During my own PTSD decades (yes, I struggled for 25+ years!), one of the toughest things for me was having to be around other people when I felt horrible, depressed, anxious, angry, sleep-deprived and just generally dysfunctional.

In the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook, Glenn Schiraldi writes, “Life is feeling. Not to feel is to be dead.” That’s quite a statement considering, with PTSD, our biggest goal is to avoid our overwhelming feelings! It’s a tough conundrum: Coping and managing with PTSD requires you to dampen your emotions so that you can just get through the day. Healing, however, requires that you do feel your emotion – and get used to it. What’s a survivor to do?

So many of the survivors I work with and talk to express the same idea: There are more than one of me in here! Technically, they don’t mean there’s more than one personality inside their mind, so what do they mean?

If you're one of over 24 million people in the US who struggle with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder then you probably know exactly what it feels like to dissociate. When a situation, emotions or triggers cause you to feel overwhelmed, anxious, frozen or terrified the mind offers a typical (and really fantastic) coping mechanism: you go somewhere else in your head. While dissociating can be a life-preserving response it can become a habit that severely inhibits PTSD recovery efforts. Part of healing means learning to become more present.

In 1981 a lazy doctor almost killed me. Who knows, maybe he was having a busy day, maybe he was hungry and just trying to get to lunch. Maybe he thought he knew so much about run-of-the-mill infections that he didn’t need to know so much about the unique disposition of individual patients. Whatever the reason, when I needed an antibiotic he failed to read my chart before prescribing a medication that my chart clearly noted as a possible danger. What followed was a nightmare that lasted for over 25 years.

During my trauma, there was a moment so overwhelmingly horrific and painful that I literally willed myself to die. I became intensely still and allowed all energy to flow out of my body. Very soon, I felt myself leave my body and move toward a tunnel in the ceiling that was ringed with white light. Obviously, I wasn’t successful in my death quest. But in that moment what did I experience?

I received an email from a client last week; he was very upset. Usually, he's the kind of guy who likes to travel on the drop of a dime but since PTSD began to control his life, he’s noticed that traveling takes an enormous toll on him. After even the smallest trip, he wrote, "I have to sleep all the next day. Is this part of the PTSD profile?" In a word: Yes.

If you struggle with PTSD, then you're no stranger to thoughts about how you could die by suicide to end your pain and anguish. Even the strongest and most resilient person may have moments so challenging the best idea seems to be death. Although you may sink to that dark space, there is a way to pull yourself out, away from thoughts of suicide.

In my work with PTSD clients, we bump up a lot against "I feel so disconnected from myself!" and "I feel so very separate from the world!" In my own PTSD experience, I too felt a big break between my experience of reality and my connection to myself and my body.

Any serious PTSD blog (and that is definitely what I want this to be!) has to start with the lowdown on the details of posttraumatic stress disorder itself. If you've heard about PTSD in the media or if you have a friend or family member - or even think you, yourself, might have a touch of this completely normal reaction to an abnormal circumstance - then right off the bat, it's good to know how to recognize PTSD (symptoms of PTSD) so that you can begin to wrangle the beast.