Coping With PTSD: Communicating With The Outside World

It’s been a busy weekend here at PTSD Central. I spent a lot of time working on the Heal My PTSD, LLC, web site, which by the way, I could use your input on. Please visit this post to join the conversation about how we, as survivors, define PTSD.

Also, for those of you dealing with PTSD from child abuse, check out Wendy’s totally cool comment on Friday’s post about how to find a good PTSD therapy group related to this issue.

Lastly, Jill Landefeld, a trauma survivor and EMDR practitioner wrote a great guest post about her personal and professional experience with EMDR. Just another peek behind the curtain of healing. (I’ll give you a hint, EMDR worked for her.)

Now that we’re up to date, there’s new topic in town: Healing Resolution # 5: I WILL EDUCATE THOSE AROUND ME.

The education of non-PTSDers is an incredibly important part of PTSD healing. For the past month we’ve thoroughly educated ourselves about PTSD symptoms, causes, effects and treatments. However, living and coping with – and healing – PTSD means that the people around us need to be educated, too. They need to understand what’s going on with us, has gone on with us, and will go on with us as we live and heal the aftereffects of our traumas.

The approach here is twofold: 1) those around and supporting us need to clinically understand PTSD, 2) they need to hear what PTSD means and is for us experientially. The more informed our friends, family, colleagues and partners are the better we can communicate our needs, and the better they can adapt to our struggle and find positive and proactive ways to support us. PTSD feels scary and out of control and completely foreign to us – imagine what it feels like for those watching from the outside.

A little case in point: By the time I was 25 (12 years after my trauma) I was deep into struggling with unrecognized PTSD symptoms. On a particularly weary day I unintentionally really disturbed my mother (in the middle of a discussion about my depression and struggle with The Thing We Did Not Know Had A Name) by telling her that:

“There are 5 women in my head.”

Understandably, this idea terrifically alarmed my mom. But I wasn’t thinking about her in the moment I made that statement. I was thinking of how hard I was struggling to figure out which of those 5 women I was supposed to be. It didn’t occur to me to clarify for her a concept that I found pretty damn unwieldy.

But if I had thought about my mother and how this comment would sound to her, and if I had considered that we need to choose our words carefully when we try to explain our situation, I would have taken the time to explain what I was feeling this way:

“Since my trauma my identity seems to have splintered into several fragments. I don’t have separate personalities, just individual selves that represent different reactions to what occurred. There’s the survivor self, the wounded self, the warrior-healer self, the traumatized self and the nihilistic self. I no longer have a grip on one single identity; I don’t know which of these selves I’m supposed to be.”

That sort of paragraph would have begun trying to explain the chaos going on in my head. But in the PTSD pain and fog I didn’t bother to explain; I bottomlined and paraphrased and expected my mother to somehow magically intuit and understand what I meant, and then, because she’s my mom somehow find a way to help me with it and make it better. This isn’t, of course, exactly the best way to handle the people in our lives who stand by us when we’re injured. If we don’t effectively communicate and educate others all that happens is that then there are 2 people who are completely bereft and confused where there used to be just one.

Over the next month PTSD U will continue by looking at ways and means of educating those around us not only about PTSD itself, but about our personal experience of it, plus how to help and support us in our struggle to heal. From clinical fact to personal approaches we’re going to tackle how to communicate with and unify our healing team, plus the world at large that may not be in our inner circle but has to interact with us anyway. There are many reasons to spread the word about PTSD awareness. A very major one is this: Educating the world can help us heal.

Have you figured out a good way to communicate and explain the PTSD experience? Leave a comment or shoot me an email.