Cured: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Michele describes herself as a city girl who drifted toward the water. These days she lives in a small beach town roughly two hours from Disney World. She once worked as a publicist, and now she teaches at a university. The private hardships she has worked through gave her a sense of purpose: she wants other people to find their way out of pain too.

The first blow came when she was thirteen. A routine medication triggered a rare, violent allergic reaction, and she landed in a hospital near her home in New York. The doctors there couldn't make sense of what was happening to her. Eventually they identified it as Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis Syndrome, a condition so severe it was comparable to third-degree burns over her entire body. She lost all of her epidermis. Physically, she healed completely. The emotional wound stayed open.

In the aftermath she sensed that something inside her had gone wrong, though she had no language for it yet. For a while she said nothing to anyone. Then it became obvious that what she would eventually name as PTSD was dismantling her life, both at home and at work. Her own view is that the mind can manufacture far more stress than the body is built to absorb, maybe half again as much, and years of untreated trauma kept draining her nervous system. The pain got harder to conceal.

One by one she walked away from good jobs at several companies. She ended up isolated and awake at night, watching her ties to family and friends fray. She wanted closeness. Building any real connection with another person kept slipping out of reach. At that point she decided to treat the problem seriously and hunt for something that worked.

What she tried was a wide mix. Talk therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. Meditation. EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. She also reached for less conventional methods: the Emotional Freedom Technique, Thought Field Therapy, and the Tapas Acupressure Technique. On top of that she worked with a shamanic healer based in Hawaii while she stayed on the eastern seaboard, and she brought in Chinese herbs and reflexology to steady her nervous system.

All of that cleared the way to the practice that changed the most for her, which turned out to be dance. Becoming present through movement was the thing that shifted something. Now she loves salsa, and she goes out most nights after stopping by the beach.

Plenty of people flinch at the word "cure" when PTSD comes up. Michele doesn't. She says yes, flatly, that PTSD can be cured. After moving into public speaking and coaching others facing the same struggle, she has watched many of them reach lives that are energized and free of that constant stress, people she counts as genuinely recovered.

Her advice to anyone carrying PTSD comes down to three things. Build a support system: find one person you can really confide in and spend time with them instead of retreating into solitude, whether that's family, a friend, a colleague, or anyone you trust. Take part in your own recovery, meaning find the path that fits you rather than copying someone else's. And commit to the work, because there is no fixed timeline; you keep going until you feel your own transformation is finished.

Michele's own first-person telling of her story appeared on yesandyes.org in August 2012.