PTSD Spirituality

I am happy to inaugurate PTSD and Prayer as a new category at the PTSD Spirituality Blog.  Learning more about how prayer heals PTSD is a voyage I wish to embark on.

PTSD seeks to kill those who are afflicted with it.  It severs our relationships.  Among them it severs our relationship with God.  PTSD drives us into isolation.  When those relationships have been sufficiently damaged and we have been sufficiently isolated, suicide is a natural, horrible outcome.  This applies to PTSD from military service as well as from other forms of trauma such as rape.

In as much as PTSD destroys our identities, prayer is a major way to restore our identities.  We have been afflicted with a PTSD-Identity.  Our souls need to be healed in order to recover and enhance our identities.  Many of us wish that we could be that person we were before we served.  And, many of those who have become alienated from us wish we were that pre-PTSD person as well.

Prayer is one of the ways we can re-discover and restore our souls.  PTSD seeks to destroy our ability to pray. Rediscovering prayer keeps us alive instead of dying. While there are many types and intensities of prayer, deepest prayer requires attention to God, PTSD destroys our ability to keep that particular sustained focused attention.

Hence, I have started this new category, “PTSD and Prayer,” for this blog.  In it I intend to explore prayer as its own topic and to explore prayer as a means of PTSD soul healing.  A healing that will allow us to diminish the PTSD-Identity and enhance the identity, the soul, which God blessed us with.

I have survived much of my PTSD due to the prayers of others and rediscovering prayer.  PTSD is a complex condition which attacks us in multiple ways.  Thus, it needs to be healed in multiple ways.  One of those ways is prayer.

Two posts in one day, I am like Lazarus coming out, I am.

 I am speaking in Madison, Wisconsin, later on today at an ecumenical Jewish-Christian PTSD healing service.  There will be a presentation about PTSD and its spiritual elements, followed by questions, hospitality and then a healing service.  Since my hands already are hurting, I will lift the information and paste it in below.  As I try to make a come back as a PTSD Spirituality blogger, I shall attempt to be more up to date and provide lead time to PTSD healing events that you may find of interest.

PTSD seeks to kill those whom it afflicts.  It seeks to take formerly vibrant human beings and transform them into the Undead until it can kill them flat outright.  Whether a person suffers PTSD from combat, rape, a natural disaster such as Katrina, or some other trauma, they now live with a new threat that seeks to take their life.

It does this by wounding our souls.  Many of us with PTSD end up killing ourselves fast or slow.  The fast cases are pretty obvious.  Slow cases of PTSD suicide comes from drug abuse, alchoholism, and cumualitive neglect from the rest of the country.  As this blog and my professional writing grow I will mention more about these in detail.

Regardless of how any of us feel about the current wars, PTSD is a confirmed result.  It is not retreat, disloyalty, or cowardice to acknowledge that trauma affects human beings.  It is simply realism.  Regardless of where we stand, saving the lifes of trauma surviors and their families should be an easy priority.

Untreated severe PTSD kills its victim.  My goal is to help increase PTSD awareness and to offer some spiritual advice.  Just because someone has PTSD and has been neglelcted by self and/or others up till now is no cause for despair.  That life can be saved.  That life has value.  That life has too much value for us to allow PTSD to consume it.

Semper Pax, Dr. Z