Wednesday, October 21, 2015

PTSD Recovery: Try Using Inner Child Exercises

I have received enormous benefit to my PTSD recovery from the use of inner child exercises. Inner child exercises help heal the wounded child who lived for so many years within my body.  It was that damaged child who suffered the abuse that led to my posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

When I was first presented the concept of inner child work, I thought it sounded silly. But in a time of great desperation, I tried it, with the most remarkable results. My PTSD recovery is greatly benefitted by using inner child exercises. Here’s how they work.

PTSD Recovery By Accessing The Inner Child

In the late 1980s, I exhibited the symptoms of PTSD, but I couldn’t remember a traumatic event that might have happened to me. I was attending the Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) Twelve Step program, trying to figure out the effects of growing up with alcoholism. One of the great blessings of that time was to be working with a sponsor (mentor) who was also a therapist.

When I told him there were blank spaces in my memories of my childhood, he PTSD recovery can be enhanced by accessing traumatic memories with inner child exercises. To find out how to use the technique for PTSD recovery, read this.suggested what he called Gestalt therapy, or empty chair exercises. He said it would be a way to access the wounded young inner child. He told me that when abuse happens, the ego gets frozen at a certain age, and that the child would be able to access those abuse memories. It sounded super psychological, and I smiled politely and dismissed the concept.

Not long after that, I began to remember traumatic incidents with my Dad, escalating in violence, which started when I was a teenager. At the same time, my world was falling apart, and I grew increasingly desperate. I sensed there was something else, even more damaging, deeply buried within my soul, but I couldn’t access it. One night I had a dream about someone chasing me with a gun, and when I turned to look, it was my Dad (PTSD And Nightmares: Dream Revision Technique.
 
 
http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/traumaptsdblog/2015/10/19/the-use-of-inner-child-exercises-in-ptsd-recovery/

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Did You Know

Darkness to Light: DID YOU KNOW?


Saturday, October 3, 2015

Stress Is The Enemy

Stress - everyone has it but no body wants it.   Stress can spur one to achieve events and rewards one has never accomplished before.  It can also cause poor health, it is detrimental to relationships, and can cause a complete mental break down.  Since I don't know what stressors you have, I will use my stressors to illustrate what I mean:
  • Being mistreated or abused as a child - major stress
  •   Leaving home,
  • Getting a bachelor and a masters degree - major stress,
  • A bad marriage,
  • A divorce,
  • A move to another state,
  • A new boyfriend and long-term relationship,
  • A major health problem.
Those are just some of the difficulties I've had through my lifetime.  Of course the most traumatic event was 9 years of sexual, emotional, mental and spiritual abuse I have had as a child which I tell the complete story of in my book, Deliver Us From Evil.

In a book called The Body Keeps The Score, it's talks about trauma and stress and the effects these have over the body many years after they have happened.  It is meant to be a textbook but I was able to glean from it the resiliency we have as human beings to go on to recover in many ways from the traumas in our lives.  I would highly recommend this book if you are willing to read a heavier subject manner book than usual.   Here is information from the jacket cover:

    "From this profoundly humane book offers a sweeping understanding of the causes and consequences of trauma, offering hope and clarity to everyone touched by the devastation.  Trauma has emerged as one of the great public health challenges of our time not only because of the well-documented effects on combat veterans and on victims of accidents and crimes but because of the hidden toll of sexual and family violence and schools devastated by abuse, neglect and addiction."
                                          Bessell van der Kolk, M.D.
 Amazon link - http://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma-ebook/dp/B00G3L1C2K/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443902110&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Body+Keeps+the+score

I challenge each of you to read this book and comment on it on my website comments page or on comments here on my blog.  Here are the links to both website and blog

http://deliverusfromevilbook.blogspot.com/ - blog
http://www.deliverusfromevil.us/ - website home page

I hope you are able to start saying no when someone asks you to take on more than you can handle without stressing and handle only what causes you less stress.

by Deborah Hunter-Marsh