I have post-trauma symptoms from humanitarian aid work in CAR.
I had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from sexual assaults a decade ago. They never tell you this, but.... Well, what they tell you is that a PTSD diagnosis makes you much more vulnerable to trauma in the future. Once you have PTSD, you have a much higher likelihood of getting re-traumatized and developing post-trauma symptoms. I'm cautious about who and how I let know about my controlled and healed PTSD because of the potential stigma it could ignite in employers and co-workers. Aid work in conflict zones means exposure to trauma. People balk at the idea of working alongside someone suffering from it-- with good reason, to some extent, since you want the people coming from afar to help to be capable of helping, and to make good decisions about security that are not rooted in either disproportional fear nor trauma-driven self-destructive martyrdom. You don't want to be depending on someone else to save you or save lives when they experience terror and freeze, drop the ball, cannot handle the danger. The responsibility will fall on you then, to suck it up and handle it despite your own terror-- how can you even be allowed to feel terror if the person next to you is subsumed by it? No. There is stigma against traumatized aidworkers.
I have a counter-offer.
A yoga podcast told me, while my forehead lay on the concrete ground of my CAR bedroom in child's pose, "Responsibility is your capacity to respond."
Healing trauma increases one's capacity to respond to trauma. How do you heal PTSD? You take months or years to investigate what trauma does to your body and brain, and you learn active methods to address its symptoms in the moment and to reduce occurrence of symptoms in the long-term. You know, coping strategies. The process of healing PTSD-- not just having PTSD, but actively working with a therapist or rape crisis counselor or self-study to learn to live with it and feel whole-- teaches you to feel your body's reaction to a trigger (a sub-conscious reminder of your trauma), to identify the trigger and your body's physical and emotional response to it, and finally to react to reduce your body's response or find safety from the trigger if need be. In healing post-trauma, you learn and practice essential skills for navigating trauma.
The post Post-PTSD: A counter-offer appeared first on Anarchapistemology.net.
