PTSD Professional Perspective: How Trauma Transforms

We’ve come to the final day of Invisible Illness Awareness Week. It’s only fitting we end on a note of self-empowerment.

A few weeks ago I posted a link in PTSD in the News for a review of CONQUERING POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. The review called Victoria Lemle Beckner and John Arden’s book, “an important contribution to the sufferer’s library” and went on to say it “comprises an organic program of practical self-help techniques that the individual can practice on her own to build her confidence, extend her social world, free herself from the past, and start living life again.”

So you know I read that and immediately wanted to hear more from the authors of this book. Today, I’m very pleased to post this guest piece by Victoria Lemle Beckner, PhD.

How Trauma Transforms

Brett** is a veteran of Vietnam. When he walked into my office, I could tell he was haunted with memories: carefully crossing a rice field at night listening for NVA soldiers; helicopters flying off with wounded men; the heat never relenting, always thirsty; images of death up close.

I am a psychologist. When I first started working with trauma survivors including this veteran, I was very focused on relieving the suffering of PTSD – of trying to help people reduce their nightmares, anxiety, avoidance, and depression. Get rid of the bad stuff, and then the individual would be healed! As I worked with this veteran, we actively targeted his intrusive memories, reduced his conditioned fear so that he could go to new places in his neighborhood without studying maps and carrying water; we explored his guilt and grief. And the treatment did help reduce his symptoms.

But we also found over time that we could not entirely banish his PTSD. Like so many who have experienced a chronic trauma like war, his experiences had penetrated deeply into his brain and his soul. And so I began to wonder: Had I failed him? He was better, but he continued to carry the jungles of Vietnam with him as he walked the streets of San Francisco four decades later.

What I didn’t know then was that this veteran, like so many of my clients, had more to teach me about how trauma can transform.

One day in my office I noticed Brett staring out the window, lost in a more recent memory. He was thinking about how on Saturday night he had braved a crowded party, and in the midst of laughter and loud music, he had spotted his younger sister talking to a friend. He watched as his sister smiled warmly at something the friend said, and in that instant Brett felt joy. I had seen this about my client before: Brett noticed the small things, and felt them intensely. He had many moments of gratitude that would well up in the presence of his family or close friends. He had seen young men die, and so he knew intimately the preciousness of life. He had been spared for reasons he didn’t understand (and still struggled with), but having lived so close to the edge of death, he had developed a keen sense of what really mattered.

This awareness and depth of feeling is what I came to see as the silver lining of trauma. War turned Brett’s sense of order and meaning in the world upside down – it shook him to the core. For a long time he was like a boat unmoored, floating aimlessly, frightened and angry. But that pain was the source of his growth. With time it deepened his empathy for other’s feelings and suffering, and with it his relationships. Having survived the unthinkable, he discovered both his vulnerability and his strength. And so as I considered Brett, the human being beyond the PTSD, I saw someone who could hold all of the contradictions and painful feelings of life in his heart.

The idea that traumatic experiences (and the painful feelings that follow) might allow for greater richness and joy is not obvious. Our natural instinct is to believe that negative feelings are a barrier to feeling good. The suffering that goes along with PTSD puts your life on hold. If only the fear, anger and sadness would go away, THEN you will be able to focus back on what matters. In other words, we tend to believe that negative and positive feelings cannot coexist within ourselves at the same time.

But Brett changed my view that one recovers from trauma simply by getting rid of the memories and feelings. For some who continue to have some level of PTSD after years, I have come to see that they have pain and they have love. In fact, it was the life-altering shock and loss of trauma that helps them connect so deeply to others and themselves. So while I still work hard to help clients with PTSD to reduce their symptoms, I also focus on how that traumatic experience and the associated pain can help the individual to grow and deepen in new ways. It’s a broader concept of healing: like Brett, it embraces the breadth and complexity of our humanity.

Victoria Lemle Beckner, Ph.D., received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her internship at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and a grant-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Psychiatry. Her research and clinical work over the last 12 years have focused on the nature and treatment of stress, anxiety, trauma and depression.  

You can find information about Beckner’s CONQUERING POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER workbook here.

**Note: “Brett” is based on a number of Dr. Beckner’s clients, with personal information left out or changed to protect confidentiality.

Tags: john arden, ptsd, soldiers, trauma, veteran, victoria beckner, victoria lemle beckner, workbook