PTSD - Symptoms or Skills

When you were at work, whether as a First Responder or with the Military, you learned to be vigilant. You learned to protect not only yourself, but those around you. Your skills were literal survival skills and kept you alive. You reacted. You were aware. You were ready.

Now, people tell you that your reactions are symptoms. You went from “vigilant” to “hyper vigilant.” You went from “safety oriented” to “over reactive” and “unsafe.” When did this happen? How did it happen? Now you need to be “fixed” or “healed” from those very actions that kept you safe and made you good at your job. If you need to “be healed,” you might expect someone else to give you medication to curb those behaviors. In other words, you expect someone else to “fix” you and you are now a victim to their process.

However, you might be able to take a bit of a different approach to things. Let me illustrate for a second. You probably know how to drive a car with a standard transmission. In this day and age I know if you drive, that you know how to drive an “automatic.” But if you drive a standard much, you have probably experienced trying to hit the clutch when you are in an automatic. It is natural and happens. When this happens though, you probably just laugh or maybe get annoyed with yourself, but you don’t decide you can’t drive anymore. You understand that your reaction of using the clutch is a habit, and you don’t need to use that habit in your automatic.

If you view your “symptoms” as overly honed skills, you put yourself in the metaphorical driver’s seat. When these behaviors are less “illness” and more behaviors or habits you’d like to adjust, you are stepping into a place of power. Now I’m not saying that you can modify these habits overnight, as they can be quite ingrained and can be a challenge to modify. Thank goodness for that, because that is what helped you be as effective as you were. But now, whether you have left that work, or you just find that your skills are leaking into areas of your life where you would rather they didn’t, you want to modify them. This is when you can find help to guide you through that process and relearn the skills you need to be happy and comfortable now.