Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for Dummies

Good book with helpful insight to help with dealing with PTSD. Interesting insight and self awareness techniques.

Flashbacks are like a time machine. You literally re-live it in every way down to your visceral responses and the same exact thoughts going through your mind. We attempt to scramble back into the present tense ASAP. This was (and sometimes still is) the hardest aspect of PTSD to get under control. Your book (and years of therapy and ongoing self-directed effort)taught me to acknowledge the unwanted memories as brain blips because of cataloging.....(i.e. a sexual snarl provoking a memories of all that molestation or torture makes a young girl rememember AND feel.....)It's not only my body "replaying" the sensations, it's also the EMOTIONAL/visceral responses......i.e. feeling scared, helpless, unimportant, unloved.....these I now realize that the physical memories (burning, violence, starvation, etc...) are ALWAYS accompanied by what you think and the emotional component. So, it's not only remembering and re-experiencing what they did to your body, it's ALSO what you concluded about yourself, the world......and what to expect next......I'm not articulate at all.....but it's these emotions that are reexperienced in my body that I ALWAYS have to recognize aren't true any more. I call them the emotional reverbations of random memories......This has helped me to learn what to acknowledge as pertaining to `now' and what got accidentally misfired.......That was and is my lynchpin to feeling capable and able to appreciate my life. The best thing is............I notice that everything is less intense and floats by more easily.............I can't thank you enough...........True, my therapies helped, but......reading your book seemed to present it as "OK and doable"........I think it was because you wrote it like the reader was talking to a friend and it's OK to have challenges like this. THANK YOU! In summary, I must remember that these are outdated "life templates". I just let them pass as such. I no longer try to PUSH them away. My gentle recogniation has actually made them recur less frequently and with less visceral impact and they "dissolve" more quickly as well. Your "acceptace" advice is, ironically, the most curative! I wish all PTSD's could know this. I owe you much that I love about life now.....including me! *blush*

This was an easy & very interesting read. I finished it in one weekend. It was in simplified terms, and chock full of good information.