Change Often Incites Fear in PTSD Recovery

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recovery (and the actions it requires) often incites a lot of fear. It has to: creating change always takes you into uncharted territories that can make you question yourself. Frequently, the pain of facing difficult things, plus the exhaustion of attempting to break free from what’s controlling you will put you in situations that bring on a big feeling of “I can’t handle it.” This moment and feeling are the essence of fear in PTSD recovery and there are good reasons for feeling it.

Two Reasons Change Creates Fear in PTSD Recovery

After trauma, it’s a normal instinct to seek (and do anything necessary) to create a sensation of security. These actions turn into habits that create a sensation of being in control.

Healing, however, requires you to release those tightly controlled behaviors and approaches to life to expand your involvement in living in healthy ways. Implementing the changes necessary for this can feel frightening because:

1. You want to feel safe. Your trauma taught you an important lesson: There is danger in the world and sometimes it will dramatically affect you. From this lesson you learned another salient message: You must be aware and protect yourself. In PTSD, this process (hypervigilance) can become so in control of your daily experience and perspective of the world that it drives all of your thoughts, actions, and behaviors. For a little while this is very smart. After trauma you needed to re-establish a feeling of safety and control as you began to navigate your post-trauma world. However, when the need for safety overwhelmingly dictates who you are and how you live your world considerably shrinks down. While this limits your personal and professional opportunities it also creates a world in which you feel able to count on familiarity; that wonderful sensation of everything being recognizable. The more known your world is the more secure you feel. It’s only natural that you would want to stay in your comfort zone, which means going outside of it (creating change) would feel dangerous.
2. As humans, we thrive on repetition. The more repeated familiar experiences you have the safer you feel. In fact, your brain (How Trauma Affects Your Brain) learns by repetition. The more often it experiences something the more deeply it embeds neural pathways that become more and more efficient over time. From a survival perspective, this is a terrific asset: The quicker your cavemen ancestors learned to avoid the saber tooth tiger, the more likely they were to stay alive. In the realm of PTSD recovery, however, the brain’s power to learn can become a liability if it isn’t managed and balanced. The more often you engage in repetitive experiences that constrict your world (i.e. creating safety by shrinking your engagement) the more your brain develops a practiced mastery for all of the constricting actions you've been practicing. Thinking it’s helping you, your brain engages in those behaviors faster and more easily as time passes. Breaking these habits and patterns can feel uncomfortable, dangerous, and just flat out wrong.

And yet, adventuring into new territory can be the very thing that sets you free. Breaking habits and patterns and replacing them with more healthy ways of feeling safe and in control can actually give you back your life.

So, while change often incites fear in PTSD recovery, it can also be the agent of freedom and your path to healing. The key to managing the fear of change lies in exploring and discovering how to reduce the fear while at the same time connecting more deeply to behavior, thoughts and actions that infuse you with a sense of self-efficacy -- a feeling of “I can handle it.” that allows you to inch forward.

Michele is the author of Your Life After Trauma: Powerful Practices to Reclaim Your Identity. Connect with her on Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and her website, HealMyPTSD.com.