The Day I Realized Ptsd Was A Life Long Condition?

[Deleted member 1860]

Since I was previously (erroneously) diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, there was no point of realization that PTSD was a lifelong disorder. The Bipolar diagnosis was hard for me to accept because people don't "cure" bipolar disorder, they merely learn how to stabilize. So when I found out that I can heal my PTSD (even though it is a lifelong thing), I was like "WOOHOO!" No longer did I have a death sentence so to speak in that I was given hope.

If anything I knew by the age of 13 or so that I was in this for the long haul. I thought I was just like my mom. I thought I'd have this horrible lifelong depressive disorder. I went from MDD at a young age to Bipolar disorder and finally on to PTSD.

Right now I'm not struggling with accepting that PTSD is a lifelong disorder. I'm struggling with the thought that I could be disabled (in a legal sense) for life. But, I'm fighting it tooth and nail.

 

[Tinyflame]

I realized (or admitted to myself) after about 8 years of dealing with it & coping maladaptively, that it wasn't going away & it was up to me to accept that & find more effective ways to deal with it or would kill me, which I didn't want to subject my mom with having to suffer through, that's what disturbed & motivated me out of some denial.

 

[Deleted member 28812]

I still do not believe my husbands PTSD is a lifelong condition. Why should it be that way?

 

[Ellabella44]

How did you react the day you realized Link Removed was a life long condition?

Anger first because of the thought that I'm stuck with this for things that happened in my past and now because of them I have a mental illness. I thought i was loosing my mind before I started therapy and came here.

Have you accepted that PTSD is with you for life? If not, why not?

Yes, for me it has been easier to accept seeing all of the people with it here. I see others who have been fully symptomatic longer than I have and they are still going. Sometimes it can be managed, sometimes it cant, and thats just how this goes. I have accepted that I will have this a long time recently through exploring earliest traumas in therapy. Currently working in therapy on what this realization means for me and the road ahead.

Did this realization make your thoughts on PTSD better or worse?


Well its been good to put a name on this and find out what it is. Honestly I had thought this was just something that happened to people who had been in the military. I hate that I was wrong about that. And really looking back a hint that i had this decades ago (in bits and pieces not full on like now) was when a classmate came back from being at war and I couldnt date him. i'd seen the look on his face , on mine before, and it scared me.

Talking about that I will have this for rest of my life makes me anxious, but ive decided i have to face it to get through to being as close as i can be to managable.

 

[intothelight]

For myself, hearing that PTSD was a "lifelong" condition involved several reactions. There was denial, anger, hopelessness and ultimately acceptance. PTSD is what I have and it isn't who I am. When I stopped defining myself by the disorder and realized that in many ways it only limited me to the degree that I allowed it that I felt OK with it.

PTSD is neither good nor bad, as it is a disorder or by analogy any other chronic disease. It is my own viewpoint or perception of how it impacts me that make it "good" or "bad". So I choose to become as well as I can, manage what I can't eliminate, and therefore, minimize the potential negatives it may have on my daily life.

 

[RussH]

I guess for me I had been dealing with PTSD for most of my life and just thought that was me, and it was normal for me. When I learned I had PTSD it was a relief because now I knew something was wrong, I had a name for it, and knew that it could be beat.
When I realized it was a life long condition, I also realized that I had a choice: to let it control me, or I control it. Knowing that I can control it has taken the sting or of knowing it is lifelong.

 

[Gary Johnston]

I am sure I will ruffle the feathers of traditional clinicians here, but PTSD is no more a life long condition than any other anxiety disorder. I have treated hundreds of war veterans, natural disaster victims, rape victims and abuse victims over 25 years, and have never seen any situation which was permanent. The traditional models like to label it life long because they have no real tools to use. Drugs sometimes help take the edge off but do not resolve the real underlying emotional memory trauma.

There are three components to PTSD that makes certain people susceptible and others not. It has nothing to do with mental or emotional weakness, and you shouldn't buy into the story that there is something wrong with you beyond suffering from an anxiety disorder.

1. In every person I have ever seen presenting with a PTSD diagnosis there is a history of at least 10 - 15 years of elevated anxiety baseline anxiety prior to the triggering event. This can be fixed.

2. For about 80% of these there are biochemical / physiological contributors derived from diet / toxicity or autoimmune issues contributing to an inability to absorb or process neurotransmitters in the nervous system correctly. This inhibits correct function of the nervous system and significantly contributes to elevated baseline anxiety , depression and anger. The elevated anxiety contributes to the triggering of panic disorder and makes life very difficult until it is dealt with. Over time the elevated anxiety and depression levels make this worse. Again, the problem is fixable.

3. The triggering event or events over time further elevate the baseline anxiety, pouring massive emotional encoding into the unconscious belief / values system, overloading it and causing the intrusive thinking and flashbacks. Avoidance behavior and hyper-alertness become automatic unconscious reactions to environment.
Again, these can be fixed.

Depending on the structure of your upbringing and environment you will need to deal with each of these elements to finally resolve, not just the PTSD diagnosis, but the sub-PTSD anxiety disorder that lies beneath it. All of these things are fixable and it does not have to take a long time.

Methods that require cognitive evaluation and re-living the trigger events often make things worse for chronic and complex sufferers. Again, if you have been down those paths and either not gained results or have been made worse by them, you are not defective in some way. These methods work in less than 30% of the population, and not for the reasons that are often quoted.

So, I don't want to take away the comfort that some of you find in accepting the idea of being life long sufferers, but the majority of my clients have come through the traditional models, sometimes for 40 years, without any hope. And usually when they find out that it is resolvable have a justifiable anger from having been told they are permanently broken.

Don't give up. And don't think of yourself as being broken or "nuts". Your response to your environment is absolutely normal for at least 20% of the population, and that percentage is increasing every year.

 

[Friday]

1. In every person I have ever seen presenting with a PTSD diagnosis there is a history of at least 10 - 15 years of elevated anxiety baseline anxiety prior to the triggering event. This can be fixed.

This totally negates me, then. As the last thing anyone would ever describe me as would have been an anxious child. Including myself. I had a pretty dang golden childhood. Shrug. Premise further breaks down as there's no elevated baseline to springboard from, nor nutrition/ absorption/ bioavailability/ toxicity issues... Beyond what's absolutely normal following intense exercise or vomiting, and easily fixed with rehydrating fluids. Medical extended family, maybe the president or the pope might have similarly rigorous screenings. But I somehow doubt it. None of the precursors you propose need to exist in order for PTSD to kick into gear are true for me. Nor for a lot of others I've known with PTSD. Instead, we go from fully operational in both worlds, to only operational in one.

 

[anthony]

Me too... my childhood was good, my teen years nothing more than any other, pretty normal, and if you asked anyone, I was one of the most relaxed, chilled, collected person you could come across. Very calm, methodical and practical. Anything but anxious...

I think your hearts in the right place Gary, though some of your information is far from factual based on the expert consensus relating to PTSD, the science and fact.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

1. Elevated baseline anxiety was BECAUSE of the trauma. Delayed onset PTSD by 25 years... This argument sort of falls apart. You can't say that there is a history of anxiety in all PTSD people when the anxiety itself was because of the trauma. Circular argument that goes nowhere. (Delayed onset PTSD is very common.)

No matter what, those on the outside will NEVER....never ever ever understand things from the inside as a sufferer. This guy misunderstands the argument that PTSD is a lifelong struggle with no cure. Maybe if he actually joined and read the many threads on this topic on the forum, he'd understand rather than posting as a guest who thinks he knows all and more likely than not, never coming back to this forum or this thread.

So Gary, if you do come back....the lifelong struggle goes something like this. There is no cure for PTSD. (There is no getting around this one.) Many sufferers go into remission, some for years, perhaps decades, or even the rest of their lives. But, there is no denying that we are susceptible to being re-triggered at any time. (My trigger was so benign that nobody would understand that something so minor kicked my symptoms into full blown PTSD.) Knowing that I require a lifetime of a higher level of self care is enough to tell me that yes, this is indeed a lifelong struggle.

Accepting the fact that this is a long term struggle is empowering, but not for the reasons that you believe. Acceptance, ie moving out of the realm of denial allows people to heal. You wouldn't believe how many people post about being healed only to come back weeks or months later only to realize it was a remission of sorts. Those of us who understand its part of the roller coaster can deal with downturns a lot better as we understand it is all part of the cyclical nature of the disorder. Those who believe they are cured because of a period of cessation of symptoms but later experience a relapse of sorts, well, lets just say that they feel like utter failures. They think that they had it beaten, that they were cured, and because things got bad again, there is something wrong with them.

Your statistic of 20% of the population having PTSD? Uhm, NOPE! (One out of Five? That's an insane figure!) No, its not even close to the true statistic....which leads me to believe that you don't know the diagnostic criteria of true PTSD (and are including lesser traumas in your diagnosis process). And maybe I'm going down a bunny trail here, but if you honestly think that 20% of the population has PTSD, then no wonder you think that we're all curable! I honestly do think you are incorrectly diagnosing people as you think the prevalence of PTSD is a lot higher than it actually is coupled with the notion that everyone can heal (rather quickly, I might add, per your own post).

Can I ask you how many of your patients you follow after treatment ends? I'm guessing very few, which means that you really don't know if these people are indeed cured. You don't know if they have a resurgence in symptoms a year later, a decade later, or even further in the future.

 

[joeylittle]

I think my feathers are ruffled, but only because there are a few things in your theory that don't quite line up with where I understand the currect research to be - specifically (as @anthony and @FridayJones noted, above) the statement that it is the presence of an anxiety disorder that makes people susceptible to developing PTSD after trauma. I've read about stress, cortisol, hippocampal volume - but no-one knows for sure exactly what, if any, connection there might be between people who develop PTSD and people who don't. It's really hypothetical right now.

Can you cite some studies?

 

[MT Johnny]

Well, the part about an underlying anxiety disorder or high anxiety baseline is very true with me - my upbringing was like a concentration camp or gulag where there were nebulous rules so you never knew what to do or not to do, but doing the "wrong thing" resulted in severe punishment.

So yes, from as early as I can remember I have been afraid of everyone and everything and lived with a very high anxiety baseline.