Clinician's Guide to PTSD: A Cognitive-Behavioral Approach, by Steven Taylor

[rachelmanija]

Reading for one of my trauma classes. I’m not summarizing the whole thing, just bits I found especially interesting.

Chapter One: Clinical Features of PTSD. Nothing new here.

Chapter Two: Cognitive and Behavioral Features of PTSD.

Amnesia. People rarely have global amnesia for traumatic events (not even knowing it happened or having no memories

Comments

[nipernaadiagain]

The not remembering bothers me very much

[rachelmanija]

That sounds terrifying.

If this book is correct, the reason you don't remember may be because you were so completely focused on saving yourself and your children, that you had no attention to spare for the collision itself.

Maybe the only way you could have recalled the collision would have been if you'd been less focused on steering... and then maybe you would have had the head-on collision, after all.

[nipernaadiagain]

Your explanation helps me to understand my terror.

As I cannnot learn from something I do not remember and so I have stopped driving - as I have no memory of the collision itself and the unknown is scarier than the known.

One can deal with the known, even with the worst of it, but how does one deal just with a hole where a memory should be?

[rachelmanija]

If you wanted to drive again, there is specialized therapy that deals with exactly this sort of issue: a phobia caused by trauma. It's usually very successful.

I cannnot learn from something I do not remember

I'm not sure that the collision itself, even if you could retrieve it, would be anything you could learn from. Any potential learning probably comes from the parts you already remember - the parts leading up to the collision, in which you were taking effective and life-saving action, not the collision itself.

I don't know what your particular collision was like, but I've been in several car crashes, including one very serious one in which I was driving. They all felt exactly the same: a tremendous sense of impact, simultaneously shocking and inevitable, painless and terrifying and over by the time you've registered that it happened.

Have you ever asked your children what it felt like to them?

[serialbabbler]

Having been a passenger during a couple of fairly serious car accidents, I'd say the narrowed focus still happens even if you don't have anything specific you can do. (One of the accidents happened twenty-three years ago, and I still have a pretty vivid memory of the trash can that got flattened against the building we plowed into right before we went through the wall. No idea what the car we glanced off of first looked like, though. Heh.)

Also, the collision itself tends to be rather abrupt and full of sensory information that mostly doesn't get processed.