His Story
Ted was an incredibly popular college professor. Every couple years he was voted the best teacher at the school. His classes were always filled. He was bright, acerbic, colorful, playful, demanding and energetic. He was a runner. He was happily married with children. Life was good, at least as far as an outsider could tell. The reality was somewhat different.
When Ted came home from his classes, he went to his study in the attic. He didn’t greet his wife, didn’t interact with his children, didn’t eat supper with them, didn’t read to them or tuck them in or help them out. He just roomed there. Once in a while he’d watch some television or a movie with them. Mostly, he meticulously graded student assignments and prepared for the next classes, also meticulously. When everyone was in bed, he’d go down to the kitchen and fix a sandwich or some soup and eat a solitary meal. Then he’d stretch out on the living room floor and sleep. He slept with his eyes open, his senses heightened, his weapon, whatever it was that night, within reach.
He’d awaken before anyone else, shower, grab his books and head off to the university. He’d be in his office by six, feet on his desk, reading. He loved to learn. His mind was jammed with stories and theories and facts and statistics. Later, as the other professors straggled in, Ted had the coffee waiting.
Weekends were different. The lawn would be manicured, the gutters would be cleared, not a fragment of debris remaining, and the pool would be cleaned and ready for the kids. In the winter the snow would be shoveled and the firewood split and stacked and the furnace filter changed precisely on the night of the last day of the month.
These activities were the extent of his family involvement. For example, if his wife and kids had things to do over the weekend, he wouldn‘t go along. He was too busy with school work. He was working on a third advanced degree and then he had his teaching. Occasionally, if the kids needed to be taken to games or events or hikes or camp outs, he’d be glad to take them. However, he then stayed in the car and waited for them. In his mind his actions proved that he loved his wife and kids. He did everything in his power to protect them and provide for them.
His wife was lonely to the core. She was a single mom with a strange man in the attic and a great handyman who required no instruction. She had had cancer as a young woman and had an artificial leg. She blamed his distance on her disability. Nothing could have been further from the truth. But, her disability and the low self-esteem that resulted from his polite, superficial treatment of her kept her a captive in her own home.
She babied and coddled the children and made them her life. She knew who was where at all times and who had what to do for homework and which socks they each had worn that day. When everyone left home for the day, she sat and smoked and drank coffee. She was horribly depressed. But it was her secret.
Ted had a secret, too. He was addicted to marijuana. When he got up before dawn, he smoked a joint. When he finished his run in the afternoon, he smoked a joint.
When he came home and headed off to the attic, he smoked a joint, and when he stretched out on the floor to try to sleep, only another joint could relax him enough so he could even lie still.
Ted was a Viet Nam vet. He had been a commanding officer for eighteen months, until the last round of wounds sent him home for surgeries and a Bronze Star. He had continual flashbacks, haunting nightmares, and found himself unable to bond with, trust, talk to, listen to, hug, hold or love anyone. He was a shell of a man. Functioning, to be sure. But how he kept going was a mystery.
When his wife could stand it no more, she demanded that he have therapy, and not at the Veteran’s Administration which had been the only therapy he’d tried before.
In he came. I was about to experience what a wonderful teacher he was, although it was not his intention to teach me anything. To say that he didn’t want help would not be true. He understood quite accurately that there were few civilian counselors who would have any idea how to help him. That was certainly true of me. But try I did.
For about eight years I was the last ditch effort before the divorce attorney. Ted started doing more with his wife and children. A couple of times a week, there might be an actual conversation. He found some activities to share with his wife. For example, they enjoyed walking to a neighborhood restaurant for supper. He realized that he could joke with the kids if he e-mailed them. This opened up a tolerable amount of interaction, and Ted started enjoying getting to know them. Things plodded along until the roof fell in.
He was caught buying pot from one of his own students. The police were incredibly cooperative and the legal system bent for him. He was forced to resign from his teaching job and sign himself into the psychiatric unit of a hospital in a neighboring town. This hospital had a new PTSD program and was renowned for their drug treatment center. For someone who seemed like he’d lost everything, the truth was, he was about to reinvent himself in a new, stable, much more healed way.
This was the tipping point for Ted, the moment when he knew it was time to make a significant change. He had been in therapy on and off for almost twenty-five years, both in veterans’ programs and in private practices. He had seen his wife and children slip away as he slipped further and further inside himself. Now his family was about to leave him. Those well-constructed defenses were going to have to be dismantled.
His Signs
Isolation was Ted’s main defense mechanism. Since he couldn’t trust himself to let down his walls in any way, he did everything in his power to stay behind a tight defensive shield of civility and information. As long as he was using the part of his brain where information was stored, he was fine. He could teach, give directions, read, work on crossword puzzles and Sudokus, but God forbid he be asked something personal or expected to engage in an intimate exchange. Isolation was the way he handled his great fear that he would fall apart, start blubbering, scream his nightmares out loud, strangle someone who challenged him or even punch the next guy or girl who tried to talk to him on an emotional level.
I remember one time Ted came into therapy and I waited for him to say something. I waited for an entire hour. Neither of us said one word. It’s much more usual that I hardly have the door shut before a client starts talking, and sometimes I have a hard time speaking a word. But silence? I could only hope it was therapeutic in some way.
The isolation from those he lived with and loved was, of course, devastating isolation for Ted as well as his family. He so feared himself and his reactions, was so terror-stricken by what he had done in Viet Nam, so disgusted by what he had seen and smelled and heard and felt, that he was sure if he let his defenses down in any way, he would go back there. He had awoken, back in the days when he was still trying to sleep with his wife, to find himself shaking her, and she wide-eyed and hoarse from screaming.
He had never chanced falling asleep with one of the babies in his arms, because he just couldn’t trust what he might do. How poignant that the actions which were intended to keep his family safe from him had made them fear him. How sad that his valiant and gallant service to his country had ruined his chances to serve his own wife and children in any meaningful way.
The fear and terror which plagued Ted were barely reduced by his pot consumption. It might be more accurate to say that his pot smoking allowed him to breathe without sounding like a freight train and without feeling constantly like he had to outrun one. His running provided nature’s most effective natural anti-depressant.
It was inadequate for him to walk or jog or run a few miles. He became a marathoner.
Unfortunately, Ted was quickly addicted to both the pot and the running. We generally consider exercise of almost any form, no matter how compulsive or consuming, to be a benign addiction. You may be “addicted” to it, in that you may have to do it on a regular basis and for a prescribed amount of time and you may feel sick and unable to concentrate until you do it, but it is not really harmful. Actually, it’s more like a habit.
Pot, at least in the amount and frequency Ted used, was definitely a harmful addiction. The cost to him and his family was astronomical in every way. Pot reduces anxiety. But then when the anxiety comes back, it comes back at an infinitesimally higher level. The more you use, the more you need to use and the more quickly you need to re-use. Pot also interferes with ambition and drive. When Ted came home from the university at night, he was done in. He had no remaining energy for himself, his family, his community or even the cat.
But the addiction continued and built as did Ted’s dependence on cigarettes. He was smoking, both nicotine and marijuana, in an attempt to turn his brain off, in an attempt to calm down, to numb out. The running, actually, did the same thing for him. Cigarettes, pot and running all helped Ted to lose his mind or at least the constant mind chatter. The saying “Lose your mind to keep your sanity” certainly applied to Ted.
Ted had been wounded in Viet Nam and lived in constant physical pain.
His legs and back had endured surgery after surgery. He was in a VA hospital for the first eighteen months that he was back in the States. The extensive physical and psychological therapy had him walking without a limp and functioning in society.
What remained was pain. The pain, like everything else in his body, his memories, his senses, his anxiety, just couldn’t be quiet. Nag, nag, nag. When I met Ted, twenty years later, he was suffering most from shoulder and neck pain. They were not the primary pain from the injuries, but they were the residual pain. Ted was stiff-necked and carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
In War and the Soul Ed Tick tells the story of a soldier who explained that in the most fearsome and most terrorizing moments of his life, his soul fled. It ran. It saved itself. It separated itself from his body. The soldier told Dr. Tick that his soul was right there beside him. But it refused to climb back inside. Too dangerous there. Ted said the same thing. His soul was gone. Invisible. No longer a part of him. What soul? He had lost his soul. He had therefore lost his connection and his ability to ever connect to God.
He was soulless and godless. He was the walking dead. He was . . . Empty.
His Steps
It would be impossible to say what Ted’s first step was. He was so deeply in denial that learning to recognize himself as a PTSD survivor might have been our first challenge. Ted was from the in-between generation who believed they should have just been able to go to war and come home and fit right back into their former lives. Except that NOTHING from their former lives fit any more.
Ted knew he was different, felt he didn’t belong, and carried the additional burden of having been a hero in a war which was considered by a large segment of the population to have been un-heroic. What in World War II and the Korean War had been a given, that the men and women who returned were entitled to the highest regard and the deepest loyalty, was not true in this war. As always with society’s big changes and gradual awarenesses, this was not comfortable, not expected, not pretty and not nice.
Protesters lined the streets and the alleys and were at the initial stages of this new wisdom unable to draw the distinction between supporting the war and supporting our troops. We’ve corrected this imbalance. Unfortunately, an entire generation of soldiers has suffered because of our blindness and lack of empathy.
Ted had experienced almost twenty years of on and off therapy through the Veteran’s Administration before he found himself in private therapy. I had seen his wife as a client and quickly realized I wasn’t going to make much progress with her until we brought him into therapy, too. When she told him she was “done,” he decided it couldn’t hurt anything.
His wife relayed that Ted was most frequently “absent” from life and that she and the children could never count on him in any way to be there for them. He quickly agreed. He went “away.” He went “inside.” He was “gone.” The why was immediately evident. How to change the coping mechanism to something all could endure was much harder.
Ted and his wife had developed a strong, unswerving pattern. He went “away.” She got mad and wouldn’t talk to him, wouldn’t have sex with him and pretended he didn’t exist. When she got mad at him, wouldn’t have sex with him, pretended he didn’t exist, he went further inside. Her anger and his shame created a self-sustaining see-saw. The more she got angry, the more he receded. The more he receded, the angrier and more rejecting she became.
My background in systems theory helped me to explain to Ted and Tess just what their negative self-supporting pattern was and why we needed to break it. They were both bright enough and determined enough to understand that we were fighting something big. When Ted distanced, Tess needed to stay available. When she got mad and frigid and blaming, he needed to stay present. They had to stop reacting and simply keep on, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “doing the next right thing.” They had to continue acting in love, even when they believed the other was withdrawing love. What a challenging assignment. Actually, everyone to whom I have ever given this assignment has had a very difficult time with it. Too bad. Miracles could be had with this one simple awareness.
To his credit, Ted was willing to engage in therapy. We started talking about his childhood, which meant we were laying the ground work for, as they now phrase it, his adverse childhood experiences. It is important for PTSD survivors to trace the stress as far back as possible. Priceless compassion and understanding for the self come with the realization that as a child one was helpless and victimized. Ted started remembering that he was taunted and teased when he was a boy and was made to feel “less than” and “weak” and “inadequate.” This was the framework from which he went into war.
In therapy he started drawing, journaling, talking, both intellectually and emotionally, and admitting that he felt different from most people. He admitted that he felt anxious all the time and that his mind never shut off. He admitted that he ached constantly, physically and emotionally. He admitted that he felt powerless and defensive when his wife or children or anyone else confronted him or asked him why he did what he did or felt like he felt.
For as long as I knew him as a client (we have since become colleagues), I would ask him, “How’s your soul?” It was as though I was always trying to reach the soulful part of him and never could. After reading Edward Tick’s War and the Soul both Ted and I realized that his soul, too, had fled in Viet Nam. His soul, however, didn’t stay beside him, as did the soldier’s in the story. His soul hid out-of-sight behind his back. It, too, ran from feelings of abject terror. He knows, now, when it fled and has written a poem about that moment.
Her eyes red, glowing
Her village napped to kindling;
Side show to the war.
He had been in charge and had given the order to napalm the village. The day before an elderly woman had fed him in her hooch. That evening the enemy tripped the ambush that had been set for them and the village was ordered destroyed. When Ted and his men returned to the village after it had been leveled, hers was the first body they saw.
Her eyes, red, glowing haunted his sleep for the next thirty years.
And there were other moments of unbearable terror. Another description in Haiku:
Rockets exploding.
Glued to a hospital bed
Never sane again.
Ever notice that the words “scared” and “scarred” are so similar? Be scared and add an “r.” Sometimes we’re “scared out of our wits.” Sometimes we’re “scared to death.” Anytime we are terrorized, I believe we are traumatized. What happens in our body short-circuits our electrical system. We have, in effect, a near death experience. If we were cats, we would have used up one of our lives. Terror becomes trauma and being scared results in being scarred. Both result in our shutting down.
The recent experience of another patient offers insight into Ted’s dissociation. She was attempting to deal with an old terror, a time when she had shut down on herself. It was many years previous. In therapy, trying to access these distant memories, she dissociated. She simply left. She recognized nothing from her present life, including her daughter who was in the waiting room. She had no idea who she was. She was taken to the hospital and given every test imaginable. Slowly, as the hours passed, with her terrified daughter watching and praying, she came back to inhabit her own body. Fascinatingly, she remembers nothing about that missing period of time or all the tests she underwent.
It is from incidents like this that I get my great respect for the conscious and unconscious mind. If we are not conscious of something, I think it is better not to dig. Our entire make-up, our whole being, is programmed for survival and anything we do to disrupt survival--like remembering things too horrendous to remember--will put us in a precarious position. Some things we aren’t supposed to remember, or we would. This was my understanding. I have to admit that in Ted’s case I was wrong.
The psychiatric unit Ted entered following his arrest was using a form of immersion therapy. I personally believe this to be theoretically dangerous, as I just explained when relating the account of the woman with the strange amnesia. Immersing someone back into their trauma takes the risk that they will become psychically stuck there and never re-emerge. I have the same problem with hypnosis, by the way. I’m not sure that we should try to trick the unconscious mind into telling us things the conscious mind has rejected and eliminated. Having professed my cautions about such dangerous, risky treatment protocols, let me tell you how well it worked for Ted. It provided his breakthrough.
Ted was instructed to tell in exquisite detail his terrifying and traumatizing experiences in Viet Nam. He talked for two hours. Then he was sent home with the two hours of tapes and told to listen to his own voice recounting these experiences morning, afternoon and evening. Within a week it had lost its power over him.
Ted started attending NA meetings (Narcotics Anonymous) and progressed from participant to leader in a number of months. He started attending a Viet Nam veterans’ group and became involved in workshops, retreats, and poetry writing classes. He volunteers twenty hours a week at the psychiatric hospital that gave him a chance to reclaim his life.
Ted is happier than I’ve ever seen him. He has re-invented himself and re-created his life purpose. He is busy every day with meaningful projects and his volunteer activities. As fellow counselors, we send each other articles and news of upcoming retreats and resources. He is helping me learn about the veterans PTSD community and I am helping him to become part of the mental health establishment.
My Story
At some point I saw every member of Ted’s immediate family as clients. I found each to be a bright, talented, determined member of society. The children, like their parents, are highly educated, each holding at least one graduate degree. They are each compassionate. Every one of them has been touched and altered in some way by Ted’s PTSD. What is remarkable about his children’s reactions is that they are using their father’s experiences to direct and deepen their own lives. Perhaps this is because they have forgiven him and embrace his recovery, a process shared by the children of many veterans.
Tess’s story is different. She remains the most wounded one in the family. Having held herself and her family together when Ted was unavailable, Tess has now folded in on herself, agoraphobic and uninterested in anything that does not involve her children. She seems to feel, simply put, betrayed by her husband. She had married someone very different than the man who came home from Viet Nam.
As a group they illustrate that PTSD is a family affair. When one family member suffers, everyone feels the ripples. It seems that Ted’s children were typical in that, like the children of so many other wounded warriors, they were able to forgive and accept. Tess, too, was typical in that like many wives of veterans, it was she who was the most deeply affected and the most fundamentally betrayed. These women married big, tough soldiers who were going to protect and adore them. After the war they found themselves in charge and, like Tess, had a stranger living in the attic or basement. The stranger was emotionally unavailable, physically shattered, mentally preoccupied and spiritually dead. Not what they had married. Not the contract they had signed.
Ted, like many or even most veterans, did and does love his wife. The problem is not about his feelings or about any change in those feelings. It is very hard for someone who is going down for the third time to worry about taking out the trash. His wounds made it impossible for him to do right by her. I remember twenty years ago asking her if she would be “done” with him had he come home from Viet Nam without arms and been unable to embrace her physically. She answered that he would have had no choice about that. She felt and feels to this day that he had choices about the way he suffered from PTSD and the way he made his family suffer. I have to believe it is the mental health community which has failed them all. I also choose to believe we are getting much wiser.
Tess’s reaction demonstrates a very poignant aspect of PTSD. You can’t see it.
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No one can see PTSD. No one can see who has PTSD.
Those with PTSD suffer in silence and are invisible.
No one can see PTSD. No one can see who has PTSD.
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Many mental illness issues, like PTSD, since they are not visible, unlike a broken leg or the effects of an amputation, are considered to be matters of willpower and discipline. For example, many people believe they would never be depressed. They’d just pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They would never suffer from anxiety. They’d just take a deep breath and calm themselves down. They’d never have problems no matter what happened in their childhoods or what happened to them in Viet Nam or Iraq or during Hurricane Katrina or anything else. THEY are strong. People who are affected by mental health issues are weak.
What an unenlightened and uninformed position. To follow that reasoning, good drivers never have accidents and good people never get divorced. On and on we go with our judgments and our condemnations. The obese are all gluttons and the poor are all lazy and the unkempt are all slobs. A recent example of this was a woman who came in with postpartum depression. Her husband had said to her. “How can you be depressed? You have a new baby. You told me you wanted this baby.” Oh, so her desire for this baby was supposed to be stronger than any chemical and hormonal changes inside her body and mind? Was she weak to have admitted that she felt something different from what society determined she should have felt?
Was Ted weak when he came back from Viet Nam with PTSD?
Was Tess weak when she was truly, finally “done”?
We simply and truly cannot judge any of this. We cannot say, “Oh, I would have done this differently and that differently.” You would have? Who knows, because you weren’t in it. It wasn’t your path. We are born with a certain chemical make-up and raised in a certain environment and pushed and pulled to believe and think certain things. The Native Americans understood that until we walk in someone else’s moccasins, we just can’t know. We just can’t understand. If only we would realize that we just cannot judge.
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“Before you criticize someone,
Walk a mile in her moccasins.
That way when you do criticize that person
You’ll be a mile away
And you’ll have her moccasins.”
The Wisdom of Grey Owl
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Memories
It’s been a long time, almost forty years.
Dark nights followed by even darker days.
Jack, Tom, Henry, Bill, John.
Each gone.
Their faces forever etched in the mirrors of my mind.
It’s been a long time.
Jack, whose life ended with the explosion of a land mine.
Tom, the same, only days before rotating home.
Henry and Bill, each taken by friendly fire,
A short round before either had time to react.
And John killed instantly by an AK-47 round to his heart
While crawling across a rice paddy.
It’s been a long time.
Woeful women wounded by eyeless bullets during fearsome firefights.
Charred children burned beyond belief by napalm.
There are many truisms in life.
One, originating during the turbulent 60’s read,
“War is not healthy for children and other living things.”
Add to that,
“Sorry sights seen in combat remain locked in the mind forever.”