In a world increasingly challenged by war, crumbling family systems, natural disasters and many other socio-cultural issues, the number of people dealing with PTSD continues to rise. It is estimated that by the National Center for PTSD that 5.2 million American adults are thought to have PTSD in any given year, and about 7-8% of the US population will experience PTSD in some form during their lifetime.
When I first had the idea for Peaceful Warrior I was with my husband at the VA Hospital and we were working with his doctors at the VA hospital to get him some help, we were given two options:
Psychotherapy for PTSD, which is a cognitive behavior therapy involved meeting with a counselor who usually had no Combat Related Experience, and while this may not seem like a big deal to some of us, how can you truly relate, analyze and treat a person who has Combat Related PTSD if you have never been in a combat related situation and have no idea the level of trauma your patient is trying to convey to you other than what you have read in books? I watched this frustrate my husband and I listened to him tell me how frustrated he was talking about these things to someone who had no idea what he had been through.
In conjunction with the psychotherapy they gave my husband anti-depressants which caused us both to struggle to cope with the side effects and added to his frustration by creating more feelings of guilt for taking pharmaceuticals.
They also wanted my husband to talk about his traumas to others, they suggested group therapy sessions, counseling, none of it alleviated his frustration.
Talk therapy can further agitate some patients and this is because the speech center of the brain often shuts down during trauma leaving the right brain to record the event visually, they may literally not have the words to speak of the trauma. Yoga can stimulate the muscle memory, so what the mind cannot always remember, sometimes the body can and working through things physically is sometimes easier than talking about what you feel, especially if you do not have words to describe the feelings.
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