PTSD Patrol Kathie Costos July 14, 2019
I thought about this for a long time and it is time to stop doing the weekly videos.
Right now, our house is for sale and we are planning a huge move. Between work, operating Wounded Times and doing other work, there are just not enough hours in the day. The message is the same on that site. While I wanted to just keep PTSD Patrol on a positive note, it seems as if no one else wants to hear it. With everything going on that is mostly bad news, I thought that people would be hungry for ideas about what they could do to change the conversation. After over two years, that hasn't happened. After we move, sometime after the fall, I'll revisit this endeavor, but for now...that's all folks!
Working to make a difference for them... or yourself?
PTSD Patrol Kathie Costos June 30, 2019 Why on earth do we save stuff we do not need to hang onto?
That is something that I have been dealing with for a last few months. We are getting ready to move as soon as our house sells. It has been a lesson on deciding what is really important and what is just something you hang onto. I have been going through the cabinets under our sinks, finding half opened bottles of stuff that didn't work. What got me was there were several of the same products...which meant I didn't learn the time before THAT DID NOT WORK. In other words, wasted time and money. What made me frustrated with myself was the fact instead of tossing it out right away, I wasted space saving it. What was I thinking? Oh, thats right. I wasn't thinking...I was just doing. Humans do that all the time especially with memories we do not need to hang onto. Nuisance residue clogging up the roadway between where we are and where we want to go. Sit down with a piece of paper and write down what you remember about certain events that caused PTSD. What do you need to remember that is helpful? What should you forget that is hurtful?
#BreakTheSilence and #TakeBackYourLife
If it is helpful, save it. If it is hurtful, make peace with it and then get rid of it. Stop carrying it around with you. Much like the lesson I have been learning this time. If it isn't worth paying to move from here to wherever we go, then it isn't worth saving now. It is taking up room that new and improved thoughts could move into! (you'll understand the title when you listen to this video)
PTSD Patrol Kathie Costos June 23, 2019 Why do responders suffer a deeper level of PTSD? Is it because they are exposed over and over again to traumatic events? Or is it because they have the "one time too many" hit them? After decades of research, it became clear that for responders, it is more about the strength of their emotional core that makes causes the hardest hit. It is the reason I became a Chaplain back in 2008. I trained to respond to responders knowing that the very thing inside of them causing them to take on those jobs, also caused them the greatest harm. Oh, no, not all bad news, because that same emotional core holds the power to heal.
This video was done for National Guards and Reservist...the IFOC gave me an award for it because they were using it to help police officers and firefighters. It is called PTSD I Grieve for that reason.
It is nice to be proven right but it also grieves me to my own core. How is it that I was right all these years...but no one would listen?
A study on veterans and PTSD from Norway was released today and the evidence should be clear to anyone trying to change the road our veterans and reponders have been on for far too long.
“A lot of soldiers told stories of how witnessing someone else’s suffering, especially of children who became victims of the war, were tough to work through.” Andreas Espetvedt Nordstrand
For Veterans, Witnessing Suffering Can Mean Worse PTSD
PsychCentral By Traci Pedersen
Associate News Editor
23 Jun 2019
A study of Norwegian veterans who served in Afghanistan finds that being exposed to the death and suffering of others tends to result in worse symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than being put in life-threatening situations.
The study, published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, is part of a comprehensive survey of how veterans are faring after the war in Afghanistan. Just over 7,000 Norwegian soldiers participated in the war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011, and 4,053 of them participated in this research.
Trauma is roughly divided into danger-based and non-danger-based stressors. Both types of stressors lead to an increase in PTSD, an anxiety disorder which can involve being hyper-alert, jumpy, sleeping poorly and reliving events after they’ve happened. read more here
To change the outcome, we have to change the conversation. #BreakTheSilence and tell them TakeBackYourLife
PTSD Patrol Kathie Costos June 16, 2019 Today is a hard post for me to put up. We are leaving Florida. After 15 years, hundreds of events and countless veterans coming into our lives, it is time to move back north. Our daughter moved a few years ago and the last trip we took up there, it finally felt like Christmas for us. I miss our family and all the memories we had, as well as the change in seasons. The heat and humidity down here is not good for someone with my health filming for hours in the sun most of the year. That said, my life is like any vehicle with moving parts. There are changes as we all get older and we need to be prepared to stop being comfortable complaining about them. Each of us know when it is time to change but the trick is actually doing it. My husband needed to let some people we know about the move before I went public with it. In this video, the move is mentioned, so I figured it was the best time to let readers know why things have been a bit out of whack for a while. Between getting this house ready for sale and trying to find the area we want to move, it has been really draining my energy. I promise that I will keep posting as long as I can on both sites and when I cannot, I'll start as soon as possible. After all these years, I won't abandon you now. OK, that's done. In this video, Sgt. Dave Matthews and I are again talking about the book For the Love of Jack, His War My Battle. Living with PTSD sucks! It can beat the crap out of any positive thoughts you have and kill off dreams of what you thought it would be like. You have a choice. You can stay trapped by it or you can kick it in the teeth and refuse it let it define how you live your life from this point on! It is hard on families when they do not know what to do, but I can assure you, if you are willing to do the work and learn as much as you can, you can win this battle for those you love too! Face it. If I can do it, anyone can!
