I haven't. I don't really expect to, either. There is no cure for the common me.

However, I have learned how to manage the symptoms well enough to live a life I am proud to call my own and feel well compensated by the many wonderful people I never would have met without the pressure of my healing needs. Some of those people are right here on DS.

there is a book called "Complex PTSD from surviving to thriving" written by Peter Walker. He dedicates a section of the book to letting go of the fantasy that PTSD will completely go away one day. He says that it's counterproductive to wait for that to happen because it undermines recovery. In truth, many of us will probably have symptoms of PTSD for the remainder of our lives. But that doesn't mean we can have an amazing life and overcome many of the difficulties that it causes for us. I just want to feel better. I want to feel at peace and safe again. I don't have to be 100% to feel that way. if it ever did happen to go away 100% I would be thrilled but even if it goes away 90% or, hell, 80%, I'll take it.

alive47, I go that Pete Walker site soulsearcher mentions here several times a week just to keep steady as to living with the kind of trauma I carry with me. I envy those who say trauma made them lose hope, or who hope for a cure. I wish I knew what that hope felt like, but it's like describing sex to someone who has only ever been celibate or like describing sight to a blind man. I was raised as a person who never had hope to begin with.

I grew up in Uruguay's dictatorship with mentally ill parents from the USA who refused to evacuate to safety and went violent in the home. A military adviser's son molested me twice, too, under the military government, so its abuse penetrated deeply into me personally in mind and body, not just in some political or abstract way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic-military_dictatorship_of_Uruguay

If you ever speak to people with PTSD who escaped, say, North Korea, they'll confirm my lifelong task of living on after surviving a dictatorship's brainwashing and abuse. It is no picnic. There is no way I could unscramble eggs and separate my brain's child development from growing up where, just in school, every piece of paper I turned in to the teacher had to have the dictator's slogan of the day written across the top in my handwriting or it could not be graded. My art teacher was taken away from my school for thinking it didn't apply to kids' artwork. He found out the hard way. The military used electric battery-powered cattle prods on human skin. I was tortured later for walking on my suburban street one Sunday with 3 other friends. That made 4 of us, and the paranoid dictator didn't want more than 3 people congregating in public.

Of all of the psychiatrists out there, the one I trust the most is Dr. Viktor Frankl, since he wasn't just knowledgeable from books but from experience. He was captured by Hitler and sent to a concentration camp during the Holocaust, so his psychiatric skills were put to the test. Save one, all of the members of his family were killed by Hitler, so after his release from the death camps he wrote "Man's Search for Meaning," describing what he called "logotherapy" as a way to go on after surviving abuse and brainwashing. It's what we do here when we write our posts on DS PTSD, and it helped him live to the age of 92, so again, my idea that there's something to it isn't from books, but from his real life example that impressed me more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl

I've been able to "fake it until I make it" for 45 years with PTSD and no cure for it now, so I'm on the downhill slope for the next 33 years to make it to Frankl's old age of 92. I reserve the right to give up any time I may choose to, but so far I keep coming back here every day. Hope you do, too. Knock on wood.

some days yes, some days not so much.

i have to remind myself that even had the trauma not happened, i still wouldn't be that same guy i was before. so his steps got me here, and i say `thanks buddy' and that's about all the time i want to spend with him.

I would like to heal too. I don't think the scars will ever go away (we'll never forget), but if I can get to a place where the pain stops then life will be pretty good.

Muji, I would like to read that book that was written by the man who escaped the Holocaust. I know what you mean by growing up under a dictator. I was not physically tortured by him (Soeharto / his military), but those things stay with you... the never being allowed to say anything bad -only praises, people disappearing, the parades of militants who ran the streets beating and raping anyone who apposed him.... and much more. And the weird thing was, I had become so used to living in those conditions that when some missionaries had arranged an escape for us, I didn't want to leave. Mostly because my father hid (kept) my older brother's passport so we had to leave him behind and I feared I would never see him again.

I think you put it so well invisablefriend!!..... Big hug Alive.....xo

Thanks arfie, soulseacher83, mujicaptsd, MrMojoRisen, invisiblefriend,BlueSky and SunCloudJD for all Y'alls Help and Y'all All are in My Prayers. Sorry Y'all are having it rough also Hugs and Love to You All

Of course.

But just like you're more likely to find hurt people in an ER waiting room...you're more likely to find people still hurting on a support site. Yes?

patti22 Yes I think everyone on DS is hurting I look at my past and I don't think it was that bad but I lived in a nightmare and I am still living one today if You can understand that