I hear from a lot of clients and friends that they have been told by their therapists that they have to learn to live with PTSD. “Walk beside it like a friend” is how one therapist put it.
PTSD is not your friend. You do not want its companionship for life.
In the yogic model of the human being, there are multiple layers. We have a physical body, an energetic body made of prana or qi/ki, two layers of mind: one cognitive and one intuitive and a bliss body. We cannot hope to heal PTSD unless we understand this important concept:
All layers of our being are wounded by the injuries and abuse that result in PTSD. PTSD is the manifestation of those wounds.
In the Western model of medicine we treat only two of the five layers. We treat the body and we treat the cognitive mind. In other words we address less than half of the system that has been injured. In many cases we don’t even treat both.
Usually people with mental disorders are remanded to some variety of psychiatric care with little attention paid to the rest of the body. Or the reverse. If the person expresses symptoms mostly through the body, it can take years for a physician to ask simple questions about a history of trauma.
Most therapists and counselors pay little to no attention to anything but the latest “evidence-based” treatment, even though “evidence-based” most often means showing an effect for only 3-6 months. Mental health treatment has become highly politicized and regulated, and essentially a casualty of the free market capitalist system here in the USA.
But I digress.
As a therapist and a survivor, I am here to tell you that you can heal fully from PTSD. In order to do this you will have to assemble your own treatment team and techniques to heal each of the layers of your being that were injured by trauma. That is essentially the thesis of my book, The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD From the Inside Out.
Please don’t give up. There is an end to suffering. The “peace that passeth all understanding” is real. It may take a while, years perhaps, but life these days is long. Keep going. You can heal fully from PTSD.
