A few years ago, I was interviewed on a provincial radio program about PTSD, on Remembrance Day (here in Canada, this is November 11, and akin to Veteran's Day in the U.S.) The program host asked me towards the end of the interview if it was a good thing to commemorate, to bring up memories of war, for those who endure PTSD as veterans of conflicts and military service. Looking back to that interview, now, I am not happy about my answer then. I don't think I really answered the question at all, really, just emphasizing instead that younger individuals, having little to no experience of a nation at war, really needed much more education about the realities of past warfare, and the impact of warfare on entire societies. This wasn't any kind of answer to the question! Since then, though,I've thought about this particular question a LOT. This is particularly since, in my own research on PTSD, on survival, trauma, and memory, I've encountered extensive discussions among researchers about memory, and history. Memory studies and trauma studies have emerged as significant areas of research and publication. I didn't intend - at the start - to delve into memory studies, but as I read more of the medical/ psychiatric/ diagnostic and neurological material concerning trauma, survival, and PTSD, it became very clear that memory plays perhaps the most significant part of all in what we call PTSD. My past from a few days ago has my description of how (or when) trauma occurs, and at what point PTSD is thought to develop. Memory functions in the emergence of PTSD, and its function initiates immediately, unconsciously. An event happens - in this case an event that is unexpected, and unexpectedly dire/ portentous, shocking, perhaps brutal or threatening brutality - and memory is formed. My perspective is that the memory is formed within nanoseconds, of the event. As the brain/ mind attempts repeatedly to insert awareness of 'what's coming' into the moments in the past which preceded the actual event (time-traveling, in a sense), it replays the memory. In effect, the brain/mind plays and replays a loop. The point to the replaying is the chance (and it is only a perception of a chance) that at some point in the replaying, the person/ mind/ brain WILL be successful in going back to the moments preceding the event, and prepare the person/ mind/ brain for what is coming next. The flashbacks experienced by sufferers of PTSD are the replaying of memory. The trigger for the flashbacks? Many can recall seeing in movies, or hearing from popularized stories about - say Vietnam vets - that sounds, circumstances, smells, tastes, and certain emotions serve as triggers for the flashback. True, though in my own experience the trigger has never been something terrifically obvious or evident. I can't recall at this point ever experiencing a sound/ smell/ taste and thinking "uh, oh, this is going to trigger a flashback!". For me, at least, the triggers have been circumstances, and the emotions spinning off them, and they have been subtle. For others????

Understanding PTSD

It's late August now. My husband says that he can 'feel' fall approaching, and I have to agree. The light is changing outside, just a bit, and subtly. I enjoy fall, and the change in seasons, really quite a lot, though sometimes I find myself feeling 'pressed' for time, like the season just finishing hasn't been long enough, or that I haven't done everything in the season that I had wanted to do, or enjoyed every last drop of it before time moves on. I mentioned that this blog was going to have reflections on PTSD, trauma, survival, coping, and memory, and I haven't changed that view, though really these parameters were set only with about half of my attention. At the time I set up this blog, it really was just an exercise in blog start-up, to see if blogging would be a workable component of courses I teach at the university. I think, for now, I'll stick with those descriptive terms. PTSD, trauma, coping, survival and memory are all fascinating to me. I have a personal interest in each, owing to events in my own life, for sure, but also because I see the great impact each of these aspects has on the lives of people historically, and now. These days, PTSD is receiving tremendous attention - perhaps more than it did in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and in the aftermath of WWI, when it was referred to by different names, most often and typically "shell shock." After September 11, 2001, with the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, rolling into the wars in Iraq, and later conflicts throughout the middle east, PTSD resurfaced into the mainstream media more and more often. Soldiers, male and female, certainly in the U.S. and in Canada, made the news with their disclosures of their own struggles with PTSD. If they did not disclose their struggles personally, and willingly, their subsequent suicides certainly revealed the syndrome for them. The resulting increase in attention seems to validate, at least to some in the populations of North America, the existence of PTSD. This is a good thing, certainly, as military men and women really must have some way to describe what they are enduring, and some way to make it relevant to those in the populace who have not endured PTSD personally. PTSD, though, isn't JUST something emerging among those confronted with battles or the dire circumstances related to military conflict. For the record, it effects all sorts of people, all the time. Some of the necessary ingredients include unexpectedly dire circumstances that involve potential physical or mental injury, or death, of oneself, or of those around one. Notice, please, that this doesn't by definition require a literal battlefield, or bombs, or military arms. It just requires sudden-ness, peril, shock, really. The trauma, according to neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and others in medical professions and counselling professions, comes in the nanoseconds AFTER the instant of the immediate shock/ danger/ threat: it comes in the instants after, where the person survives, and memory is formed. One critical reality is the UN-reality, the incomprehensibility of the survival, and the mind/ brain's inability to ever - really - go back to the instant before the event, and to 'warn' the brain/ mind/ body of the imminent threat. The mental 'groove' in the mind has been made, and the brain settles into that groove, replaying the event, particularly when a trigger is touched, as the mind attempts to fully comprehend it, even to warn off the individual in some way. This is huge, to me. At this point in my life, I can see where I have invested enormous energy in trying to figure things out, to 'see' the dangers approaching me before they happen(ed), to fully comprehend them. I want to know why they happened, fully, but I'm betting that knowing why wouldn't erase them from the place they each have in my person, my being. More later --- have to work!

Hello out there on August 20, 2014

Hello! It's exciting to set up this blog. I've never done this, but - as I am working out a one-on-one course with a student, and might assign a blog as a project component of the course, thought I'd better see how blogging actually works before I require a student to start one. It seems easy enough, so far. I am a Historian, and it is in that role that I am putting this blog together, and teaching this Directed Studies course. The course will likely be about identity in medieval England - an excellent topic. My own specialization in historical research, though, is trauma, survival, memory and self in Early Modern and Modern European and British history. This is the field of study in which I spend most of my time, really - it's fascinating. It doesn't hurt that I am someone who has incorporated the reality of PTSD in my own life, having survived molestation by a family friend as a child, and rape as an adult. Counselors have determined that I am 'high-functioning' as a person with PTSD, and I agree, but 'functioning' is really such a wildly subjective categorization, I think. In my professional life, I love challenges, and research, and teaching. As the Chair, or Head, of an academic department at a university, life is full of challenges, seldom identical to anything I've encountered before, so it sometimes seems like every single day is a completely new, unfathomable, thrill-a-minute amusement park ride. I'll be posting items here that somehow connect to trauma, memory, PTSD, and perhaps other matters, as things arise. I had better get along now - I'm at work, after all!