Create Your PTSD Support Team: The Healing Power of Connection

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) support can be hard to come by. Many people -- especially those who haven't experienced trauma -- find it hard to relate to survivors and even harder to be supportive. While PTSD symptoms can make you feel like a freak (and look like one to those unwilling to learn how trauma changes your brain and creates PTSD symptoms) the truth is, there absolutely are people who understand and are even willing to support your PTSD coping and healing strategies.

Finding a PTSD Support Team During Your Healing Process

It’s easy to feel alone in the PTSD struggle. It helps to know there are millions of others feeling as you do. And it helps even more to have a personal circle of PTSD support around you. That can mean professional practitioners, medical advisors, family, friends, and even other survivors. The less isolated you are the more you will find, hear and be introduced to information and treatment ideas that can lead your healing in a new and beneficial direction.

I know that in the grip of PTSD, the last thing you feel like doing is making new friends or sharing your demons with unknown people. But let’s think about this together. How much progress have you made alone? How many fresh ideas have you come up with? How much better have you felt over time when you burrow deeper and deeper into your own hole? Not so well, right? It wasn’t a great strategy for me, either. I spent a lot of time trying to be brave, courageous and not a burden. Instead of healing, I just spun around in symptoms, grasping at straws.

Having good PTSD support allows you to experience the healing power of connection in ways that help create direction and momentum in recovery. Reaching out and building a network of support doesn’t have to be an overwhelming job. You can go at it slowly, in one area at a time. The point is only to widen your circle so there is enough room for others to stand in it. No matter where you are on your healing journey there are people who will understand (luckily, you’re not unique) and who are trained, willing, or loving enough to stand by you. Let them in. You can’t heal in the dark. Take a chance. Let others shine some light.

Steps to Build Your PTSD Support Team

It’s time to create your own Team PTSD. Many of us keep our PTSD experiences to ourselves. Whether for reasons of shame, embarrassment, or just plain depression, we hold this secret close and don’t share it with anyone else. It’s time for that to change. Healing, like many things in life, is better accomplished in the buddy system or with a team backing you up.

1. Today, think about who you would like your PTSD support buddy to be. A therapist? A friend? A family member? An anonymous survivor who gets what you're going through?
2. Now, imagine that you can combine all of those choices into a collaborative group. Who would you want on your PTSD support team?
3. Make a list of all the people you know – or would like to know. Order the people on the list starting with #1.
4. How can you get these people on your healing team? What steps will you have to take to reach out? Will it take a letter, a phone call, an email, a cup of coffee? Make a plan to engage each person.

Every step you take toward building your PTSD support team is another blow against PTSD. We are stronger in numbers.

Michele is the author of Your Life After Trauma: Powerful Practices to Reclaim Your Identity and Heal Your PTSD: Dynamic Strategies that Work. Connect with her on Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and her website, HealMyPTSD.com.