Opal Rose
Preview of Dark Waters
I believe that posttraumatic stress is a relative dimension of biology in that it results from an injury or an insult to neurobiology. It is associated with trauma and there are many kinds of trauma. It is defined in practical ways by signs and symptoms that people who are experiencing it have in common. Too often people are diagnosed and studied and helped by being segmented into parts that are about mental health and about medicine, but each and every one of us is after all a whole being. Even though parts of us can be helped by various disciplines in medicine, psychology and other disciplines, something like posttraumatic stress deeply affects the whole being. Shifting and settling occur during healing, but we should never ignore our inner selves that may still need attention. I am not a specialist in fields commonly associated with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder such as psychology, medicine and neurobiology, and I can’t make any claims regarding the scientific validity of what I write. I can only share thoughts and feelings about what is called Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and that leaves me feeling uneasy now and then. Anything and everything can by terminology be called a disorder when functionally and conclusively descriptive of not being normal, but actually I’d prefer to not capitalize the name and to omit the word disorder. Disorder has unfortunate innuendoes attached to it, and I’d prefer to just leave it out. Let’s just call this posttraumatic stress, or stress after trauma. As living organisms we naturally react to trauma and have mechanisms that help us to relax once we are safe. This is normal and is a function of survival. Now and then we seem to somehow get stuck in a survival mode, or partly so, and our selves remember the danger signals. Our selves, not just our bodies, our minds, or our emotions. Wholeness of the individual including mind, body and soul, is an important focus that has stayed at the forefront of my individual work involved in growing away from those rigid reactions that posttraumatic stress imposes. I believe that what you’re fighting is the fractionation of your self. Parts of who you are seem to have lives of their own when triggered, during flashbacks, or simply during stressful moments. They are You and Your Experiences but they seem to envelop you within their own environments, and you react to their impulses. It’s not easy to learn how to see them with perspective, in a way that doesn’t permit them to dominate your interactions with the world around you. If you don’t give up, you can emerge into new ways of being, but you won’t be the same person who fell under the influence of the trauma and its aftermath. Just like everyone else on the planet, you’ll be an amalgam of who you are and of your experiences. Just like everyone else on the planet, you have probably had had a personality with positive and negative sides to it. You might find that your work with posttraumatic stress helps you to grow beyond who you were previously. It does takes work, and there are various kinds of work depending upon how you approach healing. You do have to approach healing.
© Opal Rose