Solo Diving: Really? Is that safe?

Tech Diving

- Steve Lewis

Emma was an instructor candidate with a difference. She was not what the dive community calls a team player... at least, not typical in one very specific way, because she empathically had zero faith in the buddy system. More to the point, she called it a big fat lie written on a Kleenex that “falls apart as soon as it gets wet.”

You’d be correct in thinking she had issues with the whole concept behind the system and had a real problem teaching it to her students without a bunch of added conditions. Not quite com il faux.

Severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) creates a strange rip in the internal fabric of time, the sheet of memories that hangs in the back or the human mind. We all deal with life-altering events differently and the spectrum of reactions to trauma runs from debilitating shellshock to indifference, but for most the result is that memories of the trauma are bent and torn, so that trying to arrange the timeline leading to and from one’s personal ‘come-to-Jesus’ moments is close to impossible. The usual Point A progressing orderly to Point C via Point B scenario doesn’t work at all. And that can make it difficult to process and explain the original event, even to oneself.

So, for most folks living with PTSD, this means the past and the present do not live separately. There is no difference between then and now because the natural flow of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, is in tatters. For those badly affected, all that remains is a mental landscape flooded by dark emotion, making it very hard to compartmentalize The Past from The Now. And that was clearly the case for Emma.

Diving’s tempest