Healing Combat Trauma

The Tao on Transformation: Intentionally Healing Old Wounds

Periodically, we quote Deng Ming-Dao's ultra-super-fabulous 365 Tao on various topics.  The reading the other day was a superlative one about the transformational process of healing.  See if you don't agree:

You hurt me years ago;
My wounds bled for years.
Now you are back,
But I am not the same.

"In the past, warriors fought by striking the same points that acupuncturists use. One famous swordsman nearly died in a duel in which his opponent attacked him in such a way. After that, the swordsman became a wanderer and tried to renounce the martial life. Years later, his enemy found him and challenged him to duel again. They fought. In the first flurry of blows, the aggressor stepped back in surprise. The swordsman smiled and said, "I trained for twenty years to move my vulnerable spots." With that, he was finally able to triumph.

Spirituality is a process of inner healing. The wounds of the past can be the greatest obstacles for self-cultivation unless we find them all and heal them. This task can take years, but we must accomplish it.

In many cases, our wounds were inflicted by other people -- enemies. This is subtle. Our enemies can be others on the street, or people much more intimate with us : parents, teachers, siblings, lovers, friends.

If we move away from such people and succeed in our practice, they will have no chance to come back in our lives. How can they? We change whatever made us vulnerable in the first place."

-- Source: 365 Tao, by Deng Ming-Dao.

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 :-)

The Tao on Caring for Others

Care.

(In short) “to care for others is to look after and nourish them.”

 

It is natural to care for others.  If you are the one dispensing the care, then do it happily.  It is really good fortune to have someone to love and to have someone who loves you.

From animals to sages, there is care.  A mother tiger, for example, will take care of her cubs.  An older brother will look after the younger.  Even in the temples, one monk looks after another.  And the sages often looked after one another.  Let us not be so concerned with our own practice that we do not look after others.

All is Tao anyway.  Who is to say that the only way to be enlightened is to be sealed in a cave?  Tao is movement.  Tao is diverse.  Our purpose is not to look in the Tao of books.  Our purpose is to look for the Tao of our lives.  If you have people you are in relationships with, then look after them.  Not because you owe it to them.  Not because it is the right thing to do.  Not because you will get something in return.  But because it is part of who you are.

 

-- Source: Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony, by Deng Ming-Dao. 

The Six Conditions for Healing

Another highly cryptic post, intended to stimulate thought and reflection.  We'll discuss and elaborate more later, but for now, contemplate what these words can mean.

The Six Conditions for Healing:

1.  Combat Veterans have to feel safe physically, mentally and emotionally;

2.  Combat Veterans need to relax deeply on a physical level;

3.  Combat Veterans’ minds need to quiet;

4.  Combat Veterans need support and permission to recognize and validate their feelings;

5.  Combat Veterans need to feel the importance and the sacredness of the moment (of bringing forth what they're struggling with, and contemplating health and integration);

6.  Combat Veterans need to open to the surge of increased chi (life energy) and to surrender to the power (of that force) withi (them).

Speaking of Catharsis: One Magnificent Quote

Catharsis:

The word comes from Greek katharsis, from kathairein, to purge, from katharos, pure. 

Among other definitions, "catharsis" means: "a purifying or figurative cleansing of the emotions, especially pity and fear..."; "a release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience, that restores or refreshes the spirit;" and "a technique used to relieve tension and anxiety by bringing repressed feelings and fears to consciousness; also, "The therapeutic result of this process."

Catharsis is the unspoken theme, hope and dream for veterans on this blog, but periodically we make it more explicit, as we did here, in a blog entry about art therapy's surprisingly potential for purging combat trauma and PTSD in veterans.

At virtually the same moment I was posting this, friend and apparent psychic twin on all things veteran, Chris Lombardi, was posting this remarkable quote on her blog.  Lombardi is writing a book for the University of California Press on soldiers and dissent (watch for it), and here she is quoting Walter Kirn in the New York Times, reviewing The March, which Kirn called "E.L. Doctorow's heart-squeezing fictional account of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's fiery, rapacious last campaign through the cities and countryside of the Confederate South". 

The quote that Lombardi pulls from Kirn offers a stunning perspective on how great catharsis can really be, when veterans (and others) decide that "the only way out [of their suffering] is through":

The rampant destructiveness of Sherman’s march is, of course, the stuff of high school textbooks, but what isn’t so obvious is the way that destruction transfigures and transforms, pulverizing established human communities and forcing the victims to recombine in new ones. Inside the churning belly of Doctorow’s beast, individuals shed their old identities, ally themselves with former foes, develop unexpected romantic bonds and even seem to alter racially. Yes, war is hell, and “The March” affirms this truth, but it also says something that most war novels leave out: hell is not the end of the world. Indeed, it’s by learning to live in hell, and through it, that people renew the world. They have no choice.

From the blog post, "What We Write About When We Write About War,' by Chris Lombardi, at her blog, Incredible Panic Rules, linked here.

Veterans Can Be a "Powerful Force for Healing in the World"

Again from Claude Anshin Thomas, a lovely quote about the true power of the combat veteran's experience.  For every veteran who suffers whether silently or with loud cries and tears; or who ends his or her life because they simply can't take the pain anymore (and I wish they wouldn't -- they have so much to give), here's a reflection on what their experience can really communicate:

 

"At the retreat Thich Nhat Hanh said to us, “You veterans are the light at the tip of the candle.  You burn hot and bright. You understand deeply the nature of suffering.”  He told us that the only way to heal, to transform suffering, is to stand face-to-face with suffering, to realize the intimate details of suffering and how our life in the present is affected by it.  He encouraged us to talk about our experiences and told us that we deserved to be listened to, deserved to be understood. He said we represented a powerful force for healing in the world.

 

He also told us that the nonveterans were more responsible for the war than the veterans.  That because of the interconnectedness of all things, there is no escape from responsibility.  That those who think they aren’t responsible are the most responsible.  The very lifestyle of the nonveterans supports the institutions of war.  The nonveterans, he said, needed to sit down with the veterans and listen, really listen to our experience.  They needed to embrace whatever feelings arose in them when engaging with us – not to hide from their experience in our presence, not to try to control it, but just to be present with us.”

-- From At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace, by Claude Anshin Thomas.

The Tao on Trusting in the Power of Touch

I remember reading in Kurt Vonnegut's book, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a kid about this mythical person the narrator knew, who made a point of sanding down his fingertips so he would ever so much more skilled as a lover, and be able to pick up the subtle electricity of his partner.  I highly doubt someone ever did that, but still, as a metaphor it's got its place.  Maybe set to the tune of the Pointer Sisters singing, "I Want a Lover with a Slow Hand..." (and sanded fingertips, besides :-). 

Anyway, it probably won't surprise you to learn that the ever-balanced Tao has something to say about the power of touch, too.  Interesting how it combines it with hope.  Thinking about how babies who are never picked up experience "failure to thrive."  As babies in adult bodies, perhaps we are all more alike than different there, after all.

Touch.

“To touch, to feel, to rub, to caress.  Our lives cannot be sensed whole.  We have to feel our way forward.  And what we feel, we have to trust.”

 

One of the hardest things to do is to trust our own feelings.  Beginning with well-meaning parents and teachers, we hear so many instructions that thwart and ridicule our perceptions that we eventually internalize this mistrust of our own feelings.  Far too many of us have voices of doubt continuously playing in our minds.  Soon, it is hard to feel anything genuine, because these voices are always telling us that we are wrong.

 

Disappointments and setbacks reinforce these voices.  Maybe we start out trying to be extraordinary. “I’ll be great,” we vow, but then we stumble a little, and then voices become louder.

But we have to stick to our perceptions and to our feelings.  That is where experience, philosophy and self-refinement come in: we know that we have accomplished things, we know that we can coordinate what we perceive with established principles, and we trust that our beings are finely tuned enough to accurately feel what is around us. 

 

What we do in life is up to us and will not be known all at once.  Therefore, we have to feel our way along, little by little, building the vision to know what we are individually meant to do.  We can’t let doubt interfere with our touch.  We have to trust our touch.

Editor's note: If you need some vintage Pointer Sisters to go with this, here's the link to their video of this on YouTube.

Unhealthy Sexuality: A Bond That Is Strong, But Lack of Desire - We Just Gave Up

Here's an item from a woman I admire to the hilt, who has been the wife of a Vietnam veteran since she was 24.  Her husband, more or less 10 years older, fought in Vietnam, and has suffered from PTSD ever since. She ended up writing a book about how she came to learn about PTSD and how it affects the family, and since then has done exceptionally kind, warm-hearted and great work on behalf of veterans and their families with PTSD.  In her case, she found that being married to someone with PTSD presented unique relationship challenges, which didn't always work out to her satisfaction.  On balance, she still accepted and took comfort in the relationship, but the sexual aspect was hard to work through, and painful to talk about.  With her permission, we have excerpted the relevant passages from her book (these passages offer a look at a slice of life from decades ago, but they are very accurate nonetheless, as hard as this stuff is to share):

Some