Psychology and Spirituality
I have been treating people suffering from PTSD for most of the 3-plus decades I have been in practice. PTSD as you may realize is in most instances a complicated syndrome to treat, with varying degrees of sustained successful outcome. For all I have learned over all these years about PTSD–from continuing education seminars, books and articles, and directly from my patients–I just recently learned some things from a seminar presenter and author named Dr. Peter Levine that I had never quite looked at before regarding sufferers of PTSD. This brilliant man proposes a few things about people diagnosed with PTSD that are invaluable insights in ongoing efforts to treat my patients diagnosed as such. For example, Dr. Levine advises we therapists and our patients to change the term post-traumatic stress “disorder” to post-traumatic stress injury! By doing so, he–so sensitively and compassionately–has us shifting the focus of the potentially debilitating symptoms of PTSD off of the clinical abnormality-implying term “disorder” and onto the totally humane, no abnormality-implying word injury! After all I ask, if you’ve experienced a very upsetting event which traumatized you, heck how can you not feel very anxious or panicky, and/or depressed, and/or prone to addiction? I believe Dr. Levine’s basic point here is: having these distressing symptoms goes with the aftermath of being traumatized, i.e,., they basically are “normal” under the traumatizing circumstances! So if you continue to suffer for a prolonged time from these PTS injuries, then just know that the perspective you don’t want to have is that there’s “still something wrong” with you; rather, the perspective you want to hold onto is that you have been psychologically injured (possibly quite badly), and that you need help healing from it no matter how long it takes–period!
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