Meandering Michele’s Mind: Why Isn’t the PTSD Community More Positive?
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 • Uncategorized •
Recently, I’ve been disappointed by something: I keep hearing professionals proliferating negative thinking.
I don’t understand why the very people designated to help survivors heal tell them they have no chance for recovery. If I had believed healing wasn’t possible I would still be living such an awful, painful life.
I have two clients who have been told by their psychiatrists, “You can’t heal PTSD. You have to learn to live with it.” And now these survivors are working with me and making great healing progress. Their symptoms are abating. They no longer feel fear. The depression is lifting. The emotional numbness is leaving. They are full of actions and plans and thoughts of the future instead of the past. The ’professionals’, it appears, were wrong.
Today, I’d like to meander your minds…
Why do psychiatrists and therapists tell survivors PTSD can’t be healed – and we believe them?
Why do ‘experts’ and clinicians deem people unrecoverable — and we accept their diagnosis?
Why do survivors love to hear and read and see stories about others struggling horribly with PTSD — and don’t want to participate in spreading the word that every day survivors are healing?
For any other diagnosis we’d get a second opinion. If we were told something was terminal the first act would be to find someone who disagreed. Why isn’t that part of the PTSD healing process?
And then we would find other survivors and use them and their stories to believe in the possiblity of our own success. Cancer survivors do this. Heart disease patients do this. Those survivors get together for mass walks and runs and do all kinds of positive things to celebrate life, survival, recovery, and raise awareness.
Why does the PTSD community not engage in these kinds of proactive, positive thought processes? Why does the PTSD community seem to celebrate the bad and ignore signs of the good?
In the world of PTSD why is everyone so quick to be negative, to believe against themselves and healing, and support the disaster instead of the hope? Please don’t tell me the answer is “because it’s easier”. Dig a little deeper. Give me something better than that.
(Photo: Creativa)
Tags: cancer, depression, diagnosis, emotional numbness, fear, healing, heart disease, Meandering Michele's Mind, professional, ptsd, recovery, survivor, symptoms
Hello Michele:
These are very good questions – here’s my take, although I don’t think it is very surprising.
Some of this seems to be the difference between physical and mental illness, and how our society views such things, even now. Changes are being made, but it is still much harder to ‘come out’ as a sufferer (or survivor) of a mental illness than a physical one. And how much more difficult for, say, a young military man to have to admit he is suffering from incidents in the line of duty. Young men don’t want to admit any kind of weakness, let along something like that. And even worse, how about a survivor of childhood incest? That subject remains so terribly taboo. A friend of mine who is a survivor said she tells no one because “They never look at you the same again.”
Not that we as PTSD sufferers have any ‘excuse’, obviously things will change when people change them, and we have to do that. But we have a hurdle that those with physical illnesses might not have – and that is the depression and anxiety that make any positive move or thought a herculean effort. I’m not saying people with cancer cannot suffer from depression, I’m saying it is not part of the diagnosis. There are lots of people with physical illnesses who are not depressed. This is not the case with PTSD. It’s the nature of it, and it poses a barrier to our becoming more involved.
I, at least, believe in healing. For everyone. Perhaps there are people who confuse healing with “a cure so complete, it was like you were never sick”. PTSD, and the rest of my current mental illnesses, will continue to inform my life in one way or another for the rest of my life. Just like a cancer survivor will be a different, and possibly better, person, on the other side. I know I can heal – not sure exactly how, but I do have hope.
Thanks for the column, keep writing.
Hmmm!!!
There’s lots of things here, not least of all that recovering from PTSD is slow, difficult and painful work that requires lots of little actions.
I suspect lots of therapists are not interested in dealing with PTSD because it’s difficult to deal with.
With PTSD it’s reasonable to say that you broke; that your psyche buckled under the strain of too much life experience. It feels like you broke; it feels like in some way you couldn’t cope with life. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s the case that everyone has a breaking point and sometimes it gets hit.
Everyone wants to believe that their psyche is invulnerable. Lots of people claim that they wouldn’t break under torture and yet I suspect most do in hte end.
So in treating someone with PTSD you are faced with your own mortality. You are faced with the underside of life and with the fact that sometimes something ‘random’ may happen to you that is beyond what you can deal with – even if you can recover later.
To work with someone with PTSD means working with someone who shows you that you too could be vulnerable. It could happen to you. That’s something most people just don’t want to face. Who wants to imagine that they could be at a bus-stop, kidnapped and then spend the next 11 years as a pervert’s toy. Do you want to choose to enter that world to help someone to heal. It takes a special kind of strength to heal and a special kind of strength to help some to do what needs to be done.
PTSD is not like a disease that is treatable with a common drug. Everyone is different and every recovery is different even if the toolbox is often the same.
PTSD is not something you recover from, it’s more like something you grow out of. You have to choose to work on building a new self that is more resilient than the old one. You have to face lots of things that you’d rather not face. You have to work to get better.
There’s no glory in PTSD recovery. There’s no glamour in treatment.
“After three years Miss X was able to go to a Cafe” or “After two years I was able to have a conversation with a tall guy without freaking out”. These are not the things that sound exciting.
IMV. YMMV.
‘In the world of PTSD why is everyone so quick to be negative, to believe against themselves and healing, and support the disaster instead of the hope?…”
Michele; thank you for bringing this subject up. Yes we can heal. And sadly it is common that survivors turn to the professionals for help only to again be victimized. Too often our sense of helplessness is reinforced by “professionals” that engage in trying to manage symptoms and medicate behaviors. I don’t think it is intentional, but it is as you have seen, harmful nonetheless.
I think that we as “consumers” are pretty much sold the idea that we cannot heal and will require a lifetime of therapy and medications to cope. We accept the diagnosis and become and live our “labels”.
Also – I think there is a difference in how we view our ability to take control of our lives and effect change if we experienced trauma in our family of origin in addition to adult trauma. This familial cycle was described to me once as what is done in prisoner of war camps to keep victims compliant.
When one is raised to believe they are bad or at fault for the abuse they become conditioned to believe they have no power to affect change in their life and may be looking to the “professionals” who unwittingly reinforce the idea that there is no solution – or hope – and this reinforces that cycle of dependence on the “providers” of services.
Personally – once I was able to remove myself from this type of system I began to learn how to identify and change the deeply ingrained beliefs and related thought patterns and behaviors that I learned as a childhood abuse survivor.
Once I grasped this, then I was able to begin to make the changes to find true healing as an adult survivor. But first and most important – I had to find my own power and believe that I was the most important part of my healing process.
I think these patterns of learned helplessness and hopelessness are key to the “why” that this negative attitude permeates the healing movement.
I think the solution is to continue to inform, educate and encourage all PTSD and C-PTSD survivors that healing can happen as well as reaching out to the providers and continue to educate them about healing v. managing survivors.
Not all ” psychiatrists and therapists tell survivors PTSD can’t be healed “. I work at a Veterans Affairs Hospital and recently saw a broadcast from another VA which featured Richard G. Tedeschi, Ph.D prsenting on the topic of Post Traumatic Growth. Goggle it and find some articles by him. In short “In the developing literature on posttraumatic growth, we have found that reports of growth experiences in the aftermath of traumatic events far outnumber “reports of psychiatric disorders (Quarantelli, 1985; Tedeschi, 1999).
I would like to thank you Michele for giving us this opportunity of discussion. It is very helpful and deeply appreciated.
This subject always gets my dander up. First of all look at the language we use for describing it. We use words like broken, mental illness, depression and toss the word trauma around like candy at a kid’s birthday party. Even the words healing and cure are misleading. The reason I say these things is because there is actually nothing “wrong” with the mind of someone who has PTSD. The brain is doing exactly what it should be doing under the circumstances both during and after the event/s.
The mind faced with an incomprehensible event of a threatening nature has two jobs: protect and process. It protects by withdrawing so that it doesn’t break. Then it is also at the same time taking in every single detail of the event. Basically the brain secures the “Self” in the bunker and then sends out the troops to detail the enemy’s tactics.
And here is where we drop the ball entirely. If we survive the event/s with “Self” intact we are supposed to process all that horrible detail. Instead we expect to get back to normal life all the while the brain is screaming that it has a boatload of detailed information on a very important threat and it must be debriefed. That’s not illness or broken that’s just a job half done. It would be as if you had every single program left open and running on your computer and you tried to insert a picture heavy disc. There is going to be a problem. The computer i.e. you is not broken but it won’t work if you don’t go in and start looking at what is running the background bogging things down.
I look at all those PTSD symptoms not as something bad but rather as clues. If I am afraid of the grocery store I have to look at why. What is triggering me about it because, that is my mind’s way of warning me that something there is like something of the enemy’s. That is my mind doing what it is supposed to do. It is telling me it has all the information I need to protect myself from that bad thing happening again. My job is to stop ignoring it and process that information one piece at a time.
To be clear, my answer to Michele’s question is this: We are negative and discouraging because we see PTSD as a failure of mind instead of the proper response to extreme events. The general community is terrified of the things we have been through and they are in the flight response to a perceived threat so it is a taboo that we all perpetrate. Oh, and the word “experts” is highly overrated.
Also where are the stats on healing and what are the time lines. Therapy has embraced all these new therapies because the old models did not work that well. Some would take decades to work.
My therapist says 99% of clients come to her without any inclination to work on their own to heal. They are looking for a pill or the therapist to cure them. This would drop the possible cures of many to zero.
I think the therapy establishment and the politics of the educators resist change and updating vigorously.
Trauma is the one of the disorders where the old stuff has been thrown away by many therapists for something new and quicker.
It shows we need to shop for a progressive therapist who specializes in trauma and has multiple approaches to healing.