When it feels terrible to love them

When it feels terrible to love them
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
July 23, 2012


When it feels terrible to love them it is because we just don't understand Combat PTSD.

Christopher Thomas, of Helmsman Studios is directing a movie on combat PTSD called Terrible Love.

He emailed me about questions he had, so I called him back after I took a look at his promo and we talked for a long time. I was impressed by what I saw but more impressed by the passion in his voice and the important questions he wanted answers for.

One of the questions was "What do we have to do first?" Point blank my answer was that since we are so far behind on helping our veterans, we have to go to the families first if we are ever going to catch up. Most of the emails and phone calls I receive come from the families first and then the veterans they care about.

My job is to get them to understand what Combat PTSD is, what it does, why they act the way they do so they don't feel so lost, frustrated, hopeless and alone, and then what they can do to help someone they love. I tell them that when the veteran comes home from combat, it's our battle to fight for them, not against them.

I did it. We're heading into our 28th anniversary and have been together for 30 years. I know how hard it is and everything else that comes with it. Even knowing what I knew it was almost impossible to stay in the worst of times, so it is very painful to think about these families with little or no knowledge to help them get through it.

One of the reasons I am with Point Man International Ministries is to help the families as well as the veterans. The outreach and support we give doesn't cost much money at all. I crunched some numbers for the State of Florida and discovered if I traveled all over this state for an entire year reaching the 1.6 million veterans' families it would cost about $100,000 including the car I'd have to buy (example Chevy Equinox about $30,000), tolls, gas, food, lodging, printing and my time. But this wouldn't cost the state of Florida a dime considering how many veterans groups are in this state claiming to be addressing the needs of our veterans and collecting millions in donations every year. They could all pitch in.

PTSD can harm families of veterans is an article about a family and how this hits the entire family. My book For The Love of Jack is about living with it for 18 years and was published 10 years ago when I self published it right after 9-11-2001 when no one was talking about Combat PTSD simply because I saw all of this suffering coming. Remembering what it was like when I met my husband and there was nothing to help me help him was my motivation. Basically every family I help is because I know how they feel. It sucks!

It sucks the life out of you even now with information overload. These families end up turning to Facebook and overnight experts telling them some nonsense passing it off as advice and support. When a wife posts about what she considers emotional abuse, the response is usually to get a divorce instead of explaining the difference between true emotional abuse and what seems like it because of the symptoms of Combat PTSD, what a flashback does or even why they act the way they do.

Symptoms of PTSD that tend to be associated with C-PTSD include problems regulating feelings, which can result in suicidal thoughts, explosive anger, or passive aggressive behaviors; a tendency to forget the trauma or feel detached from one's life (dissociation) or body (depersonalization); persistent feelings of helplessness, shame, guilt, or being completely different from others; feeling the perpetrator of trauma is all-powerful and preoccupation with either revenge against or allegiance with the perpetrator; and severe change in those things that give the sufferer meaning, like a loss of spiritual faith or an ongoing sense of helplessness, hopelessness, or despair.

But the fly by night "experts" offer the same advice they'd offer anyone never once addressing the fact that combat is not what everyone else goes through any more than they address the different levels of it or what the difference is between mild PTSD, full blown PTSD, secondary stressor and secondary PTSD.

We are the ones that calm them down or fire them up. Support them and help them to see they are not evil or we treat them as if they are worthless. We either stand by their side to help them get help or help them to become homeless. We save them when they try to commit suicides or find them when they succeeded.

We end up holding the guilt when we failed to stay or give them what they needed when we only did the best we could at the time because some hack gave us bad advice and made it all worse. Our love for them does not have to feel terrible.

If you've given up because the site you trusted turned out to be a lot of BS, don't give up. Do what I did and continue to do. Only go to the real experts to get the answers.

If we are ever going to undo the damage done when they come home, the families have to come into all of this right now. The suicides and attempted suicides go up because the DOD and VA are pushing failed programs they have finally admitted they cannot prove they work so this battle is in our hands.