Healing Combat Trauma

Combat Veterans, PTSD and Domestic Violence - A Sometimes Deadly Combination

Domestic Violence a Growing Problem for Veterans

“The increasing number of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] raises the risk of domestic violence and its consequences on families and children in communities across the United States,” says Monica Matthieu, Ph.D., an expert on veteran mental health and an assistant professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. “Treatments for domestic violence are very different than those for PTSD. The Department of Veterans Affairs [VA] 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.”

Matthieu and Peter Hovmand, Ph.D., a domestic violence expert and an assistant professor of social work at Washington University, are merging their research interests and working to design community prevention strategies to address this emerging public health problem.

“The increasing prevalence of traumatic brain injury and substance use disorders along with PTSD among veterans poses some unique challenges to existing community responses to domestic violence,” says Hovmand. “Community responses to domestic violence must be adapted to respond to the increasing number of veterans with PTSD. This includes veterans with young families and older veterans with chronic mental health issues.”

VA research 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.

— Source: Washington University in St. Louis

"Just in Time for the Holidays" -- Stress-Reduction Exercises for PTSD

Various stress-reduction or relaxation exercises and techniques are available these days in a number of places, online and otherwise; and at least a few of them make a passing reference to PTSD (though rarely combat trauma). 

Relaxation at first may seem to be an impossible goal for those with combat trauma, because jumpiness and hypervigilance appear to be hallmarks of the experience that also have helped keep troops alive. 

However, the continual wearing-down and weakening of the nervous system over years from adrenaline surges and frequent experiences of "fight or flight" shows just how important it is to develop greater familiarity and experience with relaxation exercises. 

Like riding a bike, it's a much better (and more effective) idea to DO these things than just READ about them -- especially if you want to give yourself a chance to "feel" the effects in your own body, and "test" for yourself whether these techniques really "work."  (And don't forget the caregivers, partners or spouses of those suffering from PTSD: They also carry around a fair amount of stress... )

The emerging field of Mind-Body Medicine (ironic since the idea of mind-body medicine is actually quite old) is full of techniques and tools for stress-reduction and relaxation.  Yoga and meditation, among others, are known for their ability to reduce stress.  But occasionally on the Web there's also a good guide for sufferers about how to relax and renew.  Just such a "technique" guide exists here: The subject is "Relaxation and Relaxation Exercises," and the guide was produced at the Trauma Center, with the funding of the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance (MOVA), under a federal Anti-Terrorism Supplemental Grant (ATSG), to aid Victims of and Responders to the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks.  Click here for a link to the guide online.

Also look on the left-hand column of this blog to see a number of resources in the form of books, CDs, and DVDs for stress-reduction and relaxation, including music designed to help people relax and de-stress. A section called "Healing Multimedia" is located about 3/4 of the way down the page (if you think of the blog as a single page, and just cursor down to that), or you could do a search (Cntrl F on most computers, or Apple F on Macs) for "healing multimedia" to find that section of recommended resources. Enjoy!

Vietnam Veteran Turns to Acupuncture, Qi Gong and Yoga for Relief from PTSD

We've been discussing various forms of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or "CAM" for short, which seem to have potential therapeutic usefulnessness for treating PTSD.  Here's a mention in a recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune of March 14, 2008, of other Eastern methods, including the energetic medicine, "Qi Gong," which appear to have brought some relief to one Vietnam war-era nurse.  From an article by Matthew D. LaPlante:

Mary Jane Shipley is a 62-year-old former trauma nurse who was stationed at a mobile Army hospital in Vung Tau, Vietnam. 

Shipley's "eyes well with tears," LaPlante writes, at the recollection of the young men she watched die there, burnt and broken and missing pieces of their bodies as they faded away." 

He continues, "Shipley says she knew almost immediately after returning home there was something wrong with her. In part, it was the helicopters. She could hear them, even smell them, ferrying patients to the Salt Lake City hospital where she worked - sometimes minutes before any of her associates could."

Her other symptoms are hallmarks of PTSD: "She had trouble relating to other people. She was restless. She was constantly afraid. Perhaps to the eyes of today's doctors and nurses, Shipley's illness would have been obvious. But back then, no one reached out."

In Shipley's case, according to LaPlante, "It took her 30 years to realize she wasn't alone. Now in treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, the Western-trained nurse has found Eastern therapies to be most helpful. She practices yoga and qigong. And at least twice a week, she undergoes acupuncture. "It took me so long to figure out what works for me," Shipley laments, "and I still have so much trouble."

The Woman's Bill of Rights to Sexual Intimacy and Pleasure

Periodically we revisit the all-important topic, "Healthy Sexuality for Combat Veterans."  In this installment, we include a "bill of rights" that's essentially written for the woman partner, from Gina Ogden, Ph.D., author of "The Heart and Soul of Sex," and, most recently, "The Return of Desire." The author of five books, Ogden is a marriage and family therapist and a sex therapist.  In a conversation directed primarily to women, she says:

"It's important for you to know what your sexual rights are -- no matter what your age or sexual orientation or physical ability.  Some of us seem to know our rights instinctively and are able to set effective boundaries and ask for what we want.  But many of us have never thought about our rights to intimacy and pleasure -- or even imagined that we had such rights.  When we're unaware, we're extra vulnerable to being taken advantage of by others, whether they intend to take advantage of us or not."

The following advice comes from a guide by Ogden for women about "how to say "yes" to pleasure and "no" to unsafe sex."

My Rights to Intimacy and Pleasure:

1.  I have a right to my own body and all of its sensations, including pleasure and pain;

2.  I have a right to think my own thoughts, whatever they may be;

3.  I have a right to feel the full range of my emotions – excitement, joy and anger, sorrow and depression, love and fear – whether or not my feeling them is acceptable to others;

4.  I have a right to acknowledge my memories, whether they are memories of delight or of abuse, and to base present relationship decisions on them;

5.  I have a right to be – or not to be – a sexual person at all ages and stages of my life, and a right to chose how I define what I mean by sexuality;

6.  I have a right to expect that my partner respect my body, thoughts, feelings, and general well-being, and a right to insist on respect, if necessary;

7.  I have a right to ask for what I want;

8.  I have a right to say “no” to any sexual encounter that feels unsatisfactory or threatening – physically, emotionally, spiritually, or sexually;

9.  I have a right to say “yes” to pleasure that is physically, emotionally, spiritually and sexually safe; and

10.  I have a right to feel good about saying both “yes” and “no.”

-- Source: "The Heart and Soul of Sex," by Gina Ogden, Ph.D.

A Hand across the Abyss - How Openness Helps Heal - A Therapist Talks with His Patient, both Vets

I've recently started reading a very interesting book from the Vietnam era, by Arthur Egendorf, a Ph.D. psychologist who was first a veteran - and later tried to piece together what he had experienced in a way that could also help others.  There may be a sad professional end to the story -- it appears that Egendorf has since lost his license to practice -- however, his work at the time, and the motivation behind it, really seems exceptional. 

Gerald Nicosia writes about him, too, in the excellent "Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement," because Egendorf was instrumental in establishing the veterans' "rap groups" which were an early feature of attempts made to cope with the combat trauma and PTSD Vietnam vets experienced. 

This passage, from Egendorf's book, is remarkable to me for several reasons: Egendorf's own intuitions about healing; his humility, openness and vulnerability with his patient (and friend); their nuanced dance together; and of course, best of all, the effects it actually had on the Marine he helped.  Egendorf's book is out of print, but here and there copies are available used, including on Amazon.  Here's what he wrote:

“If you look, it’s not hard to find veterans who are engaged in healing.  I met one of them eight years ago while visiting a VA hospital.  His name was Jim, an ex-Marine from the Bronx recovering from his latest breakdown, back for another of the hospital visits that began a year after he returned from Vietnam.  I introduced myself as a fellow vet, now a psychologist, who wanted to interview him for a study that would help Vietnam vets.

 
“You want to help me?” he asked.  “For six years I’ve been in and out of this hospital, and I’ve heard enough of shrink talk.  I want to know how you made it.  That’s how to help me.  Tell me how did you get it together?”

 
I responded by making him an offer.  If he would let me interview him, he could ask me anything he wanted.  He accepted and spent ten hours telling me his story.  Before the war he was the kind of youngster teachers like.  He behaved well in class and worked part-time after school.  During his teens he had seen a psychiatrist for “nerves,” but generally had held his own.  In 1969, when he was eighteen, Jim was drafted and goaded into “volunteering” for the Marines, then sent to combat duty in Vietnam.  He saw action in I Corps, in the north of South Vietnam.

 
Ever since he came back, his mother and his wife had been trying to tell him that something was wrong,  For the first year all he did was stay in the apartment, smoke dope, and listen to music.  Then one day while looking out the window he saw a junkie trying to steal the radio from his car.  Jim grabbed a baseball bat, ran after him, and started po8unding the guy so fiercely it took three people to tear him away.  After that he knew he was out of control and went for help.

 
Seven years after coming back, Jim described his burdens this way: “Before I went, I worked for six years.  I was the best assistant manager Martin’s Bargain Store ever had.  I can’t work now.  They messed up my head.  How the hell are you supposed to concentrate after all I’ve been through?  Reality sucks.  It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.  That’s why a nineteen-year-old acidhead or college guy gets out of it.  Who do I know?  My shrink from before the war said I was fine.  Now the VA says I was always cuckoo and my problem’s got nothing to do with the war.  My wife is scared of me.  My family thinks I’m nuts.  We were supposed to be over there fighting for freedom, killing people who never did us any harm.  What are you supposed to do after that?

 
I listened, particularly to what was left unsaid.  He had just started to find some direction in life when the war crashed in.  Then it was “pussy,” as his drill instructors called him, and thirteen months of being constantly threatened with death, and seeing a dozen guys he knew pulverized into heaps of bloody flesh.  Others made fun of him, mocking a grunt from New York who resented the practice of calling Vietnamese “slopes” or “dinks” or “gooks.” When the time came to go home and he looked forward to leaving the mess behind, he found that things didn’t work as he expected.  After coming back he wasn’t anybody’s hero, the afterimages of shattering brutality stayed fixed in his mind, and the business-as-usual reality at home had no room for what he carried inside.

For Jim and many like him, it was not them but the world that was crazy.  What was keeping all of it from blowing up, just like the people and placed he had seen “wasted”?  Presidents give the orders and people die.  It’s like a primitive ritual with human sacrifices to bloodthirsty gods.  Jim was sure about only one thing: The people pulling the strings didn’t care what happened to him.

 
“How’d you get it together? That’s what I want to know,” he kept asking.  Our backgrounds were different, but the war gave us a common bond.  Jim was a ghetto kid who didn’t finish high school before entering the service, whereas I had gone to private school, Harvard, and then Europe for a year of postgraduate study before my draft board notified me.  Unlike him, I never saw a psychotherapist while growing up and was never seriously upset until after I came back, and then never so bad that I couldn’t go to school and hold a job, too.  All the same, he knew.  “Something got to you too, huh?”

 
He tested me to see if I’d open up with him. “People like you go into psychology to straighten themselves out, right?”  Yes, I told him, he was right about that.  After years of taking pills and hearing therapists interpret his past and try to modify his behavior, Jim wanted to “relate.”  It was the same hunger that led a dozen of us to form the veteran rap groups that began meeting in New York City in 1970.  In these groups we asked each other and the therapists who volunteered to assist us in gaining the same openness Jim now wanted.

 
After a few meetings Jim asked to be a regular client.  At the beginning he couldn’t take much – he would miss appointments and “forget” to return my phone calls. Eventually, though, we met more regularly, and he began to thrive on the questions I raised.

What had gotten to him?  What was so troubling?  What made him so vulnerable?  What was he going to do about it now?  How was he going to handle his life?  I didn’t intend for him to answer my questions the way elementary pupils answer their teacher’s drill.  Rather, the idea was for him to use the questions to orient himself, to direct his energies where the questioning pointed.  It was time for Jim to stop telling the same story over and over and to begin living out a new one.

 
The more we worked together, the more he saw opportunities to make himself useful – a gesture that would help his wife, an odd job to pick up some cash, a game he could play with his kids.  He studied enough to distinguish his sensitive reactions from his deluded flights of fancy.  And when he was ready, he acknowledged that his suffering would never make sense o its own.  It would only be valuable if he took it as a lesson, something he could use to remind himself that how he handles his life is up to him.

 
After a few months of groundwork, Jim was out of the VA for good.  Then he got off tranquilizers and stayed away from pot.  In the next year, he and his wife stopped fighting and started talking, and soon after that he was holding a job for the first time since he left the Marines.  Two years after we began meeting he bought his own house and was holding down two jobs.  Instead of complaining about his two kids, which is all he had done when we first met, he’d brag about them.

 
The time came when he raised a more ambitious question.  Given his suffering, and what he’d learned, what purpose would he devote himself to?  “People, I want to do something for people,” he’d say.  One of his dreams was to save enough money to start a summer camp for ghetto kids.  In the meantime, he began seeing the people in his daily lives as the ones to serve.

 
Jim still has bad days and times when his kids get to him, but he no longer doubts that his life is workable, which gives him a certainty that makes him proud.  He’s especially happy about the way men who live on his street now listen to him.  “They figure I must know something after I’ve been through.  They ask me how they can straighten themselves out.”  He volunteers at the local Outreach office for veterans, run by the Veterans Administration. “If a high school dropout ex-cuckoo like me can do it, anybody can.”

As powerful as that is, here's something I like just as much: Egendorf's own description of his participation in the dance between patient and practitioner:

“How did you do it?” was the question Jim kept asking.  I knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with some formula or set of rules.  He wanted me to open up, to make it safer for him to open up to himself and to me.  And so I told him about myself, but not to give him know-how.  I simply related bits of my story as they became relevant.  For example, I told him how sensitive I was when I came back.  At first, little things would get to me. I’d be overwhelmed by seeing a dead dog lying on a highway, or the picture of a mourning woman in a magazine, or newspaper listings of the soldiers just killed. Strangers halfway around the world, especially dead ones, seemed closer to me than anyone had ever been except my family and one or two lovers.

 
I also told him about how I threw myself into issues connected with the war.  Before Vietnam I had read newspapers casually.  In the months and first years after coming back I would tear into the pages to see what new horrors I needed to absorb and to find out which people in high places I would cheer that day and which ones I would scream at during the hours I spent raging in my head.  I was more deeply moved by tenderness than at any time in my life, and I was also more easily angered. I’d write scathing letters to editors, congressmen, and the President.  I’d blurt out slogans to old friends and family, who didn’t know how to talk with me anymore.

 
I didn’t tell Jim only about matters that weighed me down.  I made sure to tell him some things that were hard to admit to myself at first, things I needed guts to say, but once said would leave me feeling lighter. I told him it wasn’t just the pain that had surprised me; I had also begun to catch glimmers of some secret joy.  I was happy I had made it through the war when others didn’t, which was hard to acknowledge.  But something else delighted me even more.  Strangely, I was glad to feel so much hurt, as if having allowed something to tear me open meant one day I would give birth to something I might treasure.

 
Jim would compare himself to me and decide that I was so much better off that I had to know something that made life easy. So I also let him know about my awkwardness – the many times I flip-flopped back and forth, from wallowing in my distress to trying to hide from it.  But I also told him I learned more from my mistakes and weaknesses than from anything else.  In fact, my about-faces, in which neither wallowing in the pain nor turning my back on it satisfied me, eventually led me to the realization that I was searching for the third way.  I couldn’t say what it was at first, but I figured somebody had to know or there wouldn’t be such people as counselors and therapists.  They must know, I thought, and so, hungering to find out what they knew and daring to think I’d know too once I joined their ranks, I took a job as a crisis counselor.

 
Jim grasped the irony of my story.  Contrary to what he had initially thought, I wasn’t useful to him because of any information I had.  What I had to offer lay in my willingness to admit that I don’t have anything in particular to tell people until I hear them talk.  I’m willing to be with them without answers, so that I can assist them with their own search.  I told Jim that I’m as surprised as anyone when this works.  The moment when someone trusts me enough to tell  me his troubles a change takes place in me.  I suddenly have more wisdom for them than I usually have for myself. I listen, make comments, and without having to think or plan in advance, ask questions they find helpful.

 
In the end, what Jim accomplished by being with me wasn’t new information to pass along, something he could go out and tell someone else.  He developed an approach to life that transformed his experience of the war from a burden to an opportunity for healing.  The shift happened as a result of our being together, and by our pursuing a joint quest that fostered trust, respect, appreciation and the openness that is healing in itself.

Most crucial is the openness.  I’ve noticed this not only with Jim but also with hundreds of others I’ve worked with since, and with dozens of therapists I’ve trained.  In this book I intend to convey what I mean by openness, in such a way that healing from war dawns as a possibility for you.”

 
-- Source: Healing from the War: Trauma & Transformation after Vietnam, by Arthur Egendorf.  Boston: Shambhala Press (1986)

(Shambhala Press is what published Claude Anshin Thomas’ excellent book,