Healing Combat Trauma

"Love Shouldn't Hurt": Combat Veterans, PTSD, and the Deadly Serious Topic of Domestic Violence

Domestic violence is an enormous public health problem in our society today. Domestic violence among families of combat veterans is also a significant problem -- if you take "significant" to mean, "important to those it affects." According to a fact sheet produced by the National Center for PTSD (NCPTSD), part of the VA, domestic violence is "the most frequent cause of serious injury to women, more than car accidents, muggings, and stranger rapes combined."

Among veterans, studies show that "domestic violence rates among veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are higher than those of the general population. Additionally, according to studies, domestic violence rates among "active-duty military men (Heyman & Neidig, 1999), couples seeking relationship therapy (O'Leary, Vivian, & Malone, 1992), and Vietnam veterans with and without post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Jordan et al., 1992) have been found to be higher than those from the general population." 

One academic paper adds, making a crucial point, "Research has yet to study couples seeking relationship therapy in which the veteran has PTSD to explore how these relationships compare with other couples. Given the elevated risk for violence among these couples due to the PTSD, the treatment-seeking behavior, and the relationship distress, couples seeking relationship therapy are an especially vulnerable population." (And of course, couples not seeking relationship therapy might be even more under-served -- it's just they can't be as easily surveyed.)

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Casey Taft, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University, has recently been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Defense to study this topic. From an article published by BU, announcing the grant, quoting Taft, and linked here:

"People who are exposed to trauma, and in particular those who develop PTSD, are at very high risk for aggressive behavior,” says Taft, who also works at the Boston Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the National Center for PTSD. “In one Vietnam war study, they found that among vets with PTSD, one third had engaged in physical violence against their partner in the past year. This rate was almost three time the rates they found among vets without PTSD. Since we know that current vets in Iraq and Afghanistan have been exposed to significant trauma and many of them have been on multiple deployments and they’re coming back with high rates of PTSD and other mental health issues, it would stand to reason that they would also engage in high levels of aggression and partner violence, though we don’t have the specific data to back that up.”

(Hence the study).

In the meantime, know that domestic violence can be "deadly serious."

Domestic violence is serious. Risks include death, serious physical injury, and psychological injury as well -- including PTSD and secondary PTSD. Just some of the psychological effects (often less obvious initially than the physical effects) are: depression and being at greater risk for subsequent suicide.

Again, according to the NCPTSD, "60% of battered women report depression," and "25% of suicide attempts by Caucasian women and 50% of suicide attempts by African American women" have been "preceded by abuse."

Some more sobering statistics about the magnitude of the problem:

• 20-30% of American women will be physically abused by a partner at least once in their lifetimes; 
• 30-40% of women's emergency room visits are for injuries due to domestic violence;
  
• 30% of women killed in the U.S. are killed by their husbands or boyfriends;
  
• 50% of men who assaulted their female partners also assaulted their children;
  
• 3.3 million children witness domestic violence each year.
• 1.3 million women and 834,732 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually;
• 201,394 women are forcibly raped by an intimate partner annually;
• 11% of women in homosexual relationships and 23% of men in homosexual relationships report being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked by an intimate partner;
• 503,485 women and 185,496 men are stalked by an intimate partner annually;
• 1-25% of all pregnant women are battered during pregnancy;

What to do if you're in crisis?  There's a

National toll-free Domestic Violence hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)

There's an excellent "Fact Sheet" put out by the NCPTSD, linked here; and

There's a "safety plan pocket guide," linked here.

The NCPTSD's fact sheet, they say, provides "information regarding the definition of domestic violence, the prevalence of domestic violence, the dynamics of abusive relationships, the effects of domestic violence, treatment for victims and perpetrators, and resources offering assistance."

There are also some good resources at other websites, including FamilyOfAVet.com, linked here.

Pulling the Pin: Combat Vets, PTSD and Troubled Personal Relationships

Combat veterans with PTSD often have tremendous difficulty with their closest personal relationships: marriages and families.  Divorces, multiple marriages, and short-term relationships that end unhappily are very common: All situations that compound the pain and suffering that already exists with PTSD.

While there are a few books out there that provide some helpful advice about the difficulty of combat vets with PTSD sustaining good relationships, some insight is also in order.  While many obstacles could be mentioned, we'll stick to just a few important ones.

1.    Needing to have a constant enemy. Combat veterans will tell you that their training requires a constant enemy for alertness, vigilance, what amounts to staying alive. Once combat ends -- or between episodes of combat -- that "role" needs to be filled by somebody.  The most obvious candidate to fill that role?  The combat veteran's usually unwitting, and unwilling, partner. If the spouse or partner isn't available, the next best candidate is a child. The combat veteran is often unaware that he or she is using this tactic at all, and the one victimized by it can often tell "something is wrong," but isn't always clear on exactly what that is.

2.    Pestering and teasing doesn't feel like love, but it does feel like irritation. Let's say the coast is clear.  It's a sunny day, everything seems (temporarily) all right in the combat veteran's world. But he or she teases and pesters a spouse, partner or family member (e.g., a child) incessantly, until that person gets fed up and walks away.  "But I was just teasing!" says the combat veteran.  Yes, but the frictional nature of the allegedly good-natured teasing has a predictable effect: it drives close others away, much like bad behavior also does. Now the combat veteran can be left alone: But is that what he or she really wanted?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  The main thing, combat vets say informally, that inspires this strategy, even on an unconscious level, is that too much peace and calm is off-putting, and creating (or re-creating) a little "chaos" in interpersonal relationships puts the combat vet with PTSD back where he or she is more likely to be comfortable.

Now factor either (or both) of these two behavioral patterns (among several others that could have been discussed) with the combat veteran's periodic desire for intimacy -- and imagine the realistic toll that such behavior, even if unintentional, takes on the spouse or partner's desire for intimacy.  More likely, either one or both of these behaviors is more likely to shut down or numb the spouse or partner, who then is more tempted to resist attempts at intimacy.  Is turning down intimacy the problem?  Is it the only problem, or even the central problem?  Probably not, if either of these fairly typical behaviors are an issue.

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.

Sexual Healing: Discovering the Ecstasy of Relating in Intimacy

As we touch back in with our recurring topic of "Healthy Sexuality and the Combat Veteran," it's interesting to read the always thought-provoking Arthur Egendorf, a Vietnam veteran and Ph.D. psychologist, with extensive personal experience with the veterans' "rap groups" of the 1970s on this topic as well.  Here's what he has to say, echoing the problem we've been learning combat veterans often have with one of the key basics of sexuality, "intimacy" between the partners.  Writes Egendorf:

"Almost every veteran I’ve seen in therapy has wanted help with intimate relationships.  In his own way, each of these men has been deeply committed to individual survival and to the ethos of the lone adventurer who has to make it on his own.  For such people, giving themselves to a relationship clashes with their long-standing refusal to let anyone get close enough to pose a threat."

Additionally, he writes:

"Virtually all troubled couples view sexual problems as part of their difficulty.  One of them will say that they ought to be having more sex.  From a healing perspective, what they’re missing is fulfillment, and they make it harder to achieve by thinking that more orgasm will provide it.  They don’t see that when sex is ecstatic it is never just the orgasm that does it.  The ecstasy comes with giving oneself in a shared embrace.  Although you can have orgasms alone or with any human being (some manage very well with animals), people seldom bother to do it with just anyone unless they can’t be with someone they deeply love.

It’s easier to have sex with a stranger than with a long-time partner who’s hard to get along with. This is the excuse many people use to sleep around.  But as long as they use the excuse, they don’t discover the ecstasy of relating is enhanced when one gives oneself where it’s no longer easy."

-- Source: Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation after Vietnam, by Arthur Egendorf.

 

For the Good of All Concerned: Sexual Feelings v. Sexual Expression

Healthy sexuality is probably one of the hardest life themes to come to a successful resolution about, whether for combat veterans or really, anyone else as well.  Part of the problem is, of course, from childhood on we've received -- been bombarded, really -- with conflicting messages about whether sex is deeply good or troublingly bad.  After all, there's healthy sexuality and refreshingly bonding intimacy as the result of a connected relationship between two people, and then there are almost as many destructive opportunities as there are people and relationships themselves, from manipulation and selfishness to heavier topics like abuse and rape.  Here to shed some light on the subject is Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., the author of several best-selling self-help books.  In the passage below, he delineates the difference between the messages we get about sexuality and the actual reality:

"Ideally, we should teach children that sexual feelings are fine.  They are a natural part of life, a deep source of energy and potential joy.  We should teach them to be smart, though, about the expression of those feelings.  We would teach them the advantages and disadvantages of the various aspects of sexual expression: masturbation, intercourse, flirting, and so forth.  We should assist them in learning to open up to the feelings while finding means of expression that have positive consequences for all concerned.

Too often the elders confuse feelings with expression.  We are taught that the feelings themselves are somehow wrong.  This belief causes a logjam inside us.  We have a deep sense that sexual feelings are good, overlaid by a belief that they are bad.  This distortion causes us then to express our feelings in distorted ways.

To complicate matters, we also have a stack of decisions about sexuality based on old unpleasant events.  I remember getting caught by my mother in the act of looking at some pictures of naked women.  Several of my friends and I were studying these pictures, bought in the locker room from an eighth-grade entrepreneur, when my mother showed up unexpectedly.  I remember the hot feeling of shame that swept over me when I saw my mother’s reaction of anger and disgust.  I saw in that moment that my sexuality was something she did not want to acknowledge, that somehow it made her uncomfortable.  In fact, I never recall her or anybody in my family saying a word about sexuality in any way during my growing up.  In a way I feel grateful, because at least I did not get a lot of distorted information that I later had to unlearn, but I feel wistful about not learning things about my sexuality that would have helped me feel more comfortable with myself.

Some of us have had much more unpleasant experiences with regard to sex than the mild event I just described.  We have witnessed ugly scenes, been forced to have sex against our will, been seduced into doing things that we would not have done had we had our wits about us. WE cannot change events, but we can always look for any decisions about ourselves or life that we made at the time.  By looking at old decisions made in the heat of unpleasant experiences, we can break the grip the past has on us.

Beyond the traumas and the negative messages about sex is the fact that we often do not get any constructive information about it.  We are not usually blessed with a guardian angel who can come along when we need it and say, “Sexual feelings are good.  Let yourself feel them deeply.  Surrender to them.  Express them in ways that will bring happiness to all concerned.”  Adult life is a process of becoming a guardian angel to ourselves.  We have to learn how to nurture ourselves and how to gather the kind of people around us who can nurture us in the ways that we like.

We can begin by loving ourselves for all the reasons we do not love our sexuality, then going on through to open up in love and acceptance for those deeply positive sexual feelings inside.  By learning how to love sexuality, we can learn more about how to love life itself, for sexuality is but one expression of a deeper life energy which resides in us all.”

-- Source: Learning to Love Yourself: A Guide to Becoming Centered, by Gay Hendricks, Ph.D.

"Only Connect!": The Elusive but Nonetheless All-Important Quality of Simple Affection

The dictionary defines "affection" as: "A tender feeling toward another; fondness;" and more elaborately, via the thesaurus, as: "The condition of being closely tied to another by affection or faith - attachment, devotion, fondness, liking, love, loyalty.  See "connect."

Ahh, "connection."  The feeling that we two are moving together towards a common goal - are yoked together in care and consideration and fellow feeling.  Sounds so good.  "There's a real connection there," we say; "I feel connected to you."  If only combat veterans also could rely on this, themselves.  It seems pretty clear they establish it with one another; but the question remains, are they able to sustain that, or to find it with anyone else?

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Back in the days when I had other things on my mind besides combat trauma -- ahh, the halcyon days of youth ;-) -- I remember going to hear Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain at the Opera House in Boston, right before he finished his run.  Holbrook, parroting Twain, had a very interesting remark, that echoes in my mind today about the plight of veterans, and whether (and how much) we show them that we care.  The remark came towards the end of Holbrook's performance, and it was meant to symbolize an elderly Twain, winding down the course of his life, and wrapping it up for public consumption.  In that context, this is what he said (writeup mine):

Seating himself in the easy chair and stretching his long legs before him, Twain lit the last cigar of the evening.  As he drew steadily on the cigar he reflected out loud on the hundreds and hundreds of letters that he’d received throughout the length of his career from his accumulated audience.  “These letters,” he said, with gratitude animating his face, “have contained compliments, and pride, and a note of affection.  And the last of those is the last and final and richest reward that a man can have.”

The last and richest reward a man can have?  Sounds pretty good to me.  I wonder if that's how we're treating veterans, though -- or marginalizing them to the edge of society with their scary stories we can't relate to, and their trauma we just want to ignore?  Hope not.  This New Yorker cartoon I saw recently reminds me of the plight of veterans on the subject: still waiting to be brought into the conversation with America, still waiting to be heard.  Let's hope it isn't so, or won't continue to be so. 

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More on the "affection/connection" front:

A few years ago, again living in Boston, I took the opportunity to see a documentary at an independent movie house called "Darshan: the Embrace," about India's "hugging saint," Ammachi, a.k.a. Amma, a.k.a. Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Sanskrit for "Mother of Immortal Bliss").  There were only two people in the movie theater (my being one), which goes to show you how little pull the concept had, but the movie was most mystifying to me.  It was a documentary about the apparently considerable impact of an Indian woman whose sole raison d'etre was that she would dole out hugs to those who wanted them.  Really. 

At the risk of insulting someone's religion, and I hope I don't (but probably will), that really was all there was to it.  Amma has apparently hugged hundreds of thousands, perhaps literally millions, of people worldwide; she hugs for a prodigious number of hours a day, when she's on task; and people who are eager for one of her hugs line up for literally hours -- maybe even days -- in India's sweltering heat (and elsewhere, when she's on tour), for just...a hug. There was so much buildup about her hugs in the movie, and about her being the human embodiment of divine love, that I really was...set up for a disappointment.  They were just...hugs.  Nothing more, nothing less.  She had a few rules for them, too: women should de-smear themselves of makeup, lest they rub too much off on Amma while hugging, and a couple of other ones that I forget. 

But two things really struck me about the experience, as portrayed in the movie (again, forgive me, it's just my opinion; you can have yours).  One is that we as a society are WHACKED if we are this desperate for what amounts to unconnected affection at such a low level; and two (minor point) that people who give up everything to go and FOLLOW someone like this are even more embarrassingly whacked on the topic than should be safe to admit.  And there were quite a few who were compelled to do so. (For a more sympathetic portrayal of the "Amma Phenomenon" than mine, I would refer you to an article in USA Today, linked here, from July of 2006.)

As relatively empty as the experience nonetheless seemed to me, do you get the big picture on this?  Possibly millions of people worldwide feel basic-affection-deprived to literally stand in line for hours to have a stranger with allegedly mystical properties hug them -- none of whose mystical properties are actually the draw of the visit?  Just the hug.  The irreverent, possibly sacrilegious side of me felt a little like Jay Leno, astonished by Hugh Grant's dalliance with Divine Brown, while he was dating supermodel Elizabeth Hurley: Just how badly DID you want it?  Yikes.

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A little closer to home, we can revel in the safer, non-religious, amystical "Free Hugs" campaign, portrayed on YouTube, linked here, which was filmed on the streets of Vancouver, B.C.  As one respondent wrote on YouTube, essentially, "hey, I tried to imitate that in my local mall, and they kicked me out!" -- "Is that any way to spread love and compassion in the world?" (Watch the video, linked here, it's totally uplifting and fun. You may even shed an actual tear...)

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We've talked a lot about "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran," and we will continue to talk about that all-but-forgotten, way-too-overlooked, thoroughly neglected topic more in the months to come.  But interestingly enough, as much as healthy sexuality and intimacy may be hard for the combat veteran to find/take part in, so too may a far more basic experience - simple human affection.

"Only Connect!" - two such all-important words, from prose or poetry, come flooding back from the days of English literature.  But from where?  From E.M. Forster's Howards End, published in 1910:

"Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."

and again:

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

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Mark Twain, Amma the Hugging Saint, the Vancouver "Free Hugs" man on downtown Robson, E.M. Forster: the message is the same: simple affection is crucial, nay vital, to life -- only connect.  See what you can do today to bridge that gap yourself, help others feel understood and connected, and appreciated.  A gift that changes the giver and the recipient...a bridge between human beings.  Only connect.

The Power of Love (and Sex): Healthy Appetite v. Unhealthy Cravings

Continuing our on-again, off-again series on "healthy sexuality for the combat veteran," here is an interesting contrast, from a bodywork tradition, about the difference between love and lust, appetite (healthy) and cravings (unhealthy).

First, this piece of information, according to their tradition:

"The sexual center (enjoyment/ creativity/ playfulness) is ... the center of drive, creativity, and enjoyment of life.  When the center allows a free flow of energy, one is happy, very creative, enthusiastic, and has a sense of optimism.  When the flow becomes restricted there, one finds it hard to enjoy life and becomes self-destructive."

And now the comparison/contrast of the two states of being, one healthy and one unhealthy:

Love and Lust; Appetite and Craving

Appetite is known in all traditions to be the sign of good health and appreciation of life.  Unfortunately, a lot of people are afraid of their appetite because they mistake a desire for certain foods for craving.  In a civilization of plenty where diets rule, appetite has become a synonym for sin.  The desire for food, a desire rising up from the deep, has also been associated with the desire of the flesh, the desire for sex, and the sin of lust.  In my opinion, we need to differentiate between appetite and cravings, which relate to each other in the same way as love and lust.  Our inability to differentiate [between the two] leads us to [mis]take one for the other.

Love = Appetite = Good Health

Lust = Cravings = Poison

Love involves, among a lot of other things, a healthy desire for sex in a fulfilling and satisfying relationship.  Yielding to love results in immediate improvement ofhealth.  Then, sex becomes healing.  In it is in fact the most potent and efficient health enhancer in the world.  Cultivating our potential for love involves the ability to satisfy ourselves as well as others, and radiates the healing energy developed within us toward others. 

Appetite means good health.  It means our body lets us known what it needs, in what proportions, and when.  Appetite changes according to seasons, weather, geographical location, mood, physical and mental activity, food availability, and even gender, blood type, body type, and ethnicity.  It is the result of an extremely sensitive and sophisticated inner network of communication that can be refined.  It tells us what kind of food we need to nourish ourselves, and when we get it, we feel satisfied.  Yielding to our appetite is the gateway to love.  How we eat generally is a reflection of our sexuality. 

Lust is sexual craving.  It is born out of the inability to satisfy our sexuality.  We try over and over again, often with different partners, with the sad result that every unsuccessful attempt builds a potential of failure that inevitably will end up in depression.  A lack of knowing better in matters of sexual satisfaction and an overload of pent-up energy, are usually the different factors that lead to lust.  Yielding to sexual cravings leads rapidly to a huge loss of vital energy and is destructive to oneself and others.

A craving is a sure sign of imbalance in our health and points precisely to our poison.  When our health is out of balance, our whole life has a tendency to lean in that imbalanced direction.  A craving points to what we shouldn't have, because if we have it, we can't stop desiring more of it.  We are never satisfied, and we are able to stop only when we get sick.  We never get satisfaction from yielding to cravings, and that is one way of distinguishing cravings from appetite. Cravings can, and often do, lead to intoxication and addiction.  As we saw in the chapter on detoxifying, addiction is the attempt of the body to prevent oneself from going through the suffering of detoxifying.

This does not necessarily mean that the objects of our cravings are all toxic for everyone and that everyone should stay clear of them.  What is poison for you can be the right food for someone else.  In any case, yielding to food cravings leads to metabolic imbalance due to not getting the energy we need.  In addition, a huge loss of energy experienced from the overload of work results in poor processing, overload, becoming toxic, and the flooding of stress hormones from our dissatisfaction.  Paradoxically, when we indulge in our cravings we might feel that we do it for compensation or reward, but yielding to cravings and eating too much is a form of self-abuse that sends the inner message that we don't deserve to live.  Yielding to cravings is also a gateway to lust and resulting ill-health.

Unfortunately, in our distressed industrialized world we easily lose faith in ourselves and look for approval through mass consumption.  I personally associate pornography, the over-exposure of sexually-explicit material designed to induce craving for sex, with over-exposure to food products designed to induce food cravings.  Both originate from greed and seeking short-term rewards, and both only provoke disgust in the healthy person.

-- Source: Healing from Within with Chi Nei Tsang, by Gilles Marin. 

Editor's note: If you can't help hearing the words, "The Power of Love," without thinking of ... Celine Dion... Andre Bocelli ... or Luther Vandross -- help is at hand.  Videos of each of them pitching their aural woo are on YouTube.  Enjoy :-)

Avoiding Intimacy: Passion is Frozen Out, Along with Every Other Good Emotion

In our on-again, off-again series on "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran," here are these words of wisdom from someone involved in a healing profession, who's been married to a combat veteran for more than 25 years now.  Together, they are the parent of one child.

The veterans' aversion to intimacy, she believes, can be traced to one thing, most of all:

"It's the wall," she says -- not meaning the "Vietnam wall," that's for sure; although they may have some inadvertent relationship (poor attempt at humor, I know."  Veterans, she says, "build this emotional wall: the body, mind and spirit join together to "protect" the person [the combat veteran].  Much like the immune system kicks in to fight off illness, the mind sets off a red alert to fight off and keep bad feelings from invading.  Unfortunately this also fights off good feelings. 

Passion is frozen out along with every other good emotion.  Joy, love, hope, excitement, all trapped out.  They can act as if they have all of them but they are unable to really feel any of them. 

 

Men will have one-night stands and visit hookers for the act of having sex, but they also do it because it is safe. There is no chance of emotional involvement.  In their minds, they know there isn't supposed to be one [the chance of getting emotionally involved].  But if they decide to have sex with someone they are supposed to be connected to, it's a letdown because they are not really attached to them. 

 

When you make love to someone you really care about, you feel the passion between you because all of the "human" is participating in it.  With PTSD, the wall stops the unity between the two people.  Physically they are there but the rest of them is not.  When they touch you, it's as if there is no psychic energy in their hands.  When they hold you, their muscles are there, but there is no heat from their embrace.  When they kiss, it's a kiss of a stranger.

 

A lot of this has to do with their age at the time they were wounded by trauma.  Most were under 20 at the time the rest of us were finding ourselves, developing the "unity" of the elements that make us who we are.  Practicing and forming of development of the "unity" comes with experience and if that is subjected to emotional disconnect, it is broken off.  Usually it does not mend.

 

When they are older and trauma hits, they have already developed the connections of the unity and they tend to not have as much of an issue, using the other parts of "them" to compensate for their lack of unity.  Even with age as a factor, there are still the missing elements trapped behind the wall."

In future posts, we will continue to explore this topic further.

When Two Are Better Than One: A Relationship That Can Save You

Although at first glance, we should really save ourselves -- not be saved by others -- there's something wrong with looking externally for something that should come ultimately from within -- still, relationships can exert powerful forces for good in our lives.  It's painful reading about the Vietnam veterans, for example, who are "unable to touch intimacy," or who still clearly keep intimate relationships at a distance, because they're afraid of the weight of failure, among other things. 

There's a nice segment of a poem from T.S. Eliot that speaks to this.  Eliot was a famous Modernist poet, from the school that developed around World War I, and while he wasn't sensational about this in his own life -- his first wife, Vivien, to whom the words "My nerves are bad to-night.  Yes, bad.  Stay with me." are attributed in Eliot's famous poem, The Waste Land, is also a woman he institutionalized; still, he is able to write these comforting words, which perhaps he practiced himself, and perhaps did not.  (They could also be about his marriage to his second wife, which was apparently much happier, though shorter-lived.  He was married to her at the time he wrote these lines.)  In any case, they can still serve to inspire us with their truth:

"If a man has one person, just one in his life,
To whom he is willing to confess everything --
And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal,
Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,
But also situations which are simply ridiculous,
When he has played the fool (as who has not?) --
Then he loves that person, and his love will save him."

-- T.S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman (1958).

Editor's note: For our ongoing series on "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran," go here.

Vietnam Veteran: "Most Of Us Are Afraid to Love" - A Profound and Generalized Sense of Distrust

As part of our ongoing series on "healthy sexuality and the combat veteran," here are some fascinating excerpts from Yale-trained psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton's work with Vietnam veterans in "rap groups" in the 60s and 70s. 

It's also interesting, in light of the extraordinary closeness and love that combatants feel for one another, how very little of that appears to be transferred successfully to relationships with intimate partners.  Combat seems to develop a closer bond than often even marriage; and the reasons for that are both various and fairly obscure -- not to mention, hardly ever even broached.  We have some ideas, and in the forthcoming months we will be discussing those.  But for now, we're setting the stage with more "raw material" from the veterans themselves about the difficulties they have touching love.

There are very few works that even mention sexuality and intimacy and the combat veteran -- literally, even mention the concept -- so it's interesting how many aspects of it he is able to cover here.  Quite thought-provoking.  "The word on the street" is that, among Vietnam veterans at least, this situation also hasn't changed in the decades since.  They're still pretty much stuck in the same patterns, for the same reasons, that Lifton talks about here:

(In Vietnam,) … even authentic intimacy and love had to be in some degree contaminated by the counterfeit universe, had to be a little distrusted.  Just as men felt that “Whenever you tried to be human you got screwed,” so one of them added, “If you got close you got burned.”

 

Vietnam had absolutized (or totalized) the whole question of intimacy for the American survivors.  Having experienced a particularly poisonous version of the “end of the world” image that characterizes extreme situations, they distrusted, feared, and could not believe in, the renewed human ties they so desperately craved as a psychological basis for reconstituting that world.  The death-dominated imagery they retained had to do with disintegration, stasis and separation.  The overall sense of disintegration (physical, psychic, moral) associated with the Vietnam environment is internally maintained in approaching the environment back home. 

 

The stasis or cessation of feeling derived from extreme psychic numbing in Vietnam leaves one with an image of a world that neither lives nor moves.  Vietnam’s extreme elements of separation – from familiar landscapes of any kind and especially from purposeful or visible images and symbols – results in an ability to find or catch hold of anything with which one can authentically connect.

 

Toward potentially intimate relationships the men at first brought a sense that any such promise of renewed life was counterfeit.  This intense suspicion of counterfeit nurturance – a form of “tainted dependency” in which love and help are equally strongly sought as a personal need, and resented as a sign of weakness – also had direct origins in the counterfeit universe of Vietnam.  There, as the men recalled all too readily, any form of help, nurturing or love was equated not only with weakness of the blind-helpless giant, but with the corruption of the executioner-victim.  To be sure, the men brought to Vietnam earlier imagery of a similar kind involving suspicion and doubt concerning love and nurturing they craved.  But that negative imagery, present from all childhoods, ordinarily combines with alternative images of trust involving one to respond to love and care with the mixed capacities characteristic of all adult life. 

 

In Vietnam, however, the negative inclination – the image of the counterfeit – is likely to be aggravated to the point of dominating one’s entire psychic life – which is why we can speak of the totalizing of conflicts around intimacy, love and nurturing.

 

The men revealed their sense of the importance of these issues in their energetic criticism of one another for maneuvers of any kind that seemed to be flights from intimacy – whether these took the form of shifting the discussion toward safely distant matters, telling shallow war stories, or suddenly shifting into revolutionary diatribes or leaden silences.  Adept as they were at exposing these maneuvers, none was free of profound individual conflict concerning intimacy.

 

Associating Vietnam as they did with their parents’ generation, ultimately with the whole of American society, their sense was something like, “After Vietnam, what could you trust of anything?”

 

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A man with unusually profound difficulties with intimacy (exceeding but touching upon those of the others), he seemed to lapse into puzzling understatement when he went on to conclude: “People aren’t perfect,” and “People are fallible.”  But what he really meant, as his subsequent behavior revealed, was that unless people (and all relationships with them) were “perfect,” they were threatening, untrustworthy betrayers.

 

An engaging person with a certain talent for human relationships, his pattern of keeping people at a considerable emotional distance was interrupted by his falling in love with an attractive young married woman.  He enthusiastically described to the group their plans to save money in order to buy a Volkswagen bus and drive around the country together.  But at subsequent meetings he seemed much less certain and talked of going south alone for a couple of months in order to earn the money for the trip.  He also said that he wanted to “test the relationship” in various ways in order to find out “whether two people can really get along when they are with each other twenty-four hours a day.”

 

It was he who had the garbage-dump dream, and in it he was expressing (in addition to the themes already described) his fearful sense that all claim to love and intimacy was counterfeit, filthy, “garbage.”  Others in the rap group pointed out that he was being hopelessly absolute about the relationship, that nobody could stand anybody for twenty-four hours a day, that he was “manipulating” arrangements with the girl, “preparing a time bomb,” and “setting things up for a break.” 

 

He denied none of this, and was even willing to explore sources of his mistrust, but nonetheless insisted on doing things his way.  He went further and said, “If I can’t love her, then I don’t think I’ll be able to love anyone.”  And when one of the [other] men gently commented, “Most of us are afraid to love,” he answered with a poignant question, “How do you tell when you feel love?”

 

He was soon to prove the men right: before long the relationship dissolved.  But he went on insisting upon “complete independence – being able to get along without needing anybody.”  His all-or-nothing approach to relationships – the totalism we spoke of before – was discussed extensively. both in connection with the Vietnam experience and his own psychological development.  He did not, during the six months or so I knew him, overcome either this totalism or his profound and generalized sense of distrust.  But he did open himself a bit to his own feelings and to glimmerings of insight; and the rest of the group seemed to benefit greatly from what they learned about themselves through him.

 

Falling in love, or feeling oneself close to that state, could be especially excruciating – an exciting glimpse of a world beyond withdrawal and numbing, but also a terrifying prospect.  A typical feeling, when growing fond of a girl was “You’re getting close – watch out!”  The most extreme emotion of this kind expressed was:

 

“If I’m fucking, and a girl says I love you, then I want to kill her [because] if you get close…you get hurt.”

 

Love or intimacy, in other words, posed the threat of still another form of corruption and disillusionment, of still another ‘death.’[1]  It was much easier to avoid that risk and stay numb (remain in an evenly deadened state) – “I feel like hiding out in my own head,” was the way the same man expressed it.

 

But the men did of course fall in love.  When that happened, especially if soon after returning from Vietnam, they would find themselves breaking off relationships because “I couldn’t go through with it,” or “I didn’t want to be tied down to anything.” What they meant was that their psychological work as survivors was so demanding as to preclude, at least for a certain period of time, sustained intimacy or long-range personal commitment.

 

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The general dilemma of these veterans had to do with the extraordinary intensity of both their need for and difficulty with sustained intimacy.  Breaking off relationships was as painful as it was necessary.  On many occasions, entire rap groups were devoted to such closely related themes as: the general problem of fidelity, notably sexual fidelity,[2] the hunger for love and nurturing, and the sense of being chained by sustained intimacy in a relationship; and the powerful influences of Vietnam corruptions – with their residual fear and guilt of great magnitude – extending backward and forward into old and anticipated corruptions that touch virtually all aspects of existence. 

 

This entire pattern of holding on and breaking off contained a continuing dialectic between persistent death imagery and imagery of life renewed.  But they came to realize that the equation was never simple: holding on could take the form either of revitalizing intimacy (life renewed) or of numbed distanced in proximity (a new death), and breaking off could be a pathetic need to reject the intimacy one craved (a self-inflicted death) or a liberating opening out to deep experience and greater self-knowledge (renewed life).  Over the course of time most of the men increased their capacity for intimacy, but that dialectic would simply not go away.

 

-- Source: Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans – Neither Victims nor Executioners, by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. (Yale-trained psychiatrist).  New York: Simon and Schuster (1973).

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[1] It is possible that he and many others continue to associated the nakedness of sex with Vietnam images of grotesque bodily disintegration – as did Guy Sajer, with memories from the German Army experience of World War II: “As soon as I saw naked flesh [in a beginning sexual encounter] I braced myself for a torrent of entrails, remembering countless wartime scenes, with smoking, stinking corpses pouring out their vitals.

 

[2] I use the term fidelity here to suggest more than loyalty, though loyalty itself was of great importance.   Also involved was authenticity – in sexual matters, for instance, the genuineness of an impulse to find a new partner at precisely the time that an existing relationship showed promise of deepening intimacy.  Fidelity thus involved being true to, having faith in, the animating principle of the new self being formed.  It included overcoming fears that one’s residual destructiveness and death taint would not harm or contaminate others.