On Trauma Therapy

(¾) “Sometimes my anxiety would get so bad that I’d turn completely white. I’d shoot out of bed some nights, and my heart would be racing, and I’d start running around the room trying to find stuff. My wife would have to physically put me back to bed. Then one day I was taking a train out of Hoboken, and we were passing through these wetlands, and there were all these reeds, and it reminded me of Afghanistan. And I looked down at my phone and there was a Facebook post commemorating the anniversary of the death of a guy in my company. And I got dizzy and couldn’t talk. I thought I was having a heart attack. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get help. I went to the emergency room at the VA and was diagnosed with PTSD. Eventually I found my way to Headstrong Project. At first I dreaded going to therapy. I went through a treatment called EMDR. My therapist would take me back to every point of trauma and have me describe it in detail. It was like literally going back in time. I could touch the faces of all the guys I’d lost. I could talk to them. We could talk about what happened. And how we all knew the risks. And how sometimes people died. And it was nobody’s fault. And I could apologize to them. And when it was over I’d be completely exhausted. And I’d feel like a bitch because I’d just cried for an hour. But it worked. The symptoms started to go away. After a few sessions, I remember walking into my therapist’s office and saying: ‘This stuff actually works!’ And he said: ‘Yeah. It does.’”

personal comic about being sad

Athos: Above all else.

-  Jennifer Andrashko, MSW, LICSW, is an ACSWA member and Behavioral Health Coordinator for a regional health center in rural Minnesota.

“Some of my colleagues tell me they can’t imagine working in pediatrics. Millions of years of evolution have conditioned us to respond to the cries of a child. We can’t bear to see a child in pain. And once we have children of our own, it makes the work even more difficult. We all handle it differently, but everyone cries at some point. Not in front of the patient, but everyone cries. Every few months we have a ceremony where we mourn all the children who have passed away. We have a slideshow. We make cards. We talk about them and remember them together. We acknowledge that we all feel the loss. And even though our grief is not as significant as the family’s, it’s not trivial either. And we must take time to acknowledge that. Or all of us will burn out.”

Interior Life

Another response is numbing, which can occur at any stage of the response and would be represented by a plunge toward the bottom axis of the graph.