I think that all I want to say is that there IS life after PTSD and that you haven’t lost yourself forever, no matter what the ‘experts’ say (usually, ‘accept it, you’ll never be the same again’). No doubt every individual is different but most PTSD information (however medical) simply swaps Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for Patronising Tips for (barely) Surviving Daily, like, er… ‘try not to get too stressed: relax!’ Or ‘just take these pills…’ (which wont work but at least we’ll feel that we’ve tried).
There isn’t any easy fix, though. It’s a long hard journey very much like a never-ending emotional Via Ferrata where you just have to keep going because you cannot see the end and the end is further than you ever thought it could be but there is no turning back. And we all know that if we’d known what we would have to face we would have given up before we ever took that first step for it is a journey that is so far beyond your own well-known capacity as to seem impossible.
At times you are clinging to a staple in a rock face thinking that it would be so much easier to simply let go, and at others, you are shaking with the effort of making sure that you don’t, as you feel your energy ebbing away while your heart pounds with an abject fear that will not be assuaged.
But when you finally get an adrenaline rush and can feel it again (as in woohoo); when you look at something or someone and can coolly assess their impact on you; when you giggle over something and nothing; when compassion resurrects itself in your heart as the tumbleweed is blown away and your mind stops going blank because some unknown, unseen, unheard, unfelt trigger has wiped it as surely as a disk near a magnet, you know it was worth it. Every painstakingly bleak second of it (and those seconds can and do add up to years. That’s a lot of bleak.)
Then, during those times when the colour bleeds out of everything again, at least you know it’s only temporary, and those times do and will get shorter.
So if you have PTSD, don’t listen to the naysayers. It’s not an illness and neither is it an altered personality, it’s a wound, a psychological wound which you have sustained because somebody or something injured you. And wounds heal.
You can. And you will.
