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!