This PTSD Primer is juxtaposed with the diagnostic criteria
of the Fourth Revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
copyrighted in 1994 by the American Psychiatric Association.
With the experience of an everyday, expectable life event, we process the input from our thoughts, feelings, conscience, and senses, extract and store the useful information, toss the chaff, and shelf that event along with all the other events of our lifetime. With the experience of an event that is beyond the pall of expectable, traumatic in nature, acutely or by accumulation overwhelming, it is much more difficult to process all the information from that event. The innate systems by which we process thoughts, feelings, conscience, and senses can be overloaded. To protect ourselves, we shut those systems down. The event or the accumulation of stressors appears to be greater and-or more powerful than we are. But this view of ourselves and the world is a temporary distortion. We have the ability to grow within our self, become a greater person, develop personal skills and achieve such a level of personal development and integrity that we can face up to any event or manage any accumulation of stress. We can restart the systems by which we process the information from our conscience, thoughts, and feelings. Once again and at a higher level we learn and we practice that knowledge to acquire wisdom.
That is what we do. That is what we help others do.
‘Traumatic Events, PTSS ↔ PTSD demand personal growth’: SRB.
‘A memory of trauma holds the same nature as any other memory; It is a record from which we can learn, grow, and gain. The difference is value. Trauma, beyond the practical lessons, forces us to face eternal questions about ourselves and humanity’: SRB.
‘There are two places on earth where we cannot escape from ourselves: on the battlefield and in prison’: Anwar Sadat.
‘Traumatic events put us in both places at the same time.; We are met on the battlefield by forces we cannot control and in the prison of limited self we are met by no one’: SRB.
‘When someone we love dies suddenly, we honor them when we struggle through our grief to consider what they would want us to do now. When someone gives their life to preserve ours, we honor them by making the most of the life they spared. Heroes recognize values that transcend individual human lives. When heroes put their lives aside, it is for humanity’: SRB.
‘Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities; it's the one which guarantees all others’: Winston Churchill.