Traumas Archives - Page 2 of 2 -

Anxiety Depression Individual Counseling Mental Health PTSD Stress Suicide Prevention Traumas Veterans Reintegration • Veteran Mental Health • Veterans Issues April 23, 2020 By Sawayer 0 Comments

Veterans Resources

I have worked with Vets from most of the service branches as a therapist in the last four years with much of my contact involved crisis interventions where there were some total melt-downs. The last incident involved a SWAT team deployment. Sometimes, folks tend to over-react when Vets have these melt-downs. Why? Well, not everyone is trained as a military sniper or Special Forces combatant, and that gets some special attention.

Personally, I grew up in a military family and spent a lot of time on Army, Navy and Airforce installations back then.

I experienced first hand the issues that occured when active duty military servicemen return to civilian life as Veterans and have serious re-integration issues.

Because of this professional and personal history of mine, working with Veterans experiencing personal issues is a passion of mine.

That said, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that PTSD is not exclusively a problem that is exclusively found in the Veteran communities. As you migh imagine, PTSD can occur from any numer of life events. The letter “P” stands for POST, the letter “T” stands for TRAUMATIC, the letter “S” stands for STRESS, and the letter “D” stands for DISORDER. You don’t see a V for Veteran because the disorder happens in many situations. Wartime or even deployment is just one paticular situation that Veterans are exposed to.

When military discharge of a person who has a known or even unknown PTSD diagnosis occurs, this greatly complicates the stresses of re-adjustment and re-integration back into civilian live. As you can see, for some Veterans, the reintegration itself can present a lot of adjustment issues. These same issues may serve as “triggers” for either a diagnosed or undiagnosed PTSD condition.

In some cases there may even be a history of being exposed to head trauma while in the military, which if severe enough can create another bad actor, TBI or Traumatic Brain Injury.

I don’t offer the new EMDR intervention for those suffering deep and active troubling symptoms from diagnosed PTSD, I do refer out to individuals who are trained, effective EMDR clinicians.

Again, these types of traumas also not exclusively a only Veterans issue, but it is prevalent among that community.

Other sources of PTSD and TBI can be a result of sexual assault traumas, violent accidents, witnessing some type of violent event, being brutally assaulted. I really hope you get the idea!

In the last two years, I discovered a great resource SPECIFICALLY for Veterans that I want to share.

That resource is the Headspace and Timing webpage of Duane France who has been a leader in the Veterans Mental Health Space. See some information about his current work at: https://www.fcsprings.com/about-us/leadership-staff/duane-france. Duane has graciously agreed to allow me to share these with my readers.

I have attached a link to the site below and within the site is a treasure of blogs, resources AND great podcasts.

You will also see that in addition to being a licensed clinician, Duane is a prolific writer as well.

A very dedicated and profusely productive advocate for Veterans….He Is!

Here is the link to his site…..enjoy exploring!!

Podcasts

Another great website for Veterans and families you will definitely enjoy and find interesting is Veterans MTC. They can be found on both Instagram and Facebook. You can give it a look by clicking their web-page http://veteransmtc.com

Headspace and Timing Podcast Link

https://player.fm/series/head-space-and-timing-podcast

Near Death Experience Out of Body Experience Retirement Trauma Traumas Healthy Relationships April 20, 2020 By Sawayer 0 Comments

What Really Is Reality?

Every experience exists in two places.

There is the place of physical reality and our brain’s interpretation of that physical reality.

That reality then gets complicated because our brain has a unique, “interpreter function”.

That interpreter is like a box of crayons we use to add color to the experiences we have in our very early lives.

So reality is like the blank page in a coloring book that presents itself just as it is, usually blank and white.

Our eyes and ears and nose and skin are like a black colored marker that draws the lines and designs on those first pages of the coloring book in our early years.

Then the interpreter function starts using the colors of life, as we get more and more information about what we believe we are experiencing.

As a result of these “interpreters”, 10 people can stand side by side looking around and all 10 will fill their coloring books with different designs and colors.

As we go thru life… the first year pages in our books have a tendency to naturally influence, or “color”, if you will pardon the pun, the next pages to come.

Eventually we become limited by our brains interpreter, which no longer allows us to experience reality directly OR very accurately… just “uniquely.

Our page designs become more limited and interestingly, so does our access to our available colors becomes limited as well.

This limiting is a protective and survival mechanism that allows us to function under the circumstances we find ourselves in at the moment.

Over time, the colors we use are filtered by the interpreter and we become less able to see the total colors of our life experiences.

This coloring book becomes something we come to define as our personality or our world view.

This explains how 10 people can be presented with the exact same experience and relate to that experience and what it means in 10 different ways. How amazing is that?

It is also why we need to share our coloring books with each other after we become clear on how we came to chose the designs and lines and colors that it contains.

This “getting clear” is how counseling helps us. We share our coloring book with our counselor, who respectfully and non-judgmentally asks about each page. We can do much of this on our own, but eventually we need another trained individual to help challenge how our perspectives are affecting our lives at work and with family or friends.

It’s not the external world around us that confuses us but rather it’s our initial and subsequent mental and emotional interpretations of that physical world that can actually change our ability to experience that world in its pristine existence.

By sharing our own individual coloring book interpretations with love and humility and without fear and/or shame, we get closer to what God’s revealed truth is. You see, I just colored this article with God!

Learning about our wonderful uniqueness as coloring artists is literally is a lifetime adventure of refining and in the end leads to appreciation of the fact that the essence of God is always ungraspable mystery.

It is that unfathomable and ungraspable MYSTERY that propels us to faith and worship and can be so comforting for many.

OK, I colored that last paragraph again. Is this not challenging?

Even counselors need counselors sometimes.