Is There A Party In Your PTSD Head?

So many of the survivors I work with and talk to express the same idea:

There are more than one of me in here!

Technically, they don’t mean there’s more than one personality inside their mind, so what do they mean?

The Facts About Your Selves

When you experience a trauma both your body and mind undergo transformations. Your body, all the way down to the last tiny cell, records the trauma. Robert Scaer, a foremost traumatologist and neurologist, wrote a fantastic book about this called, The Body Bears the Burden. Babette Rothschild, a survivor and now leading PTSD expert, wrote about it too in The Body Remembers. These are two of the seminal books on how trauma affects the body. (You can listen to fantastic interviews with both of these luminaries in the YOUR LIFE AFTER TRAUMA archives.) The body records and can hold onto pieces of the past you’re not even thinking about.

While your body is busy encoding, your mind also does the same thing. In fact, one of the primary jobs of your mind is to keep you safe. After a trauma your brain works to recalibrate. Part of that job is learning all there is to know about and after your trauma so that your brain knows what to do in the future.

Behind the science of your body and mind something else is going on too: your psyche is working overtime trying to understand, arrange and organize all of the information your trauma presented in terms of who you are, how you function, what the world is like, what the experience means to you and about you, plus about your past, present and future.

A part of this process means that different parts of you step forward and become useful and redefined at different times. For example, there is a part of you that is brave, a part of you that is frightened, a part of you that wants to fight back, overcome and heal, and a part of you that wants to hold on to the memory of your trauma. Each of these parts has a real job and function. They are all useful and full of purpose.

Bringing Healing In Your Mind

During my recovery I really freaked out my mother by telling her there were five women inside of me. She didn’t know what to do with that information! As time went by, I narrowed the crowd down to three: There was my survivor self who felt it was important to hold onto the past (and hence, PTSD); what I called my warrior self who really desperately wanted to be free and healthy moving into the future; and me, the bystander just trying to get through every day. At a certain point I had to just step back and let other two fight it out while I, the third party, observed.

It’s natural after trauma to feel fractured and splintered. At the base of trauma recovery theory is the idea that recovery comes from and with integration. Your job is to acknowledge, validate, recognize, communicate and choreograph these separate selves as you seek to draw them together into the whole of who you are. What does each one want and need? How can they have it in healthy, safe and interconnected ways?

Earlier this week in one of my PTSD support groups a survivor shared where she is in this journey. She said, “This weekend things got bad, really bad. I scared myself with some very bad thinking. And then I let my PTSD self and my healthy self talk to each other and suddenly, my PTSD self understood she’s hurting me more than she’s helping me stay safe.”

This was a huge revelation and led the group member to an incredibly healthy place as we discussed how to trade dangerous PTSD coping habits with more positive and healthy ones. Does this one thought process complete PTSD recovery? No, but it’s in these small instances that we create that leads to recovering from symptoms of posttraumatic stress and eventually lead you to freedom.

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.