I solidly believe that PTSD is one of those things you never will fully understand unless you have lived with it inside your own skin. I believe it is kinda like my attempts to understand what my paraplegic friend is going through. I ain't gonna fully "get" it because of insufficient data.

Still, I can listen, care and feel honored by the trust he shows when he allows me to ask questions. He and I share a common approach to helping the other understand our unique challenges. We answer questions as simply and directly as possible. Neither of us AssUMes anyone wants to know unless the questions are asked.

i once told a lady here on the boards who was dealing with a veteran friend who had PTSD basically the following...

when a person has to take a life it fundamentally changes them and how they relate to the world. it is impossible to go back to who you were after pulling that trigger. i haunts you forever. its a pain that becomes part of who you are. it often defines so much of you when you are expected to come back and live in a regular world where those skills are not wanted. others just can't relate. you can't relate to them anymore due to the fact that they never had to pull that trigger.

to boil it down - sometimes you are talking to the person that is still there. however there are many times you are talking to the pain.

i give that example as an opener because it is much like that for us who have been through other traumas. there are times people get to talk to the person that is us doing ok and having a good day and feeling really good. then there are the times that they need to understand they are talking to our trauma. they may even be talking to us working through the trauma. the trauma is not who we are. we are people who have survived horrible things because we are amazing people able to adapt and cope. we most definitely are not defined by those things. however they should hopefully understand that the trauma is there looking for a voice so that it can be healed. so yeah sometimes you get me and sometimes you get the pain.

One of my friends told me she finally "got it" when I told her that trauma is stored in the brain in such a way that you feel it just happened.

So regardless of the amount of work I've done or the amount of time that passes, it doesn't change that. The war, the rape, the accident, the trauma for people with PTSD happened yesterday.

Therapy helps us learn how to deal with it, but the problem is that when your brain is in a trauma state, it's hard to think straight. You're in survival mode. Therapy can help us learn to calm ourselves sometimes but it's really a challenge to get past that survival mode.

And we need to avoid triggers as much as possible. When the brain goes through trauma, it registers everything around at the time so it can be avoided in the future. So anything can be a trigger - if it was cold at the time, we may get flashbacks when it's cold. If there was a blue glass during the time of trauma, that can be a trigger.

So it's very tricky stuff and it can be really consuming.

Arfie makes a good point that while people can't necessarily understand it, compassion is what matters.

i never could quite figure out to explain the trigger part of it. thanks reed

PTSD is something I find people make a lot of assumptions about or joke about like doesn't everyone have Ptsd. When people say stuff like that I just want to thump them cause they have no idea what my life was like before the onset of this terrible illness or what the cause of this illness is or what it's like to live with it now. It feels like ignorance to me.
My feeling about this is that people don't understand that not only do you feel like it happened yesterday or any of that but in some ways its mu h worse living through it a second time around because the first time I was so dissociated at I didn't feel my feelings about it accept I was afraid for my life. Now I'm expected to heal it by going back through it with all my feelings in tact and not dissociate through what happened or is happening in my mind. So many times for survivors living through it was mu h easier than reliving it through flashbacks and feelings and all that comes with it. Its like having a nightmare that you can't wake up from. Everyone has had a nightmare at some point in there life even if it wasn't about something that happened to them. They. Can usually wake themselves up and tell themselves this is not real on people with Ptsd can't say this isn't real because it is. It happen to them. I would venture to guess that trying to explain Ptsd has to be one of the hardest things to explain ever. Like Arfie said unless you have been there you have no idea about it and almost have no way to comprehend it.
What get me is people who say oh, I have Ptsd and it's not that bad. Again thos are people I'd like to thump as well. If they are saying that then they have not been through what I have been through and lived to tell about it.
I wish there was a pat explanation that everyone could understand and yet for as many of us that have ptsd I think there are that many different explanation cause we all feel it different and heal from it different. I think it is very complex and yet there are so many similarities that connect us and allow us to support each other. I do wish there was a great way to explain this complex illness. Thanks for the topic muji. Sorry it was hard to explain to your friend. I do hope she understood to some degree which would have allowed you to have anice visit. Hugs

I'm interested in how the conversation went... how is it that she didn't understand how it still affects you. Was she not validating your symptoms, that it's not due to your original traumas...

I'd maybe use the analogy with songs or perfume. Every time you hear or smell them, memories come flooding back from the past. People can relate to that.

NOW, say that it's the same for you, but with BAD memories. And it's not a remote song or smell, it's when a person's BEHAVIOR sends your memory of bad things into overload and you don't even realize it. You're fine and then all of a sudden, WHAM! You feel all panicky because that "song" from the past is being played.

Hugs.

Smart as my friend is, she still didn't get that PTSD is not about memories alone. That it's about re-living the trauma as if it just happened, re-living it with physical sensations over and over. It really opened my eyes about how others perceive us. Since they think it's only about bad memories, they figure that eventually we should just forget what happened.

i have given up ,they dont want to know hugs min

Very difficult and we run the risk of being triggered by their response.
Some people got no idea or empathy of what is like to live such traumatic events. Its beyond what they can imagine and they can't.

I guess I've come to live with it so long, I almost take it for granted... I forget that others DON'T react to triggers like us... Not everybody goes into fight or flight mode over not being validated.

Muji- does she put out a, "shouldn't you be over this by now" air???

I guess people don't realize that it CHANGES your brain and how you process it all for the rest of your life...

It's more like a "but you did so well back then" attitude. We were in grad school together. It was before I was diagnosed and got therapy. I had just come from South America, where I had been tortured. The only thing I could do with any success was school, pursuing my doctorate in Spanish.

I did well earning a Spanish doctorate here in the USA because I was South American raised. But because I was South American raised in those dictatorial times, I was a torture survivor. So the rest of my life outside of class from sun up to sun down was flashbacks and nightmares. It was a terribly painful time for me day after day.

But all she wants to remember is my grades now. She likes to say how she had to work harder in school than I did, that she looked up to me in school as the best student in the class, yadda yadda.

It could be flattering, but it's not. I could care less now about my grades in 1983. What's stayed with me since 1983 is my PTSD and how I got it. But she blew that off in our visit. Said I was a "legend" in our doctoral program.

I said that being a "legend" was a lie. It was lucky I didn't kill myself. When I finally published my dissertation about the torture in my country I got help. I got diagnosed with PTSD, got therapy, and my life was saved.

People see what they want to see and remember what they want to remember, I guess. It's sad, because we all want a faithful witness to our struggle. That's what we do for one another here, serve as validating witnesses. I'm more grateful for that now than ever.

I've had so little luck on this front I can't reply, really. I've tried. But I'm just stuck. Even my hubby, who has known me 25 years (2/3 of my life) can't really grasp it, because, well, "I did so good" until... or unless... Argh, I can't even explain it to *me*!

You ask a good question here, yet sadly, I have never been able to answer this question. Many around me dont get PTSD at all and have no desire to. Its a back ground oddity to them that they dont pay attention to. I tend to keep my PTSD issue to myself because of this. Unless I stand naked in front of them, howling at invisible people, they just dont care about my PTSD.

Leox3 - ditto! My husband does the same thing. "But you've been doing so well,". He doesn't realize how well I can hide my true feelings. I'm a pro!

I find that most people only want to relate PTSD to war or death or rape/assault, but not to long-term abuse, certainly not from childhood abuse. My husband doesn't seem to get it, I can tell. And that just frustrates me more.

Odd- SHE sounds like the one stuck in the past. And it's a rosy one. Did she even read your book? I'd give her a copy and say you did so well in school because you are a SURVIOR. I'd tell her that getting a doctorate was a luxurious walk in the park for you, considering what you've been through.

This is all about her. She sounds a little jealous of you for some reason and she's being very subtly passive aggressive by refusing to hear and validate you. She could've easily said, "Oh my; I had no idea what struggles you have had. You are amazing."

Instead, she pooh-poohs your pain. She's the worst kind of toxic- sugar coated venom.

Hugs.