Be very, very wary of anyone offering PTSD sufferers a website that features a "payment" menu option.

Be very, very wary of anyone who wants to make "easy" those things which have come to you at great personal cost and sacrifice. Discounting your experiences is disrespectful of your need to own what only you can own.

Be very, very wary of pop psychologists who advertise processes for which there is little, if any, peer-reviewed research to back up their claims. Your sanity is more important than anything a quick, "magical" cure can offer you. Drugs and alcohol proved that last sentence to me in spades.

Be very gentle with yourself and go slow. The last thing you need to do is what I did -- get free and whole and then find yourself surrounded by people and a world where freedom and wholeness are far from highly valued or prized. Yet wholeness and freedom from fighting other people's battles inside your own head is the only path that I have found that honorably resolves what will drive you to resolve it, or perish. People need to compensate you for the space they take up in your head, especially when their presence causes you great grief and suffering.

Trauma turns the brain against itself, making it a bad and untrustworthy neighborhood. This is the unkindest cut of all. So don't go into a bad neighborhood without holding the hand of someone who has the bonafide experience of cleaning up their own bad neighborhood. Don't pay to have someone with letters after their name on a shingle retraumatize you. You have suffered enough without falling down an open manhole cover of hopelessness and despair.

There is real hope out there, but you have to want REAL HOPE. Everyone NEEDS real hope, but precious few know how to choose it. Before someone drives you to drink yourself sick or poke a bunch of needles in your arm, reach out to your elder brothers who have gone before you. Trust the process of healing that operates inside of you all of the time without your direct awareness of it. Trust your gut. It has gotten you this far.

...it is all the SAME. We are ALL ONE.

The problems of the children in Palestine and Iraq are the same as the adults we believe freely chose to be sent over there to murder and maime them.

In a universe where all is one, all time is NOW. That means that plucking out a single cause and effect relationship in an unbroken chain of related events proves NOTHING and justifies NOTHING. These are the things we distract ourselves with as a kind of comfort in the midst of our own battles with personal hypocracy.

The things I see "out there" are actually "in here," and it is my denial of that reality that drives me to believe that "out there" is being caused by someone who is not me. Words can not do justice to these concepts, so do not parse the words too closely. Just lean into the ideas gently while believing in real global unity and actual, tangible connections between all things.

Like a stenographic print, the message pops out of the background if you quiet your mind and quit defending the indefensible.

Draw a circle around your feet and then commit to fixing everything inside that circle. Once you accomplish that, then we can talk about where the choke points are in this cascade of grief and tribulation seemingly caused by events beyond our personal control.

Have compassion for the world and the people in it for life is difficult, and then we appear to die as payment for ALL our efforts. If you think you see crazy people doing crazy things all around you, can you imagine my great shock?

...not expecting treatment or a solution to a specific issue, but as a habit to cultivate. The VA can be a focal point for such groups.

People who know where you have been and where you might need to go are going to be found doing the same sorts of things at about the same time that you are.

Be the victim of a happy accident and go where you feel drawn to go and speak the truth as best you can when you get there.

Yes, trauma is such a warping and demoralizing experience that you will find many old soldiers who are compelled to defend those who injured them, even while complaining of their feelings of victimization. It's a curious double bind, but don't stay locked in listening to only these people. There are others who have moved beyond idealizing the perpetrators of their wounds.

Look for the light coming seemingly from behind the eyes.