By Roy Smith

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