PTSD Awareness Day From a Survivor

I cannot think of a better day to explain why I do what I do. I am a survivor! Not once, twice or even five times, but this will give you an idea of why I work as hard as I do, devoted so much research and get so pissed off!

It is the reason for this site, Combat PTSD Wounded Times, all the books, videos and articles, training, research and yes, my marriage that has lasted over 3 decades!

If you have PTSD, no matter what caused it, you need to hear this. If nothing else, this is the one message you need to get today of all days, because all the bullshit out there has been blocking what could change your next day.

Yep! #TakeBackYourLife from trauma. I did!

Cross posted on CombatPTSDWoundedTimes

PTSD Patrol Using Your Own Headlights

Got your headlights on?
PTSD Patrol
Kathie Costos
June 24, 2108

When most people are still sleeping, I am on the road at 5 am, heading into work. Most of the time I am thinking of what it is going to take to get you guys to turn on your own headlights and see more clearly. 

Friday, I decided to take my camera and show what it is like on the road before most people wake up!

Considering how my life has been that way, wake before most people on PTSD, the road was basically mine. There were people on the road before me, but we had a better chance of getting people to follow us than we do now.

Back then, they could see us easily. We had our high beams on to show the way out of darkness. Now it is like there are way too many people congesting the road and leaving us trapped behind them.

It is too hard to see where you are going, depending on the lights in your rearview mirror to show you the way. It is too hard to see when you have someone driving toward you with their high beams on and blinding you from seeing what is in front of you.

Anyway, you have control over your own headlights. Not the ones on your dashboard, but the ones in your own head. 

Why drive in darkness? If you do not know what PTSD is, then that is exactly what you are doing. Sure you can move from one place to another, but do you ever find where you want to be?

You can drink or do drugs, but that only gets you numb.

You can stop talking, stay in the house and keep to yourself, but that leaves you alone. This is your battle now but just like in combat, you do not have to face this enemy by yourself.

Really strange thing happened with this video. I had the radio on and the Eagle "Take It Easy" was playing. Sure enough, right where "flatbed Ford" came in, so did a flatbed pulling off the on ramp.

"Take It Easy"

Well, I'm running down the road

tryin' to loosen my load

I've got seven women on my mind,

Four that wanna own me,

Two that wanna stone me,

One says she's a friend of mine

Take It easy, take it easy

Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy

Lighten up while you still can

don't even try to understand

Just find a place to make your stand

and take it easy

Well, I'm a standing on a corner

in Winslow, Arizona

and such a fine sight to see

It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed

Ford slowin' down to take a look at me

Come on, baby, don't say maybe

I gotta know if your sweet love is

gonna save me

We may lose and we may win though

we will never be here again

so open up, I'm climbin' in,

so take it easy

Well I'm running down the road trying to loosen

my load, got a world of trouble on my mind

lookin' for a lover who won't blow my

cover, she's so hard to find

Take it easy, take it easy

don't let the sound of your own

wheels make you crazy

come on baby, don't say maybe

I gotta know if your sweet love is

gonna save me, oh oh oh

Oh we got it easy

We oughta take it easy

PTSD Patrol Sunday Morning Drive

Time to change gears
PTSD Patrol
Kathie Costos
June 17, 2018

This morning on Combat PTSD Wounded Times, I wrote about how some people want to change the term of PTSD by eliminating the "D" as if that would make all the difference. While I do agree that the conversation needs to change, they are in the wrong lane!

You changed after as a survivor from the disruption of what was "normal" for you. 

This is the definition of "disorder."

Definition of disorder transitive verb 

1 : to disturb the order of 

2 : to disturb the regular or normal functions of

Basically it means things were changed. That means you can change them again. Just like you change gears in your vehicle depending on where you want to go, the only way to go forward is to put it into D.

There was nothing "normal" about what almost killed you. There is nothing normal for humans about war, or any other traumatic event. If it was part of "normal" life, then we'd all be in trouble.

Humans need help in life all the time, but after traumatic events, they need even more help to survive. They need people trained to come and help them do that.

For those who do the responding, you need even more help to do that because the assumption is, you are trained to "deal with it" no matter how many times you respond, no matter what you have to respond to, and, no matter how much your hearts get broken. 

Think about what made you want to risk your life as a living, or even a deeper love of volunteering to do it.

That took a great deal of compassion mixed with a supercharged courage. If people think that one little letter is keeping you from asking for help, then they are not thinking at all.

PTSD Patrol Sunday Morning Empowerment Zone--Power Cables

Is Your Power Source Changed or Charged
PTSD Patrol 
Kathie Costos 
June 10, 2018

Last week I had to bring my car into KIA for maintenance. Since the only way I could get shots of under my car for PTSD Patrol, I bought my camera.

Standing under it, seeing everything that is hidden, but always there, I started to think about how the same thing goes on with all of us. 

We can see a lot on the surface. There are things we see but there is so much more going on than what we can see within us.

We have histories in our lives. Bad times when it all turned to crap and times when things were so good, we ended up thinking we did not deserve it. Funny how that works. Bad shit happens and we tend to think we didn't deserve it, then good stuff happens and we don't think we deserve that either.

We are charged by both. Negative things happen, as well as positive just like our car batteries. The battery feeds the rest of the vehicle through cables. Sometimes those cables get corroded and the energy cannot feed the power.


Ed Ruelas wrote on Your Mechanic Symptoms of a Bad or Failing Battery Cable

(Yes, Gunny, GDi, God Did it)

Corrosion on battery terminals
Another symptom of a bad or failing cable is the presence of corrosion on the terminals. Corrosion develops as a result of the acidic vapor produced by the battery when it becomes hot from exposure to the heat of engine operation. Over time, the vapor can begin to corrode the terminal and cause corrosion to build up. Corrosion will cause increased resistance along the contact surface of the terminal, and in more severe cases, can even completely block the flow of electricity. Corrosion can also seep into the insides of the cable and corrode the insides of the cable. Usually a cable corroded to this degree must be replaced.

That is the part that all of us need to remember. When it seems as if you are getting bombarded by bad stuff hitting you, it is all you focus on. That is negatively charging your life. Yet when you plug into memories of times in your life before, when it all seemed hopeless, remember that you did overcome it, then you focus on being able to do it again. That is charging your life with a positive power cable.

If you put your life on the line and ended up with PTSD, there are things you need to focus on to help you feed the power within you. First thing to think about is why you wanted to serve in the first place. Let that be your positive cable and everything good within you belongs there.

Next take everything bad that happened, all your suffering, all the times you felt as if you were being punished, and let that travel through the positive energy that was the outcome. You survived all of it!

Clearing the road to heal PTSD

PTSD Patrol Changing the Conversation
PTSD Patrol and Combat PTSD Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
June 9, 2018

We have got to change the conversation from Suicide Awareness to Healing Awareness! Suicides increase in Florida, country but we have failed at wondering what the hell we got wrong. 

Considering there has been this massive "effort" to change the outcome, no one seems to thinking about changing the FUBAR attempt of "raising awareness" that people were committing suicide. 

I've spent almost my entire life fighting against oblivious fools because I was also one of those who lost hope to the point where death seemed better than one more day on this earth.

No, I didn't try to commit suicide. I prayed I would get out the hospital bed in a body bag. Yes, I was that lost that I wanted the infection trying to kill me, to actually win.

I know what trauma is. I've been facing it since the age of 5, when a doctor not only told my parents I could have died, but used the word "should" have died. He was talking about how two things that happened, should have killed me. There was no earthly reason for surviving the push from the slide that caused me to fall onto the earth...on my head, and no earthly reason the first doctor missing the crack in my scull and the concussion. She told my Mom to take me home to get a good nights sleep.

One thing after another and every time should have caused PTSD in me, but it didn't for a very earthly reason. Nothing was left for me to "get over" on my own. My family had a habit of talking everything to death. It brought me out of the abnormality of what could have killed me, the normality of a safer existence. They never treated me like a victim. They comforted me for a while and then it was full swing into survivor mode.

I got into all this because of my Vietnam veteran husband in 1982 and have not stopped because while I do not know what combat did to him, I know what trauma did to me. I also know what it did not do and why it didn't. It is one of the reasons I spent years training in Crisis Intervention and becoming a Chaplain. 

Taking back my life from "it" was a challenge I was not about to lose and I am not about to let anyone else suffer in silence and fall into hopelessness without one hell of a fight!

I'm trying my best to get people to understand that their lives can get better. After over 29,000 post on this site, hundreds of videos, books and...you get the idea, I started PTSD Patrol because while I have seen the worst outcome too many times, I am a living example of the best outcome of all! I took back my life from the thing that tried to kill me.

Everything on PTSD Patrol is tied to driving. Yes, driving. Everyone can understand how we control where we go, how we get there but few understand how their vehicle works. This ends up with it breaking down! 

We are in our own vehicles! We are not our bodies but we are in them. The goal is simple and that is to make something as complicated as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder into something that if we do not know how to fix it, we go to a mechanic for our minds instead of our vehicles.

If you want to change the outcome, change the conversation! We do not want your money! I've done this work for over 3 decades and lose money every year because it does not cost much to talk or make people aware they can heal. Plus I have a regular job that covers the expenses.

We want your time so if you want to be part of the Road Crew, contact me. On Facebook, I am scoutpreacher and by email woundedtimes@aol.com. For videos on YouTube PTSD Patrol Sunday Morning Empowerment Zone

Kathie Costos DiCesare
Published on Feb 25, 2018
Starting today, we're going to be changing the conversation from suicide to empowerment. The only way to change the outcome, is to help veterans find hope again. They need to know what PTSD is, why they have it, but more than that, they need to know they can take back control of their lives. Lot better than taking their live isn't it?

Check back on Sunday mornings for more.

If you have one of those groups "raising awareness" then please stop talking about what veterans already know how to do and start helping them learn what they need to know, how to #TakeBackYourLife