Congrats on taking on this trip with the kids, arfie. It's amazing of you!

Yeah, startle responses are daily for me with PTSD, which is why I eventually started living alone 10 years ago. More restful for me. Hope you can get rest nights on the road.

I agree good for you getting out there with the grandbabies ... I hope that you had a lot of fun times

I have not had a startle response so I can't really comment on that however having this pandemic going on for 2 years and changing our lives so drastically I can only imagine has affected people is many ways and will take some time to turn around

I'm glad that you were able to spend time at your beloved river Arf....Nice... xo

My personal experience with startle reflexes is that they come in all shapes, sizes, causes and intensities. Random, unwanted/uninvited thoughts trigger startle responses in me. I've become quite adept at coming up with excuses for my physical reactions to seemingly nothing to others. Although I'm probably not being totally honest with myself on that opinion. A quality often associated to me by those around me is "skittish": Spend an hour inside my brain and darn skippy, I'm skittish. Poking fun at myself about it helps me deal with it. Of course humor is my drug of choice for just about everything. Not everybodies cup of tea.

Glad you found your rivers. Good medicine. Gives me hope I'll find my mountains again. This flat land, dust bowl crap leaves me feeling vulnerable, exposed, threatened, deserted/abandoned. Just p[ain crazy I guess.

Inside my own skin, I believe I have developed my awareness of the startle response to the point where I can --mostly-- keep it physical before it escalates into all the PTSD psycho symptoms such as racing thoughts, etc. In the nearly two years since I have taken on responsibility for their foster care the orphans have familiar enough that I believe I can recognize their startle responses at the physical level, as well. As we were navigating the tourist routes, the response which worried me were the reactions to the bizarre interpretations and blending of post-corona laws. The panic attacks attached seem to be fearful of yet another global shutdown. Who and/or what, exactly, are these law loving maskites, anyway? What will **they** come up with next?

Our little ship of fools has been anchored in my Pirate's Den not too far from the River Port Authority for several days now. The Pirates Den is currently occupied by my best beloved sister and the barely alive sister between us in age. It has been voted the best campsite of the road trip and the comfort here has allowed us to minimize the random social contact. We still have to navigate that cultural instability to get back to the farm, but for now, the ??startle responses?? which had me worried are gone. We'll worry about next week when it gets here.

Though the pandemic is officially "over", the depression, anxiety and PTSD that it has caused has lingered. It is frightening to think of what we have just been through and that when the summer ends we could see spikes in some communities again. For me, getting vaccinated brought great relief in a way that I never thought that it would.
But, still, Covid has killed so many people; it really has been devastating.
You are also travelling across many states--I am assuming that this is new.
I am thinking that it is natural to have a heightened startle response given all that you mentioned.

(((((Arfie)))))
Enjoy the beautiful rivers, I think it’s great that you guys are doing a road trip
Big hugs <3

Afie, sounds like you have been on an amazing adventure. Startle responses are the worst, but understandable after trauma. I have them often and have to remind myself to breath. Be safe and have fun on your trip.

I hold that startle responses are one of the hard-wired components of our survival instinct. They are what trigger the anxiety sequence which gives us the super-natural abilities to react to life threatening events in life. The PTSD challenge is keeping the threat real within the present day.

Homesickness has set in on-board our little ship of fools. I'm registering that as, "Mission Completion." Since the children were moved to the farm under official protective custody in August, 2019 and the funeral of both parents 6 short weeks later and the global shutdown a few months later, the children have yet to relax into proprietorial security. Perhaps with this bout of homesickness, they will, at last, accept the farm as home.

Just praying. . .

Yeah, even though it's homesickness, arfie, it could be as you say--a good sign that the "home" part is finally the farm, after all of the turmoil of the past 2 years.