PTSD: It happened all in a moment

"It happened all in a moment"
Combat PTSD Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 22, 2018

Tia Coleman got onto a Duck Tour boat with her family hoping to have a nice ride. A thunder storm rolled in.

Video captured by a passenger on a nearby vessel shows a duck boat capsize and sink during a severe thunderstorm in Missouri, killing at least 11 people. Source: CNN

Eleven people died. Nine from Tia's family. Duck boat accident survivor mourns her 9 relatives who drowned

"I said, 'Lord, please, I've got to get to my babies. I've got to get to my babies," she said Saturday at a news conference at Cox Medical Center Branson, where she has been hospitalized since the incident that took 17 lives, including her husband, three children and five other members of her family.

Duck boat survivor describes sinking
CNN Newsroom

Duck boat survivor Tia Coleman tells how she survived the incident that killed nine members of her family. Source: CNN

In Los Angeles people were shopping at Trader Joe's. A gunman walked in after his grandmother was shot multiple times, which he is being charged for. Another woman, shopping in the store was killed.

"It happened all in a moment. He came out of the car, the cops were already shooting at him in that instant, right before he came out of the car," said Miguel Jeffrey Trujillo Cerventes, who saw the end of the police chase and the suspect emerge from his car.

That is the cause of every case of PTSD. It happened! One moment the world you live in is "normal" and in the next, chaos. 

For citizens it is the moment you do not expect to come. 

For military folks, it is the moment you dread will happen.

For firefighters and police officers, it is the moment they know may come with the next one.  

Responders prepare to do what has to be done to save the rest of us. They also deal with the same traumas the rest of us do, but the simple fact is, they are willingly rushing to those events for the sake of others.

That is how PTSD starts. That is the only way it happens. The term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder actually says that clearly. 

Post means "after" it happened.

Trauma means "wound" and the "stress" surviving causes the survivor. The "disorder" part seems to the the term people have the most problem with, but that is simply because they do not know what that means. 

"Disorder" means that things were one way one moment and out of order in the next moment.

Nothing is ever the same after you survive a traumatic event. It is not supposed to be back to "normal" moments the moment before it happened.

The key is that you can change again, just as you did from "victim" to "survivor" and defeat what is still trying to kill you.