I recently read a magazine article highlighting the issues with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers. The article talked about the soldiers’ reluctance to admit that they were struggling with PTSD or talk about their experiences. Also recently, a woman shared with me that her father, who fought in World War II, told her about a battlefield experience that he had never told anyone before.

I always find it interesting to hear the speculations of people without PTSD about why those of us with PTSD do not share our stories because, in most cases, the speculations are way off base. I can tell you why – We don’t want to burden you. When you have endured something as horrifying as being locked in a box for hours covered in blood or feces, or storming a beach through the body parts of your fallen comrades, you don’t know how much the other person can handle hearing. We don’t talk about it because we don’t want to burden you with the horrors that haunt our nightmares.

If you are parenting a foster or adopted child who suffers from PTSD, your child suffers from the same symptoms as the soldiers you read about in the magazines. I did not appreciate that the PTSD of the soldier and the abused child is the same disorder until reading the book Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman. The only real difference is that, if the trauma started when the child was young (typically under age six), then the abused child had additional mental “tools” to use to protect herself that the adult soldier did not have. Those mental “tools” now exhibit themselves through dissociative disorder diagnoses. However, at its root, trauma is trauma, and the war veteran’s flashbacks are just as vivid as those experienced by the abused boy or girl.

Back to the topic at hand – It is unfortunate that people with PTSD are so reluctant to talk about the trauma because talking about it is the key to healing from it. My therapist told me, “you need to talk about it until you no longer feel the need to talk about it any longer.” For a few years, I felt the compelling need to talk about the trauma all the time. Now, I mostly talk about it to help someone else.

I have to be careful, though, because some people truly cannot handle hearing about the horrors that I have endured. I sometimes don’t know what is “safe” to say to another person, and so I choose to say nothing unless the person is forewarned that what I am going to say is very disturbing. I will also occasionally use a story from my past to shut someone up who is being arrogantly ignorant. (I promise I don’t do this often, but my friends find it hysterical when I “drop the bomb” because it stops the other person completely in her tracks!)

Please don’t assume that someone with PTSD doesn’t want to talk about the past. The person might just be trying to protect you from ugly truths. If you are the parent, then you need to hear those truths, no matter how ugly they are.

Photo credit: JulieC