The other day on Facebook I stumbled across an amazing page. The “Ghosts of History” photo series made by Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, (page is in Dutch, use Google Translate) shows pictures of the past combined with pictures of the present.
The scenes are absolutely haunting. Looking through these photos has brought home to me more than ever before, just how much soldiers during the war sacrificed for their country – and many still fight on our behalf today. It is one thing to read about it and ‘know’ about it, but it can be hard for the past to feel real.
I know I will no longer take my freedom and my standard of living for granted – I will be saying thank you every single day.
The artist’s Uncle Dirk.
It’s well documented that many returning soldiers battle Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – PTSD – many for the rest of their lives.
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma. This event may involve the threat of death to oneself or to someone else, or to one’s own or someone else’s physical, sexual, or psychological integrity, overwhelming the individual’s ability to cope. As an effect of psychological trauma, PTSD is less frequent and more enduring than the more commonly seen post traumatic stress (also known asacute stress response). Diagnostic symptoms for PTSD include re-experiencing the original trauma(s) through flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and increased arousal—such as difficulty falling or staying asleep,anger, and hypervigilance. Formal diagnostic criteria (both DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10) require that the symptoms last more than one month and cause significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. (Source)
But it’s not just soldiers who suffer from this. Anyone who is experienced to a traumatic event can develop PTSD.
I have Complex Post Traumatic Disorder – C- PTSD.
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is a psychological injury that results from protracted exposure to prolonged social and/or interpersonal trauma in the context of either captivity or entrapment (i.e. the lack of a viable escape route for the victim) that results in the lack or loss of control, helplessness, and deformations of identity and sense of self. (Source)
When I stumbled on these photos, of course I was fascinated (I love history among other things), saddened, and grateful – but also excited. For a long time I have tried to explain to my treatment team what it’s like to be in my mind on an every day basis. I have flashbacks every single day, throughout the day. Most of them are what I would call ‘mild’ – and would probably be better using something other than ‘flash’ to describe how I’m plunged back into my past against my will, because it’s more like a slow, lingering dalliance.
Imagine you are walking through your local park, surrounded by trees, grass underfoot, birds flying around you. But you don’t just see your park. You aren’t ‘all there’ – part of you is walking through your back yard 20, 25, 30 years ago. And faintly, in the same place as your park, you can see your house, your swing set, the longer grass and weeds of your yard, the dog trotting round…
When these happen – as they do all the time and in so many places – more of ‘me’ seems to be in that past than stays in the present. It’s lead to several people over time describing me as ‘not being all there’ and I guess they are right. I’m trapped in something that really wasn’t fair to have lived through the first time, let alone again and again for the rest of my life.
Seeing these photos of the past superimposed into the present are so much like what my own reality is – living past and present simultaneously.
Please note – this is not something that I have chosen to experience or revisit. My therapist is going to help me learn to emotionally detach from the flashbacks, but it’s not something I can just decide to not have any more and that be it. The thoughts are intrusive and unwanted, and constant.
I’m so relieved to know that there is help for this, I do accept that there isn’t any ‘cure’ and there isn’t any undoing of the past – but to know that I can learn to keep myself safe, detach emotions from the flashbacks I experience, and hopefully have some peace from them – gives me hope.
I am really interested in hearing about your experiences, how you are affected, what has helped, how you cope.
(All images taken from the Ghosts of History Facebook page.)
What a great way of portraying C-PTSD!! Amazing post! I think you already know what I’m up to, too recover!
Thank you so much! I was a bit worried that people wouldn’t ‘get’ it and think I was nuts. Yep, reading about what you are doing to recover was part of what made me so determined to not be fobbed off any longer and get real help. I’m done with psychiatrists. I just realised how many years I’ve wasted waiting for them to “DO” something to help me. Psychologists though, are the new ‘awesome’ as far as I’m concerned
xx
that’s great Fiona!! xo
Hi Fi,
I feel pretty certain that healing my chronic PTSD and other stuff requires going through the pain in a very safe supported structure. I used to think I had understood and forgiven the past abused and that I had to just get on with life. But that was only intellectual understanding not real healing. I’m just beginning to recognize the crippling effects it has had on me. (Even saying that, I have also been able to develop some great qualities and I feel a deep gratitude for the blessings in my life!)
As you know from reading my blog that I’m doing neuro-developmental repatterning to give me a foundation to build on. But the wounds from abuse and neglect have built up thick dysfunctional patterns and that takes a kind of dismantling through the grieving. I have chosen to use Re-Evaluation Co-counseling because it believes that it is natural to heal through grieving and it is very respectful of a person’s boundaries and pacing. (Also it is very inexpensive. I’m taking a class with other people. That’s just $50 for a 16 week (once class a week) course). During the course we pair up with others in the class and practice the techniques with each other, trading off. The sessions you set up between classes are free and you can set up as many as you want. It is not professional counseling and is not meant to replace that. But in addition to my occasional therapy sessions, I’m doing this peer counseling too. With my therapist, we are using EMDR. In my experience this technique helps me to face my stored trauma, without being re-traumatized by it, at the same time it helps reduce the intensity of the trauma, while giving me the ability to have some control over it. I don’t expect to totally get rid of PTSD but to have some choice and control over how it affects is what i’m going for.
Does your trauma therapist give you techniques to practice on your own? I’d love to hear what kind of work you are doing with her, if you feel like sharing that.
I think of you every day and you are in my heart and prayers.
Hi Gel,
I really like the sound of those classes. It does sound like you learn a lot of skills you can take away to help others later on at the same time you are benefiting from the counselling.
Totally agree about needing to take the traumas out and go through them in a safe supported structure. Before seeing this therapist, many people asked me or said something along the lines of “But what is going to make it any different? You have talked about it, why do you need to go through it all again, what will that achieve?”
I have my answers – talking about the trauma is NOT processing the trauma. Processing it is entirely different and is essential if we are to heal or find any peace from it. Makes perfect sense to me.
My therapist is using CBT skills to help me learn to detach emotions from memories, and learn how to keep myself safe when we do work on the past. From what I understand, processing the traumas will involve feeling what I felt then, revisiting it, but then changing the story in some way. For example, one of the things she mentioned was that there’s a technique that apparently has an 81% success rate – you read out a self-written account of the trauma to the therapist – which for most people gets them pretty freaked out. Then you are given some kind of sedative – and you read it out again. The sedative means that your body isn’t really able to stay in that ‘flight or fight’ mode of anxiety, so you feel a lot calmer and safer the second time you read out your trauma. I didn’t think this would make much of a difference but apparently it’s 81% successful so who knows! Because I can write about and talk about it as though it happened to someone else. It’s the stuff that goes on inside that gets me.
How do you find EMDR?
And I totally agree with the foundation – our early experiences ARE the foundations on which we have built our entire lives, and going back to unpick all that and build it correctly and safely means we have to unpick a LOT of our lives, too. Basically break ourselves down and rebuild.
I’m finding that a lot of past events are also taking on different feelings, and I’m seeing them differently, as new facts come to light.
Anyway thank you for sharing so much with me, it’s been very helpful, more than I could possibly say. I do hope you find as much peace as possible from this. I agree it’s probably not possible to ever be totally free of it, especially as what’s happened has shaped who we are in many ways – but just to have some peace is not a lot to ask! xx
Dear Fiona
It’s good to see you have hope, PTSD is a challenge I have been working all year, there are now DAYS, YES whole days where I may remember my own trauma, and only see images , look at it, go to my safe place in my head, and go on with my day. One thing I’ve been using it’s called the STOP technique, S is stop, literaly what ever you are doing. T take a breathe , breathe until you can watch your breathing until it is just in and out, concentrate on only the air coming in and out, at this time , your ONLY job is to breathe. Then O , Observe your own thoughts, ask yourself are they helpful or unhelpful, I often find my to be unhelpful, P, Proceed. This often means doing something to distract , often this technique is helpful when dealing with strong emotions, often mine is fear, there is also anger, anxiety, and many more. i have referred to a ‘safe place’ I spent mouths in therapy setting a seen in my head , it’s for me past place some people as no longer alive, they remain in my heart, also, you refer to your beautiful cat, i have two beautiful DOGS, Well one is a puppy, my older dog has saved me more times than I can count, so wherever I go, i know I can get my dogs hope this helps.
Penny
Hi Penny, I really appreciate your comment! I’m glad that you are making progress but it also sounds very hard and painful. It takes a lot of courage for you to do that work. I actually stumbled on the ‘STOP’ technique today before reading these comments – so reading your explanation really helps. There is so much to take in! And it sounds VERY helpful. Distinguishing between helpful and unhelpful thoughts is very important and it definitely helps to stop those thoughts continuing to go around and around in our minds. I really like the sound of your safe place, and I’m grateful for your dogs. I’m not surprised that your dogs have saved your life. My cat has saved mine, so did my first cat. It sounds like for you, they were your best friends too. They understand, they are loyal and non-judgemental and gentle. Thank you so much for your help. I hope that things get better for you. xx
OMG! You’re fucking crazy!
I’d appreciate you explaining to all who read these comments why you think I am crazy? Do you see people with PTSD or PTSD symptoms (flashbacks, dissociation etc) as being crazy? Do you think that people who are well known to suffer from PTSD, for example, war veterans, are crazy also? Please elaborate.
Wow I feel like I stumbled across this post on the perfect day. My PTSD comes in varying shapes and sizes, and seems to go through its various phases. I have developed it properly the last 9 months. Just the past week I have really really been struggling with just almost constantly being back in one my traumatic incidents through thoughts, like intense memories, and the occasional flashbacks. But i never feel I STAY in a flashback. After the initial swipe, I tend to stay present in terms of my awareness but with my thoughts being back in the past…if that makes sense. That is only a recent thing. It used to send me sideways physically and emotionally for a long time. I think something that really helped me was acknowledging what I am remembering, honouring the feeling and really feeling it as much as I feel not too afraid to, listen to the feeling NOT the storyline (that is so hard) and then bring my attention back into my body and to now, and breathing with it. It suddenly seemed to click the other week that I was doing it automatically. It feels so tempting to stick in the storyline, and sometimes it feels totally impossible not to, but I have really found stepping out of it and healthy distractions once you’ve honoured the feeling like I says above, the most helpful thing to shift the trauma in that moment. I am hopefully sorting out EMDR to start soon. I have not felt ready despite the constant encouragement from my therapist but now I feel ready. And so am finding a new therapist to do this with. Ahhh!
Tonnes of love. So glad to have found you. Keep shining xxx
Dear Fiona,
Sounds like you are doing some difficult work,I can relate well to this NEED to go to the story, when I began trauma work, there were so many ‘triggers’, this is instinctive , you body will possibly go into the flight or flight mode, this is evolution , in ‘caveman’ times this how we survived, PTSD SUFFERERS , within the brain are different to control subjects in research. I know for myself , I still struggle with hypervigilence , my fight / flight system is so sensitive , I have got better at ‘surf urging’ my therapist tells me to ‘ride the wave’ IT WILL PASS, it’s been helpful to know however scary and horrible it feels and for me I really want to do something to DEAL or COPE with it , when I ‘ride it out’, it seems to get a little easier, it’s a skill to keep as you say in the present moment, I was tought a technique called the STOP techique, you can google this . I explain it as folllows,
1] Stop, literally stop whatever you are doing
2] T, take a breathe , for me I need to take several to REGULATE my breathing
3] O, Observe my thoughts, this is hard, in time I have been able to ‘WATCH’, the idea is to look at your thinking patterns and work out if they are helpful or unhelpful, in my case they are often neg. , so I work out this is NOT HELPFUL!
4] P , this is for proceed, it’s make a decision to continue with this OR do something like walking , just something to distract from this until you are less emotive and can DEAL with these strong emotions.
It’s a basic mindfulness exercise to help ‘ground’yoursellf so you can get in control, and , for me this helps to make me realize I am safe, I am not back in a trauma,as real as it feels, it’s a memory trying to ‘keep’you or rather protect you, as I have said it’s a basic survival method, we have as humans. I hope some of this may help you , you are moving forward, I wish it was a straight road, but for me it is still up and down, up and down, going towards recovery just not all straight to healing it’s to me a difficult road, sometimes I do want to give up , I know in my truth it’s the only way I an heal and GET to some FREEDOM!
Penny
p.s take can and BE gentle with yourself, I get told this every week, I do find this VERY hard.
Everything you have said in this comment, Penny, about how you feel, the hypervigilance, the flight or fight mode, the anxiety, the urges… that’s so just what I’ve been experiencing! And the STOP technique is definitely valuable. Thank you so much! It is a huge relief to read these comments because I haven’t actually talked all that much to other people with PTSD about what it is like for them, and to know I’m not alone is just.. yes, a relief. It’s sad to know that other people go through this too, but comforting to know that there are techniques to at least help myself because they are helping others.
Thank you so much for this xx
THANK YOU for sharing this with me. It makes perfect sense to me. It’s a lot along the lines of how I have felt too. I’m glad that reading this was a good time for you, sometimes it’s things we stumble across like this that help so much, they feel like we were meant to find them. I’ve had a lot of these moments when reading Gel’s blog.
It feels like it changes all the time for me too. It doesn’t stay the same, so it’s not predictable. Different things come up, all the time. And I totally hear you about it being very tempting to stay going with that story line when you have a flashback. It’s compelling and powerful. Addictive in a way, even when we know it’s going to hurt us a lot. I feel like my mind has been hijacked a lot of the time. It’s really good that you are finding yourself automatically bringing your attention back to your body and working on distracting yourself – that’s really good. That would be hard to start doing and take a lot of practice so it sounds like you have been working very hard. I’ve never done EMDR and I don’t know if I will do it, I’m starting to hope that I will because so many of you are mentioning it. Have you done it before?
I hope so much that things go better for you and that you find the healing and peace you deserve xx
Beautiful share. Your words have touched my heart as well. Thank you.
Thank you! I’m honoured and glad you enjoyed it.
Just to say that the way the pictures are done is beautiful. I don’t know how to get over trauma..I’ve heard that it’s sometimes better not to talk about it, just to live your life and try to forget. But I really don’t know.
They are truly fascinating! They get your imagination going, don’t they?
I think that ‘not talking about it’ and ‘just moving on’ are myths. Maybe a minority of people can do that, but for most, trauma actually changes our brain chemistry – that’s been proven – and alters our experiences in life after that. Our bodies have an inbuilt flight or fight response (for survival) that when the trauma(s) occur, has been set off. Unfortunately we are wired to react that way to reminders of the trauma, just like if you were a duck and you had seen other ducks get shot at and die, you would get scared when you heard gunshots or saw hunters again and feel that fight or flight response, prompting you to flee for safety. In the wild it helps us survive. In our everyday modern lives, it does not. If you are constantly wired up with adrenalin and hypervigilant, you just can’t function and you just can’t even forget. http://ptsd.about.com/od/symptomsanddiagnosis/a/fight_flight.htm
Therapy helps the person to process the emotions that are attached to the memories and separate them, so that hopefully they are no longer as triggered or retraumatised every time something reminds them of it, even subconsciously (eg my therapist who worked with the bali bomb survivors here in AU, told me about one of her clients who couldnt’ understand why he was suddenly angry one day, it turned out that a man in a green shirt was sitting next to him. He had seen just a flash of a green shirt during all that happened, so in his every day life, he had no inkling that the green shirt was the trigger or why.)
Sorry if that doesn’t make sense, I hope it does!
I have only experience some PTSD for a short period of time during a very difficult time in my life…but enough to know that for someone to have to live with it for many years has to be a living ‘hell’. And if there are new treatments that are helping those like yourself…I am so happy to hear this as of course you are….Diane
Thank you for understanding and for caring, Diane. I’m sorry that you have lived with PTSD at all. Even if it’s a short period – that’s hard. They are coming up with new ways to help people all the time, and that’s a really good thing! xx