About halfway through my tour I was at Bagram to go on leave and another solider, who knew my background as a therapist, shared with me the symptoms of PTSD he was experiencing after a particularly awful experience. The therapist part of me tried to speak up and offer some suggestions, but I couldn’t do it.
I didn’t think of myself as stressed. But when you lined up the pieces next to each other, it seemed obvious that there was a lot on my shoulders. Not to mention the extenuating circumstances of this year — Covid, an inland hurricane in Iowa, election season, and more.
For all people, how we handle challenges has a lot to do with our ability to be resilient. Resiliency is like a rubber band, the more resilient you are, the springier your rubber band and the quicker you are able to rebound from a difficult event. As we continue to stretch our rubber band over and over as we go from pandemic to home schooling to natural disaster, the harder it has become for the rubber band to regain its original shape.
Your brain is doing what it is wired to do: protect you from life-threatening danger. The brain does a marvelous job helping your body to react quickly and know to fight, run, or freeze when needing to escape a threat. The trick is — how often are we in situations where we need to run for our lives? On a day-to-day basis, probably not very often.
Feeling Safe
I feel safe at CFS. I know the staff is professional and understanding and that my thoughts and feelings will be heard and are valid.
Building Strength
My treatment at CFS has helped me find the ability to continue on through a horrible time. The office staff always greets me with a smile, that’s great.
Embrace New Ideas
It’s great to have someone to talk through my thoughts and feelings with — to get things out into the universe and have a neutral party help me learn how to process, try new things, embrace different ideas.
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