My PTSD has had me struggling with nightmares and sleep because of my trauma from age 9 when I was in a car bombing as a missionary kid overseas.   Here's a summary I've posted here before as to what happened:

"Our car got bombed when my family went out for a drive to get some ice cream.  When we got to the ice cream parlor, a guy emerged from a building across the street with a Molotov cocktail lit in his hand. He saw me, a kid in the back seat, looking into his eyes.  He looked back, locking his eyes on mine, but he threw the lit bomb anyway. The bomb exploded across the hood of the car and enveloped the whole car in blue gasoline flames.  I don't remember how we escaped with our lives or anything else since I went into shock.  The car was resilient, though, and got repaired."

I didn't.  I've had PTSD ever since, this week with a bad nightmare about the car itself.  I posted here about that, but trying to avoid blame I didn't share here what triggered my PTSD.  Since it's ongoing and I need help, I guess I've got to fess up as to the trigger's background:  this week my flashbacks got triggered by a friend's wife.  She says that she has PTSD but, since she was a psychiatric nurse, she knows more about PTSD recovery that I do. 

In her opinion, my memory of the car bombing is false because I can't explain how I survived the car bombing. So that means it never happened.

If only she were right, but my brain injury from it knows different, as my VA doc explained to me in therapy for it. I hadn't spoken about it in therapy until I'd been in therapy for 12 years already, it was such a hard thing for me to face.  I was a kid, I wasn't a soldier, so I didn't think a VA doc would help me, but he did.  He got me to go do exposure therapy overseas back to the street corner where it happened, and I researched the country's historical record of bombings in the city that day.  

As a professor, I wrote a book about literature concerning the war in which my car bombing happened.  

For my book's last chapter I interviewed in person the combat commander behind it.  He apologized, by the way, and for another bombing of a bowling alley in my neighborhood,

http://www.lr21.com.uy/politica/354418-el-atentado-al-bowling

and for killing my 5th grade pal's dad, too.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione

My childhood was dangerous in a child's places:  an ice cream parlor, a bowling alley.  It's confirmed: much as I might wish otherwise, it happened, even if my friend's wife invalidates my memory of it. My friend's siding with his wife, even though he went overseas with me to that street corner.  It's surprising, since like me, he's a college professor with a PhD, mine's in literature, his in chemistry.My friend says that history books like mine just perpetuate bad memories and that with it I only increased PTSD in myself and others, like his wife.

My brain won't let me live in denial, though.  Not my mind, my brain itself, and it's in obsessive overdrive, especially in my sleep.  This discussion about denial with my friend and his wife awakened a sleeping dragon for me in my brain in flashbacks and nightmares this week.  My brain injury won't let me even consider denial about it, the latest email suggestion of it coming last Sunday in an Easter email I received.  I blocked my friend's email address 2 days ago so I wouldn't get more of his wife's messages about it because night by night they made my nightmares worse.  Yikes, with friends like that, who needs enemies?  So I turn to friends like you.

On Friday I fled to a hotel to try to get better sleep than I got this week at home.  I didn't have a nightmare picturing that car that got bombed again.  But I had other nightmares about it all night, and I woke up with a soundtrack song to my nightmares in my head.  Ironically, the song befits this week's flashbacks' theme for, since it's a song "Zombie" by The Cranberries about a car bombing and its second line mentions a child.  

Check it out: my subconscious mind is really pin pointing what it wants me to acknowledge. I woke up with these exact lines from the lyrics saying "in your head" clearly going over and over in my mind. 

THE CRANBERRIES LYRICS "Zombie" http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cranberries/zombie.html

The first verse goes:

"Another head hangs lowly/Child is slowly taken/And the violence caused such silence/Who are we mistaken"

Then the last verse says: 

"In your head they're still fightin'/With their tanks and their bombs/And their bombs and their guns/In your head, in your head they are dyin'"

The comment about the song on the site listing the lyrics said:" In the song Zombies (In Your Head) The Cranberries describe the violence in “The Troubles,” the decades-long conflict between Ireland and the UK.

Dolores O'Riordan wrote the song during the band’s English tour in 1993 in memory of two young boys Tim Parry and Jonathan Ball, who were killed in an IRA bombing in Warrington, England.

The song is even about "boys" who died in that bombing.  I was a 9 year old boy in my car bombing.

My subconscious brain is pushing back against my friend's wife and her suggestion that I couldn't survive a car bombing and that therefore my memory of it is false.  I wish, but reality is that I've got the traumatic memory of it refreshed in my mind as a consequence of talking about denying it with her and her husband, my friend.  I've got to reboot my therapy tools to deal with my PTSD from it.  I'm having trouble doing that.  

I've changed sleep locations by going to a hotel now, and I've bought a ticket to a live comedy show tonight with comedian Sarah Silverman so as to cheer myself up.  But the sleeping dragon of that PTSD car bombing memory now is wide awake front and center.  My psychiatrist has me taking the medication Prazosin for that.  Kidney disease restricts me from taking any other meds.

My crisis is that I'm doing everything I know to do and yet the nightmares continue.  I'm establishing boundaries with my triggering friends' emails, praying and meditating, taking my medication for nightmares, moving to luxurious comfortable sleep surroundings, asking for support group help, and going out for fun to a show.  

Any other suggestions?