Dr. John A. King responds to someone who told him to "get over" his PTSD. He explains that trauma isn't a choice and healing isn't a timeline. PTSD comes from severe stressors and involves complex interactions between genetics and experience, not weakness or unwillingness to move on.
I had someone contact me and ask me, you know, when am I, you know, going to get my stuff together and actually get over post-traumatic stress. They went on to talk about how they got over their post-traumatic stress disorder and how they're awesome and I need to stop talking about managing it and start, you know, getting on to being healed. And a couple of thoughts. Number one, maybe my trauma wasn't caused by missing a nail appointment. Sounds facetious, judgmental. It's deliberate. The second thing is I didn't think this was a comparison. You know, some people go to war, go through horrible things as a kid or horrible situations in life and never develop PTSD. It's— you don't choose to develop it. It's often a reaction in our body to whatever situation based upon whatever we've been through, nature and nurture. I don't subscribe to a victim narrative or a victim mentality. We should never get into that. But what I do subscribe to is the fact that each of us have a journey and we have to be true to it.
