More about PTSD

Obviously all of us experience emotional upsets and suffer shock, sadness, grief, anger, rage, fears and such like and we normally get over these feelings and resolve them by weeping, shouting, getting irritable, having kind, loving support, etc.

This is not what this website is about. This is for when such feelings do not pass which indicate that it was a PTSD event or it can indicate that an overwhelming PTSD from the past is involved.

In normal emotional recovery there is a sequence roughly as follows:

Denial (it didn't happen, it can't have), shock, anger (blaming others - he is responsible) or guilt (self blaming), grief/weeping, other emotions, excited talking then release. PTSD is sometimes when a person gets stuck in one position like blaming. For example - her daughter gets run over and killed while she was not paying attention and she blames herself never-endingly.

PTSDs simply do not fade away. Research shows they can last a lifetime without changing. In PTSD time stands still. It is as if it happened yesterday. It does not matter how long ago it happened, it is still happening now. It can become the forming force of social dysfunction, addiction and pathology that people suffer from and die from. Sometimes PTSDs are not apparent originally but surface 10 or 15 years later.

Victims and persecutors suffer similarly. Though it may seem strange at first, those who perpetrate violence, torture and war suffer fundamentally PTSD just as the victims do.

These resonances help the perpetrators just as much as they help the victims.

In Rwanda some of the perpetrators were so racked by terrible unforgivable guilt after the event they gave up their lives to work without pay for others. Soldiers suffer both as victims and perpetrators and, for example, after the Falklands War more UK soldiers committed suicide after the war than died in the war and PTSD is probably hugely underestimated.

Heroes of wars commonly end up in prison or being homeless and addicts and it is likely that PTSD is behind this. And it is a lifetime disorder.

Maybe hundreds of millions of people suffered from PTSD last century in wars, famine, from dictators, and unnatural events like Hiroshima where tens of thousands of people were incinerated in a second.

It is very common for people now to be unknowingly suffering from the inherited effect of PTSD and it is commonly a root cause of disease and dysfunction. Typically, the inherited effect is indicated by strange overwhelming, never ending feelings that make no sense personally, like systemic depression or chronic helplessness with no known cause even after therapy or regression. The keywords are systemic, persisting and non-individual.

When we inherit PTSDs from our forebears, it is without the facts associated with the original event. In many ways, these are worse as we have no idea of what happened and we just have a free floating feeling deep inside us that distorts our picture of reality. Without the facts we have no way of making sense of the feelings we have. This is one reason why we have many unexplained fears, phobias, anxieties, depressions, guilts, rage and inability to do certain things.

Once it is there, it only takes a suitable trigger to awaken it and to manifest a terrible consequence - alcoholism for example is known to be a way of drowning out repressed hidden shock - PTSD. Likewise it can lead to a dysfunctional family, a disease, or if it is a widespread it can become a social problem, a form of unrest, homelessness, communal violence, increased prison populations, the basis of a new politics, extreme religion, finally a war or another genocide.

From this perpective prisons and hospitals are essentially similar. In prisons/psychiatric units we incarcerate social dysfunction and the doctors are called warders. In hospitals, we put the sick who have buried their inner distress/PTSD into pathology. In society, doctors act as warders by drugging adults with 'mental disorders' and increasingly children to mask their PTSD. They attempt this way to hide the defects within society.

There is another scenario of PTSD. When a person suffers an apparently minor trauma and the consequences are way out of proportion, this is a sign that there is a resonance with a buried PTSD from early in life, most often a birth trauma/PTSD or a PTSD from previous generations in the family. So the distinction between this life events that apparently led to a PTSD and early life or inherited effects of PTSD is not so clear and frequently the reason this life event becomes a PTSD is because it deeply resonates with an old PTSD in the history. Peter Chappell wrote extensively about this in his book Emotional Healing with Homeopathy.

Buried PTSD denies or subsumes the ability to make free choices, to think intelligently and to act wisely. Buried PTSD supports violence, disputes, poverty, hatred, division, antagonism, rivalry, separation, divorce, rape, isolation, bottle feeding and lack of love. It is one important factor of the struggles within society and of the failure of a country to thrive, the failure of economic prosperity, the failure to live together cooperatively, joyfully, is a source of all diseases, and the failure to create working solutions to our problems. A book that all too graphically illustrates this phenomena working in society at large is Broken Promises, Broken Dreams by Alice Rothchild.

Obviously PTSD happens and continues at various levels of intensity and some people suffer a lot worse than others.