nutrition it needed, by body pirated the minerals in my bones.”

“Still, none of the specialists or psychologists we consulted and with whom I worked recognized my symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress. In desperation I began to do my own research. It was my proactive, self-empowered search for information and help that led to my PTSD diagnosis. Finally, after 24 years of living without understanding what was wrong with me, I had a name for my insanity.”

“Receiving my diagnosis was only the beginning of my healing journey. Literally, the journey took me from New York City to Palm Beach, Florida. In the end, it required 10 modalities and quite a few practitioners to get me to where I am today: 100% PTSD-free.”

Michelle’s website has a weekly series about other PTSD survivors.

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WARNING: In all posting about PTSD/recovery/mental illness, I never wish to assign any blame. The family members are each doing the best they can. They each need help to stop the trauma.

1. From Leila Levinson: “The War That Comes Home: How PTSD Affects Our Children”:

“Our veterans desperately want to shield their families from the horrors of war, and so they turn to silence, knowing no other way to keep the awful memories from polluting their homes. They don’t tell us about their awful nightmares (though many children remember being awakened by their fathers’ moans or cries during the night), and they don’t speak of any negative emotion, as to open oneself to sadness or grief would open the flood gates.”

“And the effect of the trauma — a distortion of perception — keeps them from perceiving how this silence shapes their children.”

“Children are sponges, absorbing whatever emotion and behavior they observe. They take on their parents’ attributes, and so I inherited my father’s depression, his emotional distancing. I inherited his war.”

“Children of Vietnam veterans recognize the connection between their emotional lives and their fathers’s war, but children of World War II veterans still resist making similar connections. Perhaps this is because we, the generation that made Prozac and therapy household terms, still need to idealize World War II as “the good war” and our fathers as the “Greatest Generation.” But I believe that that label has burdened them, made it more difficult for them to admit their pain and find help. Delayed onset of PTSD among World War II veterans has not received much attention from the media, despite the significant increase of diagnosis of PTSD among World War II veterans in just the last 10 years.”

“Our misperceptions of what PTSD looks like not only keeps World War II veterans from getting the help they need, but it will affect the level of support available to our soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is time to realize that there is no good war, and there is no victor. Everyone returns from war wounded, bringing their war home into the hearts of their families. That is the cruelest aspect of going to war, that the veteran isn’t able to protect that which he or she holds most dear: his or her family.”

“Our responsibility is to mitigate that harm as much as we are able. We must support our veterans, not with a bumper sticker but with heartfelt commitment and engagement. We must do all we can to help them heal and know peace.”

2.  From Dr. Anthony Hassan and Marilyn Flynn: “PBS’s ‘This Emotional Life’: Who Will Provide Mental Health Care to Our Veterans and Their Families”:

“The number and type of injuries, the frequency of deployments, the nature of our military force, the consequences for family life and children, and the conduct of the war itself have combined to create a crisis for our society.”

“It is staggering. The number of surviving service members with permanent disabling injuries surpasses that of any previous modern conflict. The invisible wounds of war are even more prevalent. Of the estimated 1.9 million service members sent to battle since 2003, some researchers estimate that more than 500,000 will develop combat stress disorders ranging from severe anxiety to depression.”

“Untreated, these reactions may last a lifetime. Not surprisingly, families and children are profoundly impacted. You have heard the story about the soldier who cannot sleep, turns day into night, reacts with unpredictable irritability, fails to maintain employment, and is unable to concentrate, every family member is thrown out of normal balance.”

“The soldier’s children may react with poor school performance, strained family relationships and peer related difficulties, bullying behavior and depression. It should come as no surprise that combat deployment can have a cumulative negative effect on marriages and family stability that remains even after the deployed service member returns home. The fact is, the devastating effects of frequent redeployment — a hallmark of this war — are now well-documented.”

3.  From Lily Casura in Healing Combat Trauma: “Sometimes You Have to Choose to Love–A Love Story after PTSD”:

“Into the dearth of “good news” about combat veterans with PTSD and their partners comes the remarkable love story of Josh and Helen, who met and fell in love AFTER his service, his suicide attempts, and his PTSD diagnosis. While PTSD can seem like the “third partner” in a relationship — the ever-present elephant in the room — in Josh and Helen’s story, it’s what brought them together, and love, wisdom and maturity is what keeps their union intact.”

“I had the pleasure of getting to spend a few days recently with Josh and Helen, and was impressed by both of them, and the sheer fun of their relationship, which can be too rare among partners where one has PTSD. I was struck by Helen’s clear-eyed, open-hearted approach — the education she sought about PTSD, as she was falling in love with Josh — and the way in which she’s really becoming a wise “spokesperson” for how love is possible after PTSD. For all the broken relationships out there, and all the partners barely enduring and tolerating one another, I felt like Josh and Helen’s story needed to be told, so I asked Helen to tell it. Just as a point of reference, Josh served in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2008. He was honorably discharged in 2008, and served in Iraq from 2005 to 2006. Here is Helen’s story:”

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1. From Mark Goulston: PTSD Symptoms: 7 Signs That May Signal PTSD:

1. Feeling Bulletproof: Prior to the trauma, they often felt invulnerable as if nothing could harm them (the way a very wealthy person who can buy anything — and sometimes anyone — can feel all the way to a freshly trained soldier before they enter battle).

2. Horrendous Trauma: There is usually something horrific about the trauma. Horror has a way of destabilizing the acting, feeling and thinking parts of their brains so they can no longer work together. This may explain the use of the expressions: “Wigged out,” “Coming unglued,” “At wit’s end.”

3. Raw Vulnerability: As bulletproof as they once thought they were is as vulnerable as they have turned out to be. There is a belief that they don’t know how they survived the first trauma and an unconscious belief that they wouldn’t survive being re-traumatized. One of the reasons for anniversary reactions.

4. Brittleness: Not being able to find peace outside or inside their life or inside their psyche, leads to a brittleness where anything can set them off. This leads to the heightened startle respond common to people with PTSD.

5. Terror: Inside there is a deeply held belief that any re-traumatization will cause them to shatter and fragment and there is an feeling of impending inevitability that it will happen which creates a state of terror, difficulty sleeping, heavy self-medication (which also dulls ones rational thinking).

6. PTSD Symptoms: Most of the symptoms of PTSD from withdrawing to alcohol and substance abuse to not sleeping (since the experience of and fear of nightmares adds to the terror) are attempts to avoid re-traumatization.

7. Fragility: Feeling on the brink of going from brittle to shattering, fragmenting, losing their mind and never getting it back can cause a person who needs to be in control to take desperate measures. That is because to such a person, losing complete control is a fate worse than death.

2. From Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health: More than 3,00 survivors of the WTC attacks experience long-term post-traumatic stress disorder:

“PTSD risk was greater among survivors who experienced serious life threat as defined by location in the towers, time of evacuation initiation, or dust cloud exposures,” said Dr. Laura DiGrande, DrPH, MPH, Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health doctoral degree recipient for this research and first author of the study. “As one would expect, individuals who were exposed to several of the most troubling and life threatening events during the disaster were at the greatest risk of PTSD.” Only 145 or four percent of survivors had no symptoms of PTSD.”

“As the long-term effects of the WTC disaster emerge the results from this study suggest that some survivors of the WTC disaster will continue to report psychological symptoms years after their exposure to the events of 9/11. The implication of this finding is that the impact of terrorism on survivors, particularly those in low socioeconomic positions, could be substantial, as PTSD is known to be co-morbid with other disorders and harmful behaviors that affect daily functioning, wellness, and relationships,” noted Dr. Sandro Galea, MD, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and study senior author.”

3.  From Rajiv Srinivasan–”Taking Off the Armor”:

“To a third party, and even to myself as I write this, I might seem unnecessarily dramatic. After all, Lasik is a routine procedure. My doctor had performed thousands of these surgeries. It’s easy to say that my fear was in vain in retrospect, but in the moment, I desperately feared that the needle and blood I felt meant something went wrong and my eyesight was at stake.”

“A montage of images from the most impactful events in my life flashed through my mind, most from my recent tour in Kandahar. I remembered seeing the delicate smiles of children, finding humor even in their war-torn home. I recalled the crying girl, about 7 years old, who knelt by my side during a firefight in Zhari. I saw the way she raised her hands toward her mouth, as if to cover the cracks in her brave exterior. I remembered dozens of explosions, the bravery of my men and images bemoaning the confusion of combat. I saw the faces of lifeless friends, and the purging of emotion from the losses thereof. My eyes had served me so well in my life.”

“Overcome with fear and vulnerability, I lost control of my nervous function. I began to shake and twitch on the operating table as waves of post-traumatic stress unleashed itself in my body. But then something magical happened: a moment of kindness and warmth that I will never forget. A nurse sitting to my left reached for my arm. She held my hand, and squeezed it with reassuring compassion. My left eye shot to her face. Though her mouth and hair were both covered, I could tell she was a middle-aged woman, akin to my own mother. Her eyes darted to meet mine with an empowering stare as if to say, “Don’t worry, Rajiv, everything is going to be all right.”

“I took a breath. In. Then out. My body slowly began to relax. My arms rested by my side, and I indulged in a rare feeling of delicate protection in the arms of another. It was a dramatic transition from terror to trust and security that I hadn’t felt in years. I felt like a small child, trusting my own mother and father as I received my first booster shot at the age of 5. As the surgeon regained his tempo, I finally sat motionless on the table, amazed at how quickly this woman’s touch calmed me down.”

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1.  “Catching Up and Cleaning Up” from Broken Brain–Brilliant Mind:

“And amazing, how much my life has changed, in the past three years or so. I’ve essentially gone from being locked away in a world of my own making and imagining, to being fully out in the outside world, participating with life on life’s terms… a whole lot more integrated into regular society, than I ever was before. Thinking back, I was seriously reality-impaired, and it showed. The 30+ years I spent inventing my own version of what life was all about — by never fully engaging with real-live people who could steer me right, and keeping my head buried in books that I was either reading or writing — did not help when it came to interacting with the outside world.”

“I would just say and do the most off-the-wall things… and never realize just how off base I was”.

“But what did I know? I was off in my own private Idaho, creating my own world and my own version of reality. Whenever I ventured out, I was met by people who would ridicule or dismiss me. What did I care about participating in their world? Indeed.”

“So, I built up this persona and this “reality” that was structured around and informed by my own partial imaginings of how life really was and how people really were. In some cases, I could be incredibly insightful, in others I could be so far off-base, people had no idea if I was in my right mind… An interesting mix, needless to say. And I filled my life — and my office — with all the stuff that reflected and supported that persona of mine.”

“Now I find myself at an interesting place, where the old stuff — while it served me at the time — is no longer entirely useful to me. In fact, in many ways, it just holds me back. But at the same time, there’s part of me that wants to hang onto it, like Linus’es security blanket from Charlie Brown. It’s like all the books and items around me from years gone by offer me a way to escape, a destination to run to, if things on the outside get to be too much. So, in that sense, I do want to hang onto the old things. Just in case.”

“This is all probably coming up, because I watched the move “Marwencol” the other night – the documentary about the guy who got beaten within an inch of his life, who went on to create his own little world — literally — out of 1/6 size action figures in a WWII setting. Nazis and spies and witches, oh my. I had intended to watch it, but I forgot to write it down, and I spaced on the time and date, so I only caught the last half of it.  But that last half was absolutely fascinating.”

“It was also a little sobering, because in a way, Mark’s story is similar to my own, though his experience was more abrupt and extreme. A band of hooligans beat him within an inch of his life, and after that, he had no memory of the attack, he had hand-eye coordination issues. To deal with it all, he turned to a world of his own that would give him safety and a way to play out his own experiences and pain, in the privacy of an environment that he could control, that he made happen.”

2. From Wounded Times: Editor and Publisher Chaplain Kathie: Chairelli Lauds Anti-Suicide PSAs:

“I tell the story often of a young Marine back from Iraq crying and apologizing for crying because he was a Marine and wasn’t supposed to cry. He did everything he needed to do no matter how much pain he was in. He didn’t allow himself to feel it until he was back home and no one else was in danger, except him. He wanted to live.”

“The other night I got a phone call from a National Guards Mom I hadn’t heard from in a couple of years. Her son had tired to commit suicide twice by the time she contacted me. She didn’t know what to do any more than she understood what was going on. He was totally lost. He carried the pain of something he had to do, started to think he was evil because all he focused on was what happened, forgetting what came before the end of this event. He needed to see himself through different eyes. Anyway, fast forward to two year later, he got married again, is back in treatment, went back to church and is healing. He’s closer to his Mom than ever before because she was willing to do whatever it took to help him. She wanted to understand and it saved his life.”

“We need to stop making excuses to not care, not want to know, because we lose 18 veterans a day to suicide and we’re still losing them to suicide while on active duty. We can’t save them all but they are worth fighting for and doing whatever we can to save them. After all, the fact they were willing to die for us shouldn’t mean we should let them.”

“You don’t have to know what it was like for them to be a soldier. You just need to understand what it is like for them to be human.”

3. From Marcella Zimmerman writing “Learning How to Understand Each Other” published in Family of a Vet:

“I noticed about a month after my husband returned home from Iraq, in February 2004,that something wasn’t right. He refused to go to sleep at night, and then would end up sleeping all of the following day. He was extremely aggressive and would go off on these rages that I had never seen before. One day he went on a rampage and pulled out the drawers to our dresser, smashing it and chipping the hard wood floors. At this point, I took our three year old son and had a friend pick us up.  I was shaking and crying pretty hard as I called his 1SGT to tell him that I thought my husband had a serious problem. His response to me and our situation was that he hadn’t noticed anything different about his behavior at the motor pool and that maybe I needed to back off.”

“When my husband didn’t come home early from work about three months later, I started to worry, though I was also getting use to him arriving later than usual. At first, I didn’t think to much on it when I heard his key turn in the door. Then when I saw his face and the look on it, I knew something wasn’t right. He told me that he had to go away from awhile to a locked down mental health facility in the next town. He was driving and had seen the post hospital blow up. He stopped the car in the middle of the road and started doing ID checks. An officer from another unit called the MP’s and from then on things just got worse. Trying to regulate the medication he was on was terrible. He’d sleep all the time and when he was awake, he was like a walking zombie. his temper only got worse and finally he was medically discharged from the military. Now, he is on 100% disability for PTSD and TBI. At one point he turned to substance abuse to self medicate. I developed secondary PTSD and would even have anxiety attacks. If there were too many people in line at the grocery store, I would leave my cart to the side and just go home. There were days I was too nervous to even leave my house. I began checking all the locks in the house several times throughout the night just to make sure my house was completely locked up. If I ran into someone I knew while out running errands, I would get nervous and make any excuse I could just to leave. If anything unexpected would happen, it would upset me. I developed insomnia, nightmares, and an ulcer.I filed for divorce on two separate occasions. We have been to hell and back and everything in between. So many hardships that I could probably write a novel.”

“Now he is active in ACVOW and volunteers at the local VA. He still has his nightmares and crowds will still make him nervous. He doesn’t like to talk about his experiences, so I have learned to stop asking. It took me six years to learn how to navigate through his troubles and through it all, we have become a much closer family. There isn’t too much that can shake us now days. It’s a process to go through and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But, he is active in pursuing all the outlets that help and he is taking classes to help counsel his peers with PTSD. It is our dream to one day open our own center for soldiers and their families suffering from PTSD. I have learned to be more understanding, but I have also learned not to allow the fact that he has PTSD take control of the way the family will be. In return, he has learned that while he does have PTSD, it is no excuse to fly off the handle and act any way he wants when he is mad. While we have come a long ways. we still have miles to go. I just wish there had been more support when all of this first started. At that point, I had no one and I was 22, without a clue on how to handle any of it.”

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Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,–’Wait and hope’   Alexandre Dumas

1.  From Stacy Bannerman: “Husbands Who Bring the War Home”:

“Kristi and I talked a lot over the next days and weeks—mostly she talked, and I listened. She was seeing a civilian counselor, but spent most of her time at home, shell-shocked and alone. She said her counselor just kept telling her to leave her husband, giving her lectures on the typical cycle of domestic abuse, so she tried to find someone who understood the military and veterans.”

“She called the military chaplain on post, but he never called back. She called the VA, and asked if they had support programs for wives of combat veterans. They didn’t. She called Military One Source, a free counseling assistance program provided by the Department of Defense. But the lady there just started to cry, and told her that she got “these calls all the time. I can’t help you. Unless you authorize a report, I can’t authorize assistance.”

“Kristi reached out to another military spouse that lived off post and was married to an Iraq war veteran. She told her what happened, and her friend said that she and her husband had gotten into so many fights, hitting and screaming and throwing things at each other, that she ended up going to the domestic violence shelter. Staff at the shelter told her that they didn’t have programs for wives of veterans, and that her husband made too much money for her to stay there, anyway.”

“Meanwhile, Mark was staying with friends, or sleeping in his office. After several days of silence, they began talking, but she hasn’t seen him since that night, and at times, she’s wondered if she even wants to. “I miss him, I do,” she said. “We’ve already been apart way too much, but I am so angry, and hurt.”

“Today, Kristi says that Mark’s trying to get help, but it’s not easy. He called a domestic violence hotline, and the person he talked to discouraged him from going to the men’s group because he doesn’t fit the abuser profile. “It’s not like he can make a lot of calls about this when he works for 10 hours every day,” Kristi says. “His insurance won’t pay for him go to a private therapist at night. They said he can only see someone at the base medical center, and he’s not doing that. He can’t really sneak off for three hours in the middle of the day and drive down to the VA, either.”

“Most family victims of veteran violence don’t file reports with the police or their husband’s command. The military is stepping up domestic violence programs and education at military installations, but the pressure on spouses within the active duty and retired military culture and much of the civilian population to remain silent is especially intense during a time a war. Speaking out about veteran violence at home seems to be perceived as more of a betrayal than the violence itself.”

“Even so, since 2003, there has been a 75 percent increase in reports of domestic violence in and around Ft. Hood, where the number of soldiers diagnosed with PTSD rose from 310 in 2004 to 2,445 in 2009.”

2.  From Ann Curley: “Study: PTSD signals longer-term health problems”:

“U. S. soldiers who experienced post-traumatic stress disorder  during combat in Iraq were more likely to experience longer-term health problems including depression, headaches, tinnitis, irritability and memory problems compared with soldiers who experienced only concussions without PTSD. The study concludes that screening for PTSD among troops is critical for identifying and treating long-term health problems. The findings are published in the JAMA Archives of General Psychiatry.”

“Since Operation Desert Storm launched 20  years ago, millions of U.S. troops have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Combat exposure often places troops at risk of suffering psychological trauma and injury when they are exposed to the blasts from improvised explosive devices, according to background information in the study, and traumatic brain injury has often been called the “signature injury” of the conflicts. The study says that most TBIs are mild – better known as concussions. The symptoms of concussion, or MTBI,  include loss of consciousness, loss of memory, dizziness, and headache.”

“Recognizing the increased risk of MTBI and PTSD, the Department of Defense and the VA have instituted post-deployment screening to identify service members who may require further treatment or evaluation. The researchers explain that while other studies have shown that PTSD is linked to long-term health problems and disability, less is known about the long-term effects of concussion on health problems.”

3. From the University of Iowa: “Fear discovery could lead to new interventions for PTSD”:

“This past year, I’ve been treating veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan who suffer from PTSD. Their lives are marred by fear, and they are oftentimes unable to even leave their home due to the ever-present feeling of danger,” Feinstein said. “In striking contrast, the patient in this study is immune to these states of fear and shows no symptoms of post-traumatic stress. The horrors of life are unable to penetrate her emotional core. In essence, traumatic events leave no emotional imprint on her brain.”

“In examining the role of the amygdala, Feinstein observed and recorded the patient’s responses during exposure to snakes and spiders (two of the most commonly feared animals), during a visit to one of the world’s scariest haunted houses, and while watching a series of horror films. Feinstein also measured the patient’s experience of fear with a large number of standardized questionnaires that probed different aspects of fear, ranging from the fear of death to the fear of public speaking. Additionally, over a three-month period, the patient carried a computerized emotion diary that randomly asked her to rate her current fear level throughout the day.”

“Across all of the scenarios, the patient failed to experience fear. Moreover, in everyday life, she has encountered numerous traumatic events that have threatened her very existence, yet, by her report, have caused no fear.”

“Taken together, these findings suggest that the human amygdala is a pivotal area of the brain for triggering a state of fear,” Feinstein said. “While the patient is able to experience other emotions, such as happiness and sadness, she is unable to feel fear. This suggests that the brain is organized in such a way that a specific brain region – the amygdala – is specialized for processing a specific emotion – fear.”

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1. In Coping With Life, Tom Davis writes about “Darren DeGraw, Manville and PTSD”:

“Darren, who had also lived in Barnegat, resigned on June 30, 2005 from the Manville force because of the PTSD he suffered from following a 1995 shooting, his ex-wife, Donna DeGraw, once told The Princeton Packet.”

“Even as he suffered, he apparently showed the same leadership spirit he had as a high school student, hoping to revive a community that had a wrecked economy and a population that suffered from a debilitating and deadly illness.”

“But there is only so much a person can do to save themselves, especially when they face the tragedy of depression and trauma that not only affects those around them. Mental illness is often a force bigger than ourselves. It was for my mother, who died of a heart attack in our Point Boro home, in 2003, after suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder for nearly 40 years.”

“For Darren, it was, apparently, a force that – despite the good life he led – was too big to conquer.”

“On Feb. 23, 1995, a man confronted Darren and another officer with a shotgun after a routine traffic stop, according to The Packet. The man stopped his vehicle, near Darren’s police car, and reportedly asked him, “Why are you following me?”

“The man then went back to his truck and took out a 12-gauge shotgun. The Packet reported that Darren and the other officer attempted to drive their police cars away from the man, but Darren’s car was shot at from 30 feet away, shattering his windshield.”

2.  From the New York Times, a tragedy that didn’t have to happen about a soldier, David Senft, who had had prior difficulties:

“A gentle snow fell on the funeral of Staff Sgt. David Senft at Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 16, when his bitterly divided California family came together to say goodbye. His 5-year-old son received a flag from a grateful nation.”

“But his father, also named David Senft, an electrician from Grass Valley, Calif., who had worked in Afghanistan for a military contractor, is convinced that his son committed suicide, as are many of his friends and family members and the soldiers who served with him.”

“The evidence appears overwhelming. An investigator for the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, which has been looking into the death, has told Sergeant Senft’s father by e-mail that his son was found dead with a single bullet hole in his head, a stolen M-4 automatic weapon in his hands and his body slumped over in the S.U.V., which was parked outside the air base’s ammunition supply point. By his side was his cellphone, displaying a text message with no time or date stamp, saying only, “I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.” (Mr. Senft shared the e-mails from the C.I.D. investigator with The New York Times.) “

“With Sergeant Senft, the warning signs were blaring.”

“The Army declared him fit for duty and ordered him to Afghanistan after he had twice attempted suicide at Fort Campbell, Ky., and after he had been sent to a mental institution near the base, the home of the 101st. After his arrival at Kandahar early in 2010 he was so troubled that the Army took away his weapon and forced him into counseling on the air base, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator. But he was assigned a roommate who was fully armed. C.I.D. investigators have identified the M-4 with which Sergeant Senft was killed as belonging to his roommate.”

“I question why, if he was suicidal and they had to take away his gun, why was he allowed to stay in Afghanistan?” asked Sergeant Senft’s father. “Why did they allow him to deploy in the first place, and why did they leave him there?”

3.  From Stop Walking on Eggshells: “High Conflict Relationships Can Led to Stress Disorder”:

Clinical psychologist Dr Joseph M Carver, PhD, who has a number of great articles on his website says in an online discussion that, “Every victim of abuse experiences some, if not multiple, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Carver writes:

[T]hese symptoms linger many years; some for a lifetime. Everyone knows this but it’s rarely bought up…During our period of abuse, the brain collects thousands of memories that contain details of our abusive experiences and the feelings (horror, terror, pain, etc.) made at that time. In what we call “traumatic recollection,” any similar experience in the future will recall the emotional memory of the abuse, forcing us to relive the event in detail and feeling.

Most people think of PTSD as happening only to people who have been in extreme circumstances, such as war veterans. However, in her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1997) Judith Herman describes a subtype of PTSD she calls complex post traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).

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1.  From Win Over PTSD: “Signs That You’re Healing Your PTSD”:

This is the list of seven criteria for having resolved trauma. It was created by Claudia Black, Ph.D.

1. The physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits.

2. The person is able to bear the feelings associated with the traumatic memories.

3. The person has authority over his/her memories. He/she can elect to remember the trauma and to put that memory aside.

4. The memory of the traumatic event/s is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling.

5. The person’s damaged self-esteem has been restored.

I think healing in ourselves often goes unnoticed. It’s nice to have these concrete signs to let us ponder the ways in which we may be healing without conscious thought.

I hope you’ll check out the PTSD Forum. You can become a member for free, and post your own thoughts and feelings, as well as connect with others who face the same challenges as yourself. You’ll also find people who are truly “healing their PTSD.” It’s an inspiring and helpful site.

To read the full article, go to:

http://www.ptsdforum.org/threads/criteria-for-healed-trauma.13869/

2.  From From Survivor to Thriver: “Getting Better…Slowly”:

I adore my doctor.  She’s been my doctor for about 8 years now, and I’ve never given her enough credit.  I’ve always been afraid to ask her about anything having to do with my mental disorders because I was terrified that she wouldn’t believe me.  Not only does she believe me, but she very much so wants me to get to a healthy place.

I had another appointment with her last week, and she was concerned that I am taking the ativan every day.  She doesn’t want me to get addicted to it.  I understand her concern because I feel the same way.  It’s helping me so much though.  I take it when I can feel a panic attack coming on, and it calms me right down…within a few minutes.  I told her that I feel the celexa working, but it’s not enough during those really high anxiety times.  She increased my dosage to 40mg per day from 20mg per day to see if that helps.  She did promise not to take the ativan away, but she’s hoping that I’ll use it less.  Me too.

She also suggested I find a therapist, and talked with me about FMLA when I told her I was worried about missing work for it.  I know I need a therapist, and my company will pay for the first 10 sessions, so there’s really nothing stopping me but myself.  It’s seems such a daunting task.  I’ve talked about it a lot on my blog.

I’m still very frustrated that I can’t write in my handwritten journal.  I strained a ligament in my hand.  I’m hoping that with ice and ibuprofen, it will get better soon.  I have to take it easy.  At least typing isn’t painful anymore.

I guess the bright side of my injury is that I’ve been reading a lot.  I’m almost finished with the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire, and I will read the others.  It’s a great series so far, but it’s been a bit triggering.  I will write about it in another post.

3. From  Trauma Treatment for Children: “Improved Advocating through Risking Connection Training”:

This is really true. First, by understanding brain science and the effects of trauma, treaters can become more articulate in describing why punishment is not the best response to problem behaviors. They can describe how making amends can teach the youth hope in relationships, and how learning skills can help him be less likely to repeat the behavior. By understanding the behavior and the need the youth was trying to meet, they can recommend a specific intervention which will help the youth learn to meets his needs in a more positive way. They are more confident because their ideas are grounded in a theoretical framework.

Often when people think of “doing trauma work” they mean that the youth is retelling the details of her traumatic experiences. Through understanding both the trauma framework and modern brain science treaters can explain the benefits of other areas of treatment. It is NOT TRUE that recreational activities, fun events, creative pursuits such as music and art, cooking, and relaxing with others are just time fillers in between the “real therapy” that happens in the clinician’s office. Using the trauma framework treaters can specify exactly what step in healing each activity is designed to accomplish. Changing the child’s template about relationships, re-building her brain, increasing her sense of self-worth and teaching feeling skills are all happening during these every day parts of life. When a treatment team is well trained they can describe and document each step of the day by describing its connection to healing.

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1. From Sgt. Max Harris: Life With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder– Story of Warning:

“What I am about to describe may sound very familiar to a lot of veterans and their families…How the story ends is the outcome I most fervently wish for all of them. That being said, many veterans believe that getting help is a sign of weakness — especially male veterans. It is a common belief that ‘sucking it up’ is the ‘manly’ thing to do. This story is directed at those veterans…”

“When I was serving in Iraq, I witnessed a friendly-fire incident. It really destroyed me, emotionally and spiritually. It may sound horrible but it would have been much easier to accept if the soldier would have been killed by the enemy. I ended up paranoid and broken, a danger to myself and others…so they sent me home.”

“When I returned home from service overseas, I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). My life was a mess, a complete disaster area. I was hyper-vigilant, agitated, depressed, paranoid, easily angered, and rarely sleeping. If I didn’t feel in complete control of my environment, I would lose my temper and lash out at the people that loved me the most. The irony is that I was so concerned about controlling everything around me; I didn’t notice that, physically, I was a mess. I wasn’t bathing regularly, my laundry was out of control, and I wasn’t shaving. I bottomed out and realized that I needed help about two months after I got home. I was freaking out about something; I can’t even remember what it was. My father tried to calm me down. I got so angry at my dad for trying to offer a logical solution that I almost hit him. My father has always been a kind, understanding, and generous man. The fact that I almost assaulted him made my whole world collapse around me. The façade that I put on for everyone, the one that told everyone how well I was coping, was irrevocably shattered. I finally admitted to myself that I needed help.”

“If you are a veteran who is struggling with these issues, which is better — To get help and admit you have a problem or continue to hurt everyone around you that loves you? Men, is it manlier to ‘suck it up’ and continue to have issues holding down a job or is it manlier to get help so that you can be there to support your family? I hope you take this warning to heart before you put everyone and everything you hold dear at risk.”

2.  From New York Times: ” Voice of Post-Traumatic Stress”:

“Most people associate post-traumatic stress disorder with military service during wartime. But increasingly, therapists are reporting that the typical patient with P.T.S.D. has experienced trauma in everyday life, reports Karen Barrow in today’s Science Times.”

“One of the new faces of post-traumatic stress is Robin Hutchins, a 25-year-old victim of sexual violence.”

“Friends didn’t understand why she never wanted to go out. They would play down her anxiety and say, “Oh, you’re just going to laugh at this in a couple days.” It took years of sleepless nights and paralyzing anxiety over tasks as simple as grocery shopping before she began to look for help.”

“She sought out psychologists, but some dismissed her. “They’d say, ‘What does a pretty girl like you have to worry about?’ ” she said. Others were simply too expensive. Finally, during an initial consultation, a psychologist heard her full story and said the simple phrase that changed everything: “You have P.T.S.D.”

3. From Mary Christine in Being Sober: November 3rd Stuff:

“My bed is so important to me – why?”

“Well, it became so in early sobriety for some reason. And last summer when I was going through some intense PTSD, it became moreso.”

“When I was beginning EMDR treatment for PTSD, I was asked to name a “safe” place. The only place that came to mind was my bedroom, specifically my bed. I thought it was a lame answer. I thought I should name a tropical beach with swaying palm trees and white sands underfeet. But my truth was that my safe place was my very own bed in my very own bedroom.”

“Later, when completing this session of extremely difficult remembering of traumatic events, I got to return to my “safe place” in my imagination in my therapist’s office. I had tears of gratitude when I thought about the fact that my place was reality and that it was only a few miles away, not just in my imagination, but in my reality. Later that night, I returned to my very own bed. My very own safe place.”

“Through years of sobriety, some of them very difficult, I had created this place for myself. I had created this safety for myself. The rest of the world may be difficult but my home is not. And my bed is the place that is the most symbolic of the efforts I take to care for myself.”

“I know I must turn my thoughts to others most of the time, but I also need to do some self-care.”

“My bed is where I ask him in the morning for another day of sobriety, and thank him at night.”

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1.  From Joshua Sparrow: “Four Adopted Siblings, Lots of Stress”:

“The questions children ask — if they dare to — about what they’ve been through can be overwhelming. Some adults believe that young children won’t remember. Yet even in the first year of life, children experience a broad range of emotions, including happiness, joy, surprise, sadness, anger and fear. Their understanding of themselves and others builds on these first experiences. They may not be able to use words to express these feelings, but their facial expressions and body language do. Children who have been traumatized before they could speak may have more trouble putting these experiences into words, and are more likely to feel them in their bodies and express them with their behavior.”

“To get their behavior under control, they will need to find words to organize their feelings. They will learn that they can get some control over the feelings when they can control the words. If an adult brings up the traumatic past out of the blue, children may panic, or shut down. But when a child asks, simple, clear information can help: “Yes, it was the day before Christmas when the police came to take you away from your parents.”

“Their body language will tell you if they can handle any more. If they nod silently and make eye contact, you might continue. If they turn away, whimper or become agitated, that’s all they can take right now. If you respect their pace, they’ll let you know when they’re ready for more. Slowly, patiently putting words to the experience organizes it, and makes it less scary than when it is shrouded in silence, or when there are no words for the feelings. But children need to know they are in control of these conversations.”

“Trauma is an experience of losing control, and a violation of expectations. Children expect that parents will take care of them, not hurt them. Very early on, they learn that crying gives them some control, bringing help. All of this is turned upside down with trauma. To heal, children need experiences of mastery and control that are within their reach, for example, control of when and how their painful pasts are addressed. It helps to let them know, “you don’t have to think about that when you don’t want to. When it makes you too upset, we can focus on something else.”

2. From Margaret Blaustein: “A New Take on Childhood Trauma”:

“Research on outcomes associated with trauma exposure highlights the differences between childhood onset (and particularly interpersonal trauma) experiences and adult-onset events in risk for PTSD vs. a more complex array of outcomes. This isn’t surprising – it’s not difficult to imagine that there are different responses to, for instance, a hurricane, a car accident, childhood abuse, traumatic loss, and war, or that trauma first experienced in adulthood might have a different impact than trauma experienced from the day of birth. This isn’t a matter of weighing which trauma matters more; it’s about qualitative differences in type of exposure, and ways that any salient experience of childhood – particularly those which provide the overarching fabric of a life – will invariably influence the course of development.”

“It is this developmental lens that has led experts to propose a new diagnosis, Developmental Trauma Disorder, for the DSM-V. First described by van der Kolk (2005) (3), a consensus statement released this year by leaders within the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) (4) strongly urged the DSM-V committee to consider this diagnosis for inclusion in our next diagnostic manual. Field trials are under way, and research will support – or not – the validity of a more developmental conceptualization. While it will be some time before we have the results, as a clinician who works every day with this population, I have little doubt of the eventual findings.”

“One of the most pernicious qualities of childhood trauma is often its veil of secrecy: the hiding of the known, and the not seeing of what is. So long as we, as a professional system, refuse to see Jeannie and Manuel and the millions like them, we are complicit in their continued experience – whatever we wish to call it. Personally, I don’t much care if we call it trauma or something else; I’m much more interested in how we address it. Here’s hoping our field continues to move forward.”

3. From Amy-Eden in her blog, Guess What Normal Is: “PTSD and the Adult Child: What is Post-Trauma Stress Disorder?”:

“You don’t have to be a soldier of war to experience post-trauma stress disorder.  If you’re reading this, you already suspect that statement to be true.”

“I referenced post-trauma stress disorder in this post about the urge to flee, running (not running scared, but running anxious) away from our relationships, jobs, friends, homes, children, pets, and stuff.  That kind of running instinct is a form of self-sabotage, a subconscious, knee-jerk urge to recreate the chaos of our childhood environment simply because it’s comfortable–it’s not “good” or “bad” in these scenarios, it’s just simply what we know.”

“And running scared has everything to do with post-trauma stress disorder.  (As does sitting still, when it’s an anxiety-induced paralysis.)”

“There are two key ingredients to an environment that is ripe for PTSD:  Unpredictability and Uncontrollability.  Familiar, right?  Those are also key characteristics of the alcoholic household, or any household run by an addict, narcissistic, or otherwise childlike adult.”

“What does “trauma” mean?  Does what happened to you have to have been really, really bad–do you have to have been beaten or sexually abused to qualify as a traumatized child?  No.  No, absolutely not.  There are lots of different types of abuses. Some are subtle, some are not-so-subtle.”

“PHYSICAL ABUSE.  If you were pushed, shoved, hit, or beaten by your parents/caregivers, that kind of physical abuse is obviously traumatic.  There is NO EXCUSE for that kind of treatment.  Sure, there are excuses given and you were probably expected to agree with or accept those, but there is NO EXCUSE for physical abuse.  You did nothing wrong, nothing to deserve physical action–no matter what you did.  NOTHING justifies the physical harm or punishment of a child.  Period.”

“SEXUAL ABUSE.  Sexual abuse counts.  I hope this is as obviously WRONG as the physical violence. This can include a one-time rape, or systematic abuse.  It also includes less direct, less obvious sexual stuff, like seeing a parent fondle themselves or someone else, or a hand that’s been on your knee too long or being given a massage that’s just slightly lower down your back than feels right.”

“EMOTIONAL and VERBAL ABUSE.  Emotional abuse counts, too.  Where there’s physical abuse, there is usually this kind, too.  If you were  teased, manipulated, threatened, ignored, belittled, or were loved conditionally by your parents/caregivers, that kind of emotional abuse is trauma-causing.  It doesn’t just screw with your self-esteem, it is truly traumatic.  For example, if your parents had chaotic lives but never helped you process what was going on by talking about it and reassuring you of their love and listening to you without judgment, the chaos likely traumatized you.”

“THREAT OF VIOLENCE.  In households where a parent has anger issues, there is the constant threat of violence, even if unrealized.  In this kind of household you grow up feeling like you probably will be hit when the chaos starts to whirl, you feel incredibly afraid of your parent (usually the father), even if he never actually strikes.”

“DON’T BELITTLE YOUR PTSD”

“I spent years telling my anxious self that I had no reason to feel so worried, to just “buck up” and get on with things.  But, you know what?  That’s what my father said to me.  That’s what he wanted his little girl to do–buck up, swallow reality and put on a I’m-OK face.  For him.  That’s not my own voice.”

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