We're in a giant car heading toward a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
Yesterday afternoon, my husband and I were driving down a street near here and a white van pulled out of a gas station ahead of us. I immediately thought of my doctor's patient who is triggered by white vans (which remind him of his experiences in a war zone) and what she said about him struggling with "handling" this trigger. I also thought about how, as people with PTSD navigate through the world, they never know when they may encounter a trigger. These days, I've also been thinking a lot about how global warming can become a potent PTSD trigger. For one thing, people with PTSD may live much of the time with a sense of doom or dread hanging over their lives: who needs real, immediate reasons for those feelings? This is true for those of us in recovery and for people like myself who are living through anniversaries. I know that the climate change/global warming news that we've been bombarded with this summer has heightened my already high sense of anxiety. Don't get me wrong. I believe that climate change is very real and anyone who understands science, particularly physics, agrees with me. What I want to take a look at here, is how events in the real world can add to the anxiety load that people with PTSD already carry.
In this post, I'll discuss the mechanisms involved. Next time, I'll write about ways to cope.
How can global warming be a PTSD trigger?
- Global warming events increase our background level of anxiety.
- Disaster scenarios feed our already shortened sense of a future.
- We may feel powerless in the face of uncontrollable events, which can trigger feelings/memories of our own traumas.
- Climate change denial and silencing may remind us of when we were silenced.
- Like the white van trigger (above), news of global warming is everywhere.
- Global warming events increase uncertainty about the future and the safety of the world: problems trauma survivors already struggle with.
- Fears of widespread global disaster are bound to be a trigger.
The Summer of 2012 in the United States
This summer, has seen more than its share of global warming events and ongoing climate problems, from extreme heat waves to wildfires in the American West to a huge, and spreading, drought in the Midwest. I live on the West Coast and, even here, where it has been pretty normal, there are still unavoidable signs of climate change. Smoke from the huge fires burning in Siberia has traveled across the Pacific and hangs in our air. If I turn on the news, there is often news about fires and droughts and heat waves. All-in-all it has been an unsettling summer.
Recent articles, such as, Drought Disaster Declared in U.S have said that temperatures and conditions in parts of the U.S. are worse than the Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s. It's no wonder I'm feeling on edge. Not to mention the thousands of people, in the U.S. alone, that are survivors of traumatic weather events each year. The larger "elephant in the room," is the realization that our present way of life and the Earth itself is endangered by our changing climate and the political paralysis that has resulted in a non-existent or weak response to looming disaster. But don't take it from me. The National Wildlife Federation recently released a report on The Psychological Effects of Global Warming. I intend to read it after I finish this post.
But all is not gloom and doom. Next time: how to cope, what to do and what not to do. One of the things not to do - in my opinion - is to wait for a miracle (even if Leonard Cohen makes it sound tempting.)
