Did you know that mainstream medicine doesn’t have a cure for PTSD? Their statement is basically, you’ll be like this forever. At best, the condition can be managed. The symptoms may disappear, temporarily, but the condition will not go away.
Having read this, you can do two things. You either believe them or you don’t. And that belief shapes your actions.
Suppose the zipper of your favorite pair of trousers lost a tooth. You went to a clothes repair shop and they said nope, can’t be fixed. What would you do? Keep going to the same shop with the same pair of pants? Or find a more competent clothes repair shop? What if all clothes repair shops within your area said no, can’t be fixed. Then what? Well, you could travel across the globe to find someone who can fix them. You could keep entering shop after shop, searching for someone with a cure for your toothless zipper. But given that they’ve all had the same education, chances are slim one of them was taught how to do it. Or, you could buy a sewing machine and teach yourself to sew and eventually learn to replace that zipper yourself.
That’s the state of PTSD right now. And perhaps it will always be, because I believe institutions play a large part in the development of PTSD and unintentionally in sustaining it. PTSD is a misnomer. Or, rather, it’s not complete. The assumption is that having stress that an outsider doesn’t see the point of is a disorder. But did you realize by now how complicated life is, and how finely tuned of an instrument you are? Just because another person doesn’t see the point, doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason all alarm bells are ringing in your body and mind.
At the root of many PTSD variants lies the individual’s abdication of their own judgment. That is the root cause of the stress. The body signals hey, if you don’t put your own judgment first, you’ll be putting yourself in danger by not walking away when you should or not dealing with things as you should. By doing what others tell you, in other words, by following programming that was instilled in you that isn’t applicable to the situation you’re faced with, you’re at risk of failing to preserve your own well being. Red alert! (You could also say you’ve been trained to live inauthentically or that you’re not true to yourself.)
The funny thing is that many problems in life have a self perpetuating quality. If you have shitty judgment, you won’t walk away from other people with shitty judgment because you can’t recognize that they’re as impaired as you are. And people with good judgment, why the hell would they stick around you? Unless they’ve got good judgment that got buried just like yours. Either way, you’re not surrounded by people whose sense of right and wrong has been liberated so there’s nobody to learn by example from. You’ll have to learn from your mistakes instead. So there we are. From those who have not, everything will be taken. Unless you wake up. Unless you get deprogrammed.
Still, fixing the mess isn’t easy. PTSD isn’t just stress, cortisol, adrenaline. And even with the C for complex tagged on to it, which is commonly explained as social and self esteem issues, that’s not all. It’s also hormonal, metabolic, digestive, blood sugar, temperature regulation, eyesight, hearing, smell, touch, immune system, wound healing, proprioception, dreams, hopes, fears, intuition, spirituality, the list goes on and on. Everyone has their own fingerprint but once judgment goes out the window, everything that keeps homeostasis in the body and mind starts to doubt itself. The immune system can’t answer the question “Should I let this through?”. The eyes wonder “Am I allowed to see it this way?”. The hardest part is waiting for insight on what to try in order to turn the downward spiral into an upward spiral again. But it can be done.
There are some things to try that are almost universally good ideas to try. Like cutting sugar, sweeteners, artificial crap and non-foods from your diet. To become that boring “I’ll have a glass of water, thank you”-person. The difficult part about this is bearing other people’s discomfort. They really can’t handle it. And here’s where judgment comes in. You see, judgment means choosing which price to pay. Long term health or short term smoothing over social bumps like not taking any food when you’re visiting friends. Judgment isn’t fun. Judgment is knowing that every decision or indecision carries a price, and weighing what price you’re willing to pay and then paying it without outsourcing the decision. It’s uncomfortable to have a body full of stress signals. It’s also uncomfortable watching other people squirm when you don’t have a cookie. Pick the discomfort you’re willing to bear. That’s a start.
From there, everybody’s road is different. Like me, taking a simple low paying side job that doesn’t require me to set an alarm clock in the mornings and doesn’t have office politics (much) but also having to live with the old programming nagging at me “You could (should) do better than this! You’ve failed!”. That’s a price, and I’ll pay it. I don’t miss my high paying jobs. There are people I look back on very fondly though, I do kinda miss two of the teams I worked on.
Note, you’d do well to discard everything I wrote here! Because you’re reading my personal judgment about my own life, not yours. Some of you really do need to find a master or tutor or helper somewhere and it’s your destiny to find him or her. Some of you need to follow the career path because something beckons. That’s the individual path. Mine wasn’t like that.
What I write here isn’t at odds with whatever you may experience, though. Subjectivity, that’s the clue. You have to look into yourself and around you to figure out what the right way of living is for you. I’m not going to do it for you, I’ve got my own cross to carry. There is just one belief I have and that is that I can heal myself and my life. So far, that belief has served me well.