- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I have been through a five year long structured trauma resolution process that was designed by Vietnam veterans for Vietnam veterans. At least initially it was only Vietnam veterans who were exposed to the process.
But I wasn't a veteran of Vietnam. I was a veteran of the effects of Sidney Gottlieb's wizardry and how early 1960's Psychiatry interpreted the body of his "work." And, here again, I wasn't directly exposed to this dark wizard's sorcery first hand, I got to watch my mother suffer through years of chemical and electric shock debriefings. All the king's horses at Agnew State hospital couldn't put her back together again, if that was ever their intention. Multiple traumas introduced by a father who had repeatedly raped her from the age of nine induced a wide variety of psychological and psychiatric symptoms in my mother. To say nothing of what occured to her on the migration from Oklahoma in the early 1930's when she was barely three years old. The wizards at Agnew State hospital shattered what was left of my mother's mind and I only became aware of this matter of fact at the age of 22. From there I observed a 20 year downward spiral into an unimaginable hell that I, and my siblings, could no longer bare to watch.
I became my mother's de facto psychologist from the age of five until she became a ward of the state of California in the mid 1990's. What I know of traumatology I have experienced first-hand, or I have learned the language through my multiple exposures to different treatment approaches.
The most important point to realize is that traumatic injuries drive the injured person to inflict more and more pain on themselves until they either take their own life directly, or they fall into a number of self-destructive and compulsive behavior patterns that fuel a downward spiral that leads to an untimely death.
And so the key intervention in resolving traumatic injuries to their most positive outcome is to gain access to the injured person's mind as soon as possible following the traumatic injury, and to intervene with a highly structured and systematic process. Optimally, the process needs to allow the injured person's nervous system to assimilate the traumatic injuries in a context that is far safer than the context in which the injury(ies) occured.
The key understanding I came back from my resolution experiences with is that traumatic injury is the overwhelming of the human nervous system. As the excess stimulation threatens the psychological or even physical survival of the individual, an almost tangible piercing of the human identity takes place. Once the traumatic content has entered into the injured person's mind, it continues to ricochet inside the person's identity boundary until they can no longer distinguish themselves from their environment. Complete psychological collapse presages complete physical collapse up to and including an untimely death.
The hope is in a successful intervention which resolves all traumatic content and allows the injured person to become whole again. Or whole for the first time.
I no longer believe that PTSD is an unintended side-effect of armed conflict. I believe, based on my study of post WWII psychiatry, that the intention of any armed conflict's benefactors is to leave as few survivors as possible on either side. Survivors return home broken physically, mentally and spiritually and soon become a drain on the military industrial complex which has been a parasite on their innocent largesse in the first place.
If you are a veteran of any armed conflict and continue to suffer from abnormal reactions to what others believe to be normal, or mundane, stimulation, you need not question your behavior or the things you found yourself doing to survive an impossible situation.
The only way the bastards can accomplish their goal of burying you just outside their battlefield statistics is if you refuse to seek competent help. Recovery is possible, very simple, but can sometimes be a trudge.
Forget about thinking about doing anything, just do get your butt to a therapist who specializes in trauma resolution. Hang around the VA and talk to veterans who seem to have the kind of life that you want.
You can get your life back.
