If you are living with unresolved trauma memory, whether or not it's posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or dissociative identity disorder (DID), you will almost surely bewilder people some of the time. We both know you want this not to happen, but, as is surely obvious to us, you have little or no choice in the matter, other than to avoid triggers to the extent that you know them and can anticipate them. The real problem here is that you can't avoid all triggers. So, you will bewilder and maybe even frighten people a certain amount of the time.

Loss is an immense landscape for those living with psychological trauma and its consequent posttraumatic stress. Not always clear and obvious to us, because we can be good at avoiding painful facts, the pain of the stress itself further distracts us from what we will, in healing if not before, come to know: something was taken from us, and it won't be regained easily, if at all.

I'm thinking about how to face your fear because yesterday I spoke with a radio show host and we talked a lot about fear and its place after a trauma. It has left me thinking about how fear impacts our PTSD experience and coping mechanisms or the entire PTSD recovery process. More importantly, how fear gets in the way of and interferes with PTSD. If PTSD occurs because an enormous fear has entered our lives, is it possible to get rid of the fear enough to heal?

It's a common worry: If I heal PTSD symptoms, and then experience another trauma, will PTSD return? I've been thinking about that question a lot lately. I hear it often from the survivors I coach, and also from the enormous PTSD community in which I participate. And now, I'm thinking about it for an even more personal reason: Two weeks ago I almost died in a trauma eerily reminiscent of my original, PTSD-creating experience.

Anxiety, whether or not it develops into PTSD or another anxiety disorder, pulls us off course, again and again. It sets us up to crash through life from one crisis to another and makes us less productive - all of which increases our stress level. In spite of this, you can fairly quickly organize your anxious mind and have less crisis and more "plan" in your daily life. I'll show you how.

Stress resilience is the ability to retain your sense of self and the form of your life in spite of being impacted by perceived threatening forces. All of us need adequate stress resilience and do well to cultivate this property in ourselves. You can do this before you recover from PTSD, and you certainly should after recovery. There are a number of fairly ordinary things you can do to increase your stress resilience, but to get the posttraumatic growth, you must actually do these things!

Recovery from, or prevention of, sexual assault - this is our concern, in this pair of videos. As my blog co-author, Michele Rosenthal, has told us, "‘self-efficacy’ refers to one’s ability to feel ‘effective’", and achieving that must be a part of your recovery or prevention project. She also referred us to psychologist Albert Bandura's assertion that self-efficacy derives from one's ability to feel confident in specific situations.

Last week, I wrote about what happens when we don’t forgive, and why it might be a good action to take in PTSD recovery. If you’ve come to the conclusion that you might be ready to forgive, the first roadblock to this might be not knowing how or what to do. This week, I’m following up with a very easy process that sets you on the path to forgiveness in a way that maintains your power, safety and control.

PTSD and suicide thoughts (plus how to shift them) is a topic of frequent discussion in any community of survivors struggling with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Really, how could it not be? We're asked to live inside a mind that feels crazy and a body that behaves in ways out of our control. At some point, it's reasonable for anyone to just want to be set free. Of course, suicide is always the wrong answer. Every day, we learn more about PTSD recovery and how to heal, which means that there is always hope for feeling better. In fact, with the many approaches now available for healing work recovery is more like a Choose Your Own Adventure than ever before. It took me 10 modalities to reach the end of PTSD symptoms. If I had given up and given in to the dark PTSD suicide thoughts a whole life would have been lost that really has been more than worth living.

When it comes to what it takes to heal PTSD, forgiveness is a topic that requires a lot of thought. On the surface, it’s easy to believe that when we forgive we condone (of course, that’s not the case!). Even if, intellectually, we know that forgiving does not excuse, it can feel that way and so we shy away from the forgiveness process.