{"id":268,"date":"2010-04-07T21:56:35","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T21:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=268"},"modified":"2013-09-14T15:29:15","modified_gmt":"2013-09-14T19:29:15","slug":"invisible-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=268","title":{"rendered":"Invisible Heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Belleruth Naparstek wrote Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s a book that I have found ENORMOUSLY helpful.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I remember one woman telling me “fear is a choice” when I had been in a spiral of hypervigilance for months.\u00a0 Her telling me that just made it worse.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 On the other hand, people do scare themselves with stories of an imagined future.<\/p>\n

Here are some quotes from Invisible Heroes<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think heroes are people who do good or necessary things at great personal cost.\u00a0 Heroism must be judged by the courage and grit required to do what needs doing.\u00a0 That\u2019s why trauma \u2014 that great terrorizer \u2014 produces heroes.\u00a0 No one has to override fear the way a trauma survivor does.
\n\u201cSometimes the heroism looks like nothing at all.\u00a0 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 \u2014 that\u2019s a form of heroism.\u201d
\nFrom the Introduction, p. xv.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoston psychiatrist and groundbreaking trauma expert Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, writes, \u2018The survivor is continually buffeted by terror and rage.\u00a0 These emotions are qualitatively different from ordinary fear and anger.\u00a0 They are outside the range of ordinary emotional experience, and they overwhelm the ordinary capacity to bear feelings.\u2019
\n\u201cMost psychological description (Herman excepted) is too pale and flat to communicate the roiling emotions of a survivor with post-traumatic stress.\u00a0 The intensity and severity of the feelings involved are better described by poetry, drama, and fiction, or with first person accounts…\u00a0\u00a0 Those who haven\u2019t experienced these things may suspect these stories are tainted with melodrama or overstated in some way.\u00a0 They are not.\u00a0 This is how it is.\u00a0 People who have suffered similar experiences immediately recognize the truth of them.\u201d p96<\/p>\n

\u201cSurvivors oscillate between very intense feelings and their opposite: numbness and internal deadness.\u00a0 This is the emotional counterpart to the wildly oscillating hormonal shifts happening at the bioneurological level.\u00a0 People feel as if they are sleepwalking, barely alive in these periods, and as time goes on, it\u2019s the numbness that tends to predominate, taking over more and more days and weeks.
\n\u201cSummoning up great courage and energy they don\u2019t feel, people with chronic PTSD haul themselves from task to task, somehow getting through the day without a shred of interest in it.\u00a0 One survivor says: \u2018It is like walking in a fog.\u00a0 I walk the fog walk.\u2019\u201d p 106<\/p>\n

Invisible Heroes:survivors of trauma and how they heal<\/a>, by Belleruth Naparstek<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Belleruth Naparstek wrote Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal.\u00a0 It’s a book that I have found ENORMOUSLY helpful.\u00a0 One problem of living with PTSD is that most people don’t have any idea of what that’s like, so … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting-link","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}