I'm here to tell you that trauma affects your brain. Even so, have you ever had someone say to you any of these things: "PTSD isn't real; it's all in your head" "Just get over it already!" "Only veterans get PTSD"? I speak all over the country about PTSD symptoms. Mostly, these audiences are comprised of civilians: survivors, caregivers and healing professionals. Sometimes, too, there are people who have no PTSD connection but have been invited to hear the presentation. Inevitably, whether it's before the presentation has started or after it has finished someone addresses me to say some variation of one of those three things (on a really awful day, all three!). Why don't people "get" what it means to struggle with PTSD? Why can't they understand that trauma affects the brain as well as the mind?

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?

If you've survived a trauma you know that your mind records various experiences in images as vivid as a high-end digital camera. When I first started working as a PTSD coach one of my clients came in with a specific request: "I want to erase all of the memories associated with my trauma," she said.

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.