PTSD:Demons don't just come out at night

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 11, 2024

Have you ever watched a horror movie or read a book and wondered if demons are real? The answer is yes, they are.

While you probably have heard of the religious practice of exorcisms, they have been performed for centuries. The truth is, it's gone on a lot longer than that. Just read this from National Geographic.

In Mesopotamia during the 1st millennium B.C., purveyors of magic called ašipu staved off and expelled demons that brought illness and chaos. As spiritual healers, ašipu were esteemed protectors who used amulets, performed elaborate rituals and, when needed, engaged helper demon figures in their efforts. The ancient Greek word daimon—from which the modern "demon" derives—referred to god-like spirits and supernatural forces. While a daimon could be good or evil, the latter was a malevolent force that needed to be cast out or exorcized. The 1st century A.D. historian Josephus recounted the story of Eleazar, a man who freed others from a demon by drawing it out of his nostrils and repeatedly invoking King Solomon's name, attesting to a form of exorcism in Jewish tradition as well.

HealthLine took a look at sleep paralysis and the "demon."

How people describe them
What is this “demon” that leaves you trapped in your body, unable to move or scream? It depends who you ask.

For some it’s a faceless, shapeless presence trying to suffocate them. Others describe it as a creepy old hag with claws. Some see an alien and experience what they believe is a full alien abduction. And for others, the demons look like a dead relative.

Different cultures have different explanations for sleep paralysis demons.

Canadian Inuit attribute the sleep paralysis to spells of shamans. Japanese folklore says it’s a vengeful spirit that suffocates its enemies in their sleep.

In Brazilian folklore, the demon has a name — Pisadeira, which is Portuguese for “she who steps.” She’s a crone with long fingernails who lurks on rooftops in the night, then walks on the chest of people who sleep belly up on a full stomach.

If you have #PTSD, then you know what these are like. The difference is that the only demon invading you is the trauma you survived. I survived ten times, but it took the one event that changed everything for me. I write about it often, but as a reminder, my first husband tried to kill me and then stalked me. When I had nightmares of what he did, all the other times moved from the back of my mind and into my days. It wasn't much fun to constantly fight them. It was even worse to survive them in the first place. I had to remind myself that I did survive them and wasn't about to let them destroy me or my future.

Most won't tell you that but should say to you as soon as they offer any therapy. You are not facing the threat of the events that already happened, but you are facing the danger of what came with the memories of them.

And then there are people talking about the PTSD demons. Wrestling with demons: Veterans share their experiences of battling PTSD, addiction, suicidal thoughts.

Believe it or not, that's from the Department Of Veterans Affairs website.

Veterans’ greatest battle isn't always against an enemy combatant. Sometimes, it’s with themselves.

That’s especially true for Ben Evenson and Sam Lovdahl.

To mark Mental Health Awareness Month, the two Veterans shared the struggles they faced after serving — battles that included post-traumatic stress disorder, drug/alcohol addiction and attempted suicide.

The presentation, dubbed “Wrestling with Demons” because Evenson is now a professional wrestler and Lovdahl wrestled in high school, took place under a covered pavilion on a chilly, overcast day on the Milwaukee VA campus.

But the setting was apropos, Evenson said.

“Even though it's a (crappy) day out and it's raining, the sun is still shining, 1,500 feet above us,” he said. “It's the outlook on which you look at life that determines the outcome of where you're going and where you are now.”

PTSD doesn't want you to have hope, so it destroys it until you give up. It doesn't want you to know you can defeat it, so it gets in the way, planting doubts in your brain every time you decide to reach out. Stay away from the games it loves to play. You are smarter than that. You are stronger than that.

Maybe someone told you that PTSD was a sign of weakness. It isn't. There is nothing weak about surviving the cause of the demons invading you. You stopped being a "victim" of the event/events as soon as it ended. You became a survivor! Once you understand that, you begin to defeat it.

Now that you know demons are real, isn't it time you stopped feeding them are started to starve them?

stop being trapped by your past

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 5, 2024

The walls you hide behind to protect you from more pain also protect you from more joys. It is time to remove the walls and stop being trapped by your past.

Have you ever wondered why you push people away, especially those you love? I know I did. After all the times I survived, my family saw right through me and got me to talk about what was going on in my head. Being able to talk kept the walls of #PTSD from closing me in. It was not until my first husband tried to kill me that I hid the pain well enough that they didn't suspect more than I was willing to share.

They assumed I would open up if I needed to, but the pain of betrayal from someone I loved was far more than what he caused. It involved everyone around me. I no longer trusted anyone who loved me. They did nothing wrong to me, but the walls were built to protect me even from them. Years later, I realized I was the only one harming myself. 

I didn't trust anyone. While I was making friends and dating after what my first husband did, I never felt close to anyone. That is until I met my second husband. I saw such deep pain in his eyes, and I knew he must have seen it in mine. 

He's a Vietnam veteran. The more I got to know him, he trusted me enough to share what being in Vietnam did to him. He was so young in that dark time of his life. His WWII veteran father kept telling him to get over it. After all, that's what his generation was told. I was the first to tell him it wasn't something he could just get over. He had to get through it. He needed to break down the walls built to protect him from more pain getting inside of him.

I gave great advice but failed to take my own. It took a long time for me to open up about the times I faced death. I felt as if his times were much more severe than mine were. I made it into a contest I believed I'd never win. How could my times be more significant than his? He was in Vietnam facing the fact he could have been killed every day. My times were over, and it was done, and I was safely back home within hours.

I couldn't tell him that I had flashbacks, nightmares, mood swings, panic attacks, and felt as if I could never take down my walls enough to really let him in. About fourteen years after our marriage, we moved thousands of miles from my ex-husband. I was still being haunted, although it never made sense to me. I was able to love my husband and our daughter. I wasn't able to feel their love. It was not until my cousin sent me his obituary notice from the newspaper back home that the nightmares, along with everything else, stopped haunting me. I was free. Free to finally take down the walls and believe other people could love me. It was a fantastic feeling. It also left me confused.

Many years later, we moved again, and COVID hit. I explained to my daughter how all the stress and fear would last much longer than the pandemic. I told her what my ex-husband did to me. While she knew what happened, I never told her about the lingering pain I had. She looked at me and said that I never told her I had PTSD. I was shocked!

I was an expert, but I didn't see it. I saw two therapists to help me heal from experiences I had, and they didn't see it. I contacted a couple of psychologists I knew over the years. Both of them said I had a rare case of PTSD because of all the times throughout my life I faced death. The first two times happened on the same night when I was just five years old. Long story short, a doctor told my mother I not only could have died but that I should have died twice the night before. He said it was a miracle I was still alive. I was admitted for five days to heal. My skull was fractured, and I had a concussion.

Knowing what I know now, it is never about what caused PTSD in any of us. It is what we do about our lives as survivors. 

Open up to people you trust in your life. You don't have to tell them everything, but you must let them know the basics. Trust me, because they are as confused as you are. They have no way of knowing what's behind the changes in you. They can only make assumptions. Those assumptions cause conflict between you. Don't blame them because you will have the same reaction if you look at what they are seeing in you. 

The more you talk about it and share what you're going through, the more the walls will come down. If you can't speak to your family, try a friend. If you can't talk to a friend, find a group trying to heal. If you can't find a group you feel comfortable in, find a therapist. If you don't feel comfortable with that therapist, find another one. 

You will see the world and yourself more clearly. Seeing the world without walls in the way is fantastic when you can let joy back in.

What makes us different from others?

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
June 30, 2024

Most of us may not say it, but we wonder who we are. Why are we here? What makes us different from others? Why do we have strange thoughts and feelings we can't figure out? The answer is within us. Some call it our soul. Others call it our spirit.

I often wonder what makes someone join the military knowing they are risking their lives. What makes people join the National Guard to help the people in their state while knowing they could also be sent to foreign lands? What makes a firefighter willing to risk their lives and members of law enforcement? Their jobs are obviously dangerous. They are also emotional. They leave their families to put strangers first. The people they are willing to die for come first while on the job. How do they do that?

The many professions people feel compelled to do that come with a high price to pay. Most say it was what they wanted to do all their lives. They can't explain why. They just knew they had to. 

Most of them told me they felt pulled to do it. They never wanted to do anything else. That pull came from the spirit within them. It is what they were created to do. It always seemed easy for them to accept that. They found it hard to accept that that same spirit also had the power to help them heal.

It was also hard for them to accept the simple fact that they were only human, and no matter how much training they had, there were limits to what any human could endure. When the rest of us suffer after one event, or as in my case, over ten of them, we are living proof they need to know.

Most people with our experience have our hearts tugged when we hear about their suffering. Yes, we also feel left out when no one is holding any events for us or forming charities to help us get the mental health care we need. Still, we feel for them. We didn't willingly risk our lives for someone else every day. We were just trying to live our lives when #PTSD hit us.

Just think about how much we could do for them if we talked to them and told them how hard it was to survive what we went through. We could prove to them that we are not ashamed to talk about it and happy to share how we healed with them. 

Aside from having our hearts filled knowing we just helped someone, there is a bonus to it. It fills our spirits and helps us heal even more. The more we help others, the more we help ourselves. That has been proven to me for over 40 years when I helped total strangers go on to live happier lives.

Try it and change the conversation they've been hearing about having PTSD into something they may have never heard before. It's time to #breakthesilence for them and others like us.

Kathie Costos

Author of The Scribe Of Salem, The Visionary Of Salem, and 13th Minister Of Salem

PTSD-Life is so much better on the other side of ugly

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
June 22, 2024

How important is it to turn something ugly that happened to you into something beautiful? By deciding to show kindness to others.

 

I have a five-inch ugly scar on my arm. Most people don't notice it, but I see it every day. My husband is waiting for surgery and is in a nursing/rehab home. I went to visit him one day, and when I walked into the lobby, I saw that they were offering the residents temporary tattoos. One of the nurses told me my husband didn't even want to take a look at them. I told her I'd get him to at least come out to see them. When he did, he decided to get a lion tattoo. They offered one for me as well. I chose the owl since it was beautiful and large. I loved it! I was glad it lasted for weeks. I'd look at my arm and see something beautiful covering something ugly.

It made me think of how no one can see the #PTSD scars inside of me, but I can. Even though they are still there, they don't control me. They have no power over me. Sure, they make me sad sometimes. They can even make me angry. Those emotions are in my control, and I won't allow them to last long. I choose to not take them out on others. I choose to cry when I need to. I choose to deal with the anger of my past and let it go. I chose to decide that I didn't deserve what happened to me and not allow it to rob me of happiness today.

I choose not to allow what happened to me to define me. I am not ashamed of what I survived. I talk about the over ten times something ugly happened to me so that someone else could gain that hope they shouldn't be ashamed. 

You can do it too. Life is so much better on the other side of ugly.

I didn't need to belong to a church to seek His help

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
June 15, 2024

It is hard enough to encourage people with #PTSD to seek spiritual healing but when they hear people claim to be Christian but show no relationship to what He taught, it is making it close to impossible.

I help anyone in spiritual pain because no matter if they believe in Jesus, or a higher power, it helps heal PTSD. Even the Department of Veterans Affairs noticed the importance of adding spirituality to treatment. Read Addressing Religious or Spiritual Dimensions of Trauma and PTSD

Spirituality and post-trauma mental health may influence each other, in both positive and negative ways. This has less to do with people's dispositional spiritual identity and more to do with how they spiritually cope with adversity. Given that trauma often leads to a need to find meaning, and that spirituality often provides such a meaning system in people's lives, it follows that trauma can introduce a need to reconcile difficult events with beliefs.

Changed relationship to or conception of one's deity. That is, a traumatic event can cause people to experience changes in the way they see a Higher Power, such as feeling abandoned or punished by them, feeling angry at them, or questioning how a loving, all-powerful deity could allow horrible things to happen to the innocent. When religious meaning systems are very central, then individuals may either shift their pre-existing beliefs (e.g., "There is no Higher Power.") or their sense of the situation (e.g., "I must have done something wrong to provoke this punishment."). If people see an event as likely caused by punishment from a Higher Power or evil forces, they may have a sense of predictability while also feeling that the world is more cruel than previously thought. A changed relationship with one's faith can also be made more difficult if a trauma occurs during a stage of psychospiritual development in which there are already normative doubts and questions (e.g., early adulthood; 13).

No matter what caused PTSD in you, this is an important part of your healing. The problem is, when people claim to be Christian yet spew out hatred, judgment, lies, display anger, and cause division, they are not what they claim to be, it shuts off seeking it. Understandable if people do not know what Jesus said was the way to treat others and what a "personal relationship" with Jesus means.

Here are just some of the things you need to know.

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” John 4:24

It is great if you belong to a church and feel welcomed there but do not need to go to a building to talk to God. You can do it wherever and whenever you want. You don't need money to put into the church funds. You do not need to follow their rules or confess your sins to another human, You can follow the rules Jesus laid down if you believe in Him, or whatever the higher power you believe in. There is a huge difference between "religion" and having a spiritual relationship as a Christian or any other faith you have.

If you are suffering you need to know it was not caused by God but He understands your pain. The Beatitudes

5 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them.
He said:
3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit,for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,for they will be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek,for they will inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,for they will be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful,for they will be shown mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,for they will see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,for they will be called children of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

He went to the mountainside to preach...not into a building.

You do not have to take an oath to a group of people that will force you to do what they say.

33 “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ 34 But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37 All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

Notice that it says the earth is His footstool? That was what He told Isaiah when he wanted to build God a temple.

Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool: What Temple can you build for me as good as that? 2 My hand has made both earth and skies, and they are mine. Yet I will look with pity on the man who has a humble and contrite heart, who trembles at my word.

If anyone wants you to hate someone else, He preached against that. If they hate you and claim to be Christian, they are not. They just claim to be.

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[i] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

There is so much in the Bible of what He said that proves too many you see on TV and at political rallies claiming to be "Christian" have no relationship to Him at all.

Do not be deceived by them because that type of person would be the first to tell you PTSD came from God instead of God is there to give you what you need to heal. I can't count how many times I've heard people say "God only gives us what we can handle." They don't realize they just told us it happened because God was punishing us. He didn't. I know He saved me many times, forgave me, took mercy, and comforted me. I didn't need to belong to a church to seek His help. You don't either.

Kathie Costos author of The Scribe Of Salem, The Visionary Of Salem, and 13th Minister Of Salem.