Something had to have happened during the month of May, I've seen too many posts here from wives who notice the same PTSD slide. Since we cover a wide range of years in service, I'm sure it was some traumatic event connected either to weather or something else which required a seasonal clock. My Hd starts in April and his moods climaxes in May. He agrees with me that this is a bad time for him, yet cannot explain why. It begins again in September and ends with that month. I use to think it was because that was when he left for boot camp with September being the month he came aboard the CLG-5. But there is obviously more to this. I know with my own PTSD anniversery dates are major triggers - but I know why and I can work through them. I use to hate triggers - especially since they seldom disclosed themselves. I would have a full blown falshback, a panic attack, etc. and become the Queen of all Bitches - thanks to some simple yet unknown reminder of the trauma. It could be something as simple as a color, a song, or a holiday that happened close to the event. I would literally have an emotional melt down. I finally accepted the fact that I would NEVER identify all the reminders of that event, I also concluded that fighting them, ignoring them, was just as harmful just as crippling as it zapped me of all my energy. Once I positioned myself more as an observing passenger in my journey through life could I find relief. I learned a simple, yet incredible fact - to not fight the fear but embrace it. Doing so allowed me to focus on reaching a place in which I could identify what ever it was that had triggered the memory, to sooth myself by saying this is the mind's way of protecting itself, the body's means of preventing that harm from happening again. Our lives revolve around predictability, when it does not, when an event happens that is beyond our scope of experiences the mind attempts to form its own. When the event is flooded with Adrenalin the mind often fails to take down and code what has just happened. It later struggles to pair the memory with some similar event in the past - but with trauma there is seldom a match. The mind then grabs at mind markers and simple harmless everyday events, sounds, smells, touches become triggers that draw up the past.

I learned long ago that keeping calm allowed me to discover what had instigated the memory, to then record it and accept that with time I could lessen its effect. It worked, I am no longer a prisoner in my own home. I realize my own experiences are a far cry from what our HD's are going through - but knowing this common plight among those who have PTSD might help.