Mar

6

Healing Takes Courage

Filed Under Treating PTSD 

 

generations-of-valorIts been almost two weeks since I last wrote a blog.  We had to cancel Tony’s last EMDR session and reschedule for Monday, March 2nd.  He is struggling trying to understand exactly what EMDR is supposed to do for him.  He wants to analyze everything in concrete terms.  That would be fine if PTSD were a concrete, cogntive issue.  It is not.  Trauma doesn’t first happen in the brain/mind.  It  happens in the sense cells of the body.  These sense cells then rely the information to the brain for interpretation, and the brain determines if the stimulus from the cells is worthy of response ranging from being safe to a dangerous situation that would require the body to fight, flee, or just freeze from fear. 

At the beginning of the session, Shelly, Tony’s therapist, takes him back to the first few days of being in Vietnam.  When a military person is told where his/her assignment will be, there is no discussion.  No bargaining saying, hey, I don’t want to go to that place because that is where most of the fighting and deaths occur.  You can’t stand up and yell, “Hell no, I won’t go!”  You are slowly being pushed into the decision that has been made for you by a stranger.  You come to an acceptance of the situation – a realization that what is… is.  Mission first.  The job now is to stuff the feelings… fear, excitement, apprenhension.  Shelly  keeps gentle urging Tony to focus on the feelings.  She is trying to getting his body to process the gaps between the mind and the body.  I must say, that watching this session made me understand how much easier it is to stay in the head instead of the feeling in the body.  The pain is real.  Why would anyone want to go back to hell — except that only by going back will the body heal and the mind mend. 

I am still being surprised at what I thought I knew but didn’t and what I never even considered as a potential problem.  Yes, the whole experience of war gets dumped into the same memory box, wrapped up tightly and sealed away somewhere in the mind and body.  Holy Smokes, healing combat trauma is like having to undergo an emotional chemo to survive.  Just as chemo changes the cells of the body to fight against cancer cells, therapy to heal PTSD changes the cells in the mind/brain to recreate the sense cells of the body to heal from the damage of trauma.

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