Combat Isn't the Same As Understanding What It Does

What Trauma Does Is Easier To Understand Than Trauma Itself
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
March 16, 2015

Understanding PTSD is not the same as being there when the trauma happened.

You don't have to have been in combat to understand what it did to far too many. The other good part of this is, you don't have to before you can help them. The truth is, they don't understand you either.

How can they understand someone who spends their time on Facebook looking at pictures of what someone had for dinner or watching the latest reality TV show while they were risking their lives in Afghanistan? How can you understand watching bombs blow up friends or worrying about it all the time for a year when you were here?

The trick is, you can understand what the experience did even if you can't understand the experience itself.

A friend of mine wanted to know what to say to a veteran she was talking to when he told her that there is no way she'd ever understand him because she was never in the military. I told her, quite simply, she didn't have to go to understand what it is like to be human and experience the aftermath of a traumatic event. Then I told her what I usually say. "You can't understand my life story either, but you can understand what it did to me.

It happens a lot when I get into conversations with veterans but one veteran stands out in my memory right now. We had talked a few times before the game of who had it worse got started. He didn't want to hear me say I understood because he knew I wasn't a veteran. I started out with asking him if he ever heard about trauma caused by different causes. He said none of them were worse than the hell he went through. I told him he was probably right but that didn't mean no one could understand what it did to him.

See, the first time I almost died, someone did it to me. I was only 4, escaped the watchful eye of my older brother, headed to the top of a slide at a drive-in movie (yes I'm that old) and got scared. Going up was easy. It wasn't until I got to the top without my brother that I knew I made a mistake. I didn't know what to do. If I laid down, shut my eyes I might have made it but at 4, didn't even think of that. The kid behind me was tired for waiting so he gave me a shove. Trouble is, the shove was too hard and sent me over the side.

I landed on cement, head first. To this day I get teased by folks saying "Oh so that's what's wrong with you." But they don't really know. They don't know what it was like for my brother finding me, thinking I was dead carrying me back to the car. They didn't know what it was like for my family when I opened my eyes or what it was like in the hospital for a week.

They didn't know what it was like to suddenly have to see a speech therapist, had memory problems or what it was like to go from daredevil to being terrified of heights.

Well, the veteran finally understood I knew what TBI was even though when I was young, they didn't know much about what happens to the brain after something like that.

We ended up comparing notes on how it hit us, had some laughs over it and then we moved onto the other contest. He challenge me on PTSD.

I told him straight out "I don't have PTSD but would have if I wasn't so weird."

He was confused. After hearing the story of the slide, he must have assumed my life after that was normal. It was far from just getting my brain to make peace with the rewiring job that just happened.

My Dad (Korean War) was also a violent alcoholic until I was 13. The only time he hurt me, it was an accident. He was destroying the living room, not knowing I was there when he picked up the chair, threw it across the room and hit me in the head. It was the last day he drank. He ended up joining AA. All those years of what can cause PTSD, didn't. It did change me but it didn't destroy me.

Then there was a car accident that I shouldn't have survived, health issues and oh, my ex husband really should have caused it because he came home from work one night and tried to kill me. Then he stalked me for over a year. To this day I thank God my brothers made sure I knew how to fight because I fought back and saved my own life.

More health issues and the loss of far too many family members, including my husband's nephew. He was also a Vietnam veteran with PTSD and committed suicide many years after I'd been helping other veterans go for help.  I couldn't help him.

One of the reasons why when I do a suicide article now it is still like a dagger to my heart.

Then there is what my family went through when PTSD was worse for my husband, but don't be sad since things are so much better now and we've been married for 30 years.

Then I told the veteran, I didn't expect him to understand what my life was like, but he could understand what it did to me.

He got the point, then he wanted to know what I did to fix it.

"Fix it?" as if there was some kind of magic trick I could pull off. There was nothing magical about it but there an abundance of spiritual about all of it.

I had to forgive. Forgive the people who did something to me as much as I had to forgive myself. Human nature demands we damn ourselves finding causes for what happened. By the time I had to, I was already conditioned to do it.

Start with faith and what Jesus did on the Cross.

Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots. Luke 23:34

Jesus spent His entire life talking about forgiveness.

Prayer

5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

9 “This, then, is how you should pray:

“‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

11 Give us today our daily bread.

12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

14 For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

Sure I had to rationalize God being able to forgive me because I believed in Christ and what He said, but how could I forgive myself? After all there had to be something wrong with me for all this to happen to me, especially what other people did to me. It had to be my fault. Right?

Then it dawned on me that I forgave the people how hurt me on purpose more easily than I forgave myself.

Dumb, I know, but true.

I still deal with some of it like when someone comes up behind me, I jump. I cringe every time I hear car brakes squeal. The list goes on but I am no longer a victim of things that happened. I am a survivor of them and far too stubborn to let those times win.

I refuse to let the trauma destroy me afterwards when it didn't destroy me when it all happened.

If you are a veteran, don't have to either.

PTSD doesn't have to defeat you after you defied it. Don't let it define your life even though it has been able to define who you are today, it doesn't have the power to determine who you are tomorrow.

Talk to someone. You don't have to tell your family or friends everything that happened in combat, but share with them that you are hurting and what you're going through today.

I came from a big extended family. Remember the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and the everyone knowing everything about everyone? Well, that was what my family was like. While I knew they loved me and we talked everything to death, they gave lousy advice most of the time, but they listened until I didn't need to talk anymore.

It helped as much as any psychologist could but even with them on my side, I had to see a psychologist when stress was getting to me years later. Between living with PTSD and working with veterans for so long, I needed help. Again, I talked, she listened until I didn't need to talk anymore.

My family and friends were able to understand the human part of me even if they couldn't understand what it was like to survive all the stuff I went through. They didn't have to. Your family and friends don't have to either.

Anyway, the veteran in the first part of this story ended up feeling worse for me than for himself. Not because of what I went through but because he judged me. I told him I was used to it and so was he. Folks were judging him one way or another as well. Either they thought he should be tougher or they thought he should have been a wreck. No one is ever right all the time and that is the beauty of being human.

We learn from each other, we share what we have in common and can stand side by side with folks from different past experiences. Give people a chance to understand what they can and you may be surprised by how much they can connect to you today even they were not where you were.

I never stop being amazed by how much others do understand. PTSD cannot be cured but you can heal.  You can live a better life and what you can't "fix" you can adapt to.  You are not stuck right where you are today anymore than I was stuck forever on that damn slide or on the ground below it.