PTSD Spirituality

The PTSD Spirituality Blog seeks to promote awareness and healing of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) regardless of cause.  It will also speak to veterans issues and other matters of spirituality.

There is a spiritual component to PTSD beyond the medical/psychiatric.  The latter are able to address the symptoms of PTSD with varying degrees of success.  One can be medicated to deal with anger, weeping, or sleeplessness.  Yet, anger, weeping, and sleeplessness are symptoms of PTSD and are not PTSD themselves.

PTSD sufferers exhibit objective, observable changes within the brain at the levels of the hippocampus and the amygdala.  This is important to note as it eliminates the claim that PTSD victims are simply cowards or lazy malingerers and that there is nothing really wrong with them. 

Given these physical components and the panoply of associated PTSD symptoms medical science is very useful in PTSD care.  I am not advocating ignoring competent medical advice to replace it with spiritual discovery and healing.  Rather, I am saying we can see some real healing if we supplement the medical care with spiritual care.

Beyond the medical, the core of PTSD is a spiritual concern.  The individual has suffered enormous trauma and as a result his or hers soul has been damaged.  At this point their relationships become disordered and are no longer at peace in the theological sense of peace as a series of right relationships.

The premise behind a PTSD Spirituality is that our spiritualities can help or harm us.  Proper spirituality create more peace.  It promotes life.  Spirituality can enable the soul to heal.   People who have  suffered damage to their soul, their very being, are susceptible to suicide.  The spiritual solution is to promote life.  In promoting life, I preserve my own life from the suicidal aspects of my PTSD.

When I teach on the Theology of Grief & Suffering I inform my students about a principle called “Non-Specific Solutions” (NSS).  This means that two people who suffer from the same thing may have healed in different ways and they are both valid.  There is no single, one size fits all, solution to trauma induced soul wounds.  Rather, each of is unique and valuable, and will respond differently.  This is a long winded way of saying what has worked for me and kept me from killing myself does not necessarily work for every other case of PTSD.  Spirituality has kept me alive and I have seen it keep others alive as well.

Semper Pax, Dr. Z