While post-traumatic stress disorder is experienced by many, PTSD resulting from combat has an enduring impact on veterans. This emerges in hidden, profound and sometimes shattering ways.
Combat veterans typically are regarded by their communities as heroes and heroines. Invincible protectors. It is an order of the broadest and highest expectations. Yet it often leaves these heroes destined to fail, psychologically and emotionally.
Veterans often become burdened by such collective expectations. Any feelings of pain, loss, alienation or anger must be sequestered for the greater good.
Strong and proud warriors often return home as outsiders, never again to belong, really. Their Odyssean journeys took them to places unseen by most. Some of them experience things that civilians would not want to behold or endure. The afterlife of the wartime veteran sometimes becomes discrete, profound, special, dangerous and isolated. Yet these soldiers seeking help for emotional and psychological distress was deemed odd and/or unacceptable, at least until recent years.
Platitudes of “thank you for your service” are expressed, then everyone moves along. But for the warriors, it’s as if they were returning from space. Gravity pulls its veteran capsules back fast and hard to earth. Veterans who have experienced combat feel there is something wrong with them for no longer being one of the “normals” — they fear no one will ever be able to relate to them. A painful organizing belief that somehow, they can’t be understood.
Such self-imposed isolation fuels crippling shame states, making suicidal ideation a real risk. The National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report (2019) found that the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times the rate of non-veteran adults. A Brown University study (2021) found at least four times as many veterans died by suicide than personnel were killed during the post-9/11 conflicts.
Shame in isolation remains a powerful and persuasive motivation for self-annihilation. One that must be addressed.
Understanding how the impact of trauma brings a sad and painful loss of innocence requires a deep and fierce exploration of the impact of a person’s own experiences with trauma.
A journey of healing requires a place to grieve. Where shame of loss of innocence, of a hero’s vulnerability, may be understood. Such grief brings understandable sorrow as self-imposed harshness and shame may loosen its ruthless grip as feelings of alienation are making sense through sustained empathic inquiry.
War transforms a human, bringing with it a sense of disconnection and alienation. Those who have not experienced such traumas are not able to relate. Statements such as “you have changed” or “you’re not the same any more” bring burdening shame to veterans who carry a belief something is wrong with them. Such damaging beliefs deeply misattune to the understandable impact of feelings of disorientation and disconnectedness after exposure to unnatural horrors.
Deeper understanding of the impact of war is required not only by those who have experienced trauma but by bringing greater education to those who have not. Averting mischaracterization of what change really represents will bring deeper comprehension with respect to the impact of war hopefully leading to greater empathic relating.
Being with a veteran
For those who work with combat veterans, or those who otherwise seek to help them, committing to comprehending the impact of these world-shattering experiences brings a deeper potential for connectedness and collaborative healing. The observer is also the observed; authenticity is key. Bringing a deeper awareness of what it feels like to have lived a life that has experienced pain, loss and fear, wounded healers collaborate with wounded warriors. Insight into such authenticity suggests a greater chance of improvement in intimacy and connections. Such vulnerability offers a transforming experience for both. That shared vulnerability may become part of a new “normal” human existence.
An additional awareness is that trauma requires acknowledgment that lives are permanently altered and that feelings of alienation, disorientation, a sense of no longer belonging, are very real. Veterans are forever changed. They cannot go back. Naively positing such an idea would be harmful and would understandably fuel unbearable feelings of shame, guilt and further disconnectedness.
Lingering shame
Veterans can carry unacknowledged shame forged by self- and societal expectations that vulnerable feelings should not exist. Sentiments sometimes embedded by parents from early childhood, where cumulative trauma developed as conditioning and requirements to be invulnerable pre-existed, and then were repeated and reinforced in military life.
Deep guilt and shame also arise for many combat veterans who hold convictions that all must be saved. If one brother or sister falls on the battlefield, they are to blame, they have accountability. A pervasive sense of inadequacy lingers like a sore that will not heal. In many cases shame remains to represent this perceived sense of failure. Platitudes of reassurance will not resolve these feelings.
Only those who understand their own traumas and their shattering complexities may provide authentic relational homes for such a population. A place where normal is not a requirement, where beliefs are contextually understood and empathically probed.
A place where affects including anger, rage, hurt, shame, pain and loss (to name a few) are all highly valued and understood in context, and where vulnerability is welcomed as a shared complex road toward healing.
By sharing and deeply embracing understanding as alien companions in the darkness, collaborative illumination is shared. A place where shame is reduced over time, allowing normal vulnerability and frailties of our shared human condition to exist, live and breathe with a renewed and expansive freedom.
Photo: Paula Bronstein