Furious Seasons

October 20, 2005

On Not Living in the Past

One of this blog's regular readers, in commenting on soliders returning from Iraq with mental health problems and presumptive PTSD, wrote:

For me personally, my schizophrenia I've been able stand. It's the PTSD from the schizophrenia that I cannot. Living in the past is living in hell.

She is correct about how living with past trauma/s is utterly poisonous to getting on with life and recovery. It is hell. I and many others know this. The question is how do you get past this state. I don't pretend to know much about this piece of human psychology in a formal sense. But I know about it in the more casual sense of what worked for me. It had little to do with meds and symptom remission. It had everything to do with self-determination, faith in myself, a fearlessness about trusting myself and taking risks with my life, and time and distance. The details of how you do that--what are the actions connected with self-faith, after all?--are hard to describe, the kind of thing you make up as you go along. But there was a central tenet: I was not going to let mental illness ruin my life. I refused to cooperate with all the gloomy predictions. That may sound like a lot of macho bullshit, but it happens to be true. And in it there is much power.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at October 20, 2005 06:06 PM

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Comments

I am here with you there: I am not going to let mental illness ruin my life.

What has been my primary savior is my writing. After I was discharged, I went ahead and wrote a 350 page book about everything that had happened to me within the past few years. It was amazing. By writing it all down, I was able to then close the book, put it in a drawer, and then I did not have to think, perseverate, obsses about any of it anymore. I was done. It was finished. The book took me out of the past and put me into the present.

And then, after seeing how thearauputic writing was for me, I wrote more and more about my expiriences. I began getting pieces of my story published all over the place. It was great.

Eventually, after getting it all out of my system, I began writing about other things -- I realized that just the act of writing lets me escape, lets me ponder, lets me soar in a way that nothing else can.

Now I write about anything and everything, and it has truly gotten me out of that PTSD prison.

Other things also help -- anitdepresant meds help me stay more calm, talking with my doctor relieves the stress, and things like listening to music and doing art projects also very much keeps my mind in control.

But writing, how I love it! If I didn't have the power of pen and paper, who knows where I'd be.

Posted by: Gwen Davis at October 21, 2005 05:38 PM