Explaining Ptsd To Others

[BlueOrange]

Maybe more actual sufferers should respond? Just a thought, given the topic question and how everyone on the outside is guessing at what they see.

Regrettably, being a sufferer doesn't give me magical powers to know what's happening in someone else's head. No more than being in love gives magical powers, anyway.

In general, when I read supporter conversations, my thought process tends to be something like this:

1. Yeah, I could imagine doing the things that the sufferer is described as doing, and I'm sympathetic to that.
2. That supporter experience really does sound painful and unpleasant. I also wonder why they put up with us sometimes.
3. This thread here is about the supporter's needs. Supporters are people too, and should be pursuing their own safety and well-being. Many sufferers have been taught a false lesson that they are obligated simply because someone else is unhappy - many supporters seem to have also learned that false lesson. It's a false lesson - I'll try and point that out.
4. There is most certainly (as always) another side to this story that isn't being told/noticed, and I need to be careful about over-endorsing or over-rejecting whatever is being said.

The unfortunate reality is that some decisions are just plain difficult, and it's really hard to know whether or not you're doing the right thing. Sometimes 'the right thing' doesn't really exist in a given situation, and all you can do is the less-bad thing. Most sufferers feel like there was a really important moment in their life when they got something wrong, and should have done something else instead - they keep trying to go back to that moment and fix it somehow.

I feel like the best thing I can do for a supporter in these situations is to avoid having them be traumatized by their sufferer - there's enough of us, we don't want or need more. So I try to say "Do the best you can. The best you can might not be as good as you want it to be, but that's OK, because it's really difficult, and you are an imperfect human (like me, and every other human)."

Sometimes, it's helpful for sufferers to indicate what to expect - this generally consists of "It's not going to get better anywhere near as quickly or as neatly as any of us want it to." That seems to have been covered.

It's fair enough that you'd like more support from sufferers. But I don't see any way of doing better than has been done already.