When Hope Returns, Rejoice!

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
April 12, 2022

When you are going through a rough time, things seem pretty hopeless and you are struggling, it is good time to remember all the other times you got through when you thought there was no hope for anything to get better.

I'm going through a really rough time now. I wrote three new books but I have no one to help me get people to discover them. They were written to offer hope of healing #PTSD. Not just from surviving war, but from surviving all other causes. You'd think that with PTSD in veterans becoming a billion dollar industry, especially when folks are raising huge sums of money to "raise awareness" they are killing themselves, it would be something worth talking about. The thing is, there really isn't much healing awareness going on for them. For the rest of us, there is little hope being offered.

So how is it that this billion dollar industry is something no one wants to talk about? It seems even fewer want to read about it. Is it because they are afraid it will depress them? Given the fact that most still cling onto the stigma of PTSD, that makes sense. After all, viewing yourself as a "victim" or thinking that you are weak, or whatever negative thought you have after surviving, no one wants to be reminded of any of it.

The problem is, you do not discover empowerment either. I know I become inspired when I read about someone in the writer's community talking about struggling and then finding success. I feel even more hopeful when they turn around and pass on what they learned so that others struggling will be able to find more readers too. After all, other authors know what it is like.

It is the same thing with PTSD. It is a story all of us know all too well. But we don't get "well" or live happier lives, until hope returns. 

Right now, I'm am remembering all the other times things seemed hopeless but suddenly, God turned it all around and it all worked out. What is hopeless for me to do, it is possible for Him to do. Some days I wake up and for no apparent reason, I am smiling and happier. Nothing really happened other than I know God heard my prayers and is doing what He can to help me.

That is what The Lost Son Series is all about. The main character has PTSD from domestic violence. Veterans are in the books and they have PTSD but are healing, and passing on, not just hope, but a way to get there. There are others in all three books doing the same and offering inspiring stories to give hope to anyone else, just like them.

Hope returned and they rejoiced. They passed it on and others rejoiced too! Isn't that what we should be all be raising awareness of to actually make a difference in someone else's life?

The Lost Son

Alive Again

Stranger Angels

Pink Floyd - Hey Hey Rise Up

You don't need to understand the words to feel the message.

Pink Floyd - Hey Hey Rise Up (feat. Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox)
This is something that most humans can understand. For the others, they are either slaughtering the Ukrainian people, or approving of it. This is one of the rare times when there is no in-between.

C-PTSD Mental Disorder That “Doesn’t Officially Exist”

I spent 40 years helping people with PTSD, mostly veterans. Considered an "expert" and knew enough to save lives. The problem is, because of everything I read, the therapists I saw, PTSD in me was missed. I survived 10 events but the only one that followed me wherever I went was after my first husband tried to kill me. I filed for divorce and he stalked me after that for a long time. The thing is, it stayed with me every time I heard the kind of car he drove. It hung on even though I got married again 38 years ago and moved thousands of miles away from him. The nightmares, flashbacks, mood swings and paranoia didn't stop coming with the roar of an engine until I found out he passed away. So yes, this is a very real thing we suffer from, but the other real thing is, we can heal and surviving the cause, is nothing to be ashamed of. I'm proud I survived, fought back and recovered enough to live a full life, even with the residual of what happened to me. You can too! Learn as much as you can about what PTSD is and find support. It is out there. 

Praise to Stephanie Foo for doing this! Keep in mind, every mental "disorder" did not exist until it had a name after it was proven it had been there all along!

What It’s Like to Be Diagnosed With a Mental Disorder That “Doesn’t Officially Exist”

Slate
BY STEPHANIE FOO
APRIL 07, 2022

What My Bones Know Stephanie Foo
Excerpted from What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Foo. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Learning about C-PTSD is not easy because it doesn’t officially exist. The name “complex PTSD” is somewhat new, coined in the ’90s by psychiatrist Judith Herman. And it doesn’t exist because it isn’t officially in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is essentially the bible of mental health: If it’s not in there, it ain’t real. There was an effort by a group of mental health experts to include it in the DSM-5, which was published in 2013, but the faceless arbiters of mental health behind the DSM—a group of psychiatrists I envision as a society of hooded figures chanting around a sacrificial child star—decided that it was too similar to PTSD. There was no reason to add a “C,” no need for a distinction between the two. It’s worth mentioning, however, that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the United Kingdom National Health Service both recognize C-PTSD as a legitimate diagnosis.

Because it isn’t in the DSM, there isn’t much literature on C-PTSD. What does exist is often dry, dull, and written with all the kindness and emotional intelligence of a tech bro. But still, I was desperate to learn, so I bought a small stack of books, each with a vague impressionist painting on the cover coupled with uninviting font. And I made my way through them, one painful page at a time.

The books taught me that when we live through traumatic experiences, our brains take in the things around us that are causing the greatest threat, and they encode these things deep into our subconscious as sources of danger.
read more here

what we know is not all that can be seen

Wounded Times

Kathie Costos

April 5, 2022

Fox News' viewers can change their attitudes with exposure to CNN on MSNBC shows that what we think, is always based on what we know. The problem is, what we know is not all that can be seen. And that is usually the reason why things don't change for the better. 

The research was conducted by Political scientists David Broockman of Stanford University and Joshua Kalla of Yale University. What they found is that people only know what the source of their information tells them. We live in a time when we want to learn the easy way, the quickest way and all too often, we learn based on what we already think. If we are not curious, we do not search for answers. We stopped reading manuals as soon as we were able to find a video on YouTube about how to do what we want to do. What this research shows is, when people have a different source of information, they begin to realize that what they know, is not always what is real.

Part of what’s interesting about the study is that it captured not just the difference between CNN’s and Fox News’ ideological outlooks, but also their differing commitments to sharing certain facts. Most notably, CNN was more likely to offer factual information that reflected more poorly on Donald Trump — and the Fox viewers who switched realized this: Participants who switched were less likely to agree that “if Donald Trump did something bad, Fox News would discuss it.”

This happens all the time. It happened with COVID. How many times have you had conversations with people who said COVID was a hoax and did not want to believe any facts? I know it happened a lot of times with me when I was shopping and people would ask me why I was wearing a mask, as if I was the stupid one. I'd look at them and think they were selfish and ingorant. I wore one because I didn't want to infect anyone else if I had been exposed to it, including my husband. I didn't want to be faced with living with regret that I did not do something so simple to protect him. The study shows where COVID deniers got their information from.

The switchers were more likely to care about Covid, learn different information about current events and feel more negatively toward Trump and the GOP. This isn’t to say the experiment revolutionized people’s worldviews. The Fox News viewers who switched to CNN generally continued to hold perspectives that accord with a right-wing media diet and worldview, and the experiment didn’t change whom they’d vote for. Even so, it's still striking that it took just four weeks for some of them to shift in some attitudes and observations of facts.

When I wrote part 2 of The Lost Son, Alive Again, this was the topic of the book. Chris and his friends wanted to help people see the truth because all they knew were lies. Chris didn't just battle ignorance of #PTSD, he battled the ignorance of people thinking they mattered more than anyone else. He showed how evil people were outnumbered by people doing good.

Read ALIVE AGAIN and learn how to fight to get people to see what they have not seen.

 

Beslan school attack: understand how a demon took control of Russia

If you are wondering how Putin could hate so much, he'd willingly slaughter babies and children in Ukraine, he didn't care about then in his own country. 

Beslan school attack

Britannica

The siege began on the morning of September 1, 2004, when at least 32 armed individuals stormed the school and took more than 1,000 hostages, including pupils in both primary and secondary grades and their teachers, as well as parents and relatives who had gathered to celebrate the opening day of the new school year. Some people died in the initial attack, but most were herded into a gymnasium, which the attackers rigged with explosives. The hostages were refused water or food; after two days passed, some of them resorted to drinking urine. The siege ended on the morning of September 3, when explosions inside the school prompted Russian special forces to enter the building. Many hostages were killed by explosions or in a subsequent fire in the gym.

Watch this on PBS and understand how a demon took control of Russia.