We’ve heard so many stories of veterans who live with PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan or vets who come home and struggle with PTSD. For a long time, there was a stigma around the kinds of emotional pain and traumatic stress that vets were experiencing, and they tried to hide it from friends, family, other soldiers and vets, and doctors. This may be changing. As it’s becoming known that PTSD is, in a way, a “normal” reaction to experiencing the horrors of war—seeing buddies die or get injured, killing other people, being injured oneself—soldiers and vets are feeling less fear that they’ll be stigmatized and are accepting the fact that they’re suffering from PTSD.
PTSD is painful and has consequences in one’s life
As a veteran of wars, knowing that you have PTSD and accepting the fact is a good first step. That doesn’t take away the emotional pain, though. It’s with you every day. There are a number of treatments being used to try to help vets heal from the symptoms of PTSD. Many take a long time; many offer only partial success.
Symptoms of PTSD
The symptoms of PTSD tend to be similar, whether they’re caused by war experiences or other terrifying or painful experiences. Some examples include:
- Recurring nightmares similar to the terrifying or painful event(s)
- Recurring intrusive images, body feelings and/or emotions that evoke the event(s)
- Difficulty sleeping
- Difficulty concentrating, spaciness
- Quick anger or sadness; chronic sadness or depression; emotional pain
- Feeling separate from life, from what’s happening or even from your body
- Difficulty enjoying things you used to enjoy
- Difficulty feeling connected to others; feeling you can’t love anymore
- A feeling of isolation
- Chronic grief
EFT for PTSD
Although war experiences are very different from experiences that most people will ever go through, the way you’re suffering with PTSD is similar to that experienced by anyone who has experienced the severe threat in their lives that results in traumatic stress. With an experienced EFT Practitioner/psychotherapist, EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) is a method that is often extremely effective and quick in healing symptoms of PTSD. It takes away the negative charge from traumatic experiences and gives traumatized people distance from trauma events. After relatively few sessions, clients often experience these traumatic events as being far away from them; the emotional pain is gone. It’s all just matter of fact, like watching a movie from a great distance. For more information on stress, trauma, PTSD and using EFT Tapping to heal, see EFT-Emotionalfreedom.com . Also see blog posts on PTSD: EFT helps with PTSD, EFT helps with PTSD, part 2 and EFT helps with PTSD, part 3
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