PTSD psychologist
As a PTSD psychologist, I recently had the pleasure of discussing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during a live television broadcast. What is PTSD? What do you need to learn to deal with it? And what are my personal experiences with PTSD? In this article, you can read the answers to all these questions. You can also watch the video of the interview (in Dutch, with English subtitles) below.
When I received a request to discuss PTSD on live television, I was immediately enthusiastic. I have both personal and professional experience with PTSD. As a psychologist and body-oriented psychotherapist, I have supported people with PTSD for many years through individual psychotherapy sessions and training. I love discussing topics such as fear, trauma, loss, and anger because it makes me feel at ease. The book The Wisdom Behind Emotion and Feeling is based on my professional and personal experiences with PTSD.
What is PTSD ?
As a result of a shocking event or a prolonged period of high stress and existential threats, people with PTSD experience ongoing stress. This stress may manifest in different ways, such as nightmares, reliving experiences, sleep difficulties, or trouble concentrating. You can also be extra vigilant.
PTSD brings intense emotions, feelings, thoughts, and pain on a daily basis. The intensity is often so high that you experience them as unpleasant. As a result, you push them away. Suppressing pain or unease is a normal, instinctive reaction: people without PTSD do so daily. By suppressing pain, intense emotions, or feelings, you push them out of your consciousness. As long as you are not aware of pain and emotions, you’re also not bothered by them. Not being conscious is therefore an effective way to avoid (having to) feel what is there.
Later on, when it is more convenient, you can pay attention to and dwell on what is present. This trick works particularly well for short-term, superficial, and single events. However, intrusive events or long-term circumstances make it harder to suppress pain or intense emotions and thoughts. The need to focus your attention increases.
Living with PTSD
People with PTSD are, due to the stress reactions, repeatedly confronted with pain, intense emotions, and thoughts. The way people with PTSD differ from ‘normal’ people is that the delay button does not work for them. They are taken off guard by the pain, thoughts, and emotions. It’s like the pressure in your system builds up too high, and your system automatically seeks an outlet port to lower the pressure. This leads to the stress reactions.
People with PTSD undergo intense pain and emotions without experiencing any control over them. This often reinforces feelings of powerlessness and fear. They are, so to speak, caught in a fight against their own senses and human nature. Suppressing emotions and pain no longer works, and the influx of information is often so intense to their senses that people lose contact with themselves. As a result, people with PTSD almost constantly live in emotional unsafety. It feels like they are trapped on a rollercoaster controlled by somebody else.
This has an enormous impact on their functioning, both social-emotional and professional. They suffer from the disorder to such an extent that they can’t, or are significantly less able to, participate in everyday activities.
Dealing with PTSD
In the video below, I share some information about how to learn to deal with PTSD.
An experienced PTSD psychologist can help you increase your trust in your own human nature and in your senses. This way, you can experience that you actually can influence what you perceive. Not by directly suppressing what is there, but indirectly by focusing your attention and learning to relax more deeply. With the guidance of a PTSD psychologist, you can learn body-related techniques that help you do so, such as meditation, mindfulness, holistic pulsing, and certain types of yoga. The tools I develop for sustainable change and recovery are not-for-profit; you can find them in the shop.
What can I offer you as a PTSD psychologist?
As a PTSD psychologist, I also help you develop insight into the different levels of your humanity. Step by step, you learn not to fight your senses and experiences, but to use them to support your own well-being. The book The Wisdom Behind Emotion and Feeling supports you in this. In the book, I explain what instincts, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and inspiration are and how they can reinforce or weaken each other.
During online training courses, with the help of do-it-yourself assignments, video and audio, and recovery-supporting mindfulness meditations, you gain new insights and experiences that you can apply immediately to your daily life. You develop skills such as focusing your attention, refining your contact with your senses, learning to regulate emotions, tensions, and pain constructively, respecting your limits, and expressing what lives inside you. This allows you to experience how you can still exert influence in a natural way. An important step forward.
If my agenda offers room for new consults, you can book your individual session here.
Do you have a question or would you like to know more? Please contact me or leave a message below. I respond within 48 hours on workdays (CET).
Warm greetings,
Wendy van Mieghem
PTSD psychologist
