Hi everyone, and thanks for following the tour for Dare to Hope, the 4^th book in the All Cocks series. This book is another MMM Menage story, but at times it felt like there were four main characters in the book, Micah’s PTSD being the fourth wheel. While Gabe is still dealing with the loss of his lover and a slight case of PTSD, the soldier in this story is hit the worst. Micah lost his leg in Iraq but survived the IUD bombing. The scars he carries aren’t just the ones on his skin- they run much deeper, bleeding over into his life on a daily basis.

I researched different forms of PTSD, the effects it has on the mind, body and soul. It was interesting to learn the multitude of ways the condition can affect a person’s life. Something as simple as a smell can trigger an episode, the person reverting back to the incident that created the condition for them. For Micah it’s the bomb in Iraq at the center of his PTSD. Something as innocuous as slamming a cabinet, banging on a door, popping a bottle of champagne… any one of these sounds could send Micah into a blind episode, his mind so wound around the sound that it plays tricks on him, making him think he is back in Iraq fighting for his life again. It was a challenge at times to represent this in a way that would translate well on paper.

I came across a very interesting form of treatment early on and decided to use this treatment in the book for Micah. VRE therapy, or Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy. VRE is a form of therapy where a soldier is virtually put into the same setting that caused his/her PTSD. Through VRE therapy, behavioral health providers can use 360-degree, interactive computer-generated environments uniquely tailored to expose the patients back into the environment and experience where the trauma occurred, to help reduce anxiety and post-traumatic stress in a safe environment.

I also came across dozens of articles that talked about intense, physical reactions to PTSD flashbacks that were liken to the person wanting to crawl out of their skin, or feeling like their skin was on fire. The reason is that their mind is so overwhelmed with the flashback that the tension, fear and anxiety literally have nowhere else to go. So the body consumes the excess and something as simple as touching their skin causes them pain. You ever have that feeling when you wake up after sleeping on your arm? Feels like hundreds of tiny needles or ant bites, and if you touch that arm it stings? It is something very similar to that feeling.

In the end, I hope the combination of research and me making it my own for the context of the story translates well enough to readers that they can feel Micah’s pain, but not so harsh that they don’t enjoy the book. This book was such a great learning experience for me and I hope everyone enjoys reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Micah is so beautifully broken, Gabe has a hole in his heart and Tristan, well, he is the glue that holds them together. I can’t wait for you to meet them!

Thanks again to the crew of Love Bytes for hosing me today. I’ll leave you with a couple of videos that explain and show VRE therapy in more detail.  

Youtube video where you can see VRE in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F4i6vEZ-H4

Anderson Cooper 360 does a report on VRE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1orx97sFGc