PTS without the D

"Emotional anaesthesia" is known to be a common symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and is typically characterised by a numbing of the positive feelings of joy and love, but not the anxious feelings of fear and dread.

My brain seems to have mastered, without any apparent effort on my part, the knack of experiencing a modified version of this symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress, thereby turning it into a useful phenomenon rather than it being a Disorder. PTS without the D, if you like. If I could bottle this sort of habit I'd likely be one rich gal. But I can't, so I'm not.

It's a very curious thing that, after any traumatic experience and no matter how earth-shatteringly terrified or upset I was, my brain tends to perform some sort of reverse emotional anaesthesia - I forget the traumatic side of the equation without necessarily losing the whole plot, enabling me to re-script an event to better serve me. And so it is that the thousand-headed monster that scares the daylights out of me on the rock face, disastrously compelling as it is at the time, simply vanishes no sooner am I completely safe from the possibility of any further trauma - generally this is when I'm either back in the car and on my way outa there, or if the weather turns foul, or when some vital piece of equipment has been forgotten, or there's been some irreparable injury to either me or my climbing buddy. 

This nifty little brain turn leaves me with a memory of events without a re-living of the trauma. And the happy consequence of this scenario is that my mind is now at liberty to analyse the activity and give my inner Problem Solver free reign to come up with pathways to better outcomes. My innate sense of Curiosity comes out to play, also. And my natural tendency towards Obsessive Thinking replays the event in its improved format, over and over, whether I want it to or not.

Windsurfing my way through boring lectures

Not me!! But close...

In my 20s I taught myself to windsurf in this way. After many a tiring, frustrating weekend session at the beach spent mostly pulling my arms out of their sockets whilst uphauling on the rig, on weekdays I'd sit through a boring University lecture looking for all the world as if I were intently listening, whereas I was actually visualising myself in the act of the perfect beach start followed by numerous exhilarating tacks across the waters interleaved with graceful jibe turns. Invariably, my next weekend session on the board would see my windsurfing skills (if not my capacity to pass end-of-year University exams) miraculously improved.

After each day of climbing, and from the relative safety of distance from the crag, my inner Problem Solver takes my inner Curiosity by the hand and starts weaving new and interesting threads. My mind focuses on and replays bodily sensations that worked in my favour on the rock face - the sense of balance and body tension between contact points on the rock, the grippiness of my climbing shoes and chalked fingers, fingers and toes working the rock topography, flexing leg and arm muscles as I move from one hold to the next. The fearsome dragon is safely ensconced in its cave, and I'm free to dance a merry tune.

And so it is that within a few days of my first tentative little climb, my close encounter with the thousand-headed monster of fear and subsequent melt-down, I'm actually looking forward to having another go, and then another, and then another...