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Our breakfast conversations don’t shy away from any topic.  This one dealt with – what is Post Traumatic Stress?

I went to Wikipedia to look up what this means and found the following:

“Posttraumatic stress disorder[note 1] (PTSD) may develop after a person is exposed to one or more traumatic events, such as sexual assault, warfare, serious injury, or threats of imminent death.[1] The diagnosis may be given when a group of symptoms, such as disturbing recurring flashbacks, avoidance or numbing of memories of the event, and hyperarousal, continue for more than a month after the occurrence of a traumatic event……

People who experience assault-based trauma are more likely to develop PTSD, as opposed to people who experience non-assault based trauma such as witnessing trauma, accidents, and fire events……”

Most of us only know about PTSD from movies we have seen, which includes actors portraying people with such a problem. Very few of us actually knows someone with PTSD.

Our breakfast included one person who was trying to recover from PTSD and not being successful in the effort.

Most of us these days, no matter the religion or lack of religion, believes human beings are basically good.  Our conversation at breakfast centered around the fact that human beings are mostly self-centered and self-absorbed and have to work very hard to overcome the jealousy, greed, anger, power-hunger and other emotions such self-centeredness engenders to be able to reach the other side where there is good.  We make it to that other side once in a while in our lives, but never on a consistent all-the-time basis.

Without a lot of education around the topic; without a lot of knowledge about people suffering from this problem; and without anything else which would say we are  certified by today’s standards  to deal with it, we, nevertheless, reached a conclusion as to what we thought PTSD is about:)

To us, PTSD transcends race, class, religion, sex, sexual choice, ideology, politics, or any of what we normally talk about.  People who wind up with PTSD can’t be categorized by any of the normal classifications that we use to pigeonhole ourselves.  We decided PTSD comes from the fact that as humans we are basically evil and only achieve goodness on a very rare occasion.  Those with PTSD have come face to face with the raw evil that exists in us and in them and it put them into a reality space, kicking them out of the space where we exist in our  woven and interwoven mythologiess that we use to get through life.

We  live with the assumption of the basic goodness of human beings and we talk about the evil in all of us as being the exception.  We can actually claim, without missing a beat, that all of the evil of the world comes from those few ‘bad eggs’ who cast aspersions on the rest of us.

The problem with that thought is that in this world, evil is the rule not the exception.  Even during those times when we reach that small island of goodness, we are flawed.

Once upon a time Christians believed humans were born with ‘original sin’ and that ‘sin’ was washed away by the waters of baptism.  Today, baptism has become a social act and a social time.  It is like an initiation into a fraternity or a sorority.  Many parents bring their children to Church for baptism, have a party after and they are gone until the child becomes an adult and marries.  So we see a society becoming more and more inerred of the sinful nature of human beings.  The need to raise up a child aware of how hard it is to walk that path away from evil towards good is gone. We can see the results of that attitude by looking at the increase of horror in the world.  Our little group could only talk about Christianity since all of the people at breakfast were either active or fallen away Christians, but this is not limited to Christianity.  I think, if you look at every other religion in the world today, you will find we are moving towards religion as a kind of physical exercise to move the body closer to physical perfection and theology as a justification of the self being in need of more self-control and self-actualization.

Go back to Hitlers Germany, with its destruction of some six million Jews.  It was a horrible time.  But we came out of that throwing crap on the Russians who were with us in that war and who lost some 25 million people.  We did nothing to raise them up and everything to re-create them as the new world enemy.  We worked hard to raise up Germany and those German Jews who suffered loss, but we worked harder to put down Russians and forget about their losses.  So we wound up with the predictable – a new enemy to whom we sacrificed our children, our homes, our futures, because it was necessary now to wage war against this new enemy and former friend.  We branded and put down people who did not agree with us by calling them Communists and that was a bad thing – the civil rights movement of the time was particularly subjected to this name-calling.  And the Communists waged war and trained their people to hate and distrust those who didn’t believe in and accept their ideology. That mentality is beginning to raise its head today as many don’t want to deal with the demonstrations aimed at the evils in our society.  So instead of listening and trying to address the problems, we are beginning to move back to that day when those ‘agitators’, who held up that mirror to our faces, were the problem and those who did not get involved in anything except taking advantage of the goodnesses that come from the work of the ‘agitators’  are the ones we held up in our communities as the role models.

When we come face to face with the trauma from the evil that lives in all of us, some have a hard time overcoming that experience, because they can’t climb back into the myth of the basic goodness of human beings.  Are the ones who suffer from PTSD the ones amongst us who are temporarily or for the long term living with stark reality?  Are they experiencing reality without its covering of mythology; the myths we seem to be able to crank out constantly and instantaneously?  Are we good, or have we so shocked ourselves with the extreme cruelty we can inflict on us and others, that we have to straighten up for a brief period of time and really be and do good?  Do those who experience PTSD know that and can’t reconcile the reality of life with the myth they are asked to participate in with their family, friends and colleagues?  Have they experienced something which does not allow them to do this?  Whenever they try, does truth intervene and demand that they step out of the storybook and live in the real world?  In that real world, they  can’t make excuses for others and can’t accept the same potential for evil they find in themselves.

The rest of us can live with the assumption of humans being basically good.   When we experience trauma from the evil that lives in all of us and we can’t escape that reality and can’t climb back into our created myths, will we spend our lives with the initials PTSD sewn into our clothes and drawn across our breasts?  Will we be haunted by the evil that can and has come out of humans just like us and just like them.  Will faith, trust, love – all of it – be put in a time warp, because we will have seen just how evil humans can be?  Will we then be able to face the fact that there are more people in this world  acting out of evil than out of good?  To live in a world facing that reality must be almost or completely unbearable.

When you have experienced the terrors of the world as anything other than a story in a book,  it is very difficult to see goodness as anything other than the exception.  Who we really are can be life-haunting for those who have seen humanity in its rawest form.

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