I wanted to talk a bit about the PTSD challenge and why it is important to support it. I can honestly say there has only been one person that was a true support to me with this and she was a psychiatrist that I had while on Active Duty. Of course, after retirement she wasn’t available to me anymore. She helped me to develop a lot of the tools that I needed. I believe you are really mostly alone in this struggle anyway. There are others that deal with it, but your struggle is unique to you because your experience is unique to you. How you view the struggle and choose to deal with it makes all the difference. I chose long ago to not accept those days where I didn’t feel myself as “having a bad day”. That negative connotation alone and accepting that fact puts you in a defeatist state of mind. I have days where I am off, but it isn’t a bad day. This is part of who I am now. I have days with unexpected feelings, emotions that have to be dealt with. I have days I can’t tolerate people. People don’t understand me when this is happening and that is okay. I don’t always either. The problem is when people don’t acknowledge anything is happening.

This was a frequent occurrence in my military career. After my first deployment to Iraq, I was fine when I came back. I thought I was. I had my first flashback from a body odor of someone. I didn’t know that was happening. My second one was shortly after from a bag of trash on the side of the road. I didn’t understand what was happening because you aren’t prepared for these things. Then my sleep was affected. Then I didn’t wake up in time one day for a planned event and I had to go and see our Senior NCO. I was told after explaining what was going on that NCO’s weren’t allowed to have problems. So, even though I had gone to get some help with this I decided that I would shove all this stuff away and didn’t deal with it. So, 3 years later I deployed to Iraq again and it is funny how those issues don’t bother you there because you kind of feel at home. After that deployment new duty station and new leadership. The leadership at the beginning was supportive, but the spouse used it against me. The leadership changed and the support ended. An officer with 3 years in the Army one day came up to me and said in my ear, there is nothing wrong with you. What can you do with that? Hell at work and hell at home.

This goes back to my point of just acknowledging that there is something happening. People don’t have to fix it or understand it. Just because it can’t be seen doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The way I would drive to work to get on post I had to pass by a parking lot where the civilian construction workers had their equipment. It didn’t always happen, but sometimes a grader would pull out in front of me and I would flashback to our convoys. We couldn’t go out without route clearance to clear the way for IED’s. I was turret gunner most of the time. It is hard to explain to someone else what that does to you when your subconscious goes back to a different place for however long. Your mind knows you aren’t there, but it happens, and it does affect you and takes a while to come back to normal. Depends on where you go how it affects you. The struggle is real!