Page 216 - Total War on PTSD

Pod. I entered the pod with an open mind and was determined to try to tolerate going into complete isolation. The novelty of the experience made me focus my attention of how much I couldn’t see, hear, or feel. I thought I could see some colors, perhaps some light source from outside the pod, but something as simple as waving my hand in front of my face proved to yield zero visibility (while making sure salt water did not fall in my eyes). So these colors I thought I was seeing were just a figment of my imagination. A few minutes went by and as I lay very still I realized I couldn't feel the water. Right then and there, the notion of being in a confined space had totally disintegrated. I started to feel as if the pod was huge...so huge that it was almost as if the pod itself didn’t exist. Yet strangely enough I felt connected to everything in the universe. I become aware of thoughts that seemed to simply appear out of nowhere in my consciousness. It was as if they were authored by someone else. I had no way to block them and I couldn't ignore them, nor did I try. I simply acknowledged the thoughts as they arrived and moved from one thought to another as each made its way into my awareness. Then I began to examine the way I think and how emotions got the best of me in many of my conversations. I thought about how I could change the outcome of some of my interactions if I could just be aware of what I was feeling as it was occurring. Then, I started reliving conversations I had in the past, except this time I was occasionally able to do so without the emotional charge they had carried when the conversation originally took place. I could see past the sarcasm and attitude I got from my wife during an argument and understood the message she had intended to send me through her words. I found myself standing in the middle of my garage, which looked like an abandoned storage room, with unopened boxes from my time in the Army.
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