PTSD Healing Tip: Write A Letter From Your Future Self To Your Past

Patients of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are usually treated by looking into their past, in order to address their large mood swings from one emotion to another, according to thehuffingtonpost.

Currently, the focus is to concentrate on their futures, according to Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) William O'Hanlon. The main healing point is interesting: Patients should write a letter from their future self to their present self!

By projecting themselves into five years of the future, patients can ask themselves what the problems and worries were that no longer bother them. For instance, as a sign says: "There's a reason why rear view mirrors are smaller than windshields."

Those who are afflicted with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) may feel that the future holds no promise at all, so they tend to remain stuck in the past. However, by seeking treatment, reaching out for support, and learning to cope with some new skills, you can overcome PTSD and go forward, according to helpguide.org.

But if the focus is on the future, it helps to unlock the patient from the past. As a Zulu proverb says: "You have to fetch the future, it's not coming towards you, and it's not running away."

Hence, the following questions can be asked: "What would you have to do to focus on the near future? What would you have to do in order to get there?"

The healers of PTSD, including psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists and pastoral counselors, need to understand the value of their roles as "fulcrums for their patients on the continuum between past and present." It would help if the healer asks the patient: "You can choose to do it or you can choose not to do it," thus giving the patient control of his or her own life.

It would thus help the patient to strike out into new paths, communicate better with themselves and others, empathise and contribute to the feelings of themselves and others.

O'Hanlon believes that it is important to "connect the traumatized person to a future with possibilities, to validate and include all aspects of the person, to create the pattern of the Post-Traumatic problem and to reconnect the person in places where he or she has been disconnected, e.g., from self, from others and the world" (O'Hanlon 2015).