Step away from the whole and everyone gets hurt

Get away from the people you almost died with, end up isolated and alone. The wholeness of the unit is broken. There is something missing.

Get away from the person you always thought you were, end up isolated and alone, but top that off with not being comfortable in your own skin. There is a stranger there instead of the person you thought you were.

When you live on an island all by yourself, you can just pretend to be someone else, but when you live in the real world, with family and friends, the changes in you hurt them. It's not just about "you" hurting.


A Marine comes home after his world view has been changed forever. A lifetime of pretending to be a hero with video games replaced by life changing reality where there is no reset button restoring people back to life. There is just the exasperating reset button in your brain doing it for you so the event can be resurrected just long enough to torture you. You try to take yourself out of the "picture" playing head games with yourself only to find out, the more you try to pull away, the more emotionally dragged in you become.

In the process of transformation from Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry to John McClane Die Hard, somewhere in the middle was the "you" everyone knew. You were the kid they watched grow up, heard what made you laugh, saw what made you cry, knew what you liked to eat and what would eat away at you. Your family thought they knew everything about you. Your friends thought you'd never change. When you got back from training, you were like Andy, still, pretty much the same as when you left. When you got back from a year in combat, there was not much of "you" left inside. At least not the person everyone thought they knew including yourself.

Pvt. Travis Hafterson, 21, of Circle Pines, was released from Ramsey County jail into military custody Thursday, hours before a court ordered him to be civilly committed in abstentia for a twice-diagnosed case of post traumatic stress syndrome. (Courtesy Hafterson family)

Family fears Circle Pines Marine won't get treatment after being whisked to N.C.
By Tad Vezner
tvezner@pioneerpress.com
Updated: 10/02/2009 07:48:31 AM CDT
Military mother Jamie Hafterson has one thought about her U.S. Marine son getting treatment at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I don't think they're going to treat him," said Hafterson, a member of the Minnesota Patriot Guard. "Civilian is civilian, and military is military — especially with the few and the proud."

Pvt. Travis Hafterson, of Circle Pines, who had been AWOL for roughly a month and a half — which, after 30 days, officially made him a deserter — turned himself in at Fort Snelling on Monday. The hope of his family and attorney was that he would receive psychiatric treatment in Minnesota and then be sent to Camp Lejeune for punishment, which he accepted.

Instead, Hafterson, 21, was released to the military from Ramsey County Jail on Thursday morning and taken to Camp Lejeune. Even though Hafterson wasn't in Minnesota, on Thursday afternoon a Ramsey County District Court judge ruled to commit Hafterson — in absentia — to six months of treatment at Regions Hospital.

Part of what the judge considered was that Hafterson has been diagnosed twice with post-traumatic stress disorder in the past week — including once by a jail psychiatrist.

"It got all complicated — he was going to turn himself in. We just wanted to be sure he was treated," his mother said.

A spokesperson at Camp Lejeune could not be reached for comment late Thursday.
read more here
http://www.twincities.com/ci_13467500?source=most_viewed

He is not so much unlike any of us except he was exposed to what we have not been exposed to. No, you cannot compare even the same event with them because you are not them.

We may look the same on the outside, just as these wires pretty much do, but when the outer covering comes off, what is exposed is all that went into making us who we are. Every life experience is in there, wrapped inside the shell we trust will protect us. The shell others judge us by when they walk by us on the street. Just as there are many different sizes of cables put together for different purposes, there are also many different types and sizes of cutters to take them apart. The cutters are our life events.




You may have gone through one experience just as they did, but you did not go through all of them and that is the biggest difference of all. You are not them. Your past is your past, just as their's is. Today you may walk away from a traumatic event believing you are better, stronger, smarter, more prepared than someone else, but what you don't think about is, what else they have gone through you have yet to be tested by.

You won't see how deep their pain is any more than you can see how deep their compassion is. You don't know how spiritual they are, how many times their faith has been supported or how many times their faith has been exposed to the elements.

You don't know how many excuses they are looking for to dismiss what they have going on inside of themselves. Anything they can blame other than their own core because they cannot escape that. If they cannot escape that, then there is no hope in their own minds. They need to know there is hope still inside of the covering they hide behind. That hope comes with being able to see past the casing and see into the soul. Once you can do that, once you stop judging them, once you can stop feeling superior to them, then and only then will we truly find what will heal them. Until then, we are just spinning in circles pretending we are trying to fix what we don't understand.


This is one of the biggest reasons all the programs they have come out with don't work. They never understood what makes us all different under the skin.