Understanding Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

by/Hailey Trealout

Imagine returning home and feeling that you have lost the person you once were, with no understanding of why things are different.

Wayne, who has asked his name be kept private, served with the U.S Army as a radio operator when his division was deployed to serve four months in Vietnam in 1965.  Many veterans like Wayne display the diagnostic criteria for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Although it is a disorder that has been examined and questioned since the sixth century, nobody has been able to understand it. He said the hardest part of the war was trying to fit back into society.

“When I came back from Vietnam, I didn’t know what PTSD was, we hadn’t heard of it back then. I never realized what I was putting my family through at the time. You have to remember you’re coming out of a warzone where the adrenaline is 100 per cent,” said Wayne. “When you come back the adrenaline is stopped, I wasn’t trained to stop, I was trained to keep going. They send these guys into a warzone, when we come back, don’t expect us to be the same person that went over there. You shot at people, not necessarily knowing if you injured them or killed them, but it still works on your mind.”

This is no nightmare. It is a reality faced by soldiers around the world. Wayne said he learned to keep his time in Vietnam to himself to keep others from triggering a violent reaction.

Wayne’s wife Trudy said her father helped her a lot throughout her marriage with Wayne after he returned home from Vietnam.

“It gets better, but it never goes away. Memories are the greatest gift we have. You can remember all the good things in your life, but you also remember the bad, you just push them to the back but sooner or later, they’re going to come back again and again,” said Trudy. “You live with war your whole life. Most people just don’t want to talk about it. Adjusting to life is a big step, going from one job to another, which we did, you just can’t settle down.”

In 1990 Francine Shapiro worked with soldiers to come up with an approach to PTSD called the Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing Treatment, ‘Eight Phases of Treatment.’ This study turned into a training process for therapists to help them better understand their trauma patients.

Susanne El-Baba is a clinical social worker. She saidthe information going from the traumatic environment into a person’s perception is so huge that it can’t be experienced in its totality, causing recollections.

“We live in a world where anything can happen to us at any time, but we don’t live in that awareness, we can’t and we don’t want to,” said El-Baba. “Once the relationship is good enough and the person trusts enough where we can use that therapeutic relationship, we can strengthen coping skills. It’s not like they didn’t want to cope with the event, it’s that the event was too huge to cope with in one piece. After that you can gradually expose them to their trauma and help them understand what their triggers are and how to work with it. It’s not just what the person experienced, it’s how they perceived it and then it’s how they think about it.”

Though the understanding of PTSD has come a long way, the most vital issue is lack of education on the topic. With the proper understanding of PTSD, families and their loved onces can move forward, instead of being stuck alone in painful memories.