Those are very good questions and first ((((tohelpafriend)))) if your talking to your therapist and your also including your trama and even growing up in a dysfunctional sitation, that therapist should be seeing the signs of PTSD. I am wondering if your therapist is aware of or studied PTSD in depth and can truely recognize the signs of it, and I can tell you, I have been there, where a therapist should have recognized it but didn't. So you might need to find a different therapist that understands PTSD better. You do have to remember that therapists are just people and some are better than others and can deal with certain psychological issues better than other psychological issues. I have to say myself that it took me time to find a therapist that has experience with PTSD and treated and worked with patients that have it. And he is still learning because I can tell he is also learning from me, I overwhelm him because I have a lot of abuse in my past. And he is also helping me get through a troublesome lawsuite too so poor guy gets a work out.

Ok, likewater, people tell you to put this past you and not let it ruin your life. That is much easier said than done. I wish I had a dime for all the people that have told me that but the people that tell me that do not have PTSD so they cannot understand what I deal with. And as hard as I try to explain it they don't get it.

likewater, are you working with a therapist that actually understands PTSD? Because any therapist that truely understands PTSD knows that it takes time to overcome and deal with PTSD. Seeking comfort from someone who doesn't know what PTSD really means and how difficult it is to process, is just going to make you very confused and feeling lonely and helpless and even angry. And I know all too well how very difficult it is to actually get the comfort and understanding from someone who has no idea what it really means and how it effects the brain.

As far as chats go, unless you are in a chat with someone that experiences PTSD and has been getting help, your not going to get the reaction you need in a chat other than sorry or hugs or gotta put your past behind you responses. In fact you could even end up being triggered in a chat and not understand why, and that is exactly what happened to me, luckily I found some people that were sympathetic in another chat, because I was going to leave PC. So chats are ok, but you cannot expect others to understand what your past really means to you the way you need to address it. So yes you can chat but you really have to keep it in mind that you cannot expect a curall or a real understanding of PTSD, unless as I have already said someone in that chat has it too and understands it.

A person who has PTSD responds to other people often in a unconscious defensive manner and it is a coping method that people with PTSD have and until they get therapy don't understand it on a conscious level. I didn't understand it either, and I have been learning about it, it is not a 1, 2, 3, easy process. And it all depends on each persons past and can go all the way back to early childhood experiences that started it and leading up to an event that was very upsetting and very hard to process and what happened was the brain just storred all those emotions and so there can be many triggers that bring out those emotions and even a sense of a desire to run, danger, bad touch, facial espressions, certain body language from an abuser, even sounds, (for me doors are a big trigger because I ran through so many and hid behind so many and I never realized how triggering they are to me), and there can be smells that set off anxiety where there a certain smell present in that tramatic event that you don't consciously remember. So, there is a lot to PTSD that has to be brought out and addressed and a big part of it is seeing or understanding the different triggers that can make you suddenly full of anxiety and emotions and even confusion. And depending upon what the trama involved there can be a sense of guilt because maybe it happened when someone was very young and looking back, well, we see that it had a beginning and somehow we got away from it, but during the trama we didnt see it coming, how long it was going to last and how it would end. So we have to be able to look back at it and not blame ourselves or feel guilty in anyway. And it can come from many different things where a person felt trapped in a situation of many different kinds of abuse, even in an atmosphere of ongoing family dysfuction that we didn't really see, but felt over and over again. And that is why a patient that exibits PTSD symptoms has to go back and talk about their past and be able to look at all the areas where they were in an environment or even a tramatic situation that is storred as a lot of emotions that were confusing then and now.

Does that make sense to you? It is a very personal journey, however the symptoms of PTSD are the same as the condition is very difficult and can be very troubling and confusing.

Open Eyes