I was raised with a taboo about emotions. I was not taught to recognize and rejoice in my emotions. My mother couldn’t control her emotions so she controlled mine. Worked to. My teen idol was Mr. Spock. I thought I would be perfect if I could show no emotion. I felt totally betrayed when they…
Suicide is rising as feelings of hope are diminishing. I work at a school and see how often teachers and administrators focus on what is wrong, how kids are failing, and how to test to find more things wrong. Hyper-focusing on all the negative we reach a point of only seeing the negative. Our school…
This isn’t the only article about the number of suicides that are happening. Teenagers, children, soldiers, elderly almost every walk of life are experiencing epidemic increases in suicides. Blaming internet, government, and other entities misses the point. http://www.aol.com/article/2016/07/11/suicide-now-the-leading-cause-of-death-for-children-in-utah/21430058/ My personal study on the subject is the rising wave of hopelessness, feeling they are a…
In today’s fast paced World, people treat you like a criminal if you have an unproductive day. Epitaphs such as lazy, slug, bum, and other cruel name calling come your way. Here’s the deal, I would love to be productive but my get up and go, got up and went without me. I remember as…
I finally had my melt down. I started spiraling down down down last February. Yesterday DH helped me melt down at last. There is something about rock bottom that helps me back up again. It is like I can’t stop the spiral down until I hit a low low enough to stop, catch my breath,…
My sister, Judy, and I walk almost every Saturday morning. I call our time Sister Therapy. We talk about her current work in progress books, events, challenges, past, present, you name it we discuss it. Sometimes we agree and sometimes we don’t, that’s ok. We learned a long time ago we can disagree without being…
There are times in my life when depression has the upper hand and makes my life miserable. I feel like I need a gold star for getting out of bed. I drag around barely able to function. I do nothing that I enjoy. Life sucks. Self punishment is when I am feeling fairly healthy. I…
One of the interesting things I learned from my counselor was to limit the time I work each day on improving my life with PTSD. He stressed the importance of setting aside only one hour a day to focus on past, journal writing, studying and other activities focused on healing. He explained that I needed…
Life changing experiences should change your life. I am seeing a disturbing trend among PTSD support groups on Facebook. There is a cry of ‘I don’t want this to change me.’ Frankly, I think it is very disturbing if you are not affected by a life changing experience. September of 2001 I was diagnosed with…
I am working on The PTSD Workbook, 2nd edition, Mary Beth Williams, PhD, LCSW, CTS and Soili Poijula, PhD. In their book, they refer to another book, A Clinical Handbook/Practical Therapist Manual for Assessing and Treating Adults with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (Meichenbaum 1994) the authors noticed that there are personality traits that influence how much…
PTSD - Accepting, Coping, Thriving 