PTSD:It's the cuts that bind

by
Chaplain Kathie

When I take my dog for a walk things run through my mind. He's a 13 year old Golden Retriever, great dog but not much of a retriever, he'd rather play keep-away. He's walking slower now which means more time to think.

This time it was thinking about a college student writing a paper on PTSD. When we first began to communicate, she had no idea what PTSD was. Thinking about her, made me smack myself in the head because I doubt I ever posted what I told her. If I did, forgive me but with over 6,000 posts on this blog and over 10,000 on the other one, it tends to get hard to remember what gets posted and what passes around in my brain.

I've written before how I really hate to cook. I do it enough to get by but most of my problem is, I'm a klutz. I usually end up either getting burnt or cut. Funny how that works. Once burnt twice shy, or something like that as the saying goes. It comes from the fact when we are hurt once by something, we tend to be very leery the next time we come in contact with the same situation. Lately animals have been studied a lot more in treating PTSD and even they are reluctant to repeat something that got them hurt before.

My right hand has a bunch of indents in it all from wounds. The scars have healed but the same area was repeatedly wounded. The first time I cut the area, it hurt like hell but the flesh closed up and the pain went away and soon even the scar was gone. The next time I wasn't so lucky. It was deeper and hurt more because it was a "re-wounding" of the same area. It took longer for the pain to subside, longer for the scar to heal and it was still visible long after it had healed. This repeated over and over again and each time it was deeper, lasted longer and the scar was a lot more visible.

PTSD is a lot like cuts in flesh but these are cuts to the emotions we all have.

The more sensitive the person, the harder it hits and the more it hurts. Sometimes it only takes once to be emotionally cut. Most of the time it is a series of cuts striking by what they see, what they hear, what they smell and above all, what they feel. This all gets embedded in memory but also in the place of the brain where emotions are kept. When they have a flashback, it's a replay of all of it. Not like a movie where they are watching from a distance but they are right back to where it happened. Reality TV on steroids.

Now let's take these cuts coming one after another,,,,now do you get it? When they are deployed it's not just one event but one after another before they've had a chance to grieve and heal. This causes a lot of what we're seeing with veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan but it was only the beginning. The worst came when they were deployed over and over and over again. The cuts were deeper and they never had a chance to heal before they were sent back and cut some more. It's the reason why redeployments increase the risk of PTSD by 50% for each time back.

While some may escape the cuts from the first deployment, they were not so lucky the second or the third time and really pretty much screwed after that. Even the most self-centered people you know can reach a limit before they begin to feel the pain of others around them. All that happens becomes parts of their mind that hold memories binded together with the part of the brain where emotions live.