Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Sometimes in life really bad things happen,

and I mean really bad. And when these events happen with some people, they really have a hard

time letting them go and it almost shapes our identity. They become part of that which

happened to them. The term we use for this is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

This happens when a person has a really bad habit that happen, like war or rape, something horrible, and they just can't get it out of their head.

They keep thinking about it, they have nightmares, they petrified, they may not sleep well.

There's many factors that go along with PTSD. And in today's episode,

what we're going to do is look at what can we do if we know someone or we ourselves are struggling

with PTSD and how do we still find happiness on this such tragedy?

Well first I want to start with a word of encouragement.

There are people that go through the exact same event and one of them can walk away fine and the other one can be very petrified and terrified of the event and struggle with PTSD symptoms for decades afterwards. So the good news is we can get over things.

We can get over things well and have beautiful lives. I've been in practice with 25 years now,

working with many people suffering from PTSD symptoms

and I've helped them to get over them so they have beautiful lives.

But even if we are going through hard times right now and suffering from, maybe not as severe

as PTSD symptoms, but definitely suffering from something that is keeping us awake, that is causing us not to live in the present.

What do we do with that? How do we find happiness amidst such tragedy?

The first thing we don't want to do is judge ourselves.

Judging ourselves for having symptoms when other people seem to be okay after such events isn't going to help us.

We do need to acknowledge that this event triggered us for whatever reason and our main focus is to heal it, not to judge ourselves for it happening, not to judge ourselves for having our feelings, but to work towards healing it.

The great thing about being human is we're all individuals,

and everyone matters, everyone's important.

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