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Have had two appointments over the last few weeks with both a psychiatrist and my IC. Both have highly recommended meditation among other things. Being completely ignorant on the practice, they both recommended the app Calm as a starting point for a beginner. Lots of things going on with my head right now but my IC says let's start with trying to get your brain to refocus when those triggers hit. Her approach is we don't have much control over WHAT we think once it starts (if someone says white elephant, we're going to think about a white elephant) but we can train it to refocus. Do any of you have feedback on meditation to help with what we're all going through? Success, failure? I can't see a scenario where it's going to help but the concept still feels abstract to me.

Meditation for me is self taught and isn’t any particular method, I guess there are a number of ways to go about it.

I use music a lot to clear my head first and then focus on deep breathing — five or six strong clearing breaths at this point (I’ve done it so often now) gets my mind ready to focus on something else or nothing at all.

Close my eyes, shut out the world and breathe slow and deep, that’s all I got.

I agree a bit with your IC, yes, once you have a thought, good or bad it is there.

But there is also some agency too, some power on our own behalf, or I at least developed it more over time on how to process the thought.

These days (9+ years of healing), I do still get hit by the occasional flashback, or an image of the A or other intrusive thoughts, I immediately ask myself, "Where is this coming from?"

I mean, the answer is usually the same, it’s my PTSD brain coming back to check on me. To make sure I’m on alert. To make sure my world is what it is supposed to be.

I’m good with my mind making sure I’m okay.

It’s a positive, not a negative anymore.

I process the thought, accept that whatever the intrusive thought is that bad stuff isn’t currently happening, it is an old event.

If I get stuck, that’s when I go to music, or some extra clearing breaths to reset.

If I get really stuck, I talk with my wife or I journal it out. Writing out my pain, getting it on paper was always helpful. Something cathartic about writing it down.

I think I ended up with over 400 pages of my thoughts on it all, and I finally erased all of those files last year. I had pushed through and processed it all, and didn’t need my ‘notes’ on it anymore.

At the end of the day, I’m a mediocre meditation guy at best, but just good enough to catch a bad thought and move it along.

[This message edited by Oldwounds at 10:00 PM, Tuesday, September 16th]