Stop dying a slow death, start healing

Stop dying a slow death, start healing
by Chapalain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
October 18, 2012

TO COMBAT VETERANS
Have you ever had a cut that just wouldn't heal? You wait for it to get better. You may put a bandaid on it thinking it won't get worse as you go back to doing what you always do. Day after day, you change the bandaid. It isn't getting better. It is getting worse. Then you discover it is worse than you thought. It is infected. While you waited for it to get better, it got stronger and spread.

Well, that's PTSD when you leave it alone, hoping it will just go away. Bandaids like have a few drinks, or a lot of them, only numb the pain you refuse to face. Pushing people away from you makes it worse. Trying to make sense out of what you're doing to them ends up with you blaming them because you don't want to face the truth within yourself. You need help but you may not believe you deserve it more than you think you don't need it.

Trying to convince yourself you'll get over it isn't the worst part. That comes when you believe you'll never get over it. It is eating away at you. You may think there is an answer for you, so you search but each day you are left without finding what you need, hope is slipping away. Giving up on finding it is dying a slow death as PTSD takes over more and more of your life.

The worst part in all of this is that it is also hurting your family. The people you love don't know what to do to help you. They don't know what you need. They don't know what you are going through so they're looking for reasons and bandaids just as much as you are. You may be pulling away so much you actually get what you want and they walk away. Is that what you really want? Is that what you had in mind when you were heading home from Iraq or Afghanistan? Or from Kuwait? Or from Vietnam? Or any other country you were sent to?

No, you thought you'd just go home and get over it, pick up where you left off. That delusion was fed by bullshit. No veteran has ever come home from combat unchanged. Everyone changes by events no matter what they say. Some are changed more than others for one, simple reason. Their ability to feel things more deeply. If you can love more deeply, care more deeply, then you can hurt more deeply, so you just better face that fact so that you can stop the bullshit and get busy. Stop dying a slow death and start healing.

For the families out there, you better decide if you want to fight for them or let them go. Do you really want to walk away from them? Don't you want to live the rest of your life with them the way you did when you got married? They are still in there. Everything you loved about them is still there but there is a lot of pain hiding them from you.

This is what it looks like from the inside of a family living with combat PTSD. You're looking right at it. I wrote a book 10 years ago about living with it before all the reports about PTSD and suicides came out. None of this is new and none of this is impossible. You may never be "cured" but you can heal enough so that you start living again and stop just waiting to die or looking for a way to do it.

I don't want to have a conversation with your family when it is too late to save your life. I've had too many of them already and their biggest regret is, no one told them what they needed to hear. They blame themselves for it. Do you really want to put them through that?

FOR THE LOVE OF JACK, HIS WAR/MY BATTLE gives you an idea of what it is like for the veterans as much as it gives veterans a clue what it is like for their families. Time to learn what I tried 10 years to tell you about.


If you're not into reading, then go to the top of this blog and watch some of the videos. You should learn enough to at least stop blaming yourself for what is happening to you and start putting on antibiotic to heal.