Belleruth Naparstek wrote Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal. It’s a book that I have found ENORMOUSLY helpful. One problem of living with PTSD is that most people don’t have any idea of what that’s like, so they often say things, meaning to help, that are very painful. I remember one woman telling me “fear is a choice” when I had been in a spiral of hypervigilance for months. Her telling me that just made it worse. After a lot of thinking, I realized that fear is not a choice if you have just narrowly escaped a car accident. The only choice is how you deal with it. On the other hand, people do scare themselves with stories of an imagined future.
Here are some quotes from Invisible Heroes:
“I think heroes are people who do good or necessary things at great personal cost. Heroism must be judged by the courage and grit required to do what needs doing. That’s why trauma — that great terrorizer — produces heroes. No one has to override fear the way a trauma survivor does.
“Sometimes the heroism looks like nothing at all. When a phobic rape survivor makes herself go to an evening PTA meeting, even though her heart is pounding with terror and her body is drenched in sweat — that’s a form of heroism.”
From the Introduction, p. xv.
“Boston psychiatrist and groundbreaking trauma expert Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, writes, ‘The survivor is continually buffeted by terror and rage. These emotions are qualitatively different from ordinary fear and anger. They are outside the range of ordinary emotional experience, and they overwhelm the ordinary capacity to bear feelings.’
“Most psychological description (Herman excepted) is too pale and flat to communicate the roiling emotions of a survivor with post-traumatic stress. The intensity and severity of the feelings involved are better described by poetry, drama, and fiction, or with first person accounts… Those who haven’t experienced these things may suspect these stories are tainted with melodrama or overstated in some way. They are not. This is how it is. People who have suffered similar experiences immediately recognize the truth of them.” p96
“Survivors oscillate between very intense feelings and their opposite: numbness and internal deadness. This is the emotional counterpart to the wildly oscillating hormonal shifts happening at the bioneurological level. People feel as if they are sleepwalking, barely alive in these periods, and as time goes on, it’s the numbness that tends to predominate, taking over more and more days and weeks.
“Summoning up great courage and energy they don’t feel, people with chronic PTSD haul themselves from task to task, somehow getting through the day without a shred of interest in it. One survivor says: ‘It is like walking in a fog. I walk the fog walk.’” p 106
Invisible Heroes:survivors of trauma and how they heal, by Belleruth Naparstek