Page 603 - Total War on PTSD

thinking, as the event was wrapping up, that this is why we are doing this...because this Veteran who was isolating can now break out and go do things that he couldn’t before.
I meet with everybody, as a group, before the events actually begin...providing a sort of safety and rules briefing as well as providing a reminder to all concerned to stay hydrated, things like that. From there I tend to run between the club and the drivers and I will typically have a driver on the track and then another set of drivers who are working the track. This means that they are resetting the cones if they get hit, things like that. So I am constantly running and coordinating activities, and because of this, we have actually gotten our Veterans ‘rides’ in some very interesting, unique, and expensive cars. By rides, I mean that the Veterans get to go out on the track with another driver to experience the ride in a different car and even help familiarize them with the track. In doing so we were also able to identify other Veterans who are doing these events as well, as individual participants. So all of a sudden it seems like we are back in uniform, we are talking smack to each other, and it’s a really fun time. I had a married couple at the last event that I did, and the wife actually had a better time than her husband.
Basically, there’s a clinical term called prolonged exposure, which is basically being exposed to something that brings anxiety (with PTSD, at the end of the day, at the root of it is anxiety) and part of the therapeutic treatment for that is to expose you to someone that brings you that anxiety. So, a crowd, loud noises, an unknown location; all these things can be very triggering. So in preparation for the first event I actually
603 of 1042