I joined a group of female authors and have learned a great deal from them. It is wonderful to belong to a group of people where I fit in. I am, after all, the only author I know personally. Writing itself can be a very lonely thing to do. I mean, considering I spend hours pulling ideas out of my head, after it pulls them from my heart and soul, sometimes things get lost when I travel into the world of the characters in the books.
This brought me to an amazing conclusion this afternoon. That is what #PTSD is like. We feel alone because no one understands us. Most of the time we are alone with our thoughts. Our minds pull out memories of what happened to us too. What our minds don’t seem able to do is pull stuff from our hearts and souls that can help us heal. We become different characters while remaining lost in our our own world. Then when we discover others like us, we gain strength and knowledge from them, along with inspiration.
When I started writing The Lost Son Alive Again series, I designed covers from pictures I took. I have been working on the next book and needed a break from writing, so I decided to play with a cover design for it. I wanted something different to go with the story. Once the design was done, I had an epiphany. I used my face on the cover, but did some Photoshop trickery to blend my face into the background. It came out so good, that I wanted to do the same to the other books for a very special reason.
This is the new cover for the first book,
If you look at the words, “Son” and “Alive” you can make out the faint image of eyes. I used it for two reasons. The main character felt as if he could no longer see himself when he looked into the mirror but a mysterious woman started to bring “who he was” back to life.
In the next one, Stranger Angels Among Us, it will have the same style but a different color and a stronger image of a face. (It is being changed next week.) He is seeing himself more clearly in that one as more and more people help him do what he was sent to this earth to do. He gained more strength from them, found support and inspired to do even more with his life. That is the way healing works too. The more support we have the more we heal, the more alive we become and we see what we are capable of.
These books are written so that anyone with PTSD can see themselves in these characters. The latest report says that 12 million American adults join this PTSD club every year. The first book is about adults struggling to heal from what happened to them. Some of them had PTSD from childhood trauma. As you can see, that is a lot more joining the club.
Think about how many people in this country with no clue what they have been suffering from? When all they hear about are veterans and PTSD, that is all they think about, not what they survived doing as much harm to them. On the flip side, they see the sad outcome when veterans do not receive what they need and feel as if they’d get even less help. The sad truth is, they/we are getting less help. That is another reason why I wrote these books.
I worked on PTSD with veterans and their families for 40 years but never saw I had PTSD in me because it was much different than their experiences. I survived over ten events in my lifetime and was so different two different psychologists I saw over the years never saw it in me.
I figured if someone that dedicated their life to understanding PTSD didn’t have a clue, then the rest of the people had even less chance of discovering there was a name to what hit them but even better there was a way to be a lot happier and heal.
I hope you find one of these characters that you can connect to and then, be inspired by them!
