Vietnam veteran says marriage is casualty of war

Vietnam veteran says marriage is casualty of war
June 01, 2010 7:03 AM
Wendy Victora
Daily News
CRESTVIEW -- Freddie Cavett has lived alone for most of the past decade. You could say his marriage was a casualty of the Vietnam War.

He came back from a year-long stint there as a changed man – an angry man – according to his ex-wife Linda.

They stayed married more than 30 years, living apart for a time before finally divorcing in 2007. Freddie and Linda still see each other almost every day.

“It got to be where I could hardly stand to be around him when he was in his crazy places,” says Linda, a licensed mental health counselor whose clients include other veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. “I wish I could have done better with that.”

On his dining room table, Freddie has piled photo albums and binders of all of the documents relating to his military career. He was active duty for 7 years and an active reservist for 20 more.

They are a roadmap for this man, who struggles to create any kind of a timeline of his life.

Linda, who remembers everything, fills in the blanks.
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Vietnam veteran says marriage is casualty of war

Help available for soldiers, veterans, families

Help available for soldiers, veterans, families
posted by Kate Santich on December, 17 2009 6:55 PM


Seminole Behavioral Healthcare is offering free mental-health and substance-abuse counseling to military personnel and their families who work or reside in Seminole County and have been impacted by deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq.

The nonprofit organization recently received a grant of nearly $50,000 to provide the services, which will cover individual, couple and family therapy; drug and alcohol abuse; post-traumatic stress disorder and counseling for children of military personnel. Also, in January, the agency will launch a support group for family members of deployed or deploying soldiers.

The number of sessions covered will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

“We see a great need for it,” says Jim Berko, president and CEO of Seminole Behavioral Healthcare. “We became aware of the issues when people who had been in Afghanistan started returning to our area. … There is a lot of post-traumatic stress.”

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Help available for soldiers, veterans, families

Combat Stress Workshops Planned

Combat Stress Workshops Planned: A Veteran PTSD Caregiver is to Speak Here.
July 18, 2009 -- By Loretta Sword, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo.
Jul. 18--Combat soldiers returning from war often seem like strangers to their families. Sadder still, they feel like strangers to themselves.

Those feelings, if not expressed and validated by loved ones or professionals, can lead to severe depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, suicide and even homicide, as illustrated by the recent murder cases against a handful of war veterans stationed at Fort Carson.

From the jungles of Vietnam to military bases in Canada and Africa, Sister Kateri Koverman has spent decades working with veterans who have been diagnosed with PTSD -- post traumatic stress disorder -- and helping military leaders to recognize and offer help to PTSD victims.

Koverman is the founder and director of Them Bones Veteran Community, a treatment and advocacy organization based in Cincinnati with a satellite office in Colorado Springs. She'll be in Pueblo next week to lead two free workshops sponsored by Parkview Medical Center's Behavioral Health Division and Mental Health America of Pueblo. One will be for veterans and their friends and families and the second will be for treatment providers and other professionals who work closely with veterans.
read more hereCombat Stress Workshops Planned

PTSD Caused Him To Forget He Was Still Married?

Is this a case of abusing PTSD or can this be for real? Somehow I doubt it's really what happened. While I am not a psychiatrist and do not play one on the blog, there doesn't seem to be any condition of PTSD that makes them forget something as important as being married and having five kids. Short term memory loss, sure, this happens all the time, but we're talking about having five children and a wife, not what he had for dinner the night before.

Woman Upset Husband Legally Has 2nd Wife
Man Says PTSD Caused Him To Forget He Was Still Married

POSTED: 5:12 pm CDT May 20, 2009

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. -- An Independence woman said her husband abandoned his family before the war and when he came back, he got a new wife and baby and a new life.

Marcella Rivera found out about her husband William Rivera’s possible bigamy in an unusual way. Her mother saw him on a Valentine's Day television special last year, marrying another woman. Rivera said she was floored, because he was still married to her.

"I don't think he should get away with it," said Marchella Rivera.

But he may have done just that.


Rivera found out Friday that the criminal bigamy charges against her husband were dropped. She said his attorney stated that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition he suffered after his military tour in Iraq. Rivera said he didn't remember still being married to her and thought they were divorced.

"I guess if I truly believe in my heart that he didn't know, then OK, yes, he has PTSD and he didn't know; Iraq totally messed him up. But I know he knew he was married, because we had discussed it," she said.

Rivera said she filed for divorce before his second marriage, but they dismissed the case and were going to reconcile for the sake of the five children they have together.
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Woman Upset Husband Legally Has 2nd Wife

Happy Holidays: Military Divorce Numbers On the Rise and why

This is what Paul Rieckhoff of IAVA has to say on this. He talks about the re-deployments, which is part of it. He talks about the economy, again, part of the problem. He also puts in the National Guard and Reservists, again, correct. But he left out the biggest reason for divorces of all.

Happy Holidays: Military Divorce Numbers On the Rise
Paul RieckhoffPosted December 5, 2008 09:08 AM (EST)

The holidays are usually a joyous time to spend with family and friends, sipping eggnog, trading presents, singing carols. But this year given the gloomy economic circumstances and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm reminded of a line from the holiday classic Christmas Vacation: "It's Christmas and we're all in misery."

For some military families, the stress of war has proven to be too much:

While 1st Lt. Mike Robison was serving in Iraq in 2003-04, his wife, Candance, depicted him as a "good, brave man"... But the marriage fell apart after Robison's return home to Texas. Candance said they argued over her role managing the household and how he treated her 10-year old daughter from a previous relationship.

"It absolutely changed him," Candance said of his deployment. "I still struggle every day--that year has affected every single aspect of my life."


Heartbreaking stories like the Robisons' are increasingly common. This week, new numbers from the Department of Defense confirm that the divorce rate among active-duty troops is rising.
click link above for more

What's the biggest reason people, regular people, have for getting divorced? They say their partner changed. Most of us can put up with the stress of money. After all that happens in just about every marriage. Most of us can put up with a lot if the person we married stays the way they were and we know we are loved. That is the reason we decide to marry the person we marry. We love them and they love us. We want to spend the rest of our lives with them and we expect them to stay just the way they are.

We may allow for slight changes because no one is really totally honest when we are dating. What we don't want to allow for is drastic changes. We don't know how to handle them. We don't know what to expect when the person we thought we knew changes. We end up wondering when the changes will stop happening and if we will even still like them.

This is PTSD. Unexpected drastic changes.

I was watching a video the other day addressing how a National Guardsman came home and was changed by PTSD. He was thinking about committing suicide. The wife was stunned and hurt by the fact her husband, the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, wanted to leave her and wanted to die. She knew he had PTSD but still she didn't know enough to understand where all of that was coming from and it really didn't matter what she meant to him when he was being eaten up alive. The fact is, nothing we do, no matter how much we love them, we cannot get them past PTSD without professional help.

What knowledge does is it helps us to get them to go for help. It helps us help them. With support, they are a lot more likely to seek help. One more thing knowledge does, and this is a big one, it keeps us from making PTSD worse.

How many times have you heard about a wife getting punched out for waking up her husband from a nightmare? It happens a lot more times than you will ever hear about. It happens when they are also having a flashback. In those times, they are in the grips of danger and under tremendous stress, reliving having their lives on the line. If we understand this, we are a lot less likely to make serious mistakes that can escalate into violence. The same thing happens with arguments. They think differently, process things differently, remember differently. If we know what comes with PTSD, we know when to drop a subject and walk away before things get out of hand. We know we can talk about it later when things are calmer.

I've been married for 24 years and made all the mistakes the newer wives are making even knowing what I know. Even with all the knowledge in the world, we're still human emotional people. When those times come we're able to get over without holding a grudge and forgive. There are unacceptable things done that I will not put up with but he knows what they are. If I didn't know what came with PTSD, it would be nearly impossible to not take it personally.

What really gets me is when a wife will tell me they don't want to know what PTSD is, or a husband does not want to know what happened when his wife was deployed. When they refuse to acknowledge life away from them and what the men and women deployed into combat go thru, they are paving the road to disaster. If they have children, it's even worse. The kids end up more upset and pulling away from their parent and resenting both of them.

Until we all take a serious look at what goes into destroying a marriage in the military, we're doomed to see a lot more of them collapse when they could be saved.

We can talk all we want about the usual suspects in wreaking a marriage but there is nothing usual about putting PTSD into a household without acknowledging it. My marriage would have been over and done with within the first four years if I didn't know what was doing it to both of us. Too many marriages have failed when they could have been saved. We have enough problems living with a "normal" spouse that has not been changed by PTSD and the divorce rate in the civilian population proves that. When you add in PTSD, it's the prefection of misery if they don't fully understand it.


Senior Chaplain Kathie "Costos" DiCesare
International Fellowship of Chaplains
Namguardianangel@aol.com
www.Namguardianangel.com
www.Woundedtimes.blogspot.com
www.youtube.com/NamGuardianAngel
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

PTSD stigma is over for us

After 26 years of doing outreach work, the stigma of PTSD is finally over for my husband. It was up to him when I started to use my married name because our story has been so personal. It took a long time to get here but from now on you'll see the name DiCesare on my posts and videos.

When I started to write, I was still in high school. The newspaper back home was used to seeing my name and when we got married, they had a hard time adjusting to the new name. I kept it. Back then it came in handy so that I could write about living with PTSD when the stigma was overwhelming the veterans and their families. Trying to get people to understand that living in silence should have never been necessary was nearly impossible. I tried to get people to understand that until they began to talk about this wound, the stigma would live on and they would suffer needlessly.

My husband is a private man, a quiet man and without a doubt one of the most magnificent I've ever met. Out of respect for his need for privacy, very few people knew my full name. While the work I do is because of him, veterans have claimed my heart because of him, this has never been about him. It's been about all of us. The men and women serving this nation and all the ones who came before them. It's been about the families trying to cope and understand what this wound does, not just to the veteran but to the entire family.

While I have responded to emails with full disclosure so that verifying my background can be done, many have not even bothered to ask. If you have any questions, please email me at namguardianangel@aol.com

There are still some things I do want to keep private but our lives have been pretty much an open book and that can be read from this blog on the side bar under Free Book, For the Love of Jack.

We will always run up against people who refuse to understand. We will always come in contact with people who refuse to become educated. It takes courage to talk about this but the more we do, someday, we will get to the point where the shame is laid at the feet where it belongs. Not on the veterans and not on their families, but on the judgmental people too closed minded and hard hearted to listen and learn. Over 7 million people are living with PTSD in the USA alone. Millions more across the globe. We have plenty of company.

We need to do this for the Vietnam veterans, still trying to heal and we need to do this for the new generation so they do not have to suffer in silence anymore. We need to be their voices until they can find their own.

Senior Chaplain Kathie "Costos" DiCesare
International Fellowship of Chaplains
407-754-7526
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington

PTSD veterans 2-3 times more likely to be involved with domestic violence

PTSD ups veterans' domestic violence risk
Published: Nov. 11, 2008
ST. LOUIS, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- An increasing number of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder means an increased risk of domestic violence, U.S. researchers said.

Monica Matthieu, an expert on veterans' mental health, and Peter Hovmand, domestic violence expert, both at Washington University in St. Louis, are merging their research interests to design community prevention strategies to address what they say is an emerging public health problem.

"Treatments for domestic violence are very different than those for PTSD," Matthieu said in a statement. "The Department of Veterans Affairs has mental health services and treatments for PTSD, yet these services need to be combined with the specialized domestic violence intervention programs offered by community agencies for those veterans engaging in battering behavior against intimate partners and families."

Research in the Veterans Administration shows that male veterans with PTSD are two to three times more likely than veterans without PTSD to engage in intimate partner violence, and more likely to be involved in the legal system, Matthieu said.

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http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/11/11
/PTSD_ups_veterans_domestic_violence_risk/UPI-54681226384157/

I've posted about this many times. This was the last post I did on it and it is important to understand.
Thursday, November 6, 2008

PTSD:When domestic violence is not what you think
I've written often about this issue. When it comes to PTSD and domestic violence, sometimes, it isn't what you think.

Are there combat veterans who commit domestic violence without PTSD being involved? Absolutely. We forget that the men and women who serve are just like the rest of us.There are many cases where abuse and domestic violence have the contributing factor of PTSD. This is not blame the victim but without knowing what PTSD is and what it does to some people, all too often the reaction of family members contributes to the escalation of angry situations.

click the link for more of this so you can understand there is a difference and it does not have to happen to anyone.

What are common problems in relationships with PTSD-diagnosed veterans?

Our problems are not new or news. We've stood by their sides for over thirty years. In my case, it's been 26 years since the day I met my husband. The years, well they haven't been easy. Seeing him change as mild PTSD carried him away, helpless to stop any of it from getting worse, took me down many paths. As I was reaching out to his friends to get help, he wouldn't listen. PTSD got worse and our marriage suffered more and more. What I knew about PTSD helped me to cope but did not end the heartache. It just helped me find hope that one day he would go for help. He finally did and then the knowledge I had was supported by a renewed hope that our marriage could survive. 24 years later, we're still married, in a crazy marriage without a boring moment.

Wives of veterans have a job on our hands. Too bad they don't have uniforms for us so that people would know we serve the military as well because we are the ones who take care of the veterans after the military is finished with them. We make sure they find reasons to get up every morning and keep trying. When they can't find it in themselves to fight, we fight for them. We take on the government to make sure their wounds are taken care of and they are compensated for the incomes their wounds prevent them from earning, but we also have to fight them. They want to give up. Too many times they win on this one and take their own lives, walk out of marriages or simply wait to die. They turn to drugs and alcohol instead of the love we feel for them because they can no longer believe in it. They wonder how we could possibly love them when they are such a mess inside. They have forgotten who they still are and all that we see in them becomes invisible.

The wives of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have a lot more than we did when they came back from Vietnam. There are support groups all over the country and that is a good thing. One thing that support groups are doing is opening up their arms to us so that they can learn from what we know works and avoid making the same mistakes we did. There is hope in our experiences and marriages that have stood beyond where anyone ever thought their marriage would be tested by.

Emails come in from wives across the US and many other nations because of the book I wrote, For the Love of Jack, and the videos I've done. Their stories, oh so very familiar, and they wonder how their life could be the same as mine. Soon they discover that while the wars may be different, our husband's hair grayer and our children have grown, there is really no difference between us. War is still war and wives, well, were still picking up the pieces of what war did to them.

Here is one more way to get there from here. kc

Partners of Veterans with PTSD: Caregiver Burden and Related Problems
Jennifer L. Price, Ph.D. & Susan P. Stevens, Psy.D.
Introduction
A number of studies have found that veterans' PTSD symptoms can negatively impact family relationships and that family relationships may exacerbate or ameliorate a veteran's PTSD and comorbid conditions. This fact sheet provides information about the common problems experienced in relationships in which one (or both) of the partners has PTSD. This sheet also provides recommendations for how one can cope with these difficulties. The majority of this research involved female partners (typically wives) of male veterans; however, there is much clinical and anecdotal evidence to suggest that these problems also exist for couples where the identified PTSD patient is female.

What are common problems in relationships with PTSD-diagnosed veterans?
Research that has examined the effect of PTSD on intimate relationships reveals severe and pervasive negative effects on marital adjustment, general family functioning, and the mental health of partners. These negative effects result in such problems as compromised parenting, family violence, divorce, sexual problems, aggression, and caregiver burden. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Marital adjustment and divorce rates
Male veterans with PTSD are more likely to report marital or relationship problems, higher levels of parenting problems, and generally poorer family adjustment than veterans without PTSD. 2, 6, 7 Research has shown that veterans with PTSD are less self-disclosing and expressive with their partners than veterans without PTSD. 8 PTSD veterans and their wives have also reported a greater sense of anxiety around intimacy. 7 Sexual dysfunction also tends to be higher in combat veterans with PTSD than in veterans without PTSD. 9 It has been posited that diminished sexual interest contributes to decreased couple satisfaction and adjustment. 10

Related to impaired relationship functioning, a high rate of separation and divorce exists in the veteran population (those with PTSD and those without PTSD). Approximately 38% of Vietnam veteran marriages failed within six months of the veteran's return from Southeast Asia. 11 The overall divorce rate among Vietnam veterans is significantly higher than for the general population, and rates of divorce are even higher for veterans with PTSD. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (NVVRS) found that both male and female veterans without PTSD tended to have longer-lasting relationships with their partners than their counterparts with PTSD. 3 Rates of divorce for veterans with PTSD were two times greater than for veterans without PTSD. Moreover, veterans with PTSD were three times more likely than veterans without PTSD to divorce two or more times.

Interpersonal violence
Studies have found that, in addition to more general relationship problems, families of veterans with PTSD have more family violence, more physical and verbal aggression, and more instances of violence against a partner. 12, 2, 3 In these studies, female partners of veterans with PTSD also self-reported higher rates of perpetrating family violence than did the partners of veterans without PTSD. In fact, these female partners of veterans with PTSD reported perpetrating more acts of family violence during the previous year than did their partner veteran with PTSD. 2

Similarly, Byrne and Riggs 12 found that 42% of the 50 Vietnam veterans in their study had engaged in at least one act of violence against their partner during the preceding year, and 92% had committed at least one act of verbal aggression in the preceding year. The severity of the veteran's PTSD symptoms was directly related to the severity of relationship problems and physical and verbal aggression against the partner.

Mental health of partners
PTSD can also affect the mental health and life satisfaction of a veteran's partner. Numerous studies have found that partners of veterans with PTSD or other combat stress reactions have a greater likelihood of developing their own mental health problems compared to partners of veterans without these stress reactions. 10 For example, wives of Israeli veterans with PTSD have been found to report more mental health symptoms and more impaired and unsatisfying social relations compared to wives of veterans without PTSD. 5 In at least two studies, including the NVVRS study noted above, partners of Vietnam veterans with PTSD reported lower levels of happiness, markedly reduced satisfaction in their lives, and more demoralization compared to partners of Vietnam veterans not diagnosed with PTSD. 2 About half of the partners of veterans with PTSD indicated that they had felt "on the verge of a nervous breakdown". In addition, male partners of female Vietnam veterans with PTSD reported poorer subjective well being and more social isolation than partners of female veterans without PTSD.

Nelson and Wright 13 indicate that partners of PTSD-diagnosed veterans often describe difficulty coping with their partner's PTSD symptoms, describe stress because their needs are unmet, and describe experiences of physical and emotional violence. These difficulties may be explained as secondary traumatization, which is the indirect impact of trauma on those in close contact with victims. Alternatively, the partner's mental health symptoms may be a result of his or her own experiences of trauma, related to living with a veteran with PTSD (e.g., increased risk of domestic violence) or related to a prior trauma.

Caregiver burden
Limited empirical research exists that details the specific relationship challenges that couples must face when one of the partners has PTSD. However, clinical reports indicate that significant others are presented with a wide variety of challenges related to their veteran partner's PTSD. Wives of PTSD-diagnosed veterans tend to assume greater responsibility for household tasks (e.g., finances, time management, house up-keep) and the maintenance of relationships (e.g., children, extended family). 13, 14 Partners feel compelled to care for the veteran and to attend closely to the veteran's problems. Partners are keenly aware of cues that precipitate symptoms of PTSD, and partners take an active role in managing and minimizing the effects of these precipitants. Caregiver burden is one construct used to categorize the types of difficulties associated with caring for someone with a chronic illness, such as PTSD. Caregiver burden includes the objective difficulties of this work (e.g., financial strain) as well as the subjective problems associated with caregiver demands (e.g., emotional strain).

Beckham, Lytle, and Feldman 15 examined the relationship between PTSD severity and the experience of caregiver burden in female partners of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. As expected, high levels of caregiver burden included psychological distress, dysphoria, and anxiety. More recently, Calhoun, Beckham, and Bosworth 1 expanded this understanding of caregiver burden among partners of veterans with PTSD by including a comparison group of partners of help-seeking veterans who do not have PTSD. They reported that partners of veterans with PTSD experienced greater burden and had poorer psychological adjustment than partners of veterans without PTSD. Across both studies, caregiver burden increased with PTSD symptom severity. That is, the worse the veteran's PTSD symptoms, the more severe the caregiver burden.

Why are these problems so common?
Because of the dearth of research that examines the connection between PTSD symptoms and intimate-relationship problems, it is difficult to discern the exact correspondence between them. 7, 16 Some symptoms, like anger, irritability, and emotional numbing, may be direct pathways to relationship dissatisfaction. For example, a veteran who cannot feel love or happiness (emotional numbing) may have difficulty feeling lovingly toward a spouse. Alternatively, the relationship discord itself may facilitate the development or exacerbate the course of PTSD. Perhaps the lack of communication, or combative communication, in discordant relationships impedes self-disclosure and the emotional processing of traumatic material, which leads to the onset or maintenance of PTSD.

Riggs, Byrne, Weathers, and Litz 7 did examine the connection between PTSD symptom clusters and the relationship condition. The study examined the connection between the cluster of avoidance symptoms and the decreased ability of the person diagnosed with PTSD to express emotion in the relationship. The results of the study suggest that avoidance symptoms, specifically emotional numbing, interfere with intimacy (for which the expression of emotions is required) and contribute to problems in building and maintaining positive intimate relationships.
go here for more
http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/ncdocs/fact_shts/fs_partners_veterans.html

Tom Ricks still unaware what PTSD does to a family

Tom Ricks's Inbox
Sunday, August 17, 2008; Page B03

The story below, from a military wife who asked not to be identified, reminds me that PTSD hurts more people than just the person suffering from it. My heart goes out to her. But reading her thoughts, I also found myself wondering whether she would feel the same way if her husband had lost an arm or his sight.

In the morning when I wake, I sometimes find myself in a wondering state. I wonder why I am still here and why I put up with the misery. The man lying beside me is my husband, but he could not be further from the idealized version that I had imagined spending my life with. My husband suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

We married several years ago, after we both returned from military deployments. He had gone to Iraq and I to Central America. He drew the short straw and I the long. There is no doubt that military deployments are stressful, but what ensues after the deployments is often much worse. We met five years ago. We dated shortly before we left, wrote each other often, and continued to date for a year after we returned before deciding to marry. I thought I had run through the full checklist that all women have to be sure that he was "the one." I met his parents, his brother and his three children from a prior marriage. I spent time at his apartment, he at mine. We traveled, we dined, and we talked. There were some concerns, but nothing that caused the dreaded red flag that disqualified most men from husband status. He had an inability to manage money, save money or budget money, but I could fix that. After all, I was a degreed accountant with an MBA. If I could be a CFO, then I could fix one man's money habits. So we married. Little did I know that two years later, money would be the least of our worries.
click post title for more

When I wrote my book For the Love of Jack, I use the same kind of analogy. What if he had cancer instead of PTSD? Would people still tell me to leave him, get a divorce and get on with my life? It was because they would be able to understand an illness like that but they were too far from understanding PTSD.

Wives, husbands, living with PTSD in their spouse not only lose the person they fell in love with as a partner, they are also dealing with the symptoms of PTSD that cause them to walk on egg shells knowing the wrong sound at the wrong time can set them off. They know they have to be careful what they say, where they try to get the veteran to go and what they watch on TV. They have to live with the nightmares waking them up at night as well as the veteran having them and yes, their sleep is broken as well. They have to live with wondering if today will be a good day or yet another day of bad.

For us, it's days of wondering if they will feel so angry inside they need to start an argument to justify how rotten they feel inside. Wondering what will get smashed in the house because they cannot control the rage of the frustration of endless days of hurting. We cannot wake them up next to them when they are having a nightmare of we may be punched out, end up with a black eye or bloody nose because while they are having their nightmare, they are not in the bed next to us, they are back where it all happened. We cannot go up to them when they are having a flashback and yell at them because they forgot to take out the trash with being in arms reach.

We can no longer go to movies with them because they can't stand to be in the dark in a huge room filled with people they cannot see, unless of course we get them to sit in the last row so they can have their back against the wall. God forbid anyone sit near them they don't know. It's the same story in restaurants. If there is not a booth available, forget about eating in your favorite place no matter how good the food is.

Talking? Well you can forget about that too. We're dealing with a person who is analyzing every single word that comes out of our mouths because of paranoia. Then there is short term memory loss and they forget what we say anyway. They are unable to make rational decisions and need to be reminded of the fact we no do not have the money to pay for the things they want. The list goes on and on and then there is the fact that when you have kids, you also have to make sure you are the buffer between your spouse and the kids so they know why they cannot be too noisy, why their parent freaks out when they get a cut and bleed, why their parent overreacts to a glass breaking on the floor.

Top all that off with the fact our own hearts are breaking seeing the suffering of someone we love, hoping and praying they begin to live a life again instead of just existing in it, knowing they, the person we fell in love with is still in there buried beneath the pain and the suffering. Praying to God that today we will see them smile the way they used to. Waiting and longing for the day when they will actually feel the love they used to have for us beating in their heart.

No need to wonder Mr. Ricks if you had a clue what comes with PTSD when they come home what the difference is between a lost limb or cancer or any other illness. Things like that are easy to understand. PTSD, well, you just have to live with it to understand it. Maybe the next time you get something in your in box, you may have the ability to know what is behind the pain, sadness and stress on us. A lot of us, well we just can't find the hope to stay married. I did. We've been married 24 years as of next month.

Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington