Update: May 21, 2020: Feerless is no longer available. You might want to try other trauma-trigger apps like “Warn Me” or “Soothe” at psafe.

Do you watch Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy, Boardwalk Empire, or any show of the kind that involves blood, war, sexual assaults, car crashes, pedestrians being flung across the road by a runaway vehicle ? If you have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and react at all like I do when watching those kinds of scenes – head buried into a pillow, hands shooting up to your face to cover your eyes from the gore and violence, fingers stuffed in your ears to block out the screams and sounds of breaking glass – you’ve probably asked yourself, “Why am I putting myself through this? Why don’t I just stop watching this show?” You keep watching because  you are attached to a character, or you must know what happens to Arya Stark or Jimmy Darmody. But you wish there was some kind of warning signal – a flashing caution light, a wave of a hand, anything – to prepare you for, say, an upcoming decapitation or animal dissection. Well, your wish has come true. The signal you have been hoping for is called Feerless, a Google Chrome extension that relies on crowd-sourced data to identify emotionally difficult-to-watch scenes in television shows and movies on Netflix.

Feerless was developed by Danielle Leong, a sexual assault survivor who suffers from PTSD. While watching Sons of Anarchy, a graphic rape scene, which she was wholly unprepared for, triggered panic attacks and flashbacks for Danielle. As she says in her Feerless demonstration video, “I was completely in misery for three days.” If she had been warned of that upcoming scene, she could have looked away from the screen, shut off the television or computer, or fast-forwarded past the scene. She knew she had to do something, create some kind of trigger warning for others suffering from PTSD. A software engineer, Danielle had the answer, and the technical know-how to develop Feerless.

Users download the app, then, while watching shows or movies, they flag disturbing scenes. Once those scenes are flagged, a blue bubble appears at the bottom right hand side of the screen as a warning. The nice thing about the bubble is that it’s not intrusive; yet it’s present enough to catch one’s attention. And it pops up pre-emptively, several seconds before the troublesome scene appears, allowing viewers time to look away, or not. Because Feerless relies on crowd-sourcing, numbers matter. For the blue bubble to appear, we all need to participate: the more we use the app, and report the scenes that trigger anxiety, and/or sensory-related reminders of our past traumas, the more we all benefit.

At the Vermont Brain Injury Conference last fall, a TBI survivor, who sustained his injury years ago, spoke to an audience of nearly four hundred people. He didn’t have any visible scars, difficulty with speech, or an obvious limp to his gait. He spoke clearly and eloquently, and, in fact, was back in school pursuing a college degree. Because he appears healthy and strong, he explained how those without a TBI often don’t know what to say to him when they learn that he sustained a TBI. I recall him saying to the audience something like, “I’m me.” In other words, he was affirming his TBI, not from the perspective of a victim, but from the perspective of an individual who has accepted his disability, who has learned to cope with the challenges he faces each day, and who wants others to know that, though he looks “normal,” he cannot do everything others can do.

He left me thinking, thinking a lot, about how confusing a TBI is for those who do not have one, especially if they cannot see or hear it – the scars, the limp, the slowed speech. We all mean well (or I like to think so), and when we meet someone with a TBI, or any kind of disability, it’s natural to want to offer an opinion or suggestion, even if it’s unsolicited. I’ve done it myself, and I have a TBI. A few months ago, when walking on the treadmill in the gym where I live, a middle-aged woman with a cane shuffled in, one foot dragging along the carpet. The arm on the same side of the dragging foot hung limp. Her speech was slurred when she said hello. I assumed she had had a stroke. I smiled at her and introduced myself. I watched her struggle to lift herself up onto the seat of the stationary bike, and suggested that she might want to try the recumbent bike. She responded with a soft voice, saying that she had trouble adjusting the seat of the recumbent bike. I offered to help her, but she said she could manage herself. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Yeah, I’ll figure it out.” She did. Though I was being helpful, I wasn’t. She needed to figure out, on her own, how to adjust the seat. If she needed my help, she would have asked me.

While we may mean well when interacting with someone who has an invisible TBI, or any invisible disability, there are an untold number of statements we may find ourselves saying (some of them people have said to me), that are not helpful, but hurtful. It can be said that such statements are not only meant as an attempt to be helpful, but also as a diversion from facing our own morbidity, and mortality. For instance, it’s easier to say to someone with a TBI, “But you look great,” than to say nothing at all, which would leave too much space in your mind for thoughts of your own vulnerability.

To learn what not to say to people with a TBI, go to Brainline. This same site offers other communication strategies when interacting with TBI survivors, including those with post-traumatic stress disorder. But please know that by sharing this list, my intention is not to be prescriptive or didactic. Dare I say it … it’s my way of making a suggestion. (Maybe I’m not being very helpful, but I can only hope so.)

Thanks for considering these tips!

Do you enjoy drawing, coloring, painting? So what if you are not a Picasso or a Van Gogh.  What I’m about to share with you just might inspire you to head out to your local art shop for colored pencils and a drawing pad. Research suggests that creating visual art enhances memory, and improves interactions between certain parts of the brain. Based on feedback from a small group of retirees, improvement in brain functioning may also strengthen one’s psychological state of mind.  This seems logical. After all, as researchers say, “The creation of visual art is a personal integrative experience—an experience of ‘flow,’ in which the participant is fully emerged in the creative activity.” With that integration, brain connections are strengthened, which, in turn, boosts self-confidence.

For individuals with a TBI, art is a form of therapy. It restores connections in the brain damaged by trauma. This restoration process is called neuroplasticity: the changes in nerve pathways of the brain that affect behavior. Yes, we can actually re-wire our brains by intentionally changing the way we think and do things. Since 2010, therapists at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE), at Fort Belvoir, Virginia have been using art as a tool in treating war veterans who have sustained TBIs.

Art therapy does more than help to heal an injured brain. Jackie Briggs, a therapist at NICoE says, “For service members who might already have trouble expressing themselves … art therapy gives them a chance to use free expression, allowing whatever needs to bubble up from below the surface to be seen and evaluated.” When thoughts “bubble” up, service members gain a better understanding of their symptoms such as irritability, anxiety, and depression. With that deeper understanding, their relationships benefit, because they are able to effectively unearth their buried feelings and thoughts.

At NICoE, service members decorate blank papier-mâché masks. The reasoning behind using this form of art therapy is based on how trauma works; it blocks the part of the brain responsible for speech and language. The image of the mask itself is tangible, a concrete method of showing how service members are feeling. As one of the therapists at NICoE says, “the masks have given service members a visual voice.” The added benefit is that they know they are not being judged, or critiqued. Making the masks affords them the opportunity to explore, engage in the process of creating something that encourages free expression.

The formof art doesn’t matter. Art is art. Juliet Madsen, a veteran of two wars who sustained a TBI when a roadside bomb hit her convoy, likes to doodle. In an email exchange with her this past fall this is what she had to say about doodling:

Doodling stimulates your creative side, allows your body to calm down, takes the active stresses and puts them on the back burner, can sometimes give you an artistic answer to your problems if you open to it, and gives you a time out… I am a big fan. Once you are an accomplished Doodle Artist take a set of colored pencils to your work or thin point sharpies, then you are really working it.

Juliet inspired me. I bought myself a sketchpad and sharpie and started doodling. I’m now a big fan too!

Are you a doodler, a painter, a sketcher, a creator of masks? If not, why not join in. Grab a sharpie, a pen or pencil, a paintbrush. As Juliet said, “Stimulate your creative side.”

Cheers to free expression, to an integrative experience – and to a healthy brain!

If you want to learn more about the masks service members have created, read the “The Invisible War on the Brain,” published in February 2015 by National Geographic.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/table-of-contents

Our bodies deserve to be treated with kindness. Right? If you are looking to do just that, whether you are living with post-traumatic stress disorder, a traumatic brain injury, chronic neck and back pain, migraines, or any other emotional or physical ailment, why not give cranial sacral therapy (CST) a try? Discovered in 1970 by osteopathic physician John E Upledger, CST is not as new-age as you might think.

I know, “cranial sacral” sounds nothing like new-age. You might cringe at the notion of someone messing with your neck and spinal column. But, with CST, there is no mess involved: back cracking, neck manipulation, muscle tugging. To help understand CST, I’ll interrupt here with a very brief lesson in Anatomy 101. More than most other parts of the body, the brain and spinal cord, which make up the central nervous system (CNS), influence the ability of the body to function properly. In turn, for the CNS to  function up to par, it relies heavily on a healthy craniosacral system: the membranes and fluid that surround, protect and nourish the brain, spinal cord, and the attached bones.

Since we endure stress every day – sitting at a desk for long hours, dragging a whining toddler through the grocery store, driving through bumper-to-bumper traffic – the body’s tissues tighten and create havoc in the craniosacral system. This can cause increased tension around the brain and spinal cord, interfering with the healthy functioning of the CNS, and even other systems it  interacts with.

With CST, the therapist uses her hands to evaluate the craniosacral system by gently feeling various parts of the body to assess for ease of motion, and for the flow of cerebrospinal fluid around the brain and spinal cord. Using soft-touch, she releases restrictions in the tissues, and mobilizes fluids around the spinal cord.

I’ve been curious about CST for a long time now, and, when I attended a workshop on CST at Vermont’s annual brain injury conference this past October, Kate Kennedy, the speaker, and veteran practitioner of the method, convinced me to consider it as an adjunct to alleviating my PTSD symptoms (hyper-vigilance, hyper-startle, nightmares) and a TBI (foggy-headedness, fatigue, poor concentration).

During the workshop, I learned, for CST to help heal our physical ailments, we need to let go of our emotions. Kate called them the “stuck places,” when she referred to the “emotions that take up space in our bodies” – in our muscles, tissues, bones. Vital to treating her clients, she asks them to talk about their individual traumas, as she feels for tight places, the places she senses being “over-charged.”  With the letting go of emotions, those tight areas also literarily let go.

Kate also reminded us that compensatory mechanisms influence the experience of the trauma. In other words, we possess layers upon layers of compensation before the trauma, and, for instance, how a migraine associated with a TBI heals depends a lot on what our past compensatory mechanisms were like. It’s not uncommon for people to hold onto the force of the injury – for example, neck tension.

The memory of trauma, pain, or any acute or chronic condition might very well be wrapped-up in your body. It’s true, our bodies hold our personal narratives. If we want to rid them of the upsetting narratives, or as Kate says, “The waste products of our central nervous system,” CST, with its gentle, listening approach can find those mucked-up places. I think of CST as empowering, as allowing you to gain access to your own body – the entire container of the self.

Are you ready to be empowered?

To find a CST therapist click here.

How often do you view social media sites? Two, three, five times a day? Do you have nightmares after viewing clips of school shootings or movie theatre bombings? Do you feel chronically uneasy, irritable, hyper-vigilant after watching unfettered displays of violence?

If this is the case, you might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Yes, viewing violent news events on social media can cause PTSD. In a recent study conducted by Dr. Ramsden, a researcher at the University of Bradford in the UK, 189 individuals completed questionnaires regarding personality and violent news events such as 9/11 and suicide bombings. They also participated in clinical assessments concerning PTSD and vicarious traumatization, a term typically assigned to those who repeatedly witness trauma such as therapists, rescue workers, crisis clinicians, police officers, and nurses.

Out of the 189 participants, nearly one quarter of them scored high on clinical assessments of PTSD, showing that they were significantly affected by watching violent news events on social media. The more individuals who viewed violent events, the greater they were affected. Extroverts were also found to be at greater risk for developing PTSD.

Now that I’ve added a layer of worry to your day, (sorry), how do we protect ourselves from unrestrained acts of violence? Though, in June of this year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of protecting free speech on social media and the Internet, we, as viewers, possess a similar freedom of choice, namely the freedom to make choices that protect our emotional well being. We can choose to walk away from our computers, iPhones, iPads, e-readers, and tablets. The challenge I pose to you is this: Can you shift your eyes from the screen, even for a day, and onto something else like a walk in the woods, a fantasy novel, or a crossword puzzle?

“I dream about blood.” That’s how Erin Maynard, Acting President and CEO of PTSD Survivors of America, begins her tragic story, “I Killed a Man and I Want to Die.” In 2008, she unintentionally drove over and killed a pedestrian on the Long Island Expressway. Maynard was heading home from her job as an editorial aide when she felt a “thump” below her car. That “thump” changed her life. That “thump” reverberates throughout her story. Maynard tells it to us straight, bares her soul on the page with stunning courage. Her story is so powerful, and dense, with the residue of trauma – post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic growth, survivor guilt, forgiveness, and identity – that it must be shared. It must be shared so that others can better understand life after trauma.

To learn how Maynard picked up the shards of her shattered life, I encourage you to read her full story in The Spectrum.

Click here for Erin Maynard’s full bio. 

Do you have a personal traumatic story to share? If so, how has it changed you? What can we learn from your experience?