Post traumatic growth, a personal reflection

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This is my personal experience and mental health journey as it relates to my experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It’s my story and I am sharing it in the hopes that it may provide hope, guidance, and growth for those that may need it. While it is my experience, it may or may not suit your journey and should be used as a guide only and not a prescriptive course of recovery action. If you are experiencing issues with your mental health and require professional support, please seek the appropriate supports such as a GP, counsellor, psychologist or clinical mental health triage team.

January 2003, I was starting to come to terms with a failing abusive marriage (although I didn’t acknowledge being a victim of abuse for another 6 years) and a life that was going nowhere. I was being treated for clinical depression and anxiety through my GP and a counsellor. As part of this journey, I needed to reconnect with my community and give back, so I joined the Country Fire Authority as a volunteer fire fighter. Flash forward 6 years of very active first responder duties to structure fires, motor vehicle accidents, search and rescue, flood response and several strike team responses to wildfire. I had worked my way up the ladder at the CFA to crew leader and incident controller and eventually into several officer’s position. My depression was being managed through an unhealthy balance of overeating and avoidance, my weight ballooned to about 143kgs, the biggest I had ever been, and my health was struggling.

February 2009, I had spent the previous 10 days working the Delburn Fire in Gippsland when early on Saturday the 7^th of February 2009 we received a call out to a bushfire on my home patch in Churchill Victoria. We spent the next 48 hours running to try to contain the fire which ended up burning for over a month. I recall spending about 6 weeks on the fire ground chasing active fires and eventually blacking out and making safe the burned area. In counselling sessions after the fact, we worked it out that I averaged about 4 hours sleep a day for the period of 6 weeks, with some days running on no sleep at all.

My situation had built into a perfect storm. Running on very little sleep with no down time, a traumatic home life, poor health and using my unhealthy avoidance strategies to cope, I was destined to burn out. At the time I was employed as a youth worker with a community minded organisation that allowed me time off to attend the fire fighting. After the 6 weeks, I eventually went back to work and all I can remember is sitting at my desk for the next 2 days staring at the wall, not knowing what to do and not able to concentrate. I knew something was wrong. I knew I couldn’t continue working like that, so I spoke to my manager and resigned, effective immediately. The next 2 weeks I spent in bed. I don’t remember eating or even getting out of bed. I was in a dark fog that I couldn’t even recognise. I was blank and empty, all except the re-occurring flashbacks of flames and sirens, burnt buildings and that horrible smell that to this day still brings back the memories of that 6-week period.

Thankfully, an external party intervened and gave me the kick up the butt I needed to get me out of my bed and back into counselling. I spoke with my GP and started going through the process of finding the right balance and type of anti-depressants that I needed to take the edge off so I could re-engage in getting myself back on my feet. I know that there is a lot of hesitation for some people to take anti-depressants. However, I am here to say that while they may have some side effects, the benefit they provide reducing the symptoms of depression and anxiety is enough that it allows the taker some relief, space, and energy to be able to do the work required to kickstart their recovery. I know for me they quietened my mind and reduced the severity of the flashbacks and their impacts on me emotionally.

I began regular weekly sessions with my counsellor and learned and practiced various psychological therapies, which included mindfulness and focussed breathing to help ground me in the present. We worked on emotional regulation and integrated my memories of the events of the Black Saturday bushfires to create a timeline of events which helped reduce the emotional arousal to these events and memories. During this process is when I became aware that I was living in a violent relationship, which had contributed to my development of PTSD and I started the journey of getting myself and my children out of that abusive relationship.

I learned that most of my life I had been using various forms of avoidance to dissociate myself from my emotional response to my environment, and that if I wanted to truly heal, I needed to engage with my feelings and emotions in a safe and managed way. Even if it meant talking and engaging in emotional content that I found uncomfortable with or confronting. It was only through engaging with this emotional content and connecting with my emotional responses that I was able to truly heal.

With my psychological and emotional health starting to improve, I was still unhealthy and overweight. My GP encouraged me to address my weight issue and developed a plan of walking and healthy eating. Because of the excess weight I was carrying, and a symptom of depression being reduced motivation and exercise tolerance, I couldn’t run or walk very far, so I slowly started my journey back by walking the length of my street. The more I walked the more I found I was able to do. The length of the street turned into a lap of the block. The block turned into the neighbourhood. When I realised, I could walk around the neighbourhood, I decided I would try to add a small slow jog. I would walk from one lamp post to the next and then slow jog to the next lamp post, then it became 2 lamp posts, then the length of my street. Slowly but surely my exercise tolerance began to increase. The physical benefit of being able to jog improved my health, but I also noticed that my self-confidence and emotional states became more stable and to top it all off, I felt fantastic at what I had accomplished. This made me think what else could I challenge myself to do and what else I could accomplish. So, I joined the local gym and got myself some personal training.

I had never really been interested in lifting weights, so I had never really pushed myself at the gym before. But the more the personal trainer pushed me the more I gained. I could feel myself getting stronger and more confident. I could breathe easier and now running the block only fuelled me up to run further. The more I ran and the more I worked out the better I felt. The better I felt the more I wanted to challenge my boundaries. The more I challenged my physical boundaries, the more I grew as a person both physically and mentally. I was starting to personally experience the psychological and emotional benefits of physical exercise, and it felt great.

I now run almost daily and am currently training to run my third marathon as well as having completed several half marathons and middle-distance races. I have completed Tough Mudder and Spartan obstacle course racing events, all things I had never even dreamed of being able to complete. I don’t run these races to win, I don’t even run theses races to compete against the other racers. I run them to compete with myself. Because each race is a new goal I set for myself and another chance to push my boundaries and challenge myself to see what I am truly capable of, and let me tell you, when you set yourself a goal and you go out achieve it, when you find your perceived personal limitations and you step through them, your internal world, your emotional state and your mental health sky rocket.

I am often asked why I have such a relaxed positive energy about me. I personally believe that it is because of the journey I have been on and the steps I took to rebuild and even grow through the post traumatic process. I have not only recovered from my traumatic experience, but I have also experienced post traumatic growth.We are all capable of experiencing our own post traumatic growth and we can do this by engaging in our experiences and emotions in a safe and managed way.

Thanks for hearing my story, I hope that you find something useful to grow on 😊Darren Devlin