In cheal@yahoogroups.com, "gazabedford50" wrote:
>
> I suffer with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder linked with
Depression.
> Out of this comes my poetry and for the last three years have been
writing
> various poems a lot to do with the way i feel but also more light
> hearted poems. They all come from my heart as this is the only way
>i know how and would like to share them with others.


Welcome, Garry. I hope it's not impertinent of a very new member like me to
welcome someone here.

I grew up as the daughter of a French Resistance underground worker,
later a regular soldier towards the end of the war, who married an
Englishwoman and came here to settle. He had, obviously, seen
dreadful things during the war. There was no help for PTSD in those days, and
Daddy in any case believed he had to 'be strong' and avoid the 'trick-cyclists'
(as a Frenchman he loved English slang).

Years after his death, and translating his wartime memoirs into
English, I am coming to realise how much trying to be a normal father of two
girls, and a breadwinner, must have cost him (mainly patches of deep melancholia
and bouts of terrible temper, with which alas poor mother was no help at all,
and which as a child and teenager I did not understand).

My exploratory reading (I am humanities-trained, not a scientist,
alas) tells me that the underlying permanently altered brain-function patterns
(biochemical and bioelectrical) of PTSD are beginning to be better understood.
That said, once the brain has been reprogrammed into an immediately natural,
though long-term unhelpful (especially to the sufferer) response, finding a way
to contain that response is still very difficult, but possibilities are opening
up. I am glad you have had some help at least.

As for writing poetry, it is totally absorbing, and in that sense
helpful to any traumatic response, even the more minor ones of my
peacetime life as compared with my father's. When I am writing (I write tiny
poems very slowly, often in tight conventional forms) I can carry on with the
practical demands of daily life (caring for my family and the cats, doing the
garden etc.) with my hands while being away with the fairies in my head. Do you
find this a totally absorbing process too? If so, it is a palliative, though
obviously not a cure.

I also think that the old 'basket-work' (hahaha) occupational therapy idea isn't
too bad as a helpful adjunct; even folding and ironing the dried washing or
planting out seedlings can be a healing process if one just settles to it (Old
Crone wisdom here, from someone a year older than you, so pay attention at the
back there!). Daddy just retreated into his garage and did chappish practical
things for the house, with a range of hand-tools, at which he was very good. (It
also got him out of mother's nagging; smart move.)

I hope what I say is not reductive or simplistic of a reaction to
PTSD (undiagnosed), but I am interested in 'coping strategies' given my late
father's experience.

Peace be at your hearth,

Marie (Squirrel)