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PTSD |
Post Traumatic Stress Is Not A Disorder
Take a quick tour of the internet, and you’ll find a lot of information about PTSD and how to treat it. There’s only one problem with this deluge of information: it’s all wrong.
I’m not saying the information is wrong. What’s wrong is the idea that all the disturbing symptoms of PTSD are a disorder, and that the brain and nervous system aren’t functioning the way they should. That’s what’s wrong. The truth is that PTSD is the brain functioning exactly the way it should. It’s functioning the way it was designed to function.
Post traumatic stress is NOT a disorder.
Sure, the symptoms of PTSD can cause you a lot of trouble. They can even ruin your life.
The secret to dealing with PTSD is realizing that THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU!!
Take a look at this article: The Anatomy of PTSD
https://www.brainline.org/slideshow/anatomy-ptsd
Brainline: all about Brain injury & ptsd
This article goes into great detail on the anatomical and physiological changes to the brain and its chemistry that happens when a person gets PTSD. The article describes how areas of the brain dedicated to the fight or flight response become overactive. It says that other areas of the brain responsible for calming you down become deactivated so you can’t turn off your memories and anxiety.
One glaring issue sticks out from this article and every other article you read on the internet about PTSD. In order to get a diagnosis of PTSD, there can’t be any brain injury that would otherwise explain the problem.
Herein lies the key to the matter. Your brain did NOT change its basic anatomy. No part of your brain got damaged or destroyed. In fact, these changes can start the very instant you experience a traumatic event, such as a train wreck, earthquake, or the death of a loved one.
This means that the brain is functioning the way it should by creating these symptoms. There’s nothing wrong with you. This is the way your brain is supposed to deal with traumatic events. You don’t have a disorder. You had an experience, and you’re processing it the way human beings are supposed to deal with it.
For millions of years, humans dealt with trauma in this way. They didn’t take mood-altering chemicals to make it all go away so they could go back to acting normally. They processed the event, and that processing begins with these symptoms.
Here’s a list of symptoms for PTSD. (taken from Anxiety & Depression Association of America) https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/posttraumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/symptoms
Flashbacks
Nightmares
Avoidance of people and places associated with the event.
Avoidance of triggers
Numbness
Difficulty sleeping
Difficulty concentrating
Hyperalert
Exaggerated startle response
Irritability
Uncontrolled emotions
Anxiety
Depression
Inability to remember the traumatic event
Exaggerated negative beliefs about yourself or the world (such as, “I’m bad,” “No one can be trusted,” “The world is completely dangerous)
Distorted blame of yourself or others
Reckless & destructive behavior
Persistent fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame
Lack of interest and participation in activities that used to interest you
Feeling detached or estranged from others
I wish I had this list when I was recovering from growing up in a cult. I suffered from every one of these symptoms, and I had no idea why. If I had known and could have put a name on what the problem was, I could have recovered a lot faster.
Let’s look at flashbacks as an example, since that’s one that causes cult survivors a lot of difficulty.
Why do you get flashbacks?
If you look at the next item on this list, you’ll see that another important symptom of PTSD is avoidance of people and things that could remind you of the event. Obviously you don’t want to be reminded of something painful, so you avoid it.
Flashbacks, overpowering emotions, lost sleep, nightmares, etc. are the brain’s way of making you deal with the event, even as you try everything in your power not to. You want to forget it. You want to wipe it out of existence. You want to go back in time to a place where the event never happened.
The problem is that you can’t undo the event. It happened. It’s stamped into your being. You can’t un-experience it. You can try all you like to un-experience it, but your brain says otherwise.
The bottom line is that your brain and nervous system cannot function under the extremes of stress all the time. Your brain will find a way to shut those stress responses down. When you suffer from PTSD, that’s exactly what’s happening. Your brain is struggling in every way it can to cope with an overwhelmingly intense stress response. It tries to shut down the memory and to cope with it at the same time.
The good news is that there’s a very simple, powerful tool you can use to reduce and, in some cases, eliminate flashbacks. You can find it here, in The Ultimate Guide to Flashbacks.
As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, human beings need to assign meaning to their experiences in order to process them. Let’s say you got into a car accident in which you lost several of your loved ones. You want to unmake that accident, but you can’t. It happened. Your life has changed irrevocably, and you can’t go back.
You have to build a new life based on the new reality, and that means finding some meaning in what happened to you. You probably have to tear down your whole identity based on your former life and create a new one based on the new reality. This is why you lose interest in things that once made you happy. The old structures and relationships don’t work anymore, so you have build new ones, and that takes time.
The same is true of cult involvement. You will never be the person you could have been had you never encountered the cult. That’s not you. You had a certain experience, and it made you a certain person. Now it’s your job to figure out who that person is.
I can guarantee you that person isn’t worthless or evil. I can also guarantee you that person isn’t living in a world that is worthless or evil, either. I can guarantee you that there are good people out there. You can be happy again, and you will be.
Get comfortable with asking yourself the hard questions.
“Who am I?”
“Why did this have to happen?”
“Why did it happen to me?”
“What does it mean?”
“What is my life worth with this in it?”
These are the questions that make us human. Every human being on the planet is struggling with these questions. This is the stuff that life is made of. You can read more on this subject in this blog post, where we study what happens when a person asks the question, Why Me?
The psychologist Viktor Frankel wrote about this in his landmark book Man’s Search For Meaning. Frankel survived the Nazi Holocaust, and he developed a clinical procedure for treating trauma that involved guiding the patient to find some meaning in their experience.
The important thing to remember is that there’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t have a disorder. Your brain and your body are functioning normally. YOU are normal. You’re dealing normally with a traumatic experience. There is a normal, natural beginning, middle, and end to this process, and that end doesn’t include taking a drug to make it go away. There is no magic powder a doctor can sprinkle over your head to make it go away.
You will get there, and you’ll be a different person than you were before it happened or, in the case of child abuse, who you would have been had the abuse never happened. That has nothing to do with trauma. That’s just life. The same thing would happen if something wonderful happened to you. We all change. We can’t stop ourselves changing, even when good things happen to us.
Take a quick tour of the internet, and you’ll find a lot of information about PTSD and how to treat it. There’s only one problem with this deluge of information: it’s all wrong.
I’m not saying the information is wrong. What’s wrong is the idea that all the disturbing symptoms of PTSD are a disorder, and that the brain and nervous system aren’t functioning the way they should. That’s what’s wrong. The truth is that PTSD is the brain functioning exactly the way it should. It’s functioning the way it was designed to function.
Post traumatic stress is NOT a disorder.
Sure, the symptoms of PTSD can cause you a lot of trouble. They can even ruin your life.
The secret to dealing with PTSD is realizing that THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU!!
Take a look at this article: The Anatomy of PTSD
https://www.brainline.org/slideshow/anatomy-ptsd
Brainline: all about Brain injury & ptsd
This article goes into great detail on the anatomical and physiological changes to the brain and its chemistry that happens when a person gets PTSD. The article describes how areas of the brain dedicated to the fight or flight response become overactive. It says that other areas of the brain responsible for calming you down become deactivated so you can’t turn off your memories and anxiety.
One glaring issue sticks out from this article and every other article you read on the internet about PTSD. In order to get a diagnosis of PTSD, there can’t be any brain injury that would otherwise explain the problem.
Herein lies the key to the matter. Your brain did NOT change its basic anatomy. No part of your brain got damaged or destroyed. In fact, these changes can start the very instant you experience a traumatic event, such as a train wreck, earthquake, or the death of a loved one.
This means that the brain is functioning the way it should by creating these symptoms. There’s nothing wrong with you. This is the way your brain is supposed to deal with traumatic events. You don’t have a disorder. You had an experience, and you’re processing it the way human beings are supposed to deal with it.
For millions of years, humans dealt with trauma in this way. They didn’t take mood-altering chemicals to make it all go away so they could go back to acting normally. They processed the event, and that processing begins with these symptoms.
Here’s a list of symptoms for PTSD. (taken from Anxiety & Depression Association of America) https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/posttraumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/symptoms
Flashbacks
Nightmares
Avoidance of people and places associated with the event.
Avoidance of triggers
Numbness
Difficulty sleeping
Difficulty concentrating
Hyperalert
Exaggerated startle response
Irritability
Uncontrolled emotions
Anxiety
Depression
Inability to remember the traumatic event
Exaggerated negative beliefs about yourself or the world (such as, “I’m bad,” “No one can be trusted,” “The world is completely dangerous)
Distorted blame of yourself or others
Reckless & destructive behavior
Persistent fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame
Lack of interest and participation in activities that used to interest you
Feeling detached or estranged from others
I wish I had this list when I was recovering from growing up in a cult. I suffered from every one of these symptoms, and I had no idea why. If I had known and could have put a name on what the problem was, I could have recovered a lot faster.
Let’s look at flashbacks as an example, since that’s one that causes cult survivors a lot of difficulty.
Why do you get flashbacks?
If you look at the next item on this list, you’ll see that another important symptom of PTSD is avoidance of people and things that could remind you of the event. Obviously you don’t want to be reminded of something painful, so you avoid it.
Flashbacks, overpowering emotions, lost sleep, nightmares, etc. are the brain’s way of making you deal with the event, even as you try everything in your power not to. You want to forget it. You want to wipe it out of existence. You want to go back in time to a place where the event never happened.
The problem is that you can’t undo the event. It happened. It’s stamped into your being. You can’t un-experience it. You can try all you like to un-experience it, but your brain says otherwise.
The bottom line is that your brain and nervous system cannot function under the extremes of stress all the time. Your brain will find a way to shut those stress responses down. When you suffer from PTSD, that’s exactly what’s happening. Your brain is struggling in every way it can to cope with an overwhelmingly intense stress response. It tries to shut down the memory and to cope with it at the same time.
The good news is that there’s a very simple, powerful tool you can use to reduce and, in some cases, eliminate flashbacks. You can find it here, in The Ultimate Guide to Flashbacks.
As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, human beings need to assign meaning to their experiences in order to process them. Let’s say you got into a car accident in which you lost several of your loved ones. You want to unmake that accident, but you can’t. It happened. Your life has changed irrevocably, and you can’t go back.
You have to build a new life based on the new reality, and that means finding some meaning in what happened to you. You probably have to tear down your whole identity based on your former life and create a new one based on the new reality. This is why you lose interest in things that once made you happy. The old structures and relationships don’t work anymore, so you have build new ones, and that takes time.
The same is true of cult involvement. You will never be the person you could have been had you never encountered the cult. That’s not you. You had a certain experience, and it made you a certain person. Now it’s your job to figure out who that person is.
I can guarantee you that person isn’t worthless or evil. I can also guarantee you that person isn’t living in a world that is worthless or evil, either. I can guarantee you that there are good people out there. You can be happy again, and you will be.
Get comfortable with asking yourself the hard questions.
“Who am I?”
“Why did this have to happen?”
“Why did it happen to me?”
“What does it mean?”
“What is my life worth with this in it?”
These are the questions that make us human. Every human being on the planet is struggling with these questions. This is the stuff that life is made of. You can read more on this subject in this blog post, where we study what happens when a person asks the question, Why Me?
The psychologist Viktor Frankel wrote about this in his landmark book Man’s Search For Meaning. Frankel survived the Nazi Holocaust, and he developed a clinical procedure for treating trauma that involved guiding the patient to find some meaning in their experience.
The important thing to remember is that there’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t have a disorder. Your brain and your body are functioning normally. YOU are normal. You’re dealing normally with a traumatic experience. There is a normal, natural beginning, middle, and end to this process, and that end doesn’t include taking a drug to make it go away. There is no magic powder a doctor can sprinkle over your head to make it go away.
You will get there, and you’ll be a different person than you were before it happened or, in the case of child abuse, who you would have been had the abuse never happened. That has nothing to do with trauma. That’s just life. The same thing would happen if something wonderful happened to you. We all change. We can’t stop ourselves changing, even when good things happen to us.
