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Traumatic Stress Disorder in Selco’s and the other fellow's behavior he described when in the same circumstances, came from seeing and smelling. The sight and the smell were put in a box in their brain and sometimes that box would open and they were back in that situation in their mind and that would happen even years later. That tends to happen when one is helpless in the original deadly situation. You can't keep someone from dying in front of you and you may be the next one in that condition so you have absolute fear with no way to fix it - helplessness.

Once out of that, regular life experiences gradually displace the sights and smells experiences into a box in the brain. More regular life experiences keep happening and the box manages to stay closed for longer periods of time. The brain uses dreams to sort out and solve problems. The brain has a hard time resolving the sights/smells problem due to the helplessness attached to that and the person will likely wake up, maybe feeling the same amount of fear at the time it happened. A therapist may help in this situation - to take the problem out of the box and talk through it while the person isn't in a state of fear.

I didn't deal with dreams of my patients unless it was the same dream over and over. When that happened, then it was time to delve into that dream and try to resolve it while the patient was not asleep.

Sights/smells while not in fear and helplessness:
When I responded as a first responder to an illness or accident, I never knew what sight/smell was going to be there. If I think of those now, I think, “Oh, my, that was just terrible for that person.” I never thought that then. I was disassociated from what I was seeing/smelling because I could “fix” it, I wasn't helpless.

I saw a person's eye bitten by a dog but I thought, “I have to stop that injured eye from moving to stop any more injury, and I went about doing that not thinking of the bloody sight or how painful it must have been and was at that time.

I saw a 2 x 4 with a large nail in it and a woman's foot impaled on that nail with the nail coming out the top of the foot. I thought, “I have to stabilize the foot on the board to keep more damage from happening”, and that is what I did not thinking about the pain or the blood or the terrible sight of it.

I saw a woman on the road who fell off a bike going down a hill without a helmet on and part of her skin was on the road and her head was a mass of blood. I thought, “I have to stabilize her neck with a collar right now to prevent further damage if it is there.”

I saw a man on the bathroom floor who I knew had a heart attack and I knew this man. I thought, “I have to get blood to his heart and brain”, and that's what I did.

Then, one day I was going to Houston with a man who was going to his doctor and wanted me to go with him. We were meeting at a restaurant and he didn't show up and didn't answer his phone. I went to his house out in the woods and found him dead. I called the sheriff's office, had the man's dog follow me to my car and we waited for the sheriff and deputies. That man was my friend and I was cold and shouldn't have been. I went back in the house with the cops, and worst of all, I had to call the man's son and tell him. That was the worst of it. I was cold when I left and went to a friend's house and stood in front of the fireplace. I couldn't get warm.

Finding the friend dead affected me - I was helpless to fix that - there was nothing I could do and I hated calling that son.

Think of the situations you have gone through - how were you when you could do something and how were you when you were helpless? Do the helpless times stay in a box in your brain and sometimes that box opens?