A Message of Hope to People That Are Suffering

how about this gentleman second from yes John's got the mic there thank you I don't want to look behind me how many people are here because I'll get a bit nervous to ask this question also this may not apply to many so I expect your answer might be a bit short um I'm a vet and currently serving police officer in wa and I've got PTSD and I'm at the Marion Center which is a mental place for them they let me out today oh yeah legally I just wanted to ask you how do I move from

day to day Hedonism and ideations and and risk The Hope and cautious optimism of a long-term life with the conditions I I currently have or for anybody who might be having complex PTSD and living day-to-day well I mentioned this program that I have online this self-authoring program one thing you might try you might try doing it so one of one of the one of the uh so it's got three parts the first part is a guided autobiography and what it asks you to do is break your life down into seven epochs and seven stages sometimes

people do that by relationship or by by year or by occupation however you choose and then to deal detail out the most significant emotional events of your life especially those that still hold some emotional valence and that would help because what happens with PTSD in some sense is that the narrative through which you see the world fractures and because it fractures your perceptions and your consequent emotional responses become chaotic and that chaos produces stress response chronic stress response and so what you need to do to recover from PTSD is to knit the story back together

and I had a client who had PTSD very seriously affected she was only 17 and she was so fractured that she was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and when I first saw her she could barely talk and she could barely Focus her eyes and she would move her hands up and down and I I could like she was grasping for something and I asked her why and she said that she could see lines in front of her and that she was trying to interact with her with them I mean she was when your perceptions are fractured

you're in pretty rough shape and it turned out that she had been terribly bullied by a boy whose Amorous advances she had rejected and he set out to make her life hell and certainly succeeded and I had her walk through this past authoring program in the course of therapy and she could hardly write to begin with and we went through her life right from the beginning and as we went through it she got more and more coherent and by the time we had brought her up to date including walking through this catastrophic bout of bullying

in the school's absolute inability to do anything about it she had glued herself back together so the other thing I would carefully recommend especially if what traumatized you happened more than 18 months ago is that you spend some time either writing about it or another thing to try is just before you go to sleep bring the memory to mind and not enough to push you farther than you want to go but as as vividly as you can and then let it go like don't don't push yourself harder than you can you'll see you want to

initiate a process of active engagement with the dragon that burned you fundamentally the the psychophysiological pattern of active engagement is the opposite to the psychophysiological pattern of involuntary stress and so if you can practice embodying that voluntary confrontation then that stance can come to dominate and that's the stance you want to dominate because that moves you forward voluntarily into the world and so and that in all probability that that will work so I had another this is a friend of mine he had PTSD and he had been brutalized in a Canadian residential school when he

was a kid and it was Bloody rough like Auschwitz level rough it was really bad you can't listen to his story without it like breaking down you know it's bad and he told me that he hadn't looked in a mirror for 40 years he was unable to face himself eh and he also told me that when he dreamed he was still eight years old in his dreams same age he was when the cataclysm occurred and and and that he had started to become aware that he was stuck in his dream he's kind of a Visionary

guy he's an artist this guy and so I suggested that he spend a little bit of time in front of the mirror each night before he went to bed just taking a glance at himself because I he had not looked at himself for so long he didn't even know how old he was because he so what happened in his dreams this was so cool he started to age in his dreams so instead of being stuck at eight then he was 10 and then he was 12 and eventually he did this for a number of months

eventually he got as old in his dreams as he was in real life and what that meant like you imagine your dream image is a it's the representation of yourself in imagination and if it's stuck 50 years in the past then your self-concept is some in some sense hasn't been updated for that period of time just that process of voluntary engagement which was him being willing to look at himself in the mirror despite his shame his deep shame at what had happened to him that was enough to pull them back together so that should work

that should work you know the other thing with with PTSD it's also very useful to develop something approximating a sophisticated philosophy of Good and Evil because people generally have PTSD because they've been struck by something malevolent and so it's not just tragedy there's a there's malevolence in it reading there's a book there's a couple of books I'd recommend one is called Ordinary men it's about a police Battalion in Germany who was trained to do highness things in World War II it's a great book ordinary man it's a great book and another one I would recommend

is called the Rape of Nanking and these are rough books man the woman who wrote the rape of Nan King she committed suicide it's a rough book but the utility of the books is that they universalize malevolence so almost everybody who's traumatized has been either touched by their own malevolence or by witnessing it or being subject to it at the hands of someone else and one of the consequences of that is that you if you don't have an advanced philosophy of Good and Evil you have no place to put the contact with malevolence part of

the utility of the doctrine of original sin was the universalization of malevolence so you know you might say and it's true that there's a little bit of Hitler in all of us and there's a little more than a little bit you can be sure of that and that's a pretty cataclysmic realization and you might say well how can you bear that self-understanding or the revelation of that kind of malevolence in the world and the answer is in part by understanding it as part of the Eternal conditions of existence you know the idea that the state

the The Sovereign of the state has an evil Uncle that's an idea as old as time so for the Egyptians that was set and the sun sets by the way because the set the spirit of set is what devours the Sun at night and and set is the root word for Satan and so even the ancient Egyptians knew that malevolence as us that it was worthwhile contemplating the existence of malevolence as an independent spirit and that allows you to take responsibility in some sense for the existence of malevolence in your own life but it also

universalizes it so that it's not exactly about you right it's more a reflection of the structure of existence as such and that's that can allow you to detach yourself from it a little bit and that can be extremely useful too