Do They Think About Price Paid Generations Before Them?

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
June 7, 2015

I think it is wonderful that so many spouses are talking about what happens when veterans come home from war afflicted by PTSD however I think it is horrible they decided to not listen when we said it all before and very loudly.

Every generation came home from war with what has been known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder since the late 70's. That's right the 70's. It was not until the 1980 that the Department of Veterans Affairs started to call it that. It happened because Vietnam veterans decided to fight for it and stop suffering in silence. They got loud!

They also knew that they were not just fighting for their own generation but for their Dads and Granddads as well as their own kids and Grandchildren.

If you are guessing I am sort of ticked off after reading yet another copy and paste of our lives, you're right but you may be off on the reason.

They seem to think that it only happened to them. They forget about us and what we tried to prepare them for. The term "new normal" came from our generation and what was seen as abnormal to the rest of the country. We didn't settle for "just get over it" and move on.

If you want to know why there are Crisis Intervention Teams and trauma specialist all around the world, it is because Vietnam veterans came back and fought for it. They changed the entire world so that survivors of trauma could be treated instead of shunned into silence.

Say it out loud
Army spouse tells her own story to help military couples work through reintegration and other stress
Stars and Stripes
By Terri Barnes
Published: June 6, 2015

“It was a new normal,” Corie said. “We had to start over in a new way. We had to repurpose and re-envision who we are as a couple. We both had changed. … It changed our marriage. We don’t regret that. We’re better for it, and we use our story in our marriage retreats to normalize and validate what other families go through."

In the most difficult days of her marriage, Corie Weathers practiced a principle she learned as a licensed professional counselor: Say out loud the things that are hard to say out loud.

Like many military couples, Corie and her husband, Matt, an Army chaplain, experienced their toughest trial after Matt’s first deployment. During that deployment, several of Matt’s fellow soldiers were killed, and many were injured.

“My husband came home definitely with combat stress, on the line between combat stress and (post-traumatic stress disorder),” Corie said. “There was a lot of his experience that I couldn’t relate to, because I wasn’t there, and I didn’t share those experiences with him.”

On the homefront during that deployment, Corie was using her own expertise, counseling and supporting the spouses of the killed and injured and others, as well as being the sole caregiver of the couple’s two young sons.

“I had my own experiences that [Matt] didn’t know how to process,” she said. “We now call them sacred moments. There’s no way for each of us to understand what the other went through; because we can’t understand it fully, we have to respect those spaces.”

Reaching that understanding required Corie and Matt to learn how to communicate their feelings to one another.

“There’s so much power in saying it out loud,” she said. “For me to verbalize how mad I was that I was so tired, and when my husband came home, I couldn’t just jump back into dual parenting immediately. That was a difficult transition.”
read more here

In 2003 For The Love of Jack, His War/My Battle was published.

18 years of a couple's life should not have been so hard. But they were. Kathie takes you through all the heartache of watching her husband suffer with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She opens her heart and shows her faith as she fights her husband to get help and fights the government to make sure he gets the help needed to heal. To Kathie it was a commitment to try her best to stay by his side when he wanted to escape. She showed that there is healing and help for people like her beloved Jack and hope for all.

It was republished in 2013.

"Although we communicated while we were living apart, we couldn’t actually have a conversation any more. It was small talk. It was as if he had forgotten how to give and take in a normal conversation. Most of the time it was as if he wasn’t there although he was in the same room. I could tell by looking at him that his mind was too far away to reach. I would end up yelling at him to snap him back into the moment."

"They need to know that they can have a normal life again and that society has finally come to terms with these illnesses instead of speaking about them with whispers."

Does this generation ever think of where all the resources they have came from? Do they think about the price paid by the generations before them? Do they ever once consider what it was like for our generation to step up after being betrayed by the entire nation? Or what it was like to fight for all generations after the older generations wanted nothing to do with us?

When they finally use that fabulous gadget called a cellphone in their hands and actually do some research on all of this, then maybe they'd be able to save more lives than are lost everyday. After all, everything our generation did was done before the Internet, Facebook and the only tweets we heard came from Looney Toons.

In The Living Years
Mike and the Mechanics
Every generation blames the one before.
And all of their frustrations come beating on your door.
I know that I'm a prisoner to all my father held so dear.
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years
Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
I'm afraid that's all we've got
You say you just don't see it
He says it's perfect sense
You just can't get agreement
In this present tense
We all talk a different language
Talking in defense
Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It's too late when we die
To admit we don't see eye to eye

I just uploaded a video I made back in 2006 on living with PTSD.

Wounded Minds
Jun 7, 2015 In 2006 I created Wounded Minds video so that others could learn the easy way after my generation learned the hard way. We found what worked for us living with PTSD after combat. While so many seem to think PTSD is new, it isn't and that is what causes the most harm. None of this is new. Our generation is living proof that PTSD can be defeated even though it cannot be cured. If you think the term "Wounded Minds" is new, it isn't and it is time folks stopped taking work that belonged to someone else as their own. This video as up on YouTube in 2006.