Past, Present and Future

The human brain is a marvelous piece of work. It weighs a bit more than 3 pounds, is kind of like holding a jelly fish in your hand (ycch), and enables us to experience our past, present and future. Not only that, we can shift from one to the other very rapidly. Needless to say, good mental health is being able to know which tense we are truly in--that is, if what we are experiencing as a brain state matches objective reality. This is very abstract. Perhaps an example will help.

Suppose you are a corporal in the Alabama National Guard stationed in Afghanistan. There are car bombs going off all the time, explosive devices along road sides, and being stuck in slow vehicular traffic is dangerous because of the fact Americans are targeted for attacks. Every trip in a vehicle is hot and dangerous and triggers maximum alertness, tension and vigilance. You find yourself always keyed up to respond to an attack.  Suppose that two months later you are back in Alabama working your usual job as a police officer in one of our coastal communities. You find yourself stuck in heavy traffic, its very hot and there is a lot of noise from honking cars. You suddenly find yourself profusely sweating, very tense, hand on your pistol and expecting to be attacked at any minute.  You start scanning the traffic for Taliban troops with weapons. For about 30 seconds you are in Afghanistan. This is a dissociative state that we sometimes see in folks with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Thankfully it is not that common, but can cause folks a lot of grief and anxiety.  Certain trigger mechanism cause us to be hyper-vigilant. You can probably easily identify them from this short scenario:  heat, snarled traffic, loud honking. The braiin state of hyper-arousal is triggered by these stimuli in our environment. Key insight: we react to a present event as though we are in the past. Gettling locked into these patterns can rob us of enjoying our present.

Intense experiences tend to make a stronger connection among the synapses that make our memory. Hurricane Katrina in 2005, financial crisis, job losses, and now the Oil Spill. These bad events get linked in our brains and create powerful negative mood states. Not only can these memories overwhelm us in the present, if we dwell on them we can lose the ability to look at the future. One feature of PTSD is having a foreshortened future. Big words for a simple process--we lose the ability to imagine outselves in the future and enjoying love, life, and happiness. We lose the ability to put ourselves into a future happy place. It is so easy to lose the joy from the past, the ability to hope for it in the future and to enjoy it in the present moment. That can lead to such despair that we take our lives.

Do not get to that point. We on the Gulf Coast have to learn to do what military folks have learned. Be a Battle Buddy to our family, loved ones and friends. Reach out an connect to those around you. Listen to what is going on in their lives. Ask what they remember that makes them laugh. Go to a comedy. Laugh and enjoy the present moment and talk about the fun you expect in the future. Remember the second letter of SAFE Therapy is Attunement.  Tune into your fellows and celebrate the fact that the oil has stopped flowing into our Gulf. Focus on that good news, share it, and next week we will think about re-building.