Treating PTSD: Make Joy A Priority
Friday, November 27th, 2009 • BRIDGE THE GAP Healing Workshop •
Healing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder takes time, dedication and commitment. Come to think of it, living with PTSD takes time, dedication and commitment, too. Why is it so much easier to give our time and energy to living with PTSD than getting over it? I have a theory about that…
In PTSD we feel powerless to change, and we don’t have to make much of an effort to indulge the symptoms. Nightmares come without our working for them. Insomnia, rage and dissociation just appear, what luck! We can give our full attention to experiencing PTSD without having to lift a finger.
Healing, however, requires you lift a finger - or two, or three, or four. Healing takes focus, determination and resolve. Healing requires you to make recovery a priority. Which means everything you do towards healing must take priority over everything you to toward allowing PTSD to remain in control.
Take, for example, the idea of joy. True, it’s easier to feel sadness, desperation and despair — but those are not empowering or healing sensations! Seeking and feeling joy take a little more effort but consider the reward: time off from feeling the heaviness of PTSD itself. Moments (hours!) away from feeling lost in the PTSD chaos. Days (weeks!) spent using the strength and power of joy to develop your own strength and power, resolve your feelings about the past, experience the present, and design a future full of things you want and love.
Incorporating joy into your life means making it a priority. Just figuring out what you love — or maybe even experiencing it once or twice — isn’t enough.
Incorporating joy into your day/week/month is an important aspect of developing who you are outside of, beyond and in spite of PTSD. It’s time to make joy a priority. You do deserve it. Anyone disagree with that?
BRIDGE THE GAP Exercise
Today the question to answer is: How can you reprioritize your life to make joy important?
Look over your weekly schedule. What are you making a priority? Work, relationships, exercise, therapy sessions…. For everything on your priority list, double check to make sure it belongs there. If you’re spending 6 hours a day making watching television a priority… guess what? It’s time for a priority change!
Find one hour a week that you can make joy a priority. If that’s easy to do, then up the challenge: find 3 hours, or 4, or 5.
Come on, I dare you! Begin to live in the moment. Experience the bliss of the present in a way that makes you feel utterly, completely the opposite of how PTSD makes you feel.
(Photo acknowledgement on Flickr.)
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Tags: dissocation, healing, insomnia, nightmares, post-trauamtic stress disorder, ptsd, rage, symptoms, The Healing Power of Joy
To plan to feel joyful is something which everyone would benefit from. It’s sad that so few people actually plan to do such a simple and rewarding thing. How much happier would the world be if everyone spent one hour every day devoted to seeing joy in the things around them!
@Roseanna — You’re so right, and it’s that simple: one hour a day. We make the time for so many things that don’t feel good, and we so rarely make the time for things that DO make us feel good. Why is that?