Resurrect Your Mind! PTSD Recovery
We complete this focus on resurrection as relates to PTSD with exciting news concerning our minds and traumatic events. It is interesting that Evidence-Based Psychotherapy ( EBP), as mentioned in last week’s BLOG HERE is effective in helping people recover from traumatic experiences because rather than avoiding and suppressing memories, the memories are faced and dealt with, offering long-term relief.
Those words long-term relief are critical. There is relief from traumatic experiences, whether PTSD comes into play or not, and it’s not secured through avoiding our experiences and memories. Healing comes through facing them, speaking them out loud to someone we trust so that they no longer hold power in secret, dark places in our lives.
Bethany Wangelin, PhD, Director of the PTSD Clinical Team at the VA Medical Center in Charleston, SC shares, “Our mind is like a file cabinet. It categorizes events and information to make sense of an event and find a place for it. Every experience goes in a nice, orderly file. However, deeply traumatic events fit nowhere, they just intrude.EBP helps bring order to chaos. Once these traumatic events are properly addressed, they can be placed in a file no longer causing further hindrances with life.”
Sometimes our traumas are of our own making and other times we did nothing to cause them, but getting them out into the open and sharing them with others defuses their power.If the trauma is of our own making, we are told in the Bible, “…Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”(James 5:16) And if they are not of our making, we learn of God’s solution, “This is the message we have heard from Him and declare to you: in Him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, purifies us…” (I John 1:5-7)
Hiding and isolating ourselves in response to traumatic events and their memories merely takes us into deeper and deeper personal darkness. Freedom comes when we bring these things into the light by sharing them with a trusted individual, allowing our minds to realize these memories are no longer hidden in guilt or shame but instead are exposed, discussed, processed and categorized, ready to be placed the file cabinet of our minds labeled, “The Past.”They no longer hold power to harm us.
God makes this possible by offering forgiveness, hope, and the realization that in His love, He can weave all circumstances in our life into something that ultimately will be used for good in our lives either by strengthening our character or equipping us to help others with similar experiences. We read, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”( II Cor.1:3)
For your refreshed life today, may your mind be freed and comfort found as you bring every memory into the light to be dealt with, and then placed in the file cabinet of your mind marked THE PAST! Then you can face tomorrow with hope and anticipation.
