PTSD Spirituality

Please accept my apologies for being away from the writing.  Combination of ill health and a lot of grading diverted me from what is really important, healing souls afflicted with PTSD.

 I want to inform you of a wonderful program that is designed for healing souls wounded by Combat PTSD.  It is called Vets Journey Home.  It used to be called the Bamboo Bridge prior to the current activities in Afghanistan and Iraq.  You may link directly to them at http://www.vetsjourneyhome.org/index.html

I have lifted the following from their website: “Some veterans return home feeling unappreciated and hide their service from others. It’s finally time to come home–in a good way—and, all the way.

“The Vet’s Journey Home invites veterans to come all the way home and find out that they are not alone. There are many who care about you–who are willing to walk point, be at your side, and cover your back. This time, you’ll be coming home together with other veterans, and welcomed with respect and honor.

“All combat veterans are urged to attend. The Vet’s Journey Homeis also recommended for incountry and offshore non combatant Vietnam veterans.

“Additionally, all combat zone veterans from any era are urged to consider attending. Both men and women vets may attend the Vet’s Journey Home.

“Our intention is to turn away no vet. Scholarships are available. Registration closes one week prior to the event.”

Upcoming session are as followed:

a. Houston, TX., May 31/June 1, 2008 and August 29-31, 2008.

b. Mt. Airy, MD., April 11-13, 2008.

c. Milwaukee, WI, August 22-24, 2008. 

I expect to be at the upcoming Milwaukee session.  I know one of the co-directors of Vets Journey Home and am very impressed with the compassion and expertise in helping women and men heal from PTSD.  Compassion and expertise are a rare combination in my experience when it comes to dealing with the soul wounds of PTSD.

The Vets Journey Home is focused upon combat veterans.  My own focus is broader, endeavoring to heal whoever is wounded by PTSD and trauma, Vets Journey Home are doing exemplary work that will serve as a model for others.  They also desire to train volunteers to help with the healing and as with all missions where compassion and expertise are combined, they can certainly use a donation to help offer scholarships to veterans seeking healing.

http://www.vetsjourneyhome.org/index.html

Semper Pax, Dr. Z

As a follow up to my previous post on how unemployment can magnify some of the effects of PTSD:

We have the most recent report on unemployment indicating an additional 80,000 Americans who have lost their jobs.

This moves the current unemployment rate from 4.8% to 5.1%.  Thankfully this is not a Depression Era unemployment rate.  However, the real rate is higher than that reported because the government does not count those workers who have dropped out of the labor market due to despair.

 Please recall that the unemployment rate for recent Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is 18 percent.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke predicts additional rises in the unemployment rate will occur over the next several months.

Unemployment causes the sense of personal worthlessness, it damages one’s self value.  This is also a feature of PTSD that leads people to despair and self-destruction.

As I noted in the previous post, the creation of jobs is a moral issue.  We save lives, we save families, and we provide positive treatment of PTSD by allowing our veterans to have meaningful work.

Semper Pax, Dr. Z

The Washington Post reports that 18% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are unemployed.  While the Veterans Administration has stepped up programs to help vets find work, 18% remains a staggering number.  I can always look at this as a glass half full (fooled?) possibility and imagine that without the VA programs (for example, the Coming Home to Work program), it would be dramatically worse, maybe 36%.  I’ll let your own personal experiences with the VA be the lenses through which you view it.  Either way, nearly one out of five American Veterans, cannot find work.

 One of the characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is afflicting the victim with a sense of worthlessness.  This is connected with a characteristic  common to all of us: We need to have meaning in our lives.  Most veterans, peace-time or war time, had experienced significant meaning in their roles as service members.  Whether it is combat, humanitarian missions, keeping a flight-line clear of obstructions, or being called out to fight forest fires (or called way to late to offer assistance in a hurricane), the man or woman has given of themselves to a cause that is much greater than themselves as individuals. 

In these acts veterans had found intense personal meaning (and sometimes that is discovered only upon further reflection).  What they do really matters.  What their buddies do really matters.  And they all put it on the line to ensure the mission is done.  This is why soldiers protect their buddies in an almost feral way.  They had bonded in something that provided great meaning.  Surveys have repeatedly shown that most front-line troops don’t fight for a national foreign policy or vague terms like victory.  Rather they fight for each other and it promotes extraordinary caring and heroism, it promotes mean.  We pray that the missions they are used up on are those which promote the common good.  And, thanks to the U.S. Constitution we can debate that point and not be deemed as non-patriotic or not supporting the troops.

 Where does unemployment mean in regards to PTSD?  Men and women come out of an environment in which they constantly had meaning and worked for goals greater than their individual selves.  Military service will do that to a person.  For all of its other traits, it does give a person a sense of meaning and purpose, a chance to put others before themselves, something which popular American Culture abhors. 

 A soldier returns from meaningful experiences where lives and high value equipment turned on their performance to one where they can’t get a job selling tires, hot dogs, and other mundane essentials to American life.   They go from being a worthwhile member of the Team to an individual who cannot find work.  The system tells them they are worthless because no one will hire them.  It is made even worse by the persistence of our current recession.

 PTSD inflicts a sense of worthlessness on its sufferers.  This is further exacerbated by unemployment.  The human person goes from being incredibly relevant and necessary to being incredibly irrelevant and shown to have no value in American society.  This sense of worthlessness will promote depression and isolation.  These are an ugly spiral that destroy one’s own appreciation of their self-worth.  If the PTSD monster gets you in that situation it becomes even harder to climb out and attempt to readjust to “normal” life.

Veterans Unemployment is a Moral Issue.  Creating jobs for veterans is not simply an economic necessity with the happy by-product of lower welfare rolls and a wider tax base, but it is a moral issue where the people we trained and deployed need to know they will not end up homeless (20,000+ homeless Iraq war vets), on welfare if their lucky, and made even more vulnerable to the soul killing effects of PTSD.

The Washington Post Article can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/31/AR2008033102586.html?hpid=sec-business

 Information on the Vets Coming Home to Work program can be found at http://www.vetsuccess.gov/cominghome/

Semper Pax, Dr. Z

PTSD seeks to kill those whom it afflicts.  It seeks to take formerly vibrant human beings and transform them into the Undead until it can kill them flat outright.  Whether a person suffers PTSD from combat, rape, a natural disaster such as Katrina, or some other trauma, they now live with a new threat that seeks to take their life.

It does this by wounding our souls.  Many of us with PTSD end up killing ourselves fast or slow.  The fast cases are pretty obvious.  Slow cases of PTSD suicide comes from drug abuse, alchoholism, and cumualitive neglect from the rest of the country.  As this blog and my professional writing grow I will mention more about these in detail.

Regardless of how any of us feel about the current wars, PTSD is a confirmed result.  It is not retreat, disloyalty, or cowardice to acknowledge that trauma affects human beings.  It is simply realism.  Regardless of where we stand, saving the lifes of trauma surviors and their families should be an easy priority.

Untreated severe PTSD kills its victim.  My goal is to help increase PTSD awareness and to offer some spiritual advice.  Just because someone has PTSD and has been neglelcted by self and/or others up till now is no cause for despair.  That life can be saved.  That life has value.  That life has too much value for us to allow PTSD to consume it.

Semper Pax, Dr. Z