I was recently contacted by a couple of marines who commented on my articles about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  In particular, they expressed their own problems in dealing with their PTSD symptoms like anger and depression.  I was grateful for their words and that I was able to help them know they are not alone.  That is why I write about PTSD and I am happy to hear I have  helped others like me.  I encourage the two marines and others to seek the professional help they need as I did and I share the following article with all of them in an effort to help them and to help non-PTSD sufferers understand this disorder.

In The Beginning

            My diagnosis of PTSD has gone through several evolutions and from the beginning I was told why I was afflicted with the condition.  I was told my PTSD was a result of circumstances that where unavoidable and that it was something I just needed to deal with and get over. I was even told that PTSD is something I will never get over and it was my own fault because I chose to be in the military. Later, I was told there was nothing I could do about the symptoms like nightmares, anger and depression.  I was told a lot of things about my PTSD each time I came back from a deployment and the answers always seems to be something different. Therefore, I began looking for my own answers as to why I felt the way I did. 

            What I know about PTSD is this that sometimes it’s unavoidable.  I know now my own PTSD is carried with memory and rage. It’s carried with the names of my friends who I have lost and it carries the memories of the lives I have taken. For me PTSD is not just a Stress Disorder, it’s an experience disorder.

When Anger Comes First

            I was angry in war, I was angry when I got home, I was angry each time I went back to war. I am still angry and I now believe I will always be angry. My anger used to be easily channeled. I could direct it anywhere on anyone or anything and used that ability to complete my missions during war.  It wasn’t so easy to channel it once I came back though. If you looked at me wrong I gave you a death stare. If you asked me how my day was I would answer something like “what the hell is your problem and why do you care?” My anger was like oxygen because I breathed it in to survive and welcomed it to the point where it filled my mind, heart, and soul. It encompassed who I was and everything I did, regardless of whether I was at war or at home and there became the real problem.

Coping With the Anger

            There is no making the anger go away or diluting it once you let it take over but there are ways to cope with it so you can control it. Ways to maybe not wake up each morning dreaming about every moment of hell you have walked through as I once did. It’s hard to have a good day when you went to war the previous night and the dreams are so vivid you swear you smell the smoke and blood. Most people don’t understand the realism dreams can have. When you have really seen it, or shot it, or heard its screams and watched it die in real life then it’s not a nightmare, it’s a memory and the experience of a real event relived while asleep. The memories are even more real and personal if you relive your own injuries each night like I have for four years now.

            My memories are like my anger; I carry them with me everywhere I go.  I realized there is no escape from them so my anger grew.  My anger got to the point where it came before my memories. I was angry all the time and it affected every aspect of my life, even my relationship with my daughters and wife.

Overcoming the Anger

            Anger is what lives within me now that I have returned home and one of the things I learned since I started writing is there are more people out there like me then I thought.   My message to all of you like me is that you too can control the anger.  It may not seem like it now but trust me, you can.  I ask you to try to overcome the most debilitating aspects of PTSD such as the anger, depression, misery, pain, and anguish which are the most severe symptoms. 

            I ask you to trust what I am telling you and that even if today and tomorrow turn out to be extremely bad days, believe that the next day can be better.  Don’t give up. I won’t tell you everyday will be good, but you can get to a point where most of them can be.  That is the stage I am at now with my PTSD. You will get there as well.  

            I will always have nightmares but I don’t wake up screaming anymore. Took me a while to get there but I got there and so can you.  It’s not always about making big steps. PTSD and escaping from its grasp is about understanding the moment. You might only have one hour a day for three days that you can say you felt all right. The key is knowing when that one hour is and recognizing it. Once you begin recognizing that you had what I call a “good hour” go back and see what triggered that hour.  Be sure your reasons behind that “good hour” are healthy. If you are truly being honest you may realize as I did that in the beginning my “good hours” were occurring after I had lashed out in anger at people or situations and from turning to alcohol.  I made that mistake in the beginning and hopefully you can avoid it.  Too many of us with severe PTSD turn to drugs and/or alcohol to “self medicate”.  It is ultimately is self destructive. 

            However, once you have the one “good hour”, it can lead to more.  You just have to accept you are allowed to have good periods. Something else I have learned struggling with my PTSD is that you have to honestly want yourself to be angry or depressed or miserable.  Sounds weird, I know, but I discovered that I had become comfortable with my physical pain, anger and misery.  After a while, I became who I was and all I knew.  I had gotten to the point where I didn’t think I deserved one good hour and I was convinced I deserved everything I was and had become.

Inspired to Seek Help

            One of my readers is a Marine named Shawn who commented on my previous article titled, “Understanding My Anger”.  I truly wish him the best of luck and I hope he reads this article.  It was inspired by his words to me and I hope he understands that each day is a new step and can be a new beginning. Each day offers a new opportunity for us to escape our pain and anger. Just keep trying.

            Getting help is important and sometimes you might not have someone in your life that can provide it. Understanding you have a choice is one of the most important steps to winning your freedom from the hell that is PTSD.  Not giving up the battle is so much of the struggle for me even to this day and I send all the courage I can to Shawn and others like him.  Even those like use in physical as well as mental pain can overcome and live happy, productive lives.  Maybe you can even find a way to channel your anger like I have.  I chose the written word and volunteering for charities as my outlet. 

            I still have bad days and it is still hard to check myself when people piss me off. However, I also have the ability to sit and fish for a day without remembering the hell I have been through in my life. And it’s not worth it for me to get angry anymore even if the idiot that cut me off truly deserves to be punched.  Anger is every day for people like us, it just has to be dealt with. We unfortunately can’t chose to forget the trauma which makes us who we are now, but we can chose to not allow it to rule the rest of our lives or let anger govern everything we do.

Understanding PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is important for anyone whose husband, wife, son, daughter, or friend has been diagnosed with this very persistent and misunderstood problem. This article is my attempt to provide first person experiences with PTSD in order to help those like me. It is a firsthand account, in my own words, of what I experienced and witnessed around me during the most difficult part of my life. Hopefully, this article will provide both PTSD sufferers and those closest to them an understanding of what PTSD is and what those with it have to endure to get better.

The Discovery Process

For me, being diagnosed with PTSD was the start of a process. That process started when I discovered that I needed help to reintegrate myself back into everyday life and family following my deployments spanning twenty one years in the active duty US Army. The process can take many months for mild cases of PTSD or many years for severe cases as was the case with me. It started several years ago with being prescribed a number of medications as well as attending weekly and sometimes bi-weekly counseling and therapy appointments. The medications and appointments were for a number of reasons but mainly were to mitigate the most severe PTSD symptoms I was experiencing. Chief among them were blackouts, violent mood swings, nightmares, headaches, anxiety, insomnia, and depression.

The drugs and therapy helped with my integration back into normal day-to-day life. The counseling specifically enabled me to want the things I used to have do prior to the PTSD. It helped my understanding of what was going on and slowly develop the tools to function in everyday life.

I have spoken to enough PTSD sufferers and experienced my own condition to know you can feel very alone. For me, the isolation was watching everyone look at me funny when I would do something like jerk around at loud noises ready to fight. I could no longer stand large crowds because I no longer felt safe or I felt I could not keep my family safe. I continually checked around corners of buildings, walked the long way around garbage bags along the side of the road, and looked under my truck every time I approached it. All this obviously appeared abnormal to my friends and family but had become the norm for me and had in fact helped keep me alive.

I was having a very difficult time dealing with the differences between a war time environment and off duty time with friends and family. It got to the point where friends would stop hanging out or asking me to do things with them or worse we would all get together and sit there silent. Soon everyone started treating me like a piece of china. Something to look at but not touch and I became the subject of many conversations.

Looking back on those days, I realized that I was trying to do everything too quickly and I was trying to fit into the mold everyone thought I should be in. They wanted me to be the same person I was before all the deployments and PTSD diagnosis and I tried to be that person, but it led to more problems. I tried to ignore that I had problems related to my deployments instead of addressing them and seeking help.

Regardless of the severity of the PTSD, there are a couple of aspects of PTSD which I think most sufferers deal with and that I will highlight here.

Ordinary Life Stuff Has Little Meaning

I am not referring to life itself here. I am referring to just ordinary, day to day life maintenance things. The more sever sufferers of PTSD no longer look upon those things in everyday life as important or even necessary. I know this from personal experience. This even extends to those things which ordinary people would view as necessary and important. This is one of the most important things to understand for people who call PTSD sufferers husband, wife, brother, sister, or friend. In my case, doing thinks like filling the truck up with gas or buying groceries simply wasn’t important.

I spent so many years in mortal danger from rockets, snipers, ambushes, IEDs, and doing the things which kept me alive that they had become the only things of importance. My outlook on living had become making life and death decisions and anything else had lost its meaning and relevance.

Where is my Cure?

I remember asking my psychiatrist that question after a particularly bad week. I was still active duty and stationed in the United States. I witnessed a car accident which involved no deaths but lots of blood and hurt children. It occurred right in front of me so I pulled over and helped those involved. That night, nightmares came to me for the first time in weeks as well as extreme anxiety, paranoia, and anger. I couldn’t figure it out until I met with my psychiatrist that week. He talked with me about the incident and how I had been feeling afterward. We later figured out that one of my triggers as he called them was the smell of blood and there had been a lot of blood at the car accident. More than I had seen since my last deployment and it had caused, as my doctor indicated, everything to come to the surface.

I was grateful that I understood what was going on and why but then I became very angry in his office after a few minutes. I couldn’t help but ask him with a very angry tone when I was going to be through with this stuff (not the word I really used). I thought I had been cured. My psychologist calmly just looked at me and with a lot of understanding in his voice he told me that there was no cure. My issues of nightmares and anxiety and fear of large crowds was never going to go away but that with time the severity would be lessened substantially. He was right of course. Though I still have nightmares and I still suddenly jerk violently when startled, they are substantially reduced in severity and duration.

So, there is no cure. For the more severe cases of PTSD the symptoms never completely go away. If a person experiences traumatic events which cause PTSD it can irreversibly change a person so much that they can no long be the person they used to be. Once you have seen the true scope of man’s ability to be inhuman to his fellow man, once that veil of civility has been removed, you are never the same. This is just my opinion of course.

Things do Slowly Get Better

However, there is a happy ending. My life did get a lot better and so can everyone else’s. I learned with time to enjoy ordinary things again but for different reasons then before. I love spending time with my children but now I use that time to impart onto them the moments and lessons I have found the most important in life. I have learned to relate to people from where they are at instead of where I have been. This has been the most difficult yet rewarding part of the process.

It is important though for those who suffered from PTSD and those who know husbands, wives, sisters, bothers, or friends who suffer from it to know that life does get better. I am living proof of that. How did I get to this happy stage in my life from where I was? Well, once I left the military, I spent a year not working. I got to spend a lot of time thinking, exercising, and simply doing all those things which I never had time to do during my military career. Those of you who have been in the military will understand this. Taking that year to think and work for myself was the best thing I could have done. I met my current wife, we set up a home, I went back to college, and I started sleeping in for the first time in my adult life. All of these things and others allowed me to proverbially find myself and what was important. More importantly, it allowed me the time to realize that who I am now and who I was then during my 21 years in the military don’t have to be the same person.

I also learned that I didn’t have to be alone. My current wife is great and understands enough to not judge me or look bad on me when I do have a bad day. I still go to therapy and talk with others. I even joined a Veterans of Foreign Wars organization and encourage others to do the same. Then you can conduct therapy over beers and food.

Either way, I hope the meager words in this article were found helpful by some. There are a lot of us with PTSD now after eight years of war and it helps to know you are not alone.

Sources: 

PTSD Sypmtom Teatment 

Symptoms of PTSD

 http://www.ptsdsupport.net/PTSD_Brief_Checklist.html

It has been argued that the new PTSD guidelines could lead to fraudulent claims.  However, this is unlikely due to the fact a veteran must first be diagnosed with PTSD and if that veteran shows improvement their benefits can be cut back over time to reduce costs.

The changes came after years of endless appeals processes averaging 4.4 years and after one large class action law suit filed against the VA in 2007. The law suit challenges that by taking up to 15 or more years to resolve benefit claims for veterans, the VA is in violation of the each veteran’s constitutional rights. Specifically addressed is their 5^th amendment right to due process under the law and 6^th amendment right, which provides each individual the right to a speedy trial. The suit is currently held up with the ninth district court of appeals. Its outcome is still uncertain but it is unique in that most federal courts do not handle cases against government institutions.

As explained in court transcripts, it was found that nearly 3,000 soldiers die a year while waiting for their appeals to the VA for mental health benefits. As of 2009 when the trial took place over 85,000 veterans were on a waiting list to claim mental health benefits. Also addressed is the manner in which claims are handled by the VA. Currently the Veterans Judicial Review Act passed in 1988, provides certain powers to the VA that are somewhat unique to government benefit institutions. For one, the VA itself accepts and denies claims with out first having individual claims run through an independent review officer, as you would with Social Security for example. Also a veteran currently does not have a right to retain counsel. Why I couldn’t tell you, yet these practices have prevailed and have contributed to a back log of claims.

After hearing about years of issues of neglect and red tape, I find myself asking, why wasn’t this done sooner? So many men and women have been affected by the poor mishandling of these cases. One man, Richard Sanchez, was diagnosed with PTSD in 2006 after serving nearly 10 years doing tours in Afghanistan and Kuwait. After being diagnosed he filed for claims with the VA but was denied once it was determined he did not have proper documentation. Ten years of his life were dedicated to the service of this country and to the protection of people like you and I and we couldn’t help him in his time of need because of paper work? He, like so many others, is still waiting for his claim to be resolved.

Thankfully the VA has finally come through on this issue. The new guidelines for PTSD benefits are retro-active and therefore should help unclog the pipeline of claims streaming into the VA. The VA’s recognition of non-combat veterans as PTSD victims is a huge step forward. Even more significant perhaps is the establishment of a precedence which takes the burden of proof off the shoulders of the veterans themselves when claiming to have PTSD symptoms as a result of specific combat experiences.

For those of you reading this that may be in a similar situation as Mr. Sanchez, I hope these changes get you the help you need. I hope you know how much we all appreciate your service, regardless of how unappreciative we may seem at times.

For some of you reading this article, it may be hard to fathom why those like me with PTSD would be angry and jealous of you.  I understand and will give my best effort to explain it to you.  Put simply, some of us have lost the ability to enjoy the good things in everyday life and society.  We lost it because we are anxious around large crowds or have flashbacks during social events.  

Each Sufferer is Different

It is important to understand that each sufferer’s condition and symptoms are different because the events which caused their PTSD are different for each individual.  Therefore, the next time you wish to thank someone for their military service, don’t assume they are angry and jealous with you.  I point this out because not every PTSD sufferer has anger and jealousy towards non sufferers.  I am just speaking for myself and those who I have spoken to over the years who feel as I do.  My experience has shown that there are a lot of us who feel this way. 

Anger and Jealousy

The anger and jealousy in which I am referring is not the ordinary type.  The anger and jealousy which I am talking about is what I feel when I see people relaxing in restaurants with their backs to the door.  They are not worried about seeing or knowing when someone new comes in.  They simply are unconcerned and feel safe in any environment.  It is their level of comfort which they have and I can no longer achieve which makes me angry and jealous.  So you see, though I am angry and jealous of those people, it is really my own inability to do things which ordinary society does that makes me angry. 

I see people sitting in crowded stadiums watching softball games with not a care in the world that they are closely packed with hundreds of people who they don’t know anything about.  They don’t jump at loud noises but they look at you funny when you do.  They don’t see garbage bags along the sidewalk or road as anything more than unsightly where as I and those like me look at them as potentially dangerous.  I even get jealous when someone describes a new war movie to me but I know I will never go watch it because a scene could cause me to have a flashback.

The Anger Is Still There

I am now retired from active duty and have become accustomed to the anger and jealousy and even understand where it comes from.  However, I would be a liar if I told you that I no longer grew angry when I see or hear certain things.   On a weekly basis, I come across people who ask if I am military and then thank me for my service.  Some even go as far as buy my meals in restaurants or my coffee in Starbucks.  I end up looking at them and thanking them politely but then disengage from them as soon as possible before they and engage me in conversation any further.  I do this for two reasons.  First, I view my military service as me volunteering to do a job.  I wasn’t drafted and I originally joined simply to afford college.  I view it as me simply doing my job.  Besides, there were a lot of times I had to do stuff which I really should never be thanked for. 

Second, I look at my anger and jealousy towards others as wrong though I can’t change how I feel.  I can’t help but wonder if after all these years as I look back on my career that perhaps the cost of what I did was too high.  Was it too high if I can no longer enjoy the society I spent so many years protecting?  Was the cost to high if I can no longer enjoy a football game in a stadium because I can’t relax enough in a crowd that large?  I and many others with PTSD struggle with this challenge every day.  We don’t begrudge others for their ability to enjoy life but we miss the carefree mentality which they still have and that we can no longer enjoy.

It Is More Difficult For Some

The challenge of overcoming the anger is harder for some like me.  Specific training and the number of missions during a career can make the anger more intense and because of that some of us have to avoid certain situations.  For example, I can no longer drink alcohol to the point where I get drunk.  My flashbacks are more powerful to the point of blackout if I drink too much.  Some would say this is a sign of a drinking problem but I have blackouts during other times as well so I do not blame the alcohol.  Either way, it is not good, nor safe for someone with my training to have a flashback in a public bar.  I unfortunately have hurt a few people until I realized what was happening. 

This is a good example of why I am angry and jealous of non PTSD sufferers.  It may not sound like much but simply having the ability to sit in a restaurant or bar and enjoy time with my wife and friends is something everyone would miss if they were suddenly unable to enjoy them. Previously, I had found bars a relaxing place to meet up with friends.  I still go to bars but I go with my very patient and understanding wife during a bar or restaurant’s non-peak hours.  She gives me the ability to concentrate on her and provides an azimuth check for me if I start to feel nervous or if something happens. 

A small bit of advice for those like me, I strongly encourage you to find someone to help you like my wife helps me.  She has prevented me from hurting more than a few people, even if they were stupid and probably deserved a butt kicking.  I am no longer a reliable judge in a crowded setting as to whether I am reading a situation correctly.  She provides that for me and I have come to rely on her judgment.  Besides, the kind of people who you come across in a busy bar really don’t deserve someone with my training coming at them and putting them in the hospital simply because they were drunk and stupid.  I have enough guilt to worry about without having to worry about adding to it because someone was stupid and I read the situation wrong. 

No Longer Carefree

This is an extreme case of course but relevant to the point I am trying to make.  I miss the carefree person I used to be.  I simply am no longer capable of viewing the world as society would term as normal and need my wife to ensure I am not literally a danger to society.  Therefore, the only thing I can do is continue to attend therapy and psychology appointments and work through this particular challenge.  I struggle with it on a daily basis and because of that I feel angry and jealous at the world I left behind.  It sounds pathetic but I can’t help it.  I feel anger when I see someone walk on a sidewalk without a care in the world.  I feel it when I go to Star Bucks and I see people sit and have normal conversations.  I am jealous of the man who can stand in the bar with his back to the door and not get nervous or jerk around when someone yells in the bar behind him. 

I Now Understand What My Father Said

When I was a kid, I remember seeing news reports in the late 70s’ and early 80’s about Vietnam vets who lived in isolated places of the country away from society.  The news reporter would talk about how the veteran he interviewed simply couldn’t stand to be around people.  He viewed society as full of people who were stupid, or idiots, or crazy and he preferred to live away from everyone because it was more comfortable for him.  At the time, I didn’t understand and actually made fun of the veteran for living in a cabin or camper in the middle of nowhere. 

However, my dad voiced sympathy for the veterans during each interview and I couldn’t understand why.  He would say it wasn’t their fault and that people should try to give the veterans more understanding.  I found out much later after my father had died that he suffered from nightmares and anxiety when in large crowds.  My mother told me he tried to explain to her once that he was angry all the time and he couldn’t relax in crowds.  He had the same desire to hide from people and avoid situations in the same way as the Vietnam vet. 

One of the biggest regrets in my life is that I couldn’t understand at the time what my father was saying to me and that it was only after he died and I spend so many years in the military that I could understand.  I now understand why my dad, who was a World War II vet, had sympathy for the veterans in the interviews.  It is the same sympathy I have now because I have the same desire from time to time.  I too feel more comfortable when I am not around people and so I came to understand why the Vietnam veterans in the interviews lived away from people. 

Most Things Are Insignificant

Simply put, this entire article has been about how I and other like me feel anger and jealousy toward people around us because they can get enjoyment and happiness from things and situations which we are no longer capable.  In a further attempt to explain to non PTSD sufferers the challenges some of us have to endure, it is important to understand there are other issues which complicate the problem.  I am referring to how most things in day to day life hold no importance to us, even the ordinary, day to day life maintenance things.

The more sever sufferers of PTSD no longer look upon these things in everyday life as important or even necessary. I know this from personal experience. This even extends to those things which ordinary people would view as necessary and important. This is one of the most important things to understand for people who call PTSD sufferers husband, wife, brother, sister, or friend. In my case, doing thinks like filling the truck up with gas or buying groceries simply aren’t important.
My psychologist and therapist have explained to me why this is.  Because I spent so many years in mortal danger from rockets, snipers, ambushes, IEDs, and doing the things which kept me alive that they had become the only things of importance. My outlook on living had become making life and death decisions and anything else had lost its meaning and wasn’t important. In other words, so much of my life was taken up with life and death decisions that paying the electric bill had ceased being important.  It also made it to where being paranoid was an asset.

I don’t know if the reason above my psychologist and therapist gave me is correct but it is the best explanation I have come across over eight years of therapy.  I have also learned that recovery from PTSD is a process which takes years.  One of the most difficult things I had to come to grips with was that there is no cure for PTSD.  That is an article for another time however.

Conclusion

I hope this article has assisted some of you in understanding why some PTSD sufferers seem to be angry all the time.  They appear surly and grumpy and they look at you and the world as a whole as if everything bothers them.  They may not talk a lot and when they do talk, they speak in short phrases or one word answers.  All of the above is me describing myself of course but is true for many other PTSD sufferers. 

If you take nothing else away from this article then take this.  They are not really mad, angry, or surely at you necessarily.  They are angry at what they have lost.  They are jealous that people around them still have the ability to relax and enjoy themselves.  I just ask you to understand they have given up a lot and they simply want it back

PTSD Diagnosis Had Little Meaning

The diagnosis had little meaning to me as I was still active duty for many years following the diagnosis and in fact I would have to deploy four additional times before I retired.  You see, in the Army during a time of war if you have a highly specialized job in short supply they give you counseling, some “coping skills”, some medication, and then certify you to deploy.  Therefore, my PTSD diagnosis simply became one more step in my deployment medical screening I had to pass before I deployed again.   

My “moment of clarity” didn’t occur until I had retired from active duty and was sitting in one of the most unlikely of places for such a revelation, drinking coffee in the corner of a Star Bucks coffee shop.  I had sat in that very seat several years prior happily talking to my daughters about school and going swimming.  However, at that moment I found myself sitting in the same place alone and thinking about very different things.  I wasn’t sitting in the corner because it was the single open seat in a busy coffee shop but instead I had picked it because I could watch the entire shop and see who was coming through the door.  I wasn’t thinking about the fun I was going to have with my daughter.  Instead, I was alone, my children were with their mother, several states away and we were divorced.  I was actually watching everyone in the shop and quietly sizing them up as threats.  During this “moment of clarity”, the glaring differences in my thinking became apparent to me.

I Was Unprepared For What Was To Come

The first time I had been in the coffee shop with my daughters was in June 2001.  I had been part of the active duty US Army since September 1988 and though I had deployed several times nothing traumatic had happened to that point in my career beyond seeing the occasional dead body and starving child.  My deployments included the 1991 Gulf War, Kosovo, and a few deployments conducting direct support to Special Forces operations.  Though they were eye opening and exciting at times, none were particularly traumatic.  Being a truck driver during the Gulf War and a simple intelligence analyst in Kosovo writing reports and recommending targets for bombing from a safe tent were too impersonal to have an impact on me.  Things became a lot more personal and intimate after September 2001. 

That lack of preparation seemed extreme and glaring to me as I sat alone in the corner of the Star Bucks that day in Nov 2009.  Nothing appeared to be the same even though the same people frequented the place, the furniture was the same color and design, the coffee was still expensive, and everyone crazily ordered whipped cream on perfectly good coffee or espresso.  The same people were even still working there because one of them recognized me even though I no longer had hair and my face was a lot older.  Yet everything was conspicuously different to me.  I ended up sitting in the coffee shop for three hours watching people come and go. 

A Moment of Clarity

That was when my “moment of clarity” came to me.  As the hours went by, I realized that the changes I was noticing were a matter of perspective and that I was the only thing that had substantially changed in those years.  The rest of the people who come into the coffee shop hadn’t changed mush.  They had went about their lives and got educated, got married, advanced in their career, had children, and bought a house.  They had continued on with their lives even though two wars and nine deployments had changed me beyond my ability to recognize it until that moment.  A moment of clarity!

I spent the next hour realizing two things.  I was the one who had changed and that I was angry about that change.  The topic of my anger is an article for another day.  I also realized that not only had I changed but that I had changed forever.  I ended up realizing that it was how I had come to see the world since 2001 which had changed. 

I went to see a psychologist for the first time since my retirement.  He had been treating PTSD in patients for many years, most of them military personnel.  He was the one who labeled it as my “moment of clarity” and said that it was a significant breakthrough in my recovery. 

I still see him regularly and hope that if you have been diagnosed with PTSD that you have had your “moment of clarity”.  It was truly the start of my recovery and hopefully it will be for you.