Opal Rose
“Healing from posttraumatic stress isn't easy. It takes courage, honesty and determination, and sometimes the process feels like it's uphill for longer than you'd like for it to be. You'll grow along the way, you'll learn so much, and your spirit can expand. It's a journey of many twists and turns, of many colors and hues, and of discovery.”
Dark Water: Stress After Trauma begins with general information about trauma and about posttraumatic stress. It is written from the point of view of a layperson. The book continues with thoughts about how posttraumatic stress might feel, about fear and fear-based symptoms, and about how they might affect one’s life. It stresses that professional help is always a good idea and that a desire for healing is important.
The book talks about personal growth that can occur as a result of trauma and overcoming its aftermath. It mentions that in personal outlook there might be differences from pre-trauma to post-trauma because posttraumatic stress creates change, and change can be seen as an opportunity for evolution of the entire person including spirit and psyche. It suggests that posttraumatic stress affects the individual as a whole, including neurophysiology, and in moving forward with one’s life it’s important to take that into account. Basically the book is written in a conversational style and is generally meant to be of help to those who are experiencing posttraumatic stress or to those who know people who are.
“Growing away from fear and fear based symptoms can open vistas of thought and understanding that otherwise might never have come into being. Life is a winding path and you truly don't always know what is around the corner, but sometimes what you see is breathtakingly beautiful.”
Opal Rose is not a clinician or a psychologist but has simply shared thoughts about what could happen as a result of trauma and about moving on. She shares only from her own point of view while recognizing that each person is an individual and when recovering from trauma at least, each person is a work in progress. She found that healing from posttraumatic stress could lead to differences in outlook, a different future or perhaps one that’s been rearranged, and this means looking forward, not back, although there are always pitfalls along the way because it’s life. She mentions that healing neurophysiology is important and that one’s spirit plays a huge role in the healing process. Her experience with posttraumatic stress is the basis for writing Dark Water: Stress After Trauma.
I believe that posttraumatic stress is a relative dimension of biology in that it results from an injury or an insult to neurobiology. It is associated with trauma and there are many kinds of trauma. It is defined in practical ways by signs and symptoms that people who are experiencing it have in common. Too often people are diagnosed and studied and helped by being segmented into parts that are about mental health and about medicine, but each and every one of us is after all a whole being. Even though parts of us can be helped by various disciplines in medicine, psychology and other disciplines, something like posttraumatic stress deeply affects the whole being. Shifting and settling occur during healing, but we should never ignore our inner selves that may still need attention.
I am not a specialist in fields commonly associated with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder such as psychology, medicine and neurobiology, and I can’t make any claims regarding the scientific validity of what I write. I can only share thoughts and feelings about what is called Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and that leaves me feeling uneasy now and then. Anything and everything can by terminology be called a disorder when functionally and conclusively descriptive of not being normal, but actually I’d prefer to not capitalize the name and to omit the word disorder. Disorder has unfortunate innuendoes attached to it, and I’d prefer to just leave it out. Let’s just call this posttraumatic stress, or stress after trauma.
As living organisms we naturally react to trauma and have mechanisms that help us to relax once we are safe. This is normal and is a function of survival. Now and then we seem to somehow get stuck in a survival mode, or partly so, and our selves remember the danger signals. Our selves, not just our bodies, our minds, or our emotions.
Wholeness of the individual including mind, body and soul, is an important focus that has stayed at the forefront of my individual work involved in growing away from those rigid reactions that posttraumatic stress imposes. I believe that what you’re fighting is the fractionation of your self. Parts of who you are seem to have lives of their own when triggered, during flashbacks, or simply during stressful moments. They are You and Your Experiences but they seem to envelop you within their own environments, and you react to their impulses. It’s not easy to learn how to see them with perspective, in a way that doesn’t permit them to dominate your interactions with the world around you.
If you don’t give up, you can emerge into new ways of being, but you won’t be the same person who fell under the influence of the trauma and its aftermath. Just like everyone else on the planet, you’ll be an amalgam of who you are and of your experiences. Just like everyone else on the planet, you have probably had had a personality with positive and negative sides to it. You might find that your work with posttraumatic stress helps you to grow beyond who you were previously. It does takes work, and there are various kinds of work depending upon how you approach healing. You do have to approach healing.
