Friend of mine had to divorce her husband when he came home from Iraq. Violent as hell in his sleep, doesn’t remember a thing. And then there were all the other PTSD things.
Seems a jihadi ambushed him with a machete. Next thing he remembered was his superior officer, and a few other dudes, pulling him off the mutilated corpse. Took some doing to identify the remains, as in, not sure of the nationality, or gender.
I’ve had “PTSD light”, no use telling the stories involving robbers and bears, but I shudder to think what the real thing is like.
What do you do? Fuck I know. It does fade over the years. Many, many years.
Being real, even “light” PTSD is no joke. Compared to some combat PTSD survivors I’ve known, my version is a cake walk. Like, support group meetings can get real because folks can trigger each other, and the vets, they can sometimes totally dissociate from the world around them because the trauma is just that deeply ingrained and suffused into their system. But that doesn’t mean your trimmed traumas amd symptoms aren’t absolute hell too. A different area of hell, yeah, but still
Me, it took years of group therapy, 1 on 1 therapy, and support groups to get to the point where I was stable enough to return to life on a realistic level. Time helps for sure, but I’d not be here without the external support to get that time.
Friend of mine had to divorce her husband when he came home from Iraq. Violent as hell in his sleep, doesn’t remember a thing. And then there were all the other PTSD things.
Seems a jihadi ambushed him with a machete. Next thing he remembered was his superior officer, and a few other dudes, pulling him off the mutilated corpse. Took some doing to identify the remains, as in, not sure of the nationality, or gender.
I’ve had “PTSD light”, no use telling the stories involving robbers and bears, but I shudder to think what the real thing is like.
What do you do? Fuck I know. It does fade over the years. Many, many years.
Being real, even “light” PTSD is no joke. Compared to some combat PTSD survivors I’ve known, my version is a cake walk. Like, support group meetings can get real because folks can trigger each other, and the vets, they can sometimes totally dissociate from the world around them because the trauma is just that deeply ingrained and suffused into their system. But that doesn’t mean your trimmed traumas amd symptoms aren’t absolute hell too. A different area of hell, yeah, but still
Me, it took years of group therapy, 1 on 1 therapy, and support groups to get to the point where I was stable enough to return to life on a realistic level. Time helps for sure, but I’d not be here without the external support to get that time.