Transcript
With Prolonged Exposure therapy, one of the things
I dealt with that was really hard was
I didn't like to go out in public,
and I didn't like to be in large groups
because I was attacked in Iraq out of a large group
in the middle of a market, and it kind of put me leery
about groups because those are things you can't control.
You can't control really large groups of people.
It's really hard to maneuver, there's a high sense of danger.
With Prolonged Exposure and re-living the instance
over, and over, and over, and over, yes, I'll say it again,
over and over again, the memory doesn't fade,
the intensity behind it does.
And I learned with the Prolonged Exposure,
by re-living some of the most scariest moments of my life
when I was in Iraq, you learn that it's there,
but the intensity of the memory goes away.
And it goes to a way that you're able to cope with it,
where it doesn't control you anymore, where things
don't always trigger events because you realize
the memory is there versus avoiding it.
And that's the worst thing, is avoiding the instance
and trying to ignore anything that might deliver triggers.
And I do that, and I ignored going to the mall,
and I avoided large groups of people, on purpose.
But with the Prolonged Exposure, it allowed me to realize that
by re-living every instance and going over it over and over
and seeing the different scenarios and playing each part
over and over in my head, I realized that
it wasn't the group that I was afraid of,
it was one particular individual.
And when I learned that, that allowed me to be willing to
go out into public and go get things and be OK with --
yeah, I still don't have a whole lot of tolerance with just
kind of floating around, but I think that's more
of just how I always was, I was always a person
that went in, got what I needed, didn't really peruse,
didn't really browse, knew what I wanted and got out.
But it was more, after Iraq it was like, if I had no choice,
"Alright, go in, get it, get out, that's it, done."
Now it's, "OK, let's look around a little bit,"
because I learned to separate the group,
because of Prolonged Exposure, and realized that
the problem I had was actually with one individual,
one dangerous person, and when you realize that
that's not the threat anymore, you can move forward.