Well for starters stop smoking pot...

There are heaps of things that can help you move forward from this - and not just psychobabble. Do your see a psychiatrist or a therapist? Both avenues can help with PTSD and I also have several other mental illnesses as well that a therapist and doctor help.

Also, after I tried to end it and nearly succeed two and a half years ago I was put on a 10 week, one night a week course on the therapy model called Act and Mindfulness. The text we used (and I continue to use today) is called The Happiness Trap. I found the whole thing amazing (I am also an 11 years sober alcoholic in AA, but that doesn't address mental illness, although this therapy runs fantasctically well along with 12 Step Programs).

Act and Mindfulness can really help with intrusive, repeated, destructive thoughts, including traumatic memories. My therapist also has been trained in this method and so it all chimes in well for me.

The other thing is that there is a book called The Brain that Changes Itself. It's about Brain Plasticity and the ability even as adults, to actually change the functioning of our brains, and this includes the follow-on problems like your past use of pot (which is so very powerful these days because of hybridisation and hydroponics) and how it is still affecting you now. I would highly recommend it - it is very inspiring and will give you hope that if you keep working on yourself through both psychiatry and psychology, you WILL expeprience major change.

As I'm a 12 Stepper, could I ask have you tried MA? AA has saved my life and like I said, therapy and 12 Step programs go really well running in parallel to each other.

While well-meaning, I think both of you inadvertently missed "the rest of the story," as Paul Harvey used to say. She only smoked pot one time, and had a terrible experience.

It's a tough one, because my logic-minded part wants to explain that marijuana (used one time) does not produce any long-term effects, nor does it produce flashbacks like acid. It's completely out of your system within 30 days, and then your body is back to the way it was prior to using it.

At the same time, I know you already know all of that. Logic has nothing to do with emotional responses (as I can attest to personally!) Just because I was molested by an old bald guy twenty years ago, doesn't mean I ought to get anxious around every old bald guy. And yet, it can happen. So I understand.

All I can suggest is what has helped me: Using my logical-part to research the heck out of it. Either by researching the truth about marijuana (erowid.org has a balanced approach to education, showing both positive and negative), or by researching PTSD and doing your own psychoanalysis. This is what I've been doing and it's helped me understand, change and get rid of many of my symptoms.

I have a random thought to throw out here, too... Often a single trauma triggers symptoms that were hiding already within us from much older traumas... If you're up to it, you may want to consider whether something much deeper in your history may be trying to surface, using the fear from this experience as its springboard. There may be something that you remember but have felt no emotional connection to, or parts that you think you should remember but don't. That's a tough area to dig into, but with the way your symptoms are manifesting, it feels like there could be more behind it that your mind has been seriously avoiding for a while.

You have my support, sister. PTSD is tough, but it CAN be overcome if you keep at it.

Hugs,
Wistala