Cole Lyle is a 26-year-old veteran of the War in Afghanistan. Upon returning home to Texas, he faced what so many of his fellow soldiers contend with: Unrelenting bouts of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTS) that upended the life he’d known before his deployment.

Burdened with the weight of carrying his experiences and being thrown back into civilian life...

A study reports that the relationship between nightmares and suicidal behaviors is partially mediated by a multi-step pathway via defeat, entrapment, and hopelessness.

Results show that suicidal thoughts, plans, or attempts were present in 62% of participants who experienced nightmares and only 20% of those without nightmares. Multiple analyses suggest tha...

Like many others, Alison Hallworth used to associate Post Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) with soldiers returning from war. But as the 41-year-old discovered, the condition can cast its net much further.

For Hallworth, PTSD struck in the months following the traumatic birth of her eldest daughter.

Hallworth’s birth story is a catalogue of disaster. After 40...

Michael Garvey has about 2 1 / 2 minutes of material, and it’s rough. It’s also heartfelt — and angry. He opens with a joke about being from a Catholic family, “raised off fairy tales and bullsh--.” After all, his mother needed something to keep all her kids in line.

Garvey’s voice shakes just a touch, but maybe it’s only nerves. It’s h...

On the first day of my yoga teacher training, my teacher repeated the phrase, “Yoga is the practice of inquiry.” She emphasized the “journey” with and through oneself and demonstrated a healthy yoga practice as a way to open doors, break down walls, and express vulnerability.

But how do you do this when you’re disconnected from yourself? What do you do when...

Marine Lt. Theresa Larson was forcing herself to vomit as many as five times a day when she was medically evacuated out of Fallujah, Iraq.

The problem had started back at Camp Pendleton in California, but Larson was doing her job and keeping it together, so the very few people who knew about it backed her up.

“I convinced everyone around me that I’d be fin...

The brains of anxiety sufferers may have completely different wiring than people who don’t have the mental disorder, according to a new study out of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. People with an anxiety disorder may have already felt somewhat like a worrisome outsider to the average laid-back person, but the research backs this up by delving...

Some degree of stress is a fact of life, but not all stress is created equal. Following a traumatic event, nearly 7 percent of Americans will have nightmares, physical pain, inability to concentrate and worse. Their debilitating stress is categorized as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and costs them time away from work and the people and things they lo...

Divorce can traumatize. This should not be news to you.

Whereas physical trauma happens to your body, psychological trauma affects your brain and your mind. The traumatic response is characterized by debilitating anxiety, overwhelming vulnerability, flashbacks and an inability to cope.

In a traumatic divorce, survival instincts often get triggered out of n...

It is not uncommon for adoptive parents to come to us feeling out of options for their difficult child and overwhelmed about what could have created all of these DSM diagnoses and intense feelings and behaviors.  Especially if the child was adopted at or near birth.

“We adopted our son at birth. We brought him home from the hospital ourselves and have done...