This past weekend I had to do or actually I chose to do quite a bit of socializing. I had a family wedding, an overnight at a friend’s house and a 1st birthday party for a nephew and they were all out of state. The first event was the wedding. My nephew, Stephen, got married. It was a beautiful event and I was glad I was there celebrating with my family. However, I had great difficulty being in a large group. Continue reading
This week’s blog is about one of the tools I have used over the last 10 years to manage my PTSD on a consistent basis – journaling. This past week was my 55th birthday. I am finally free from the day-to-day internal war, terror, and wall of shame I have had my entire life. I have a beautiful, gentle, kind, compassion and authentic love in my life. I am attached to two people in my life and they, along with myself, know my deepest nature, my soul. What great gifts to receive in my lifetime.
The gratitude, freedom, and joy as well as the intellectual arousal I felt from my reading this week created such a hypervigilancy and mental overload in me that I could not sleep for 2 nights. My thoughts and energy were racing and I couldn’t shut them down enough to sleep. In the last few years, I have learned to approach this inability to sleep differently. Instead of my past history of getting angry and frustrated that I cannot sleep and being terrified that I will die from lack of sleep, I now consider this a time when my creative energies and my unconscious are trying to flow. It is a time when my inner wisdom wants to share lessons with me about my journey and my unfolding. I now get up and sit at my computer with a cup of decaf coffee to ground me and write in my journal about the ideas racing around in my head. Continue reading
I truly realized this past week how my life can be both beautiful and disabling on a daily basis. Thank goodness over the last decade, I have learned how to accommodate for my severe, complex, chronic PTSD enough to have a purposeful, hopeful, and exciting life while negotiating pain and suffering daily. I am on the greatest adventure of my life – to continue to learn to be in a loving, kind, and compassionate relationship with myself and another individual. (A gift I never thought I would have nor deserved in my life.) Loving with your full heart is what I am learning and I am becoming more capable of it every day. It is bringing me such joy, beauty, and a sense of completeness. In addition, I feel so intellectually, relationally and spiritually alive. However, I cannot simply rest appreciating these incredible gifts, instead my PTSD magnifies my hypervigilance and sends my brain and body reeling. 
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One of the challenges I have run into my whole life is how my brain gets overwhelmed and becomes foggy to the point that it shuts down and I cannot focus or remember what I am reading and learning. Also, I have difficulty following directions and conversations at times because of what I label as a prefrontal cortex shut down. My thinking and learning both become disorganized, thereby, increasing my anxiety and causing another prefrontal cortex shut down. This is what has made life and learning challenging throughout my entire life and why I developed such an art of dissociation. Over the last 10 years, I have gained appreciation for my innate heart, brain, mind, intuition, and body intelligences. I can see my own brilliance in many ways. However, I have not been able to cure my fogginess and dissociation, nor prevent my brain from shutting down, nor have I been able to eliminate the confusion and disorganization of my thought processes as a result.
Just trying to write and organize this blog is an extremely difficult challenge for me and produces great anxiety which causes my prefrontal cortex to shut down for several reasons. Continue reading
Living Purposefully with Severe Chronic PTSD 