Heal the soul and you'll heal PTSD

Heal the soul and you'll heal PTSD
by
Chaplain Kathie

There is no cure for PTSD for one simple reason. There is no "cure" to what happened in the past. There is no reset button to push to undo what you regret today. Or is there?

When it comes to combat and PTSD there are a lot of regrets flooding in the minds of the men and women we send to fight. If a friend dies, "it should have been me" or "I should have done this or that and he'd still be here" along with a list of what ifs. If they ended up killing civilians, which happens in war more often than not, regrets are fed by guilt.

Wars are unclean. It is not just "bad guys" that get killed. Good guys get killed. Civilians get killed and hospitals fill up with humans from every walk of life all fighting to stay alive.

The most powerful image they have in their minds is the last one. It is trapped in time. Everything that happened before that moment is a blur. Clearing the events leading up that moment is vital in resetting the damage done by PTSD.

The revisions provide examples of symptoms that result from moral hazards: "I am bad," "I've lost my soul forever," and "the world is completely dangerous."

That is a quote from the following article. It's pretty powerful considering that is the number one thing that troubles the veterans I talk to all the time. They believe they have become evil because that was all they saw in those horrifying moments. Buildings and homes being destroyed by bombs, bombs blowing up in the road, fires, dead bodies, body parts scattered, kids toys laying on the ground near a bloody pool and the screams join in with the images trapped in their minds.

A young National Guardsman returned home after recovering from wounds obtained in Iraq. Every time he looked at his wife and small sons, he was haunted by the family he killed in a car that wouldn't stop. That image wouldn't go away. It was so powerful it blocked out everything that happened before it and what came after it. To him, he did an evil thing almost as if he intended to kill that family. What he was not able to remember was that he did everything humanly possible to avoid it.

He was on a Humvee one night when a car was approaching too fast. Suicide car bombers had taken out a lot of US soldiers before this night. He wasn't sure who was in the car but positive he needed to get that car to stop. He threw rocks. Fired warning shots into the air. Screamed. Prayed. Tried to fire at the tires. The car wouldn't back off. He opened fire on the car. It stopped. When they went to check on the occupants, it was a family. For whatever reason, the Dad decided he was not going to stop.

He tried after that to rationalize what happened and ran the what ifs around in his brain until the same response came with each question he asked himself. It was his fault. He did an evil thing. That caused him to lose everything. He got divorced, lost his job and home. He slept on the couches of friends able to take him in. By the time I was contacted, he tried for the second time to end his pain by committing suicide. Once he was able to look at everything that happened that day, along with the fact that he joined the Guard to help people, he was able to see himself as he really was. A man willing to die for the sake of someone else. He made peace with that horrible night and then was able to find peace with himself. He is not "cured" of what happened while he was in Iraq but he has healed. He was able to forgive himself.

I've talked to several veterans able to believe they are forgiven by God because of Christ but still unable to forgive themselves for what they had to do, for what they saw and even for what they believe they caused.

A Marine was sick one night and recovering when he was supposed to go out on patrol. Another Marine took his place. That Marine was killed that night. When another Marine friend came to tell the first Marine what happened, he snapped and blamed the third Marine for coming back alive. The first Marine was so filled with guilt that blaming himself wasn't good enough. He had to find others to blame. The third Marine ended up feeling guilty because he began to believe it was his fault that he lived. Both suffered for what they thought they caused.

Combat PTSD is a wound to the soul and has to be healed from the inside to heal what is outside. It is reversing the trauma. Trauma comes into the soldier and healing has to begin at the source. The soul.

That is what Point Man International Ministries does. The veterans in Point Man take on the healing of the veterans from the inside and get them to not only understand they are forgiven by God but help them to be able to forgive themselves for whatever they feel they need to be forgiven for. They do it because it worked for them and since 1984, they have seen the power of healing the veteran. This is spiritual healing first and last. It is not about one denomination over another or hitting someone in the head with a Bible telling them they are going to hell unless they convert. It is about helping them to do the hardest thing of all. Forgiving themselves.

For thirty years, this has been my life because it is a part of my life. I didn't serve in the military. My Dad did. My uncles did. My husband did in Vietnam and he's the reason I do what I do. He is also the reason why I know that helping them to see themselves as "not evil" is vital to healing them. Point Man took me in a couple of years ago even though I did not serve mainly because of how long I've been doing this but there is no way I can measure up to these veterans who have been there and done that. I can only understand what they went through to a point but will never know what it is like to have been where they went.

Over the last few years scientist have been studying the damage done by guilt. There is mental illness people are born with and then there is PTSD which is only caused by an outside traumatic force out of their control. Addressing guilt is the first step to hitting the rest button.

Modern wars changing the way PTSD is diagnosed
By GREGG ZOROYA
USA Today
Published: February 28, 2012

Psychiatrists studying the feelings of guilt or shame associated with close combat say the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are influencing changes in the "bible" of psychiatry in the USA.

The section of the American Psychiatric Association's manual for diagnosing mental illnesses that outlines the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder — an illness afflicting 15 percent to 20 percent of returning combat veterans — is being expanded to include symptoms of persistent and reoccurring guilt or shame.

"We've seen … thousands of young men and women coming ho me terribly impaired emotionally by the war, and it certainly has gotten us thinking about what the consequences are (of combat)," says David Spiegel, a member of the association's working group that is rewriting the PTSD section.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has treated more than 200,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan for PTSD.
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