Two vignettes, both true, both involving combat veterans and PTSD:
A Marine with multiple tours of duty in Iraq and elsewhere, who can't allow himself to move after the death of two of his guys, for which he feels responsible -- even though objective third parties wouldn't see it his way at all. It's clear from messages he left behind that he wasn't able to move on past the guilt, and eventually takes his life, and that of another person.
A former Marine with multiple combat tours in Vietnam, and one of his few buddies who survived from his platoon, who for decades spent their annual "Alive Day" getting together and staging a recreation of the battle that almost killed them with toy soldiers. They laid out the toy soldiers in the positions of the battle they remembered from that day, and continually changed the way they arranged them, to see if there's any way the battle could have gone differently, and they could have saved any more of their men. Was this replaying of the fatal battle at all therapeutic for them, despite how many times they did it? Did it ever actually help? "No," he answered, "all it did was make us mad."
I was lucky enough to have a conversation the other day with Dr. Farris Tuma, director of the Trauma Stress Research program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington, D.C. As part of the conversation, he was telling me about what they've learned, over the years, in terms of resiliency -- who's likely to rebound after suffering a tragedy, and who is not. Ironically? Or maybe not so ironically -- those who hold onto blame (including self-blame) -- who need to find someone at fault -- "don't adjust as well, over the long term." It's relatively easy to see why. Blame, even self-blame, keeps you stuck in the terrible, tragic moment, while life -- with all its implied suffering, challenges and growth -- continues to move on. It's very natural, Tuma said, for people to want to find someone to be at fault, at least initially. That's hard-wired into us as humans, he said. When it becomes a problem is when that isn't just a phase we go through -- but one we're not able to leave.
The solution? He says it's to connect with mental health professionals who are "capable and trained," and are able to address "issues like [misplaced or unhealthy] guilt," when the person is ready -- ideally, as soon as possible. What you want to overcome in situations like this is the innate cognitive bias -- the tendency to see things a certain way, different from the way they really happened, and believe that, rather than the truth, per se. Continuing to carry the baggage from the incident, continuing to blame yourself keeps you from getting past it. What's important is to work with someone qualified who can help you see that "you didn't do something wrong." Improved mental health can often be located on the other side of that particular statement; and unfortunately, there's lots of resistance to letting go, as though it disgraces the memory, or dishonors the deaths of those who died. Big, thorny, difficult subject...the point of bringing it up is only to say, excessive guilt and self-blame where you can't seem to move on can be a distortion of reality, and there is a way to get help.
