PTSD Survivors Speak: How anxiety feeds PTSD

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Our PTSD symptoms don’t only affect us — they affect those close to us, too. Today, a family member describes his view of his father, PTSD, and what you can do about “the groove worn in your soul.” It’s never too late to take action!

How anxiety feeds PTSD — and what you can do about it

I used to think post-traumatic stress disorder was something that came from combat, or at least horrific experiences in wartime, as refugees sometimes had. Then I realized that people who had lived through horrible events in peacetime, from fatal car crashes to domestic violence to caring for a dying loved one could experience the same debilitating reaction. The source of the stress wasn’t as important as how it was perceived, and how the individual dealt with it.

My father always clouded over with anxiety and anger at the holidays, for reasons I never understood, until I realized he was reliving a private holiday trauma over and over again that he could never speak of. Every holiday brought it back to him, and he would darken the season, and never say why, or what, or how. All he could do, it seemed, was try to spread it. From those grim experiences, I grew more aware of how stress could become a constant enervating force in one’s life, poisonous, heavy, and painful.

PTSD isn’t the result of one traumatic episode. It’s the result of that episode plus an unresolved anxiety about it or one’s response to it, and the inability of the individual to reach out for help or resolve the anxiety.

It’s not easy to identify the cause of the anxiety; you can’t simply point to the event, or events, because seven out of ten people with the same experience don’t have the same reaction. My own thought is that PTSD is like the probability of being a hero in a crisis. Circumstances line up, the individual feels a call to act, and acts. There was no real rational decision to be a hero. In post-traumatic stress disorder, the same sort of unconscious assessment occurs, but unlike a hero situation — you’re either a hero or you aren’t, end of story — there is no resolution. A chance to act came and went without the individual being able to do anything but suffer through it. If you can’t resolve what happened to you in a crisis, even if you do end up doing something heroic, then that subconscious issue becomes a rock in the stream of your life, roiling everything after. It never ends.

Eventually either an individual faces and unearths that unresolved anxiety, or finds a way to keep from triggering that anxiety in the future. The trouble with the last solution is that it’s not always possible to avoid such triggering events, since they’re not always like the original trauma. A battle-scarred veteran may always flinch at firecrackers, for example, and yet still be able to go hunting and fire a firearm.

Without resolution, PTSD can operate in the background, in the subconscious, and limit a person’s life significantly. The fear of triggering an episode can become as traumatic as the original event, and a cycle of self-oppression begins that is very difficult to stop.

It helps to have supportive friends and family, and somebody to talk to. Some people find their religious faith very much a part of their recovery. But the better part of being able to heal is the ability to use such help to deal with the unresolved traumatic anxiety. There’s no magic wand. No single solution. Every single instance will be different, even if from the same cause. At the least, the afflicted individual needs to confront their fear. They will not be alone if they have friends and family behind them, but that confrontation will still be lonely, and worse than the first time, because there is now a groove worn in your soul that is so easy to follow, and not so easily covered up again.

In time, with patience and perseverance, confrontation will lead to strength and resolution. It’s a dark journey sometimes, but at the end is light and freedom. If only we can complete the journey out of darkness and fear.

© 2009, Pete Rogan

Pete Rogan is a business analyst and writer from Detroit, Michigan. He has spent most of his 20-year professional career studying and fixing process dysfunction on small and large scales, in the business world and elsewhere.

The ideas contained in this post solely represent the perspective of the author. To contribute to ‘Survivors Speak’ contact Michele.

Tags: anxiety, healing, post traumatic stress disorder, ptsd, stress, symptoms