keywords
PTSD, trauma, prevention, resilience, mental health, community support, coping strategies, self-care, emotional well-being, post-traumatic growth
summary
In this conversation, Jess discusses various strategies to prevent PTSD, emphasizing the importance of staying connected to one's body, identity, and memories. She highlights the significance of establishing routines, engaging in self-care, and seeking community support. The conversation also touches on the need for resilience and the potential for post-traumatic growth, encouraging listeners to create protective circumstances before trauma occurs and to process their experiences in a healthy manner.
- Exercise and stay associated with your body.
- Focus on routines and purposeful actions.
- Engage in narrative efforts like CBT.
- Self-compassion is crucial during recovery.
- Avoidance can lead to further trauma.
- Modify diet for better health post-trauma.
- Create protective social circumstances.
- Grounding and centering skills are essential.
- Processing experiences takes time and space.
- Post-traumatic growth is possible with effort.
Let’s do a quick rundown of behaviors to prevent PTSD from the research we’ve done.
If you’re interested in specific examples check out the sister post on the small, specific, actions I’ve been taking post-two varieties of trauma running concomitantly.
From the literature, though, we’ve learned these broad strokes:
- Exercise
- Stay associated with your body, identity, memories, and experience
- Don’t drink or drug. Avoidance is a debilitating way to almost guarantee PTSD.
- Engage in BALANCED socializing (don’t overlean or overpull or overindulge)
- Focus on establishing structure in your life: not work. ROUTINES are FRIENDS.
- Focus on taking actions that feel purposeful: not work. MEANING over MONEY.
- Do your nervous system work; bring yourself up or down, as needed.
- Do your narrative work, including CPT, CBT, and resulting cognitive reappraisals. (A shortcut for CBT: asking “why did I just do that?” Identify the motivating emo/thought – reprocess it – rework the overarching story you’re telling yourself)
- Note your risk factors (ongoing stress points) and provide self-compassion
- Go slow: anything else is avoidance masquerading as being productive
- Allow for doing nothing and flow behaviors, this is actually processing
- Ask for help with resources of all variety and try to manage yours. Post-trauma there will be expenses; however, don’t take it as a reason to blow your savings account.
- Aim for somatic experiencing to work the trauma out of your meat. Feel your feet.
- SLEEP
- Watch for B/W thoughts: recalibrate towards gray tones that acknowledge good and bad. This includes thinking “finally, it’s all over!” OR “finally, it’s all over.” Anticipation of outright good or negative forthcoming events can set you up for another trauma or extend the same one. The reality is: life’s a hike. And you’ve got well treaded boots.
- Note points of self-agency and action within the trauma; protect your esteem
- Beware of inflammation and immune functioning: sickness is likely. Modify diet towards all whole foods, rest, drink water, consume antioxidants, minerals, vitamins, probiotics
- Engage in honest and accurate assessment of “when it’s over” (it may NOT be over when local refs call the game: don’t pressure yourself to believe their judgements)
- Notice social influences and manage engagement with them. THEIR stress predispositions are transmissible.
- Use BOUNDARIES. Which might become clearer during and after the trauma. To create self-supportive space
And to wrap it all up together:
Pre-trauma: it helps to be socially protected, so a negative event isn’t the single factor between being okay and being resourceless. The ole “most americans are one missed paycheck away from houselessness” sentiment… is a problematic one that sets us up for PTSD emotionally and practically. This is where community and independence from societal pressures come in. We must create our own protective circumstances socially and in our lifestyles; those of us in the cptsd community generally don’t come equipped with them, or else we wouldn’t have the cptsd.
Peri-trauma: we need the brain-body system to operate. There will be times our physicalities are overwhelmed; cognitive functioning needs to take over. There are times our mentalities will be overwhelmed; body wisdom needs to be put in the driver seat. Building up grounding, centering, nervous system regulation, and attention-managing skills will help mightily.
Post-trauma: we need to stay associated with ourselves (meaning, our bodies and the timelines we live on). Avoidance of body, of identity, and of memory is damaging… because we WILL eventually need to come back to those things. It’s better to titrate throughout than to dive into a burning house down the road. Also, we need to be able to rely on our communities for resource support and mundane-reality pressure relief. We need to process in our own time, which means “getting back to normal functioning with minimal time out” should not be our focus. It doesn’t measure strength, it measures how successfully we’ve been conditioned to avoid our feelings. And we need time, space, and emotional energy to create stories that accurately reflect not only what happened, but how we estimate ourselves vs. our place in the world. “The earthquake took away everything because I am powerless on this dusty rock” is a PTSD-encouraging narrative. “The earthquake took away everything because natural disasters happen and humans, across history, show amazing resilience in recovering from these setbacks when they’re able to survive, like I did.” Is an accurate, neutral-positive, and healing place to start.
There are SO MANY THINGS WE CAN DO TO HELP OURSELVES before adult traumas take place, that we didn’t have the resources or autonomy for when we were children. We can’t stop trauma. We can’t erase societal pressure points (adverse living experiences). But we can prime our brains and bodies to respond to threats in the most beneficial ways possible. And. As PTG research tells us: we can even come out BETTER on the other side, thanks to our efforts, educations, and applicable intellect.
Til we meet again to continue the tr-conversation… Hail yourself. Hail your healing. Hail Archie. And cheers, friends.