The Dudeism Forum

Anyone know anything about Abiding with PTSD? Had some full on undude flashbacks last couple of weeks, really messed up my zen thing.

OK it's been 2 months of active self searching and while on paper not much has changed, I do feel a little better inside.

What I found (although I may be wrong) is that responsibility consists of two factors: caring and worrying. And the former is usually a direct result of the latter: you do not want to be hassled with the negativity of failing to meet deadlines, so you worry about making it in time, thus you care and sort of push yourself to doing things.
However what's the point if you end up having negative emotions no matter what? You worry about doing everything in time, and you succeed, but you still went through stress. OR you don't care and deal with the stress of not succeeding later on.

Needless to say, worrying is a useless emotion in the meaning that it disrupts your thinking processes and just makes you feel bad. It's only good side is that it makes you care - thus, SORT OF makes you responsible. This briought me to what I think is the balanced solution: find a way to care without worrying. It sounds easy on paper, but IRL you have to really dig around to find what exactly makes you care. Be it money you earn, opportunities you get or people you work with. The important thing here is to not lie to yourself - you can't MAKE yourself like something you genuinely dislike, but I can bet you can find something positive about what you do that you previously took for granted.

Find it, make it a beacon and use it to fuel your caring. I won't use the word motivation, cause it's a different thing. As soon as you start caring, try to stop worrying. It's a long and very gradual process, but the end goal is to separate worrying from caring, so that you can do the latter without the former. Nothing will ever go perfectly, but that's not the reason to start kicking yourself. Failure is experience and that means you'll be more prepared to these situations in the future.



So there. Just my thought process that has been boiling in my brain throughout this time. I still don't know how effective it will prove to be, but it sounds good and trying to follow this path has worked well so far. Hope it helps anyone who is going through the same busy stressful times.
Abide!

Quote from: Eru on August 26, 2013, 10:56:06 AM
Anyone know anything about Abiding with PTSD? Had some full on undude flashbacks last couple of weeks, really messed up my zen thing.

That's big, mate. I can go on and on about how you should try to separate your mind from that, but who am I to give advice without being in your situation? Best advice I can give is stomp the old memories with new better memories. Hang out more, communicate more. If you can't burn certain thoughts, you can try to bury them under new ones. Hope it helps