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Dealing With PTSD

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Ritual abuse is one of the most severe forms of physical, psychological, and spiritual trauma that a human being can undergo. During the trauma itself, the victim is silenced and taught to ignore his or her own internal feelings about events, and in many cases is taught to dissociate their trauma away.

Once safety is achieved, or in later life when the survivor experiences events that remind them of former painful events, they often wrestle with the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.

In fact, dissociative identity disorder, which is common in ritual abuse survivors, has been labeled by some therapists and psychiatrists as “a chronic form of PTSD”.

What are the Symptoms of PTSD? The symptoms of PTSD can begin soon after the trauma, or may resurface years later, depending on the coping style of the trauma survivor. The main symptoms include: re-experiencing the trauma, and the symptoms related to the event(s) and avoidance of remembering the trauma.

Re-experiencing the trauma can include any of the senses, and for the survivor may mean brief visual flashbacks (such as of a ritual scene or a long suppressed event), feeling emotions tied to the traumatic event (such as terror, nausea, or rage), and feeling physical sensations, or body memories. These can include feeling that the hands or feet are tied up, that the survivor has a gag over their mouth, or even re-experiencing the sensation of being shocked or sexually tortured.

Bad dreams and nightmares may mean sleepless nights, or nights with interrupted sleep, as the survivor wakes up with a feeling of terror.

In some cases, the survivor may fully re-experience the event and act as if it is happening again (abreaction). The remembering can cause feelings of severe anxiety, defensiveness, or even combativeness in some survivors, as anger, terror, and physical feelings recall the original trauma.

These re-experiencing the trauma are as if the brain and psyche are trying to struggle through the trauma that occurred and was forgotten. The survivor may not have total conscious recall, but their body never forgot what happened to it.

Remembering can be triggered by sights, smells, tastes, sounds, or a situation that in some way reminds the survivor of their trauma. Some survivors are triggered when they have children who are the same age that they were when they underwent certain abuse; the sight of their child reminds them of their own pain history. Others may be triggered by holiday decorations, or the anniversary of a painful event.

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