This is pretty much a worst case scenario for PTSD. Methods for dealing with it have only been developed in that past couple decades.
Having said that, this fills me with optimism, confidence and hope. It is fantastic news. I have a name, and a route to follow. I have a path which I am confident will lead me to more or less full recovery, or at least substantial mitigation of symptoms.
Now, this is highly personal, and nobody’s damn business, but I share this for a couple reasons.
First, anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows I have some emotional problems. I have a powerful will and a very strong mind, so I can self correct. But simply existing is work for me and always has been.
Second, I want to offer an example for any readers I may have who suffer from, or know people who suffer from addictions.
Here is the thing: I believe I understand fully why people take heroin, why Russell Brand took heroin, why Phillip Seymour Hoffman chose to end his life with heroin.
There are traumas you can’t name, you can’t pull up. There are gaps in emotional development that happen that no normal therapist can identify, much less heal. “Substances” like alcohol, like heroin, like pills, come to seem like reliable friends. You can trust them.
And so too with “addictions” like sexual addiction, or video game addiction, or gambling, or workaholism: they take you out of that place you can neither name, face, nor escape.
I want people to know therapies do exist, now, which can help you face and process these traumas.
Missing from the psychotherapeutic arsenal has been treatments for very early childhood. Holotropic Breathwork can certainly help, but what I experienced was very targeted, and very useful.
But there are very, very few therapists trained in these methods. Think about this: my trauma is very likely nothing more complicated thanfeeling the terror of my mother hating me for crying too much because I had colic: how common must this be?
I think often of the black community, because that is where much of the misery in this country is concentrated. How often must these teenage girls fail to bond properly with their babies? How often must other children have felt and feel what I did? I think it is extremely common. This should give us pause. Decent human beings–Liberals, not leftists–should wonder how we can start to undo all the damage all around us.
We start with ourselves. That is what I am doing.
And as a link, MDEM is a part of Emotional Transformation Therapy: http://www.ettia.org/
It is not normally a long term process, so you could literally book a vacation to go see one of these therapists, and do 2-3 sessions in a week, and leave feeling substantially better. Just pay cash, if your insurance doesn’t cover it.
I will add as well that my therapist–this is her website –said that the most common methods used by the VA (immersion/exposure/in vitro therapy) in most cases either don’t help, or make things worse. If you are a veteran suffering from PTSD, first off, I can now honestly say I feel your pain, and secondly, you should avoid the VA. Pay cash for treatment with MDEM and/or EMDR. Believe it or not, your symptoms can be dealt with quickly and effectively in the vast bulk of cases. If you suffer from intruding thoughts/feelings/images/smells/sounds, then EMDR can fix that quickly in nearly all cases. If you suffer from traumatic grief at the death of a buddy, or from having killed, then Induced After Death Communication–which is a modification of EMDR–reportedly brings nearly instantaneous relief in about 70% of cases, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest if you walk in completely convinced there is no afterlife.
A case can be made that this blog, and my website, and all my other output, is an extended reaction formation. This would be partly true. But I think it has been my choice to deal with my trauma THIS WAY. I could just as easily have been destructive, or indifferent. I have chosen a path of what I consider to be service. I suffer, so I try to help others who suffer, and this reduces my pain. As I gain in emotional flexibility and wisdom, my work will be more effective. One must always keep in mind that even if you are trying to help, you may be hurting, and that is certainly true of me. Very, very often your best option is to do nothing. People need to be allowed to fight their own fights, so they can win their own victories.