The Storyteller, new film on Korean War veteran with PTSD

Actor Christopher Atkins discusses his film 'The Storyteller' and post-war PTSD
(Photos)
Examiner
MAY 29, 2013
BY: RENE THURSTON

Fans probably best remember actor Christopher Atkins as a curly-locked boy, running around the beach with a teenage Brooke Shields in the 1980 film "The Blue Lagoon." Or perhaps soap fans remember him in the original run of series "Dallas" as Peter, a college student and camp counselor who has an affair with a much-older Sue Ellen Ewing.

With those images in mind, fans will no doubt have no idea they are looking at that blonde, blue-eyed actor in a loin cloth when they see the character of Walter, an elderly man suffering from the ravages of his time in the Korean War, in Atkins' new film "The Storyteller."

The 52-year-old actor sat down with Riverside Soaps on May 28 to talk about the making of this emotional new film.

Atkins plays Walter, a once-revered children's book writer who regresses to the world of a child after the ravages of the Korean war, and the loss of his wife and youngest daughter to a car accident, leave him reeling from grief and agony.

Walter's remaining daughter, Susan, in a poignant performance by Gabrielle Carteris, is a bitter and lost soul, left to care for her shell-shocked father, now in his 70's. With hope fading for ever reaching her father, Susan makes the decision to put him in a home; however, she is forced through tragedy to experience a miracle that will change her life forever.
read more here

Making peace after trauma comes with knowing the different types

Making peace after trauma comes with knowing the different types
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
April 21, 2013

It does not just happen. It does not take time to heal all wounds. It takes a lot of work but what has happened after men and women are out of combat zones proves what does not work. "Resilience" during combat is one thing but expecting it to work on preventing PTSD is a deadly notion.

I was reading this article about "Mindfullness"

"New study from University of Michigan, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System shows group mindfulness activities have positive effect on PTSD symptoms."

First, it is not new in the world of psychiatry but it may be new to University of Michigan. Part of PTSD is the loss of ability to calm down. The function of the human body has been compromised by the constant stress of combat, multiple traumas topped off with the treat of them happening again. In other words, the body learned how to survive on "alert" and it needs to learn how to calm down again. 

It claims that,

"After eight weeks of treatment, 73 percent of patients in the mindfulness group displayed meaningful improvement compared to 33 percent in the treatment-as-usual groups."

Sounds great but any help can make people feel better when it comes to PTSD because as soon as they start talking about it, it stops getting worse. What this study does not address is the longterm.

There are three components to healing. One is the mind and that requires a trauma specialist to respond right after "it" hits the "fan" and then the event is not allowed to take over. This does not have to be a "professional" but can be done with someone trained to respond the right way. Someone who will not dismiss or minimize what the serviceman or woman is experiencing. Someone who is trained to stay away from the wrong choice of words. I've actually heard people try to "fix" someone by saying "God only gives us what we can handle." That ends up enforcing what they already think. People walk away from trauma either believing they are one lucky SOB or they just got nailed by God. God either saved them or did it to them. If they believe God did it to them, then bingo, they just heard they were right and God gave it to them. I have also heard well trained crisis responders do it to perfection. They listened right, saying very little and with compassion. They focused on the person they were helping. Not taking phone calls, checking their watch or looking around the room as if they had something better to do.

If that doesn't happen then you need to have a mental health professional but even that is an issue if they are not trauma specialists. Otherwise they get it wrong too. Psychiatrists and psychologist come with the same issues. If they are not experts on what trauma does, they get it wrong. If they are not specialists there is also the issue of many not believing PTSD is real even though brain scans have shown the changes in the brain. Some of them know so little all they offer is medication as if "they have a pill for that" is the answer to everything. Medication numbs. It does not heal. There is also the issue of many medications coming with a warning they could increase suicidal thoughts being prescribed. The right ones can work to calm things down enough so the other part of treatment can start to work.

The body is the second part that needs to be treated. Everything is being drained by flashbacks, nightmares following a year of being constantly on edge. The body has to relearn soothing and calming down. There are many ways to get there. Yoga, meditation, martial arts, writing, swimming, walking and playing a musical instrument help with that as long as they can train themselves to focus on what they are doing and not the negative thing that happened to them. If they start to think of the events they survived, they need to push it out and think of what they are doing.

The other, and I think the most important part of healing, is spiritual. Forgiving. Knowing they are forgiven for whatever they feel they need to be forgiven for and forgiving whomever they have to forgive. That is not up to anyone to judge or dismiss. It is the only way they being to make peace with what happened. With combat and a close cousin law enforcement, it is not just surviving the event. Often it is participating in it with the use of weapons.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend about being confused over something I said about this. It is a good time to clarify. There are different causes of PTSD but all are being diagnosed and treated the same way. They treat someone surviving a hurricane (one time event) the same way they treat a rape victim even though a hurricane always comes with a warning but rape does not. The threat of something happening again or not is part of what has to happen in therapy. Something that happens in a natural disaster is not man made. Rape is. It is done to the person by another person's actions. Worrying about it happening again is part of what PTSD does. Then the human issue of forgiving comes into it. Forgiving their attacker while seeking justice is tricky. It requires a lot of work to do that but once it is done, life gets better not carrying that burden on top of everything else.

Abuse is another one especially when you live with the person. For me it was my Dad, a violent alcoholic until I was 13. Then my ex-husband tried to kill me. Huge difference between what nature does and what people do.

They treat someone with PTSD after a car accident the same way as the other three even though the threat to them is the repeated every time they get into a vehicle. Again it is the human factor of someone causing the trauma or worse, when they caused it.

Firefighters are another different group. They put their lives on the line everyday and when they are not rushing to a fire, they are waiting for it. They don't know when the next alarm bell will ring. The friend I talked to yesterday is involved with firefighters. He told me that some of them are armed when we were talking about how cops and military folks use weapons. (That is something we can explore later as I learn more about that aspect.) For the average firefighter, again, there is a huge difference between the type of PTSD they get hit with because of the nature of the trauma, the threat to their lives and concern for facing it all over again. There is survivor guilt when they couldn't save someone or when one of their friends die in the line of duty.

We are all talking about the bombs in Boston last week and people seeking things no one should have to see because other humans decided to do it and others decided to help afterwards. They will have a lot to deal with on a whole different level. It is close to what firefighters/first responders face on a daily basis. Lives on the line and seeing things no one should have to see but they know someone has to do it.

Then you have police officers and the troops. Cops know the risk every time they clock in but they get to go home at the end of their shift. The troops don't while they are deployed into combat zones. The troops get to go back to the states away from combat, but cops have to get up and do it all over again everyday. (Getting how complicated all this is yet?) Both groups have to use force and become part of the event itself. The nature of the trauma is much different for them from the other groups and they have to be treated differently.

Then you also have the secondary stressor. I had a DEA agent years ago contact me because he was worried about losing his security clearance. He was a combat veteran and had been through a lot working on both jobs yet it was not until his younger brother was killed in Iraq that it hit him like a ton of bricks. What he discovered was he was pushing past mild PTSD and not addressing it. He was not ready when he was hit by the event that was the thing to wake up sleeping PTSD.

That is something that is happening right now after the bombings in Boston. People will react differently when they go out in public and need help right now. The victims will need a different kind of help. For the responders, they will need help too. Yet if they are treated the same way, then they will need a lot more help then they would have if they are treated properly right now.

There are experts who are not experts in trauma, but there are experts in trauma that I learned from over all these years. They are out there and those are the people who should be running the studies like the one you just read about. They are the ones who should be listened to if we are ever going to get any of this right. If we keep listening to the ones doing the talking most of the last 40 years, the ones getting the attention and funding, then we are all screwed.

They say take care of all parts of the survivors of trauma with their minds, bodies and spirits and then you have healing. Otherwise we have the history of PTSD being repeated.

In the dying process, PTSD can "rear its ugly head"

This is one more thing not being discussed as much as it should be. When we talk about "secondary stressors" turning mild PTSD into a full blown assault, knowing the end of you life is near, is just about as stressful as you can get.

There are many veterans with mild PTSD and doing ok until they have an accident or face an illness, then everything they have been trying to "get over" boils to their awareness and takes over.

It happens with elderly veterans when they experience losing a spouse or other family members. It also happens when they experience something else traumatic. An elderly WWII veteran had experienced a long list of stressful things in his life. Past the age of 90, his apartment was broken into and after that, he was never the same. Think of living all those years believing you escaped it only to discover that it was just sleeping.

Program to help ensure that no veteran dies alone

Mary Garrigan Journal staff
Posted: Saturday, December 10, 2011

John Fleming wants to make sure his fellow veterans do not die alone.

Fleming is a volunteer with No Veteran Dies Alone, a new program of the Veterans Affairs Black Hills Health Care System. Everyone dies, he says, but no one should do it alone, least of all someone who has served his country.

"Someday, we're all going to be in that same boat," Fleming said. "I just like to be there with these guys."

The new hospice volunteer program is patterned after No One Dies Alone, a national end-of-life concept that was launched at a hospital in Eugene, Ore. Mary Ann Herrboldt, coordinator of the hospice and palliative care program at Fort Meade, said military veterans have some unique end-of-life needs, and other veterans often are best equipped to meet them.

"Veterans do have a unique culture and they do have some unique needs at the end of life," Herrboldt said. Some studies show that as many as 65 percent of veterans experience some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, whether it is ever diagnosed or addressed, she said.

In the dying process, PTSD can "rear its ugly head," sometimes for the first time, said Mary Graham, a nurse practitioner with the hospice program.
read more here

With humanitarian missions into Haiti, they will carry memories of combat with them

With humanitarian missions into Haiti, they will carry memories of combat with them
by
Chaplain Kathie

The Haitians could have had a better chance of recovering from the earthquake had there been relief ready for them. This was impossible considering how far spread the destruction was. Many of them found themselves being helped by total strangers in their time of need. The aid given offered hope, showed them they matter to someone and they were not alone. For some, they encountered selfish people and they will need more help to recover from this natural disaster because of what people did following it.

Latest Haiti news
Survival depends on makeshift care
Medical chief: I ordered docs to leave
Top 2 Haiti U.N. officials died in quake
Orphans have no food; home destroyed
Where bodies go after disasters
Techies brainstorm ways to help
'He's our son, and we want him to live'

With Katrina, the trauma was compounded by what people did and did not do as they waited for help, for medical care, food, water and shelter. Some had someone there to help them and this offered the restoration of hope, belief that they mattered as the kindness of strangers reached out to them. For other survivors, they had to survive the aftermath compounded by neglect.

When you look at your own life, you will find many times of trouble and grief related to traumatic events. A car accident will leave you more nervous driving as you are not able to trust other drivers. While this may ease in time, there is always that memory in your mind. The next time you see another accident, you remember your own.

Surviving a natural disaster is easier to recover from until the next time a tornado, hurricane, storm or earthquake comes. It is harder to recover from if the help you need is delayed in coming and even harder if the actions of other people further place your life in danger.

With September 11th, that was an event other people did. We all think twice when flying about the other people on the plane. Crimes will end up having us constantly on guard until the sense of security returns again. Fires have us worrying about it happening again as we become obsessive with smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and our own personal safety especially if someone died in the fire we survived.

We are all only human.

Each one of us have experienced different types of trauma. Some of us recovered with the memory of the event sleeping peacefully until the next reminder comes and we have to recover from the trauma all over again. We have a time of "normal" a time of peaceful living and we find ourselves returning to wholeness with memories at rest. For the men and women in the military, their deployments can be filled with traumatic events and complicated by whatever events they faced from previous ones.

Feuds grow over reaching victims in HaitiPORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A flood of food, water and U.S. troops flowed toward Haiti on Saturday as donors squabbled over how to reach hungry, haggard earthquake survivors still trying to claw others from ruined buildings before the dying became the dead.

The U.S. Southern Command said it now has 24 helicopters flying relief missions — many from warships off the coast — with 4,200 military personnel involved and 6,300 more due by Monday.

Read More

If the previous deployment was filled with traumatic events and the emotional needs were not taken care of, they carry those events into the next deployment so that even if the deployment was less traumatic, they may experience an emotional meltdown over something they would have normally been able to recover from more easily had the other past events not happened. They may have trapped out the memories of the other times but those memories feed the one they hang onto. Until all events are addressed, they pay the price with the next one and the next one cutting them deeper.

With humanitarian missions into Haiti, they will carry memories of combat with them as they try to aid the Haitians. We will assume they will have no problem recovering from what they will see because we want to avoid the history of what these men and women have already gone through. If they saw the bodies of children in Iraq or Afghanistan and did not recover from that, see more in Haiti, then even if they know the cause of death was by earthquake, the deaths they saw during combat will be resurrected.

There is an assumption humanitarian mission are healing for all but they are only healing depending on what they have taken with them and what they encounter while doing the aid work. If they are handing out food, water, evacuating the wounded or building shelters, then it can be very healing for them, but if they are filling mass graves, pulling bodies out of the rubble or picking them up off the streets, all of this can feed the pain they are already carrying. This can be the turning point for the better for some but we have to be aware it can also be the turning point for the worst.

Military leaders and Chaplains along with mental health professionals need to be aware of this so they can address it all properly instead of just passing it of and knowing that while these current traumatic events are in their life right now, it is what they have not addressed in their past that will do the most damage. It's called a secondary stressor. It is the event that hit them the hardest because they were already wounded by the other events they tried to put away and get over. If they only address the current event and not the real pain behind it, then it will do no good at all leaving the root of the pain still in place to claim more of their soul and mind.

Spontaneous spouse of war

Self sacrifice of oneself or one's interest for others or for a cause or ideal

Sacrifice a : destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else
2 : to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief, or end
http://reference.aol.com/dictionary?dword=sacrifice

When you read the meaning of the word sacrifice you can see how it applies to a spouse of member of the military or of a veteran. There has been very little reported about the sacrifices the troops families make between long, often extended deployments and redeployments or of the sacrifices the families of National Guardsmen and Reservists. We can excuse what they have to go through as a choice they made to marry someone in the service, but too often there are even more spouses who had no choice at all other than to fall in love with someone who supposedly left the military behind them.

When wives fell in love with their Vietnam veteran husbands, they never thought twice about what came with them. They saw them for who they were right then and there, never thinking about the changes that could happen without warning. When they have mild cases of PTSD, it never dawns on anyone that the symptoms can get worse. Then there are the veterans with dormant PTSD, sleeping inside of them without showing many clues the war came back with them.

Mild PTSD and dormant PTSD awaken with another stressor. This secondary stressor hits them hard without warning. It is not a slow process. It happens within hours. While PTSD develops eating away pieces of a life, secondary stressor PTSD takes out a huge chunk in one bite. This can come from the loss of a loved one, car accident, family tragedy, a crime, a fire, on the job or because of the job, natural disasters and even new wars that have nothing to do with them.

The spouse is often left in shock wondering what happened. How can a person change overnight? How did their lives fall apart in a blink of an eye? They look at the veteran thinking they are still the same person but angry all the time, looking for a fight, acting like they don't care, all in all like a stranger they no longer know. Most of the time they blame themselves for what has happened never making the connection between what happened to them while they served in war and that time in their lives.

Choices are made without knowledge of what they are dealing with. A lot of wives and husbands of veterans, simply do what other people do in marriages that are not what they thought they would be and they leave. It has not occurred to them that their spouse is ill. All they can think about is what they know and deal with it accordingly.

Yet when they know what it is, what is behind it, there is a choice they also have to make. Do they leave and begin a new life putting the veteran out of their life entirely or do they regret what they were unable to do the rest of their lives? Some are too selfish to be able to stay. Nothing against them because there are different kinds of people in all walks of life. Some are too weak to stay because they cannot take any of the turmoil any longer. Again, nothing against them because of their nature. Yet then there are the spouses stronger enough to be willing to stay. They become the spontaneous spouse of war. The rest of their lives will be a struggle against the war their spouse lived through. Every aspect of their marriage from that point on will have something to do with what their spouse did before far apart from them.

For the spouse who is able to stay, they need all the support they can get because they are doing the hardest thing anyone could ever do. They face sacrificing everything other humans seek. Their entire marriage changes. They no longer have a co-parent and feel as if they are a single parent making all the decisions and holding all the responsibility for brining up their kids. They spend countless hours alone when before they had their spouse with them, going shopping, to the movies, out for dinner, to family functions and parties with friends. They make excuses for why their spouse no longer attends with them and they feel as if they have no marriage left as they remember the good times, hope for them to return and cling to every resource they can find to cope with it all. They wonder how they got into what they are in and sooner or later they wonder how to get out of it. Some will look for hope that their spouse will get better. Some will wonder when the last straw will come and they have to leave. They come to a point when they think they just can't take it any longer and then again they must decide.

Some spouses look back and wonder how they did it as long as they did, while others wonder what else they could have done. None of us are the same and each one is capable of what they were built with but even the strongest marriage cannot survive without the tools to do it.

Family support groups are vital in keeping these marriages going on instead of ending. Having someone to lean on in the worst of times gets them to where things begin to get better as they build a new life with a marriage that is working for them. They can find their own kind of "normal" in a life that is anything but normal. Just hearing that someone else went through the same thing helps a great deal. Knowing they are not alone builds them up and supports them as they go through making the changes in their own thoughts, wishes and futures.

We need to restore the support groups in the Veterans Centers and VA hospitals to support the spouse in all of this. It was not what they ever planned on going through and none of us can dismiss it with saying they knew what they were getting into when they got married to a veteran. No one plans on PTSD showing up years later, but it does. Just ask the wife of a Vietnam vet and you'll get a better idea of just how shocking it is to wake up with a stranger.




Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
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