A Good Movie, Dinner and PTSD

A Good Movie, Dinner, and PTSD

Yesterday was fantastic. I woke up spry and happy. By 8:30 am I had been asked out twice. I was going with some dear friends to dinner after work and then a movie: “Silver Linings Playbook.” I would have never expected the day to end the way it did.

I took a little nap before I went to dinner, because I thought maybe I’d be up later than I usually am. When I awoke, I took a quick shower and got to the Mexican dinner. My friends and I laughed and cut up and ate some great food. Damn, if I didn’t think that this movie we were going to see was a comedy/drama. But I had it in my mind that the movie was going to be an extension of the fun we were having at dinner.

Alas, the movie is about a young man, Bradley Cooper, who has bipolar disease plus a few other things like, rage, ADD, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It appears quite early in the movie that he has gotten into this mental institution because he found his wife cheating on him and brutalized the man who was with her.

Bradley Cooper’s character plea-bargained his way into the institution. His mother— feeling like she was doing the right thing—takes him out of the institution under her own auspices with a court order. But what happens is that she bring him back to the environment of his childhood, which began his disease. Bad move.

As soon as I saw Robert Dinero, who plays Cooper’s father, I said to my friend, “God, he looks just like my father and talks like him too. This is weird.” I felt a strange sensation going on inside my body, but I just let it go.

About forty minutes into the movie, Bradley Cooper’s character acts out in a big way, hits his mother and his dad is beating him up. His mother is trying to pull the father off of the young man. There was screaming, yelling, and crying all going on at the same time.

I had flashbacks immediately of the same thing happening to my brother as I was on the top bunk and my father was beating my brother beyond belief. Everyone was screaming. Yet, it felt like I was in a silent movie—paralyzed and unable to move from danger. This feeling was going on both in my head and in real time at the movies. This is PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

I got up and told my friends I had to leave. Something was seriously wrong with me and I had to get out of there fast. I was disoriented and scared and shaking. I hadn’t felt those feelings in a long time.

I got in my car and started to drive. I couldn’t find my way home. I put on my GPS, but I had forgotten it was on silent. So, it wasn’t giving me voiced directions. I called a friend who is a therapist. He talked to me for fifteen minutes. At the end of the fifteen minutes, I realized I was in Spring Hill, not Nashville as I had intended, 30 minutes away from my destination. I lost time and place.

My wise friend told me to get off the phone, breath deeply, focus on the now, and get to driving home. Make that my only focus. I did what he said. Came home, took a hot shower, talked to my mother and hugged her tightly for a long time, then called my friend back to debrief.

My therapist friend led me through some right brain-left brain exercises that get you out PTSD. By that time I was almost fine. But his helped kicked me out of the last vestige of fright.

If you are a victim of something traumatic in your past, you may also have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). This disease is strongly wired into your neuro pathways. The disease comes out of nowhere and if you haven’t gotten some help about it, it’s probably time to.

I felt proud of myself that I could see that I was being triggered. I got out of the movie before the PTSD was full blown. I probably shouldn’t have driven though. But you do what you have to do to get to safety sometimes, even without knowing what that is cognitively. I’m fifty-two and still being triggered at my core by something that happened to me forty-five years ago.

Our human capacity to hold trauma is huge. We need to be compassionate to that part of each of us every day. This is why I keep telling you to get to know that compassionate observer in you through hypnotherapy or meditation. It is well worth the understanding when you find yourself faced with the ugly past and there is nowhere to retreat but into your own sense of compliance to loving yourself.

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Bo Sebastian is a Hypnotherapist and Life & Health Coach, available for private sessions to QUIT SMOKING, Lose Weight, New Lap-Band Hypnosis for Weight Loss, CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE! at 615-400-2334 or www.bosebastian.com.

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