Conquering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

The Newest Techniques for Overcoming Symptoms, Regaining Hope, and Getting Your Life Back

Victoria Lemle Beckner, John B. Arden

• Publisher: Fair Winds Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781616737771
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

More than 13 million Americans experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and one out of 13 adults will develop it in their lifetime. Recent worldwide crises and events including the Iraq war; the September 11th attacks; numerous Columbine-like events; the Catholic Church child molestation scandal; and the Katrina tragedy in New Orleans, continue to present thousands more PTSD cases each year in all age groups. This book helps victims make sense of the events that led to their illness and teaches them how to create a new reality with specific advice and action plans that put them on the road to recovery and long-term healing.

SECTION 1
What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

CHAPTER 1

Six Trauma Survivors: Their Stories

In this chapter, you’ll meet six people who have experienced trauma and have developed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result. While these particular individuals are fictitious, their cases are based on clients we have worked with over the years; identifying details have been changed to protect their anonymity. “Sonya,” “Dan,” “Nicole,” “Barry,” “Angela,” and “Ian” will be your companions on your journey through this book, as you travel from trauma to recovery.

Sonya: Auto Accident

Sonya, a loan officer at a bank in a town outside of Chicago, was driving to her office one morning when it began to snow. As she exited the freeway, she could feel her car begin to slide. Suddenly, the car skidded off the ramp and rolled over, tumbling down the embankment. To Sonya, it felt as though the accident was happening in slow motion. When her car stopped, it was upside down and she was trapped, her left arm crushed. The hot chocolate she had been drinking dripped from the ceiling as she waited in terror for help.

Sonya was hospitalized with several broken ribs, and her left arm sustained multiple fractures and nerve damage. Sonya’s ex-husband took care of their eight-year-old son, Eric, while she was in the hospital.

When she was discharged, she knew something was wrong beyond her serious physical injuries. She was having nightmares about the accident, and felt anxious all the time. Her friend Laura and several coworkers checked in with her periodically during the several months she was on disability leave, but Sonya didn’t want to see anybody. She had family in New Mexico, but she discouraged them from coming out to help. She felt strange and disoriented, as if the world had suddenly been stripped bare, revealing itself as a precarious and dangerous place.

Because of her injury, Sonya had to learn how to do her household chores and other activities with one hand. She relearned how to get dressed, cook, and type with just her right hand. But Sonya was terrified of learning how to drive again, which meant that she had to depend on her ex-husband to take Eric to school and soccer practice. She felt ashamed of her fear, and often helpless as a mother.

Dan: Combat in Iraq

Dan was a thirty-five-year-old Army soldier who served two tours in Iraq, the last time in Baghdad. He saw a lot of combat, especially when his unit tried to secure a new area. Security patrols were also dangerous because of snipers and the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on the roads.

During one of these patrols, the Humvee in front of Dan’s hit an undetected IED. It was carrying his close buddy Cesar and three other soldiers he knew well. The explosion was followed by sniper fire, and Dan ran forward to help while his fellow soldiers returned fire. When Dan got to the smoking Humvee, he found that Cesar had been mortally wounded; the other three sustained injuries, but survived.

When Dan returned to his hometown near Fort Hood, Texas, after his second tour was over, he was edgy, numb, and irritable with his wife, Heather. He was relieved to be back, but life felt strange on the home front. He couldn’t relate to the day-to-day things that seemed important to others, and he missed the feeling of intensity and the sense of purpose he’d had while on active duty. He was also plagued by gruesome images of Cesar’s body, and guilt that he survived while others died.

The months dragged by. Dan couldn’t let down his guard anywhere. Groups of people made him intensely anxious, and he started avoiding crowded coffee shops, bars, and shopping centers. He began smoking pot during the day to “chill out.” Most nights, he drank to get to sleep and woke up exhausted. Fights with Heather had become so frequent and intense that she threatened to move out.

Nicole: Childhood Abuse

Nicole was an only child who lived with her parents in Omaha, Nebraska. Her father’s brother and his wife lived nearby, and visited frequently. When Nicole was seven years old, her uncle started to spend more time alone with her, giving her a lot of desired attention and physical affection. She adored him, and felt safe and comfortable in his presence.

Slowly, her uncle’s touching started to make Nicole feel strange and afraid. She tried to avoid him, but he continued to find ways of sexually abusing her for years. He told her to keep their secret “relationship” to herself, and that her parents wouldn’t like what she was doing. His words deepened her shame, and she didn’t tell anyone about what was happening.

Nicole withdrew inside herself, often feeling detached from her life and from others. Sometimes when she was with her uncle, she would feel as if she were outside her body and lose track of time. Later, she learned that this feeling was called dissociation, a way of mentally escaping the situation. Her parents commented on her quiet and sometimes sour disposition. They signed her up for piano lessons, dance classes, and school plays, trying to get her more engaged with life and other kids. Reluctantly, Nicole went along with their efforts.

By the time she was in middle school, Nicole had learned to avoid her uncle by leaving home whenever he and his wife visited. She grew into a guarded teenager with few close friends. Though she struggled internally with anxiety, shame, rage, and low self-esteem, she put on a tough exterior. She kept people physically and emotionally distant with her edgy sarcasm and serious demeanor. Because Nicole worked hard in school and did well, her parents assumed she was okay.

In college, she was able to get closer than usual to several women friends, but her occasional angry flare-ups would sometimes drive people away. She struggled with dating and had a panic attack the first time she became sexual with a boyfriend she’d been seeing for a month. After college, she continued to date without much success—she felt mistrustful of her partners, and the physical part of the relationships always triggered anxiety and avoidance in her.

It was not until Nicole was thirty-seven years old that she finally met someone—Peter—with whom she felt she could let down her guard. Hopeful that she might finally be getting past her history, Nicole became engaged to Peter after they’d been together two years. But as they grew closer, Nicole discovered that her memories of abuse were surfacing stronger than ever, and with them, intense anger and anxiety.

Barry: Fatal Fire

Barry had been a firefighter for twenty-one years when one day he and his company were called to respond to a series of fires that were spreading out of control in Southern California. He was working in a neighborhood that was in danger of burning, helping to evacuate residents. Suddenly the hot, dry Santa Ana winds turned eastward, rapidly driving the flames toward the neighborhood. As people were scrambling to flee, they told Barry about a woman who was trapped upstairs in her home. Barry ran toward the house, and when he entered, he was almost overcome by the smoke and heat. He could hear the woman screaming from the second floor, but the stairs had given way and he could only call to her, asking if she was alone in the house. She was.

Barry and his team tried desperately to rescue the woman. On the roof, they broke through a window in the one spot where fire wasn’t consuming the second floor, but inside the room was ablaze. They could not get inside the house, and she could not get out. Slowly Barry realized that an impenetrable wall of fire and smoke hopelessly separated him from the woman. They had tried everything, but he couldn’t save her. Barry and his team had to move on and continue clearing other residents out of the area.

Barry was haunted by this fire and by the death of the woman he had never met. While others had died in the regional fires, the woman’s death felt personal to him. She had screamed for his help, and he couldn’t save her. He felt he had failed in his duty.

Barry’s captain told him to take some time off, but it didn’t help. Images of flames and crumbling stairs kept intruding into his thoughts, and a feeling of helplessness and doom darkened his mood. Sometimes, he would break into tears, then quickly pull himself together. Other times he just felt emotionally flat, and lacked motivation to do anything. Already a quiet man, Barry withdrew from his wife, Shaundra, and their two daughters. He stopped socializing with his colleagues at the fire station. Whenever he was called out to an emergency, he felt shaky and uncertain. He had lost faith in his power to protect others.

Angela: Hurricane Katrina

Angela was living with her brother and his family in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. They had stayed in the city hoping to ride out the storm, as they had many times before. But this time, the levees broke and flooded their neighborhood. They narrowly escaped to the roof of their home. After waiting helplessly for a day, they were rescued by boat and taken to the Superdome.

Meanwhile, their mother was trapped in a retirement home in a different part of the city, and Angela could not get any information about the facility. After her brother’s family was transported to Baton Rouge and Angela went to Houston to stay with her sister, the family learned that no one had been evacuated from the retirement facility. Eventually, Angela’s mother’s body was recovered from the wreckage.

Angela’s anxiety did not go away once she was safe in Houston, and it was compounded by intense grief over her mother’s death and the sweeping loss of her lifelong community and home. Rainy days kept her in bed all day, fighting the memories of her world disappearing under water, and imagining her mother’s death. She was also disturbed by an underlying sense of dread and waves of anxiety symptoms, including dizziness and trouble breathing. Sometimes she would have spontaneous panic attacks and thought she would faint or die of a heart attack. This made it difficult for her to keep her temporary jobs, and she started avoiding buses and other situations where she feared she might be trapped.

Eventually, Angela gave up working and stayed close to home, taking care of her sister’s toddler. Before the trauma, Angela was known for her high spirits and busy productivity, whether at home or at the restaurant where she worked. But Katrina had stripped away her enthusiasm for life and her sense of purpose, and shaken her religious faith. Two years after the hurricane, she still couldn’t regain a sense of safety or normalcy.

Ian: Assault and Robbery

Ian was four years out of college and working his first job as a software programmer for a firm in New York City. One evening after a particularly long and exhausting day of work, he walked toward his car in the underground garage of his office building. When he clicked his remote key to unlock the car door, the headlights blinked, revealing two men sitting in his car. Ian froze.

After what seemed like an eternity, Ian’s legs started working and he turned to run. The men got out of the car and chased him through the garage. When they grabbed him, Ian saw that they were teenagers. They took his wallet, keys, and watch before they beat him up and sped off in his car. A few minutes later, a coworker found Ian conscious but badly injured on the floor of the garage and called 911.

Ian recovered physically from the assault, but not emotionally. He was anxious in his apartment and installed a costly alarm system he couldn’t afford. It took him hours to fall asleep. After finally getting to sleep, he would wake four or five hours later, exhausted and irritable, often covered with sweat from a nightmare.

Sometimes Ian would stay with his parents on Long Island just to get some rest. He felt deeply ashamed for freezing during the assault and not being able to defend himself. He returned to work a week after the assault, but he couldn’t concentrate or remember what happened in meetings. Finally, his boss talked to him about getting treatment for PTSD.

Although these six people experienced very different kinds of trauma, they ended up with very similar problems. They all struggled with intrusive memories of the event, such as nightmares, flashbacks, and unwanted thoughts and images. Their nervous systems seemed to be stuck on ready alert much of the time: they were jumpy, edgy, hyper-vigilant for danger, and had trouble concentrating and sleeping. All tended to avoid situations or cues that reminded them of the trauma, and most felt numb or estranged from the people in their lives. These are the common symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

What Is a Trauma?

Everyone has experienced stressful events, such as having to give an important presentation at work, getting into a fight with one’s spouse, being in a minor accident, getting caught in storm, or even going to the doctor. These experiences are stressful because they threaten to some degree one’s physical, social, or emotional well-being.

A trauma involves facing an unusually severe threat. It is a highly stressful event in which one’s life, health, or emotional security is seriously threatened or harmed, although it can also involve witnessing the death of or serious threat to another. Traumas have a much deeper impact on one’s well-being than a typical stressor, and can take a long time to recover from.

Traumas can come about in several ways. Natural traumas are caused by natural disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, tornados that rip through towns in the Midwest, fires that threaten your home or neighborhood, major earthquakes, or floods. Other natural traumas include experiencing a life-threatening illness, such as stroke or heart attack, or seeing a loved one go through the end stages of cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.

Traumas can also be brought about by events that are caused by humans, either accidentally or intentionally. Unintentional traumas include accidents such as an explosion in a plant, the collapse of a bridge or building, or a serious car accident. Particularly vulnerable to the effects of unintentional traumas are first-responders. Firefighters, police, emergency medical teams, and disaster-response workers regularly confront life-threatening situations, cope with threats to their own lives, and witness death and serious injuries.

Intentional traumas are generally the most psychologically damaging. Intentional traumas are human acts of violence such as physical abuse, shootings, assault, kidnapping, terrorism, war, or torture. Many of our combat troops are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD after experiencing multiple life-threatening attacks as well as having to kill others.

People can also respond with intense fear or horror to an event that, objectively, may not seem as threatening as those listed above. For example, discovering that a spouse is having an affair would make anyone furious and upset. But for some, such an event may threaten one’s entire sense of trust and meaning, taking on a traumatic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1: What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
• Section 2: Overcoming Anxiety, Avoidance, and Depression
• Section 3: Taking Care of Your Brain and Body
• Section 4: Healing Trauma by Improving Relationships
• Section 5: From Trauma to Growth
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index
• Copyright Page