. Recently, I did an interview about my baseball career. It was for a college project on a 20th-century man. (If that does not make you feel old)
First question: Tell me about your childhood.
That froze me for a long minute. My brain has this well-developed record, that plays my narrative of childhood. I know it is how I perceive my childhood, saved under duress.
How can you share in words the damage this abuse has caused me? It never goes away completely. There is a void inside me, a feeling of not being good enough.
When you are physically and emotionally abused by your caregivers, self-worth never develops. Constant criticism leads to a flawed ego, a feeling of being worthless at our core.
My memory of childhood is sparse, and limited. My ability to hide most of my childhood back then saves me from more anguish.
These images are hard to share, I bluntly state a few incidents without any hint of nuance.
My childhood is recorded as a black-and-white movie, with short snippets of violence and shouting.
So after the interview, I felt vulnerable and exposed.
Abused kids never like to be judged. I have a sense of fear about what he will write.
It’s part of our disorder, PTSD, fear, and worthlessness.
. . Childhood PTSD (complex PTSD): It is how our brains are wired during childhood that makes our thoughts (dissociation) the problem.
From the Complex PTSD workbook: “Dissociation, like all other symptoms of C-PTSD, is a learned behavior that initially helped you cope with a threatening environment. A neglected or abused child will rely upon built-in, biological protection mechanisms for survival to “tune out” threatening experiences. In adulthood, dissociation becomes a well-maintained division between the part of you involved in keeping up with daily tasks of living and the part of you that is holding emotions of fear, shame, or anger.”
My nervous system and emotional regulation are distorted: Childhood abuse fires the fight or flight mechanism, consequently, we store these memories as traumatic.
Traumatic memories or implicit memories are stored in the right amygdala, out of reach consciously.
Our brains are wired to spot danger above all else.
We spend enormous amounts of time spotting danger.
Questions bombard us on how to avoid, face, or deny our perceived danger.
Our self-worth is damaged, and we feel vulnerable and isolated too often.
Emotional regulation is a constant issue.
Our thoughts are a big issue, for me, it is a constant battle to let go and come back to the present.
. It has been a while since I posted. I needed an emotional break.
Recently, while examining my behavior and habits, fear of failure was always under the surface.
Even retired, my fear of failure influences my behavior and emotional state.
I would say many professional athletes compete out of fear of failure.
We feel it’s a trial of worthiness, every challenge, game, or tournament.
If it’s a team sport, we fear letting our teammates down.
In sports, a lack of performance leads to firing, death to who we thought we were. My mother told me God made me to be a professional baseball player. Who can I be now at 71?
Some athletes have considerable difficulty losing their supposed true identity.
Fear of failure is jet fuel for worry.
Self-worth has an enormous influence on every aspect of life.
My work is to be aware of fear’s influence, then adjust letting these emotions release.
The more that I can stay present, the better chance for equanimity.
“Equanimity is steady through vicissitudes, equally close to the things you may like and the things you do not like.” By Sheila Catherine . .
. . My online kundalini teacher passed away yesterday. She was only 51.
There was something special about Jenn, a quality, a fearlessness, and a selfless way of living. I found her meditation group online during covid.
After five years at a zen center, no one resembled her. I sensed a special being, a selfless warrior who placed herself in the middle of others’ trauma without fear for her mental health.
Meticulously I showed up every day trying to understand how she became who she was. Somehow, someway, she elevated her being.
Jenn had a way of making you feel safe. She would make time between appointments to talk to me. I always felt better after our conversations.
Jenn was the purest person, charismatic to a fault that I have ever come across.
She always had a different perspective, outside the box.
Here is an example:
“Pray for yourself to find peace and healing, pray for them to do the same, pray for forgiveness to release yourself and forgiveness to release them. Pray for an opening in your ego to allow the heart to temper it all with love and grace.”
We all feel blessed to have known her and feel a void now that she has passed.
Our fight or flight mechanism firing is what we think of normal fear.
Cortisol, adrenaline gets dumped into our bloodstream along with bp, heart rate, and respiration increasing.
That deep thud in our solar plexus freezes us temporarily.
Some of PTSD fear uses the same mechanism when a trigger fires.
Other PTSD fears are more abstract, they are connected to past violent trauma
I think these are implicit memories, subconscious and abstract.
“Implicit memory relies on structures in our brain that are fully developed before we are born. Because it’s an unconscious, bodily memory, when it gets triggered in the present, it does not seem like it’s coming from the past.
Instead, it feels like it’s happening now.
Thus, we react as if we are back in the original situation.”
From These Invisible Memories Shape Our Lives Lisa Firestone, Ph.D.
This is why PTSD feels so alive, so ever-present. . .
The U.S. Army is in the throes of a burgeoning readiness crisis with military service leaders anticipating a significant drop-off in their ability to recruit enough Americans to its ranks.
And at least part of the reason is the grinding suicide crisis in the military. Not only do recruits have to worry about their safety on a battlefield; they now must be concerned about ailments that trail them after their service to the nation.
“To compete for talent, the Army must provide a workplace environment free of harmful behaviors, to include sexual assault, sexual harassment, racism, extremism, and the risk factors which lead to death by suicide,” Gen. Joseph Martin, the Army’s vice chief of staff, told a House panel last month.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth echoed the frank admission. “We need to show that we are doing something about suicide prevention in the Army,” she said.
To be sure, several factors contribute to the current recruiting deficit – they include a robust labor market in the civilian world, fewer Americans who are physically qualified, and a pandemic that prevented recruiters from meeting with prospects. But it’s also no coincidence that the deficit has emerged as the service is experiencing historic levels of suicide in its ranks.
“Suicide has proven to be an incredibly difficult issue for the military to get its arms around,” said the publication Task & Purpose. “The Army specifically saw its highest rate of suicides in 2021 since 1938, coming in at 36.18 suicide deaths per 100,000 soldiers.”
By comparison, among all U.S. adults, the suicide rate per 100,000 is about 18 deaths. Among veterans, the suicide rate also well surpasses the civilian rate.
For example, experts at the Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledge the powerful physiological connection between brain injury and suicide. Some portion of those who die by suicide in the military and among veterans – and it is unclear how many because it has yet to be adequately studied – may have undiagnosed brain injuries from their training and service that present as mental illness but require an entirely different approach.
Whatever the root causes, suicide in the ranks is particularly tragic because it is the opposite of what the military is supposed to be about – an esprit de corps, a sense of connection and fellowship, where someone always has someone else’s back, where no one is left behind. . .
Deep brain stimulation,” or DBS, can offer significant relief to as many as two-thirds of patients with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, a new study found. Photo by Raman Oza/Pixabay
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by Alan Mozes, HealthDay News
When traditional treatments fail to help patients with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), an implant that zaps the brain with electrical pulses just might, a new research review shows.
It found that the remedy — known as “deep brain stimulation,” or DBS — can offer significant relief to as many as two-thirds of such patients. On average, it can reduce OCD-triggered symptoms by nearly half, the review found.
“[OCD involves] intrusive and bothersome thoughts that the individual cannot silence, and compulsions that are repetitive, ritualistic behaviors performed to reduce the anxiety produced by the compulsions,” said study author Dr. Sameer Sheth. He is an associate professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
An estimated 3% of the global population is thought to be affected. For those with severe OCD that is uncontrolled, the symptoms can be “all-consuming,” Sheth said. Examples of OCD include repeated handwashing, ordering and arranging, repeating words in one’s head, and checking and double-checking.
“They can prevent the person from being able to perform other necessary activities of life, and therefore be extremely disabling,” Sheth said. “Some people cannot leave their room or home because of the cleaning rituals that would be necessary to re-enter, or cannot interact with others because of incessant taboo thoughts.”
The good news is that a combination of behavioral therapy and standard antidepressants — such as serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) — help many individuals.
The bad news: “About 10% to 20% do not respond” to those treatments, Sheth said.
PTSD - A Way Out.com 
