His Story
Spiritual leaders of diverse groups often wonder if we choose our parents. Perhaps, they suggest, we select parents who will nurture us or challenge us or even beat us up if we feel we need to be beaten. The theory is that we choose parents who will provide for us, either positively or negatively, what our souls most need to advance through our karmic or developmental path. I am not suggesting whether this is true or not true. But, when you meet someone like William, if you have ever heard this theory, you surely wonder if this was William’s preference.
William was born to a sixteen-year-old, red-headed sophomore beauty who had a brief sexual fling with a twenty-three year old African-American law student. The red-headed child never told her beau that she was pregnant. She simply had the baby and immediately gave him over for adoption. I would guess this sixteen year old felt the need to preserve her figure. Her baby boy was born with bowed legs and club feet, having been rather confined in a rather tight space. She named him Robert and requested he go to a family where a college education would be a possibility.
A foster mom took him home from the hospital and almost immediately took him everywhere she went, including to the bowling alley. She performed the exercises needed to reshape his squashed legs and feet, named him Justin, and loved him up for four months while she introduced him to strikes and spares and sustained loud noises.
Then adoptive parents appeared and William went home with two liberal, white, hippie, college professors who already had a biological child but believed that adoption was the right thing to do. They never imagined that this baby’s cocoa-colored skin might prove to be a problem, for them or for the baby. After all, it was 1974. The decade of racial unrest was over. Another biological child came two years later to complete this family. And William, with his third name in four months, grew up as a bi-racial, adopted son sandwiched between two white biological children.
William almost immediately proved himself to be different from his two siblings, not only because, as his older sibling noticed at four, William was “the tan man.” While his siblings were quiet, William talked a blue streak. While they were cautious, William was impetuous. While they obeyed the rules, William never bothered to learn the rules. He threw his first party when he was in fifth grade. He and his friends, male and female, skipped school and hung out at William’s house one winter day while his parents were at the university teaching.
William’s predisposition to danger and adventure deepened when he was fifteen and fell in love with a fifteen-year-old Caucasian girl. Her parents forbid the friendship, admitting it was because of his mixed race, and William started a painful journey to find out who he was and where he belonged.
When he was with his black friends, other blacks called him Uncle Tom. When he was with his white friends, other whites called him a nigger and called his friends nigger lovers. Everyone who knew him as an individual liked him. He was a four point student and an incredibly talented athlete, but in the mid-eighties society had no place for him. When at eighteen he married a white girl, dropping out of the college his biological mother had dreamed of for him, William and his new wife watched in horror what happened to other mixed couples in their neighborhood.
Before his marriage there were run-ins with the law and run-ins with drugs and alcohol. After his marriage there was only work and an increasing number of children to support. He and his wife had agreed, when he dropped out of college, that she would start college and get her degree and then it would be his turn. After fifteen years of marriage, she had more than enough credits to graduate but had never done so, and his turn had never come.
In one of his many attempts to support his family, he decided to join the Reserves.
Soon after he did, he was sent to Iraq. There the traumas of his childhood, not fitting in, being different, not being accepted, loving danger and adventure, all crystallized on a lonely rooftop watching the bombs explode near-by and keeping vigilant while his soldier brothers slept. He was sent with a gun he had been inadequately trained to use, and with not enough supplies and not the right supplies. His family and friends sent care package after care package, with everything from fans to long woolen underwear to flea collars to keep sand fleas at bay.
William describes his time in Iraq as a turning point, but he wasn’t to realize it for a while. First he came home on a medical discharge, with nerve damage on his right side which would give him chronic pain. Then he fought his wife, who hadn’t wanted him to enlist in the first place, and then he fought the alcohol which had dulled her criticism, quieted the bombs of his memory and numbed some of the chronic pain.
William is now a divorced dad, running a house, raising his children, drinking non-alcoholic beer, working his day job and getting a 3.8 at college. He plans to be a counselor for other vets. He is happier than he has been since early childhood, has his head screwed on fairly straight and is focused on his present fathering and his future career.
His Signs
From the time he was a baby, William couldn’t sleep. His mom tells of his awakening eight, ten times a night. She would reach down in his crib and pat his back, and he’d go right back to sleep. This went on until he was about fourteen months old at which time she begged the pediatrician to drug one of them so they could sleep through the night. Two nights of cough syrup with codeine and William was sleeping. But throughout his life, the slightest disruption or stress, and he went back to his hyper-vigilant state of insomnia.
His anxiety, as in most male children, looked like ADHD and sent him seeking adrenalin. At two he reports being lost and his mom finding him on top of the refrigerator, sitting still and smiling at her while she called and searched. At fourteen he took the family car for a spin one day when everyone was out. He was the star of every team he was on, playing harder than most people worked. At eighteen he was already on the university football team when he decided to get married instead. He had sex early, drank early and often and tried every substance offered him. Cigarettes were a long time addiction, until, as with the alcohol, he stopped cold turkey and never started again. All of these adrenalin rushes and addictions were aimed at reducing his anxiety.
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Some of the ways we might know if we are adrenalin junkies:
Schedule ourselves into oblivion
Be constantly late for things
Experiment with drugs
Consume massive amounts of alcohol
Seek and promote drama
Engage in risky behaviors
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Isolation was an indicator that William wasn’t doing well. He had months, after he was first home from the war, when he would get up and go to work and other than that, spend his days and nights in his room. This sounds like Ted, doesn’t it? William and Ted and a million suffering others. He would avoid his wife and children as well as his family and friends. He definitely suffered from impaired volition, as this usual go-getter collapsed in on himself. His life-long coping mechanism of compulsive busyness had failed him.
Of all his PTSD symptoms, surely the most troublesome for William always has been and probably always will be that he cannot shut off his mind. He thinks and analyzes and plans and self-criticizes and worries and frets constantly. He has trouble concentrating and focusing and when he does get zeroed in on something, he tends to obsess.
His Steps
William tried responsibility. Unwittingly, but nonetheless consistently, William made himself as responsible to others as he possibly could, thereby giving himself a reason to work against his more natural predisposition of irresponsibility and impetuousness. As a child, he became a leader. Whether it was scouting, social interaction, an art class or his ever present sports, he stepped to the front of the pack and took the lead. He dropped out of college to be responsible for a young, single woman and her baby. They had other children and he worked more jobs and welcomed responsibility in all areas of his life.
Responsibility led to purpose, whether it was as father, construction site boss, church deacon or baseball coach. Indeed, William kept himself in a whirlwind of compulsive busyness, but he also scripted his life with purpose and responsibility. He made himself accountable for the welfare and safety of others. He kept himself as well and safe as possible almost by default. He was the leader in many things, and the leader needs to lead by example.
He has always joked that fear is a very powerful motivator for him, and so when he had a very scary experience with alcohol, he quit cold turkey. After he had that pretty well handled, he decided to quit cigarettes the same way. Pain medication followed those first two addictions, and that, too, he left behind. His tendency to be a black and white thinker has definitely caused him some problems, but when it came to leaving his addictions in the past, it served him well. William simply made up his mind that he wasn’t going to be addicted to anything.
While this transition was underway, William tried physical therapy and found that some of the very simple therapy techniques could do more for his constant pain than popping the pain pills, and without the numbing effect on his mind and spirit. When the pain was under more control, he started running. Of course, a fellow like William wouldn’t start walking. He is now running marathons. Mind over matter again. As Carl Jung says, “Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses.” Consequently, our greatest weaknesses are our greatest strengths, too.
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Our greatest strengths
Are our greatest weaknesses.
Our greatest weaknesses
Are our greatest strengths.
Carl Jung
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At the foundation of all these steps was the first step William took when he was released from Walter Reed Hospital. He sought out the local Veterans Administration counseling center and became a client. His counselor, who he’s been seeing on and off for almost five years, was a major influence in his life, talking him through many of his fears as well as leading him to value who he is and to dream of who he will become.
At a local university William found a veterans program based on the platoon model. A group of former soldiers enter college together and they help each other to succeed in the classes they take together and to encourage each other in their lives. This is not a structured group, simply a group of like minded souls doing similar things at the same time. They just naturally are supportive of each other. So, William, in his thirties, is a college student determined to be a responsible and productive member of society, using his talents and experiences to help himself as well as others.
William has chosen not to join AA or NA or a soldiers group. His steps have been personal ones and, as we’ve seen throughout this book of case studies, one size does not fit all. I remember reading somewhere that the PTSD treatments which work best are those where the survivor becomes the author of his or her own story, the general contractor of his or her new, improved psychic house. Each of us must pick and choose from the available list of steps and possible healing tools, those which most speak to our story and our temperament. And when we need steps and tools which are not available, we need to invent them.
In William’s case, this included volunteering to coach his children’s sports teams, running for public office, keeping himself busy and accountable through church and work and school, communicating incessantly on Face Book and through e-mail, and exercising to reduce anxiety and improve his health and fitness, not to mention his self-image. We all know that PTSD is not something from which one ever recovers, but there may well be longer and longer remissions and more and more awareness of how to minimize and neutralize the PTSD symptoms when they do reoccur.
My Story
William’s story is one with much to teach us. Consistently throughout his life he has tried to use his greatest challenges, like not being able to shut his mind off, to accomplish something instead of letting himself be defeated. While he has kept himself overscheduled and overbooked, it has worked well for his abundant adrenalin supply that he is almost always not quite where he needs to be with almost always one more thing to accomplish than he could possibly fit in.
William has also chosen activities with his children which work to re-instill in him some of the innocence and play and safety and pleasure which war eroded.
He plays sports with his kids and those in the neighborhood during the appropriate seasons and plays video games and Wii and other things off-season. Spending much non-working time with children is a balm to the weary spirit, seeing the fairness of the rules of sports and the joy of personal accomplishment and the mania of a team victory where they have come together and each done his or her part to create success for everyone. The losses, too, are healing, since they are not life and death losses and there is always next year on the baseball diamond.
Getting divorced was another obstacle William chose to see as a new challenge. Contrast Roger’s reaction in his case study where he describes his divorce: “I was RAPED, gagged, bound and flung head first into the concrete.” William, on the other hand, quickly saw that this was an opportunity for him to get out of a critical, unloving marriage. Being as responsible as he is, this is a step he never could have initiated. After a little thought, he was glad his wife had a boyfriend. He acted quickly. He pushed through a quick dissolution and got the house, the kids and some child support.
Like many other PTSD survivors, William has that illusive character trait, resiliency. Why he has it would make for interesting genetic research. William has an extremely high IQ. Clearly, it doesn’t hurt to be bright. While William had the bi-racial and adopted legacies, he did have quite a bit of childhood family support, including extended family and activities like family vacations and reunions and lots of time spent with grandparents. This inter-generational sense of belonging gave William a template for working out his own personal sense of self. The general childhood sanity he experienced also helped him a great deal in getting through and recovering from his Iraq war experiences.
Those veterans of wars after Viet Nam can thank the Viet Nam vets for taking the brunt of America’s confusion as we, the country, tried to separate out the dislike of war from the disrespect shown to those who served in the war. Had the Support Our Troops banners and bumper stickers materialized during the Viet Nam war, we could certainly have helped veterans heal somewhat more quickly by not turning on them when they finally straggled home. Insult to injury was never more pronounced than by the treatment Viet Nam vets received from those for whom they fought. Iraq war veterans, like William, at least did not have that with which to contend.
William is doing well as I write this. Life is crazy-busy for him, as always, but he is seeing it differently and working hard to treat himself in newer, saner ways. His exercise, his sober living, his challenge of school, his responsibility for his children and their futures all have been embraced by him as he sees and knows he is a PTSD survivor from before the war, a PTSD survivor because of the war, but a survivor in both cases and a man determined to live his future in freedom--from PTSD as well as other things.