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• Thursday, December 21, 2006 08:16 AM

  Pop Psychology and Sanity

  Be very, very wary of anyone offering PTSD sufferers a website that features a "payment" menu option.

  Be very, very wary of anyone who wants to make "easy" those things which have come to you at great personal cost and sacrifice. Discounting your experiences is disrespectful of your need to own what only you can own.

  Be very, very wary of pop psychologists who advertise processes for which there is little, if any, peer-reviewed research to back up their claims. Your sanity is more important than anything a quick, "magical" cure can offer you. Drugs and alcohol proved that last sentence to me in spades.

  Be very gentle with yourself and go slow. The last thing you need to do is what I did -- get free and whole and then find yourself surrounded by people and a world where freedom and wholeness are far from highly valued or prized. Yet wholeness and freedom from fighting other people's battles inside your own head is the only path that I have found that honorably resolves what will drive you to resolve it, or perish. People need to compensate you for the space they take up in your head, especially when their presence causes you great grief and suffering.

  Trauma turns the brain against itself, making it a bad and untrustworthy neighborhood. This is the unkindest cut of all. So don't go into a bad neighborhood without holding the hand of someone who has the bonafide experience of cleaning up their own bad neighborhood. Don't pay to have someone with letters after their name on a shingle retraumatize you. You have suffered enough without falling down an open manhole cover of hopelessness and despair.

  There is real hope out there, but you have to want REAL HOPE. Everyone NEEDS real hope, but precious few know how to choose it. Before someone drives you to drink yourself sick or poke a bunch of needles in your arm, reach out to your elder brothers who have gone before you. Trust the process of healing that operates inside of you all of the time without your direct awareness of it. Trust your gut. It has gotten you this far.

  —Volaar Read Volaar's other letters
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