Helen Harray, 24 June 2014

When your mind goes over and over something, around and around and can’t get out of the rut, over processing, reliving, examining and not letting go. I think this is post traumatic stress on the lower end of the continuum. You may not have had a dramatic trauma such as being in a war, accident or earthquake for which you are diagnosed with PTSD, an extreme end of the continuum, but you may well have had significant interruption to normal functioning as a child which expresses itself in very similar patterns on a lower end of the continuum, but just as debilitating. You may not have survived combat, but you ‘survived’ childhood and now have the same kinds of disturbances.

I don’t like being told off. Well who does!! But my childish response to this was to vow to be ‘good’ and never put myself into a position in which I felt ashamed and would have to say sorry. This set up the rather unhealthy dynamic of having to be super aware, super organized and to guard reactions and emotions all the time. It’s tiring. We might think this just gets better as we grow up but very often it does not. The inner child is just as wounded as the day it happened, until the memories are faced and resolved.
I do believe that present conflicts that often produce ‘over-reactions’ in us are an invitation to look behind the stirred emotions and see what unresolved things are being triggered. So instead of just being angry with the person and trying to justify my responses, or feel powerless and doing nothing, we can learn a better way.
When someone telling me off recently set off my PTS processing pattern again, I faced the memories of my mother being constantly angry with me. As I allowed Jesus into them, the truth and insight he brought renewed my mind and the love he communicated restored my soul. I took responsibility to repent and break the power of the inner vows that set up a core belief pattern…in this case: to be good and to avoid situations where I will have to apologise. And so I could even rejoice in the current situation which had enabled me to grow.

Why do I think this is sooo important? Here’s a couple of good reasons.
1. These unresolved traumatic memories create blockages which hinder us from perceiving the Lord’s presence and connecting with him more intimately and they cause us unnecessary angst as we process over and over.
2. And as we age, the frontal lobes of our brain are especially affected and the defenses with which we used to manage and hide our unresolved issues are progressively weakened. As this happens we become more reactive and dysfunctional. After 50 years of minimally impaired functioning, but subtle evidence of trauma, war veterans may suddenly get full blown PTSD and as dementia erodes the strength of their psychological coping tools their woundedness and dysfunctional ways of being are then barred and exposed. The elderly who have spent their life cleansing and maturing their minds and spirits on the other hand are an inspiration. (Dr K.Lehman Outsmarting Yourself, 2013)
The short summary of this is that as we age we may increasingly walk around in our psychological and spiritual underwear. For good or not.