Trauma and Resilience

In my last post, I wrote about my quick trip up to Chicago.  It was a good thing that both my husband and my daughter pushed me to go.  I have gotten more "hermitty" these years.  I do not think it is the result of the COVID crisis, but when we have PTSD reactions to traumatic events, we really may not realize both the reaction and the cause and may think it is just our brain providing good careful advice.  So, who knows?  I will possibly never know.  But it did reassure me that flights and hotel rooms can go smoothly and I will not be lost somewhere among skyscrapers.  Of course, I was with my well-traveled daughter who uses her phone like a gigantic file cabinet.

Regarding smoothness and trauma, I forgot to mention a discussion we had with our distant cousin in Chicago about EMDR.  This is a technique I had never heard about and you can read up on it in the grayed link above.  Anyway, as I wrote, our cousin is a young woman with her Doctorate in Nursing and takes on private clients to help them with drug addiction.  Yeah, no small thing!

She lives on a lovely tree-lined street just outside the city itself and in walking distance of the city businesses.  Her husband works at Northwestern University which is about a mile from their home.  It is a prime location.

Our cousin said she had used EMDR to help with a trauma that occurred months ago.  Their neighborhood had been without electricity for a day or so and she was in front of her house using her car to charge her cell phone.  (I did not ask, but she must have been pregnant then.)  Someone approached her, put a gun to her head, and stole her car leaving her stunned on the sidewalk.  

She managed to call the police but nothing came from that, except maybe interviewing her.  Doing research, she herself found her car and identified the man (actually a 16-year-old) that had carjacked her and threatened her life.  She reported that to the police, and either due to a tremendous backlog in life-threatening criminality there or Chicago's police bureaucracy, the 'man' was never arrested. ( I have great respect for our law-enforcement folks, but like our medical professionals and our public education professionals, they are overworked and in some cases underpaid.)  I mentioned to her that was awful and since he was young it would just embolden him until he gets killed.

Her response was, "He did get killed weeks later."

Anyway, she found that she could not get over the trauma as she had hoped  (no duh!).  She decided to use EMDR and said it really worked!  I will keep this in mind.  Our brain is a really amazing conglomeration of electricity!

Well, hopefully, my next post will be more uplifting on my other blog about Fred and Ethel as they now have a least one little one!  I have to work on that, after I read some blogs.