Imagine feeling afraid every time you take a ride in the car, or walk out in an open space, or going into a store and not knowing where the exits are, or sitting in a dark basement on the Fourth of July because you feel like its a war zone out there.
This are not imaginings for those dealing with PTSD. I call it PTS, leaving off the disorder part since some veterans find that part offensive and labeling. Anybody can be affected by PTS. At pretty much any age. It is a breach of the brains ability to repel traumatic stress and calm itself to know that things are going to be ok. The victim of PTS has trouble when they try to differentiate between the event or events that took place in the past, like IED’s going off on a road in Afghanistan and hometown fireworks on July 4th.
The current event may be totally benign and even family friendly, but the victim of PTS is not living in that moment but a past moment(s) that was filled with danger, fear, rage, shame and other complicated emotions.
Every war has produced PTS but it was not officially recognized until the 1980’s, several years after the real end of Vietnam for America. It was technically over in 1975, but for the most part, we wound down our ops there by 73. And a good number of Vietnam vets suffer from it.
PTS is very common among returning soldiers, sailors and airmen. And it’s pretty common in the general public as well. Estimates are all over the map, but conservatively, half or more of the vets that were in combat are dealing with PTS.
I saw a lot of vets over the years with PTS though most had learned to manage it. It left them off course sometimes and vulnerable, but some learned to rise above it all and make good use of their lives. I’ve know dozens that didn’t. It can be treated.
The key problem is trauma, and in many cases, repeated trauma. I’m no expert on Trauma and treatment but I recognize symptoms when I come across them, especially after my dealings with veterans at the end of their lives.
It took quite a few years to recognize the trauma in our lives, Debbie’s abusive father being the source of repetitive traumas in her life, and a couple of traumatic experiences in my life that have affected me. I don’t think I’ve ever been traumatized enough to warrant the diagnosis of PTS, that’s another subject since I’ve certainly gone through some hellish experiences, but Debbie had seven to nine years of repeated traumas.
The traumas set her off in a bad direction for those years. The army seemed to provide an escape from the traumas, I get the irony of that of course. But she found decency, hard work, some identity and some good friendships in the army. And then she met me.
I was unaware of what she had been through so I did not understand some of her distance at first. She was never mean, or even cold, her personality is too bubbly for that. But she had me just off at arms length from really knowing and exploring her heart and mind.
I’m a skunk, if I want you to know what I’m thinking, I just come out and tell you. Frankly, most New Yorkers were like that when I was going up. Maybe it should be called New Yorker disorder. Debbie was from California and a more mellow world where you wernt’t as direct. Debbie was a turtle, if I tried to find out what she was thinking and feeling, she found herself instinctively pulling inside her shell. She needed a safe space at times in our marriage, sometimes I was safe and sometimes I wasn’t.
We have both moved more toward being skirtles, crosses between skunks and turtles. I almost never blurt out my deeper feelings because I learned to filter some things for various reasons, and Debbie has learned to talk about how she feels about things that are tough for her now that she knows it’s safe to do so.
This is where I have had to learn what security means to her. Saftey, freedom from trauma, repeat trauma in fact requires repeated safe activities and spaces.
It’s no good at all for you to use a label like PTS and apply it to someone in your life to put them in a category or box. It is a clinical term and diagnosis that should be determined with care and love. Having said that, you should not be ignorant of what it looks like, the expressions it takes or as they say in the brain health work, how it presents.
And do not mistake PTS like episodes that happen once or twice in life for PTS itself. But learn to recognize trauma in your relationships and how you might be a source, or a secondary source of that trauma and then hopefully a source of hope and support to the one that has been traumatized.
I have friends that do not much like all this diagnosis stuff, they find that if you just love people that you will be doing what God wants you to do and that it’s just that simple. They have little trust in professional help. I get that, the day we live in it’s hard enough to trust people. But the cost of that distrust might just be too high.
I wouldn’t say it hurt our marriage much, but it did hold us back from some things over the years, and I could have done better at some things had I known or understood how PTS and trauma affected our marriage.
Trauma creates barriers to intimacy. Learn about those traumatic barriers and your intimacy will have a new part to play in your marriage. Some people repress the major traumas of their lives. Ther’re just too traumatic for them to live through again. If someone doesn’t want to talk about something, learn to respect that. It took me quite a few years to come to that place. Patience and love are called for at all times.