Being "resilient" comes after the trauma

Being "resilient" comes after the trauma
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
October 19, 2012

There is so much that is missing in what the DOD and the researchers are doing that you'd think the results would give reporters a clue they need to ask more questions. We've been reading reports like the following for far too long to not understand that.

It isn't enough to say that the people I talk to all the time make fun of all of these "studies" attempting to make people believe they have discovered something new. The thing to really know is that most of what they're doing is a good job of selling bridges they don't own.

If everything is "working" then why haven't we seen an end to veterans suffering? If any of this was really working, then why have suicides, attempted suicides and calls to the Suicide Prevention Hotline all gone up?

The truth is nothing works for enough but something works for everyone. Yes, that is what I just wrote and it is not a typo. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder stops getting worse as soon as they start talking about it. It takes that horrible memory and brings it into the world they live in now.

The bridge between the traumatic event and life after is talking, sharing the experience with another human, in safety, trusting they will not judge you or tell you to just get over it. If the listener does it right, most avoid PTSD, but if they do it wrong, they could in fact make it worse.

Crisis Intervention Teams have proven this.

Read this and then check at the bottom of this report.

Training the brain to stress less
Harnessing technology, "Matrix"-style
Updated: Thursday, 18 Oct 2012
Amanda Enayati
(CNN)

Editor's note: CNN contributor Amanda Enayati ponders the theme of seeking serenity: the quest for well-being and life balance in stressful times. She delivered a version of this piece as a talk at Stanford's Medicine X conference last week. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook .

Train the brain. Until recently, this phrase made me picture Neo from "The Matrix" proclaiming "I know kung fu" after he had martial arts abilities uploaded into his brain .

But what if we really could harness technology, Neo-style, to help train our brains to better cope with everyday stress?

For many of us, the days seem to pass in one anxiety-ridden blur after another. Mental health professional increasingly agree that these daily sprints, accompanied by a soundtrack of endless beeps, chirps and vibrations emitting from various devices, set off our stress systems, keeping us in a persistent and physiologically damaging state of fight-or-flight.

Training soldiers for the battlefield

A conversation with Dr. Albert "Skip" Rizzo, psychologist and research professor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, is like a lesson in applied science fiction, with your mind reeling from "Star Trek" to the original "Total Recall."

Except Rizzo's jaw-dropping efforts are not fiction, nor are they "on the horizon." They are here, now.

In a collaboration between the military, Hollywood and USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, where he serves as the associate director for medical virtual reality, Rizzo and his colleagues have developed cutting-edge gaming and virtual reality technologies to serve the clinical needs of soldiers.

One project, Stress Resilience in Virtual Environments (STRIVE), helps train service members to have better resilience and emotional coping skills in realistic virtual-reality combat scenarios before they are exposed to the real stresses of combat.

A second project, called Virtual Iraq (there is also a Virtual Afghanistan), helps soldiers returning from combat work through their trauma by donning a helmet geared with video goggles, earphones and a scent machine, and revisiting the scene in a virtual reality setting, complete with sound and smell. Both STRIVE and Virtual Iraq (and Afghanistan) are based on exposure therapy , which has been effective in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The problem with PTSD is that the person often avoids anything that reminds them of the trauma, and this avoidance begins to generalize to everyday things, says Rizzo.

"It's a snowball cascade effect. The things that evoke the fear and anxiety are no longer directly tied to the original trauma but generalized to the outside world. You see people with PTSD who will no longer leave their house, and if they do, they're a nervous wreck."

The idea, says Rizzo, is to re-create the stressful environment in a doctor's office, to help the patients confront and challenge the trauma and to give them the tools to better cope emotionally with what happened.
read more here

The underlined part is the worst. Telling them they can "train their brains" to be "resilient" ends up telling them if they end up with PTSD, it is their fault for having a weak mind and not training right. We may think it all sounds fine and could be a good thing, but we don't go into combat. We don't see friends blown up. We don't see dead bodies or have to pick up body parts of someone that was alive and near you one second before. We don't have to think that we could end up the same way in the near future. Imagine what that's like. Then imagine some hack had you play a computer game before they sent you face all that and told you they just trained you to take it.

The second enlarged paragraph is what needs to be focused on. Every expert I talked to about my own life is astonished I didn't end up with PTSD. I've face death several times. Not in combat, but just as a civilian. What worked to prevent it was not what I was told before it. It was not "training my brain to prevent it" but it was what was done after the events. I was not only encouraged to talk about it, but to "watch the whole thing" from start to finish. All of it was replayed until I didn't need to talk about it anymore.

That safe place to talk and reflect was provided by my family right after it happened. The abnormal events, things that people don't encounter on a daily basis, were defeated in my "normal" life.

One of the times I heard "you're lucky to be alive" was after a car accident. My parents picked me up at the hospital. My Dad drove us to see the car. It was destroyed. I couldn't believe it was that bad, fully understand how I walked away from it and then pushed the car to the other side of the highway and ended up with very little body damage. Then he handed me the keys to his car. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I had to drive on the same highway I almost died on. I thought my Dad was a real jerk until days later when I thanked him for making me do it. If too much time went by before I was driving again, I doubt I would have driven again at all.

I was fearful of cars getting too close behind me for a long time. I drove in the left lane most of the time and couldn't drive past the speed limit. As time went by and I was able to acknowledge that it was fairly safe, I feared less.

The only time it comes back to me now is when I see a bad accident. That's the point. There will never be a day when I am totally free of that day or any other day when I faced dying but there is not a day when it has taken over every part of my life. It was never allowed to gain territory.

For combat troops facing death everyday they can become resilient by what is done after the trauma but not before it.

They need to be put in the driver's seat and handed the keys after every time they face death but in combat, that is almost impossible to do. Having a "battle buddy" is only good if the buddy knows what the hell they are talking about and aren't as deluded by the propaganda of "training" right to avoid what the event can create.

This is what the military and "research" hacks keep missing. All of the studies and research they do will show some good results but not for the reason they think. It is because "something" is always better than nothing, but too often we discover that it is never enough to really change much at all. In some cases, the better than nothing is deadly.