Oh...so, do y'all think it's better to leave it alone? Or wade through it and feel all that crud? I seem to be temperamentally stuck doing the latter, but mileage may vary?

I ask myself this same question you asked , is it better to wade through it or put it behind?

In my twenties I had A LOT of therapy, three times a week with one doctor and once every two weeks with another. I believe I did a lot of that healing then and I was 'able' to put the trauma behind me and not feel it all of the time. I still have triggers and reactions I work with every day and must dig into my past to realize why I feel this way and how to cope for both the physical trauma and the mental abuse.

I do think it is different for everyone, especially for those who repressed it. I guess I am the same way, better at processing it and getting on with living now.

Good topic

For example...

I wrote about my rape in my journal last night. I can do that without current pain and anguish.

The mental stuff is harder to deal with because it is brought on and pounded into us as children as if it is ok to be that way or our system feels its ok to react how we do using our unhealthy fear mechanism.

I think it depends on the person and the trauma. Like, for me talking about ti helps but not in detail. It is easier for me to "get over" things if I talk generally about it but not relive it.

i can understand not re-living the trauma. Not living in the past, learning to appreciate the present, and hope for the future.

However, with my therapist and support group I found that repetition also brings mastery. At least, that's what he told me and we practiced. And I think we practice it here, too. In other words, the first time you tell your story you re-live every detail. But when you come up along side a member here in solidarity, you can repeat it but without re-living every detail. Eventually, it seems that you control the narrative more than the narrative controls you.

Anyway, I can see the therapist's point in not re-living it. But I've gotten a lot of benefit out of this "repetition brings mastery" concept from my therapist, too. I guess what he did was have me start to tell it in a different way for a different reason--in less detail and for solidarity with others. It made me realize I was not alone any more.

The therapy that I am doing is more focused on PTSD and how to recover from it than how I got it. I do not ignore the trauma, but I do not talk about it.

When in therapy she will ask me to think of a trigger, and ask me how my body feels, what muscles are tense, is my heart pounding, what emotions are present, etc. Once we have identified the feelings, emotions, stress etc, we work to ride out the trigger, bring it to a head and talk me down. Again noting how the body reacts along the way.

We have identified themes to my trauma, such as fear, overwhelmed, unable cope, feeling helpless, etc. She will ask me what theme my trigger fits into.

The thought behind this is that by me bringing up the triggers in a safe place, where it is controlled, she can help me deal with it and defuse it. When it gets defused, the brain has formed a new pathway and no longer goes directly the trauma part of my brain when triggered for that particular trigger. In short it rewires my brain. It is ok to maybe have to do this more than once in order to ensure the pathway no longer goes to the trauma part of the brain.
She could explain it a lot better than I can

She tells me that in the brain scans they did, they found that when people talked about the trauma over and over again, it actually showed activity in only the right rear part of the brain, which is where PTSD trauma resides. This is reinforcing the trauma as the go to part of your brain and shutting down the rest of your brain.

I like this approach it treats the PTSD and does not care how I got it and does not make me tell my story over and over again. I have built up a good trust with my therapist and I hope she is on the right path. She seems to be on the cutting edge of therapy for PTSD because of her involvement in brain scans of PTSD while triggered, not triggered and while recounting the events which lead to PTSD.

I think this also helps me move ahead by not constantly talking about it. If I do have to talk about it now I try and keep it very short with very little detail. I focus more on the steps I am taking to get well. That is the most important thing right now...getting well. I did have to tell my new paralegal the details and I got to tell you, it was upsetting, I cried. I was uncomfortable and did not feel right for a few days after.

I talked my way to a better place. I believe there's no limits to how often and how long a person needs to talk about their trauma. If it's there, it's there.

For me, staying functional and on my feet is all about balance. In the case of my traumas, I want to be able to look back without staring. There is valuable information in all of my past experience which is beneficial to access upon need. However, it is only information. It is done and cannot be undone, nor relived, however real my flashbacks may feel when I get lost in them. I get that information source back on the shelf and pull myself back to the here and now once I have the pertinent info.

I think. I might just be babbling like a woman on her way back to a place she don't wanna go. My beloved is still in the hospital...

I think it's case-by-case, really. My current therapist and my p-doc (who is also a neuro) said that talking about it too much just re-focuses our minds on it and we end up re-traumatized. Dealing with the effects is usually best, before getting too deep into the "causes", is what they've told me. But like you, BD, I repressed a bucketload, so I *have* to talk about it---or I'm just living on Da River De Nial again, or that's how it feels for me, anyway....

I often re-visit it, but in light of new context or insight---seeking understanding of the situation, me, how it's affected me. It's not so much a "Hey, let's just discuss this trauma until we all puke" sorta thing.

I

I think the biggest challenge for me in terms of re-visiting it or not was when my therapist got me to do exposure therapy and actually go back to the city where I survived a car bombing. I never thought I would want to go back there again. That was in 2009. It was so good, though, that I have gone back every summer since then. I went back this past August and had my photo taken on that street corner in triumph.

I think there's a time for not caring how you got PTSD and dealing with it in the now. I had been in therapy for 14 years before re-visiting that street corner. But there was a time for going to that place, too. By the time I returned it was far from the scene of war and chaos that almost killed me. The city had gone through PTSD recovery, too. The country had done recovery work from its civil war, and the president himself talked openly about having recovered from PTSD. That's why my username here is Mujica. President Mujica is his name. He was shot 6 times as a combatant during the war I survived as a civilian in that carbombing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqhCAORmsaE

In other words, a healing context had grown up all around that street corner where i got PTSD, so my therapist was right to get me to expose myself to all of that healing everyone else had done, too. I hear it's why Vietnam veterans sometimes travel all the way back to Vietnam. It was beyond my wildest dreams.

So I guess whether you re-visit your PTSD incident or not depends on context. In my case, it showed me the world had moved on but in a way that validated what had happened, too. I could truly leave it in the past because I could see with my own eyes that things had gotten better. So I could, too. That's when I came here.