Welcome to my blog. Today, I’m diving into what PTSD feels like and introducing a related concept from my experiences in military support work called moral injury. These conditions can deeply affect anyone who has been through intense stress or trauma.
Understanding PTSD and Moral Injury
While PTSD often involves fear from traumatic events, there’s more to it. In my military charity work, I’ve seen many suffer from moral injury. This condition emerges when someone feels guilt, shame, or anger because what they've done or seen conflicts with their moral beliefs. These emotions can be just as challenging as the fear associated with PTSD. I'll explore moral injury more in a future post.
The Role of Memory in PTSD
Our memories play a significant role in PTSD. Imagine our hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in memory formation, acting like a TV producer. This "producer" has a narrative about what happened and why it happened during a traumatic event, similar to how a "Match of the Day" program selects clips to support a pre-decided story about a football match. This narrative includes picking certain memories while omitting others. We each have our internal producer that generates narratives and files away 'clips' of our memories, whether they are distressing or otherwise. For example, we tend to remember the good parts of our best holidays and often leave out the parts where the kids were crying in the airport during the long wait for the plane.
How Therapy Can Help
In therapy, especially Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), we start by managing symptoms like flashbacks. We introduce tools to help people handle these intense memories better and feel safer discussing them in therapy.Then, we work like watching the full game instead of just the highlights. We revisit the forgotten details of the traumatic event to form a fuller, more balanced understanding of it. This approach helps update our memories and reduce the intense and sudden emotional reactions they can trigger. the hippocampus or our tv producer can then re edit and send the memory to the vaults. Of course this is making things sound a lot simpler than they are in reality but this is just to help you understand a bit about the process.
The Importance of Seeking Help
PTSD can affect anyone, no matter how strong they are. Asking for help can be tough, but it’s often harder to keep silent. If you or someone you know relates to these experiences, reaching out for professional help can be a powerful step towards recovery.Why CBt and what are the chances that it will help me?
Evidence Supporting CBT for PTSD
Research consistently shows that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is highly effective for treating PTSD. Numerous studies indicate that CBT can significantly reduce the symptoms of PTSD, such as intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, and emotional numbness. Techniques like exposure therapy, cognitive restructuring, and stress inoculation training help individuals confront their fears in a safe environment, challenge and modify harmful thought patterns, and learn coping strategies to manage stress and anxiety. For example, a systematic review published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that patients undergoing CBT for PTSD showed substantial improvements in their symptoms compared to those receiving less structured therapies. This body of evidence underscores CBT's role as a cornerstone in the effective treatment of PTSD, offering many sufferers a pathway to recovery and a better quality of life.
Stay tuned for more on this topic, including a detailed discussion on moral injury. Remember, asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. You're not alone in this journey.
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