Tony Robbins says that our biggest fears come from loss, less, or never. He says the best way to counteract them is to find a place of gratitude.
I’m not going to disagree with Tony, I think he is on to something. If we think we are going to lose something it puts us in fear mode. It really triggers our amygdala if it’s one of our basic human needs: food supply, water supply, and shelter (we don’t deal with very often in a first world country where they are abundant and never ending) love and belonging (these threaten us all of the time).
When something is threatening to take away those needs from us, whether it’s a person, corporation, or situation, it can almost paralyze us in the moment. It’s really hard, and almost impossible, to find gratitude in those moments.
Eventually the paralysis disappears, and life carries on, but the energy of that threat keeps living inside of us and we become hyper sensitive and over reactive to anything that feeds it.
This is how I see PTSD.
PTSD exists on a spectrum from a person who has had their life threatened to a person who has had a basic human need threatened. The less control we feel we have over a situation the more we feel threatened by the loss, less, or never threats.
A threat is quite harmful to us because it looms and we keep churning it over in our minds trying to resist it or work our life around it so it won’t happen.
The energy of the threat needs to be deactivated and released from us before it loses its power over us. If we leave it alive and well inside of us our lens becomes jaded, we can’t see things clearly or think clearly and we become reactionary, creating new issues where none existed.
My energy therapy lady helped me to deactivate a lot of this energy I was holding inside. Writing about it and exploring the angles helps to deactivate it also. This is part of the catharsis of writing.
The worst thing we can do is ignore it because when it’s activated it’s still rolling around in our thoughts and living inside of us, many times without us realizing it.
PTSD isn’t just for war veterans. It happens to all of us because life happens to all of us.