Just as polio stalked the 1950s, and AIDS overshadowed the 1980s and ‘90s, post-traumatic stress disorder haunts us in the early years of the twenty-first century.
—
Over a decade into America’s “global war on terror,” PTSD afflicts as many as 30% of the conflict’s veterans. But the disorder’s reach extends far beyond the armed forces. In total, some 27 million Americans are believed to be PTSD survivors. Yet to many of us, the disorder remains shrouded in mystery, secrecy and shame. Drawing on his own battles with post-traumatic stress, David J. Morris — a war correspondent and former Marine — has written an essential account of the illness, through interviews with people living with PTSD; forays into the rich scientific, literary and cultural history of the condition; and memoir. The following excerpt is from the chapter, “Alternatives:”
The fact is that for many people, Western talk therapies do not work for post-traumatic stress. Modern psychotherapy, partially inspired by the Freudian ideal of catharsis via verbiage, is in some ways the last thing some people need. As anyone who’s experienced true terror will tell you, the essence of the experience defies words, a fact that only serves to irritate some therapists, many of whom cling to a sort of crackpot wisdom that says that disclosure is the only way out. Jonathan Shay, a VA psychiatrist, describes in Achilles in Vietnam…
“During the early days of the current era of PTSD treatment, mental health professionals shared a folk belief that simply ‘getting it all out’ would result in safety, sobriety, and self-care. The consequences of these well-intended ‘combat debriefings’ were catastrophic, resulting in many suicides.”
As an alternative to mainstream talk therapy, yoga stands out as a uniquely effective treatment, precisely because it insists that people shut up and start listening to their bodies. Yoga works to correct the central lie of Western philosophy, which goes all the way back to Descartes, who said that the body and the mind are distinct entities that exist independent of each other.
Yoga seems to do this by encouraging you to focus on the “now” of your physical self, a form of nonthinking that might seem counterintuitive at first.
|
A number of recently completed studies, including one conducted by David Emerson and Bessel van der Kolk at Harvard Medical school, have shown that yoga is very effective at reducing the hypervigilance and hyperarousal associated with PTSD. if you’re familiar at all with yoga practice, it’s not hard to imagine why. Yoga teaches mindfulness of breath, calmness and connection to the rhythms of your body, allowing you to feel “at home” in it. All of these core practices serve to repair the damage done by trauma. As van der Kolk points out, “Neither CBT protocols nor psychodynamic therapeutic techniques pay sufficient attention to the experience and interpretation of disturbed physical sensations and preprogrammed physical action patterns.”
One of the major long-term goals of any trauma therapy is to get survivors to change their perception of time, to focus less on the past and focus more on the present. Yoga seems to do this by encouraging you to focus on the “now” of your physical self, a form of nonthinking that might seem counterintuitive at first. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this state as one of flow,arguing that “after an episode of flow is over, we generally emerge from it with a stronger self-concept . . . The musician feels at one with the harmony of the cosmos, the athlete moves at one with the team, the reader of the novel lives for a few hours in a different reality.
Many of these therapies exist on the margins of modern science and are only now being explored by researchers.
|
Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.” (Several trauma survivors have told me that they found the focus on “being present,” as described in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, to be strikingly powerful for them. As Tolle argues in his book, “To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.”)
Yoga is also… ridiculous. There is nothing sillier than seeing a bunch of people standing around in a park twisted into enlightened pretzels, repeating words from a long-dead language. Yoga is moronic, which is part of what makes it so great. In the Marine Corps, we had a saying: “If it’s stupid but it works, then it isn’t stupid.”
Personally, I plan on doing stupid, functional things like yoga for the rest of my life.
◊♦◊
Anton Chekhov, who was a doctor as well as a writer, once observed that “if many remedies are prescribed for an illness you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” There are many remedies recommended for post-traumatic stress, a truly bewildering variety of choices that can seem at times like a psychological supermarket. Some of these alternatives seem at first like applied common sense, while others seem more like applied hobbies, ideas that took root after someone found comfort in them and began recommending them to friends. Some of them sound suspiciously like religious cults.
Many of these therapies exist on the margins of modern science and are only now being explored by researchers. One review of alternative therapies published in the VA’s PTSD Research Quarterly in 2012 concluded that “the most striking finding overall is the relative lack of empirical evidence for CAM [Complementary and Alternative Medicines] for PTSD.” Very few of these alternatives seem genuinely harmful or dangerous, except possibly to your bank account.
The sheer number of them speaks to the magnitude of the problem, the inherent complexity of PTSD, and the extremes to which people will go to seek relief from their symptoms. With the growth in popularity of the PTSD diagnosis and mounting concern about the welfare of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, alternative therapies are showing up everywhere these days.
Excerpted from THE EVIL HOURS: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by David J. Morris. Copyright © 2015 by David J. Morris. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
The Evil Hours is now out in paperback.
This article was originally published on MariaShriver.com.
Would you like to help us shatter stereotypes about men?
Receive stories from The Good Men Project, delivered to your inbox daily or weekly.
—
Photo: Getty Images