Healing And Dealing With PTSD

by Wayne
(Savannah, Georgia)

This is Part Two of a two-part story by Wayne. Read the first part here, entitled, "The Making Of A Soldier & PTSD."

Eventually you come home and leave the service. The military is done with you. Your very essence has been drained and shrouded with this darkness where there seems to be no way of escaping it. To many, death seems to be the ONLY choice. The environment that held you together is now gone. Everyone else isn't, for the most part, trained to repress and hold in the intensity inside. You are standing there, alone, with this darkness inside.

Now the body takes control. It has an innate desire to heal and to be healthy. It will do whatever is necessary to relieve itself of those intense memories and feelings it is carrying around. Another part of you will do whatever it can to avoid the very same memories and feelings. Vets will over drink, over drug, over sex, over work, over eat, and even over exercise but the exercise won't include cardio work-outs. It will be mostly weight training. Cardio work-outs cause a person to breath heavy for an extended period of time and this causes feelings to come out so vets won't do that. Another avoidance is to come home and get a job that resembles the military. They will work in the police department, the jail, the secret service etc. That way they can continue using the military tool of not feeling. The normal path of healing is where the body tries to heal during dreams but the dreams are so crazy vets will wake up during the night some time between 3am and 4:30am. Then they only have 3 to 4.5 hours of sleep ending in sleep deprivation. The immune system starts to falter and blood pressure starts to go up. Autoimmune diseases start to kick in. This is all well iced with the physical injuries sustained during the military environment. This is normally diagnosed as PTSD.


The cure to the PTSD involves re-learning to feel and to look at those memories. I always tell the vets to picture a bucket and that each time something happened to them in service, they place a marble into the bucket. Each marble represents the memories and feelings of the event. Some of the marbles are as big as bowling balls and some are just tiny. The idea is to only take out one marble at a time, open it, feel the real feelings of the marble. I tell them to not let anyone tell them what to feel, how to feel, or when they are done feeling. Only put the marble in another bucket on the other side of them when that marble is done. The other bucket is wisdom. As the bucket with all of the marbles empties, the PTSD will heal and a certain kind of wisdom comes from it. This is of course a very simplified version of the story (Simple?)

PTSD is a state of never feeling safe and as long as a vet feels unsafe they build this great wall around the bucket. No one will get to the bucket. When a vet is out in the public they will seem blank, but together. The general public doesn't feel safe to be around. Vets will get along with some of the public but won't spend too much time with the public. In the service, relationships are more like gears of a machine working together. In the civilian world, relationships are about emotions and connections. To do that a vet has to give up the "NO Emotions" tool and enter into the world that would allow the marbles to fly out. Vets will tend to begin isolating themselves to stay away from the feelings. What about those times when a vet does feel safe? Say the mate comes home and they are loving and safe, concerned about the vets well being. The wall around the bucket starts to drop and stuff starts to fly out of the bucket freaking out the vet. The vet pushes off the loving mate stating that they need more space. The vet then goes through the feelings of guilt, sadness and needing the spouse but can't take the intensity of the spouses love. The vet believes that the walled-up numbness "feels better". A push-me, pull-you relationship kicks in. The spouse, after a number of these rejections starts to fade away from the vet.

While most of this story is about what I have seen, it is also what I have experienced. When my PTSD kicked in, I sat down in the corner one day and could not get out. The fact that I have a Masters in Psychology gave me insight to the insanity that I was just entering into and for the most part have moved through. Even though I was well aware of the different process of releasing these pent-up issues, it didn't absolve me of having to take marbles out and go through the healing process. My wife and I together decided to face our buckets together. Part of the support we used was Bill DeFoore's writings. It was a small but intricate brick in rebuilding my foundation of health. Bill's work involves feeling ones feelings. That is the way home.

This is Part Two of a two-part story by Wayne. Read the first part here, entitled, "The Making Of A Soldier & PTSD."

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