Helpful resources
If you or someone you know need help for PTSD or other serious mental health issues, the following resources may help:
Combat stress - for veterans
For more urgent support, contact your GP, call 111, or in an emergency call 999.
I'm a military veteran with combat-induced complex PTSD, acute anxiety disorder and clinical depression. I've had dark hours, including serious attempts to end my life.
Thrive asked if I was comfortable to share my experience of the benefits of horticultural therapy and nature based healing with you.
The benefits are real, there's no doubting that. If it wasn't for nature, I wouldn't be writing this now.
Finding help
Of course, for such serious mental health problems, a sufferer absolutely needs professional clinical help too.
Unfortunately, when I left the military, such help wasn't easily available. PTSD wasn't even understood as a 'thing'. I feel like Bilbo in Lord of the Rings saying; "I'm old Gandalf!"
So, I had to fend for myself.
Don't do that - seek help! It's there to be found now. If these conditions
assail you too, avail of that help ASAP.
If you or someone you know need help for PTSD or other serious mental health issues, the following resources may help:
Combat stress - for veterans
For more urgent support, contact your GP, call 111, or in an emergency call 999.
The experience of complex PTSD
What does complex PTSD do to you?
Eventually, I gained access to a Clinical Psychologist and other neurological specialists. They explained the seemingly inexplicable to me.
I frequently experience two simultaneous realities. The reality of everyday events happening in real time in the present. Everything I see, hear, feel, sense that's actually happening in the present moment.
Complex PTSD also forces me sometimes, when 'triggered', to simultaneously re-experience (from my overloaded temporal lobes) everything I once saw, heard, felt and sensed during particularly traumatic events.
Those visual, audio, sensory inputs, even my temporal awareness, (that's the sense of the rate of passage of time), are 'played back' to me and the parts of my brain which process vision, hearing, temperature etc.
These aren't hallucinations. These are replays in the highest fidelity possible of reality.
There's help! Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and nature can help you find a way.
Experiencing two simultaneous realities at the same time isn't something we can cope with easily. It can cause complex PTSD sufferers to take their lives. Don't do that - there's help! Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and nature can help you find a way.
Finding space with nature
I needed to understand what was happening to me. CBT did that for me. There are other routes, but I found that the most effective for me.
However, it's one thing to sit in a room with your therapist, listen to their advice, then go home with that information. It's quite another thing to put that advice to practical use in your everyday life.
In my case, and I strongly believe this will apply to many others, I needed to be in a place where I could 'get my head around' the advice I was being given.
I desperately needed a safe space where I could reflect on that advice and recognise how it truly related to my life experiences. A place where I could not only reflect but plan positive actions to combat what was attacking me.
I desperately needed a safe space where I could reflect on that advice and recognise how it truly related to my life experiences ... Nature provided that space.
Nature provided that space. In gardens, parks, woods and wild places I found my refuge, my quiet safe space. The places I could begin healing in.
To begin with this was a very solitary experience, but Nature has powerful healing capacity, and I gained the ability to be in such places with others. I gained insight and support from others, and hopefully provided some to them too.
Thrive and therapeutic horticulture
Thrive exists to create, maintain and develop such vital spaces in nature, with nature. Their work is invaluable for people like me, but I believe every human being will experience times in their lives when they will need to feel nature's restorative powers.
I hope you find what you need with Thrive, I'm sure you will.
I wish Thrive, and all of you, the very best and happiest of peaceful futures.
I believe every human being will experience times in their lives when they will need to feel nature's restorative powers.
I'm also acutely aware of the extreme trauma being experienced right now by the population, civilian and military alike, in Ukraine. I know they need nature's help and Therapy Gardens like never before.
I'm involved in providing just that in a pilot project in Podil, Kyiv, Ukraine. Watch this video produced by Mikael Colville-Andersen, a Sustainable Urban Designer with an international reputation, to understand the need and objectives of the project:
This is the Therapy Gardens for Ukraine website: https://www.colville-andersen.com/therapy-gardens
Hilary has lived with osteoarthritis for over 12 years and has recently discovered the joys of gardening for her health and wellbeing.
