Best Tweets for Trauma and PTSD Survivors is a weekly Friday feature. My selections are entirely subjective, and I know it will never be possible to include every great resource tweeted. But I can try! I’ve personally read all tweeted links, and believe them to be of great value.

Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for content found on any other website. Stay safe, and don’t follow links if you believe you might be triggered by them. Also, I will not be re-checking links from older Best Tweets posts, and if the site’s archived URL is different from the one I’ve provided here, you may need to do a search on their site.

Please share my stuff!: You can now “like” and “share” this post everywhere with the touch of a button or two at the end of the linked tweets! Feel free to do any or all of that! (And thanks.)

Photo Credit

@soulseedz “If your compassion doesn’t include yourself,
it is incomplete.”

Six Standalone Tweets to Ponder

@LillyAnn “We rarely take a breath without making a judgment. Don’t mistake naming for knowing.” ~ Ezra Bayda

@karenkmmonroy “Spirit moves you to action, ego wants to find the reasons why to act. Spirit is enough to act, you don’t need ego’s reasons why.”

@Tamavista “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” ~ Jung

@malcolmjackson “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

@LillyAnn “One of the biggest steps you’ll ever take, however small its length, is to turn toward your fear.”

@rcinstitute “SoulfulSunday: be compassionate; it’s necessary for your soul.”

Linked Tweets

@SarahEOlson2009 15 Ways To Support a Loved One with Serious Mental Illness
[SEO: This is practical, actionable information about how to support a loved one with a serious mental illness. While it stresses that blame is not a part of that support, it also discusses how over-involvement by family members can actually be detrimental to recovery. This is a great guide to give to people in your life who want to support you in meaningful, healthy ways. It’s also a primer in how you can be proactive in helping them to help you.]

@Mary_Jaksch How to Be Your Own Best Friend (via @LillyAnn)
[SEO: An insightful post discusses old patterns of perfectionism leading to beating yourself up when you eventually falter. Offers a “realistic expectation” of what to do when perfectionism falls apart, and how to put it into practice.]

@psychcentral Feeling Anxious? Here Are 3 iPhone Apps to Help You Relax
[SEO: “Technology can scatter our attention into about a million directions at once. A million, anxiety-inducing directions. But not all technology is bad for our collective stress level.”]

@drchuckelliott Don’t Worry, Be Unhappy
[SEO: It’s rare to find anyone with a rational response to all the ‘happiness’ gurus out there, as well as to the societal norms that expect us to be always nice, often to a fault. This post, based on research, describes the author’s personal take on ‘mild negativity’. “For people who lean towards pessimism, pretending to be optimistic (imagining successful outcomes) before starting a task can actually work against them; the same with optimists approaching a task pessimistically (by imagining all the things that can go wrong). Both optimists and pessimists found that fighting their nature interfered with their performance.” As the author notes, full-blown negativity is usually counter-productive.]

@tinybuddha 10 Places to Find Hope (via @AlwaysWellWithn)
[SEO: I don’t find a contradiction in championing ‘mild negativity’ (above), and now presenting why it’s a good thing to find hope wherever it may be. Hope has kept me alive much of my life. When adversity strikes, as it does for this post’s author, it’s a solid basis for hope which allows you to make good — or perhaps better — decisions, and to carry on and cultivate what obtains from those decisions. “When something happens that threatens to leave you hopeless, remember that you are strong. You are resilient and you can take the necessary steps to protect hope and encourage change. Without hope, there is no next step. Without hope, there is no possibility of happiness. I choose hope.“]

@psychcentral Problems, Puzzles or Paradoxes: How Do You Define Life’s Challenges?
[SEO: A great post! Explores with detail and examples, how choosing to call something a ‘problem’ may define how you attempt to solve it, and may preclude solutions based upon your past outcomes with ‘problems’. How would you look at it differently if you began with the premise instead that it’s a ‘puzzle’ or a ‘paradox’? “What might those kind of thoughts unleash for you, that ‘problem-saturated’ thinking might not? And what other words might you use?”]

@grace2244 What I Didn’t Know Might Help You
[SEO: While the backdrop of this post involves the lack of availability of in-patient trauma services in the U.S. for dissociative identity disorder (DID), this post also discusses the efficacy of SSRI antidepressants, which long-term is lacking. The author also discusses the frequency of suicide attempts amongst trauma survivors triggered by the death of an abuser parent. If you are struggling with abuse issues — regardless of your diagnosis — these are important issues. But first and foremost keep yourself safe. You might want to just pass it on to your own therapist.]

@SarahEOlson2009 The end of therapy and the beginning of life
[SEO: Describes the natural progression of the path of good therapy, in that at some point, therapy stops being a life-line, and lessons learned in therapy begin to translate well into everyday life. The post discusses the concept of transference in depth, which in my opinion is crucial for both your therapist and you to fully understand, to create a successful outcome. In good therapy, a time will come when the attachment to your therapist will diminish, and your experience of a broader life than ‘just therapy’ will expand.

The author offers this wonderful metaphor about the need for the decision to end therapy to be a slow deliberative process: “For an eternity there was just my therapist and I in an enmeshed relationship in my head. Separating ourselves was like trying to untangle a basketball-sized bundle of knotted wool. Neither of us wanted to chop the ball in half and own our severed part, we had to slowly unravel section by section until I knew that all the wool was entirely mine, but it was now one long piece that could be knitted into anything I wanted it to be.”]

@psychcentral Self-Directed Neuroplasticity: Mindfulness, Therapy and Sculpting the Self
[SEO: “This phenomenon is called ‘experience-dependent neuroplasticity’ — and basically, it’s about how your experiences, and what you make of them, literally shape your brain at a physical level. And, in turn, how your experiences can therefore shape the kinds of thoughts you might be more likely to have next time. ‘So if you’re routinely grumbling in your mind, [over time] your brain will take the shape of your low mood…,’ Hanson explains. It’ll get easier and easier to fall into the groove of it. To get used to it. To forget there’s an alternative. And maybe eventually even to associate that groove with ‘who you are.'”]