If you have negative people in your life, making it worse, it may be time to get them off your cloud! Yes, thinking about The Rolling Stones song with “two’s a crowd” because if they are not helping you, they are getting in the way. We see people like them all the time. They use the power they have to make life worse for everyone else, because it makes them feel better about their own miserable lives.
The Dallas Morning News has an opinion piece on COVID-19 “How to turn pandemic PTSD into post-traumatic growth” by By Rakesh Jain.
In many ways, that hope made what was already a traumatic event so much worse. We let down our guard as we pictured returning to our old normal. Sadly, many experts wonder if we have even reached the worst of the pandemic. There will be more signs of hope, but there could be more setbacks and more trauma.
Dallas Morning News
When you have PTSD, that is a huge issue. We suffer so much that when we find something that offers hope, we come to believe that is the “thing” to make us happy again. Hope is a powerful thing. False hope is a monstrous thing.
Maybe it is because changing from “normal” into survivor happens so fast we expect healing to happen just as fast. It never does. Shock wears off but too often, so do we. The things that make us who we are end up being pushed out of the way for the emergence of dread. Things can suck so much that any glimmer of anything that is better, including getting emotionally numb, become a fraying lifeline.
We turn to drugs and alcohol, learn to keep silent and hide our feelings. We push people away so they don’t get close enough to see that we are wounded. The worst thing is, we end up fearing that we will just continue to suffer for surviving.
The article went on to say;
Public health experts say that we, as a nation, are showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. As a psychiatrist, I see these signs in my patients and I’m seeing them in my community and in our nation. We are more on edge, depressed and angry.
Most of us are not coping with this trauma in healthy ways, especially after having that glimmer of hope earlier this year. We’re turning to alcohol or drugs to manage our pain, denying the seriousness or existence of the virus, or looking for perfect solutions when there are none. Arguments and fights break out over what might have been minor occurrences in the past.
Now on the flip side, there is real hope that will change our lives for the better. None of it comes automatically. While you had no choice in whatever caused PTSD to hit you, you do have a choice to work on healing or not.
The biggest obstacle is what we think PTSD means. If we think of it in a negative way, then we are ashamed but if we view it for what it is, we realize it is nothing to be ashamed of at all. What shame is there in surviving? That is what you are after all. Once you stop expecting non-survivors to understand that, it frees you to heal. You end up searching for other survivors who already know what it is like. They can offer you support and knowledge, as well as inspire you.
The next thing is, understanding you have no power over anyone other than yourself. There is nothing you can do about the people who deny we are faced with a killer of a pandemic and jeopardize the rest of us. All we can do is stay away from them and keep telling the truth. It is extremely depressing to suffer for someone else being too blind to see, but they will always be there, getting in the way of where we want to go. You have no power over people who deny PTSD is real, call you names or make you feel as if you are weak. Believe it or not, most of the time they are dealing with their own mental health issues and taking it out on you. You do have the power to define yourself and what your future will be. Don’t waste time on them! You got healing to do!
Remember, it’s your life…get in and drive it!
#BreakTheSilence and #TakeBackYourLife from #PTSD
