A Simpler Way to Understand PTSD

by Alison L Miller, MSN, PMH-BC, RN, FAIS

I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 1986, six months after my baby daughter and I almost died during childbirth. But that isn't when it started.

If there was a DSM qualifier for PTSD that included "stacked" traumas, that's what I would be diagnosed with. Instead, they tend to call it "Complex PTSD." or cPTSD. Whatever it's called, it sucks to deal with.

Like so many, my first batch of traumas started in childhood. I lived on Chicago's South Side during the 1960s and endured repeated threats and physical assaults by roving gangs of older kids while riding my bike or walking home from school. I was an easy target and they enjoyed terrorizing and beating me. Compounding the trauma was my parents' self-absorption and lack of interest in me and my world. It was, as they say, a difficult childhood.

Later in life, I suffered three different, unrelated, serious medical events that were handled with an appalling a lack of medical skill and compassion. One of the events nearly cost me my life.

Over the years, additional traumas have been stacked on top of those, but the physical threats at such an early age imprinted themselves on my nervous system so that I now have the classic "persistently dysregulated threat-response" of PTSD.

Happily, I put my experiences to good use. I made a career out of helping others understand and navigate their own dysregulated threat-responses--specifically combat veterans. I served as a kind of "translator" for them because I am able to speak directly to the inner world of the traumatized. I have lived in that unique world for decades. I know that place and its landscape.

And more importantly, I know how to build roads and bridges that take us away from that place.

Trauma-Informed Care is simple: it means that all health care professionals start with the ASSUMPTION that every patient has been traumatized, and therefore, our actions, our words, our systems need to be gentler, kinder, and more compassionate. Genuine empathy is the balm that soothes those of us with PTSD. It really is that simple. (More on this in another post.)