Fighting the Battle For Your Indentity One Tattoo at a Time

The work of Jonathan Shay, on the Odyssey and the Iliad, illustrates the long history of the phenomenon of PTSD. Shay cataloged Odysseus's effort to return to an immemorial sense of home. Though I value the majority of Shay's claims, and I applaud his life long commitment to helping veterans I am however, troubled by a few of the approaches he has taken into his study of PTSD. He seems to wipe away all of the chauvinism in the Odyssey and in veterans as if it were caused by PTSD. This has real problems because, as this blog shows, women in combat are actually more likely to have PTSD because the increased risk of sexual trauma. Moreover, he portrays PTSD as a completely determinate condition that a veteran cannot be self aware of or win his internal battles. Certainly these symptoms are hard to shake and are permanent, but as veterans we do have power to fight for our identity and preserve themselves.

I think a key obstacle in retaining the best parts of our identity is breaking away from the aspects of the immemorial homeland. Certainly at war we use the concept of home as place for our minds to escape the harsh realities that we lived in. I often wish that instead of the figure of Odysseus we looked at the life of Aeneus. He was a Trojan figure who lost his homeland and was forced to rediscover and redefine one after the Trojan war. I wish that instead of trying to regain a sense of the immemorial home, we would struggle to redefine our home after war has changed our lives, and preserve the best parts of our identity and our values.

One way that I have fought for my identity, both consciously and intuitively, has been with tattoos. After the suicide bombing I slowly recognized that I could not feel anything but anger. I noticed that I could not develop a close relationship with anyone (accept other people in my unit) and I was becoming an individual obsessed with instincts and self preservation. I tried to go to church, but all of the silent prayer made me have flashbacks (my first serious flashbacks came at services) and all I could do was sit there and be angry. I could sense that I was loosing who I was and my value system. I had experienced other veterans who began to think of all Arabs or Muslims as terrible. I feared that I might lose my moral compass because of how angry I consistently found myself.

Team RWB

I had seen and experienced what it was like to watch a man's life end and I was afraid that I could never forgive myself if I ever took an innocent life. As a person raised in a religious evangelical family, I was a faithful person. I could no longer endure church services, but I wanted to express my values in a way that would constantly remind myself who I was. I started by expressing the hopes that I would never taken an innocent life by tattooing a double edge sword and the words god's breath on my firing arm. I could effect what I could effect, but I desired divine intervention every instance that I used my weapon. I had a great desire to never be the agent of the horrible things I saw after the suicide bombing.

There was something really freeing about that experience and it made it easier to grasp who I was. PTSD as a culturally negotiated and defined soul challenges our ideas about our self, but as a simple neurological phenomenon it damages the place in our brain that manages conscious memory, and identity. Both have extreme impacts on our lives so tattoos can become powerful reminders of who we are when the world that we know falls apart. I recognized the utility of wearing my values on my sleeve so when I was having trouble conceiving of them so I permanently placed on my body.

I recognized that with grace and perseverance that any storm could be weathered. There was a simple solution. I tattooed the words on my forearms and recognized that my greatest resource was myself. The left forearm would be perseverance because "the first rule in a knife fight was that you are gonna get cut, get cut in the left forearm" and reinforced my desire for divine help with grace on my firing arm. I deployed again and it was the worst year of my life. I had serious PTSD and mTBI, but I was officer and lives depended on my performance.

I was broken and worn down, but I had my values on my sleeves. My attitude was terrible but my performance never waned. I could perform my job, but everything was painful. I left the Army bitter and alone. I began blaming myself and thinking that is my fault that I had succumb to an invisible wound. I began to believe that I was letting soldiers down in Afghanistan. I should be better by now, right? No one would ever concede that I even had any problems because I was articulate and I was in shape. No visible wounds.

I began to really despise myself and believe that it was my fault. I was weak, a coward, or immoral. Three tours in Iraq as infantry platoon leader and Iraqi Army Operations officer was not enough service. I was letting my country and soldiers down. I was training Cadets and no matter how well I did by winning the top instructor award, I was not doing enough. I was not on the line fighting, keeping soldiers alive, bringing drinkable water to villagers, and safeguarding civilians. I could do more, I thought it was my fault that I was no longer fighting. Their was something wrong with me.

But this was bullshit. Sure the feelings were strong and survivor guilt is unshakable, but my logic was absurd. I had done everything I could, fought as hard as I could, and longer than most in my situation. An army officer who fought on the line for 20 months before company command is more than rare. An ROTC instructor who despite serious medical issues won the top instructor position has done enough. A historian working to challenge the notion that PTSD has existed and been a problem for every generation of American veterans is still producing fruitful work and still serving soldiers. Nothing was good enough so I  had to step outside of my emotions and look at what I contributed on paper. In writing.

Just like when my world first collapsed I had to give myself a visualization, on my body, that this was not my fault and in a lot of ways I am better. I was beginning to become open unashamed and even in ways proud of my struggles after my service in Iraq. I read Hemingway's "The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places." Though I did not yet feel strong, I again decided to fight for that idea. To place it on my body as commitment to myself and my identity. I also wanted to to use Hemingway because, in the end, he lost his battle with mental illness and took his life. I wanted to be reminded that even in a victorious idea that we, who have had our identity challenged by the crucible of war, have to fight everyday to preserve ourselves in spirit and in body. That this is both a neuro-chemical battle and fight for our own souls.

There is nothing wrong with anyone of us who struggle to come home. Tolkien's famous "not all who wonder are lost," is such a fitting metaphor for the long road home. I think it is a never ending battle to preserve our identities and I would challenge others by stating that the fight is worth it. If you have this conflict your are not alone, this is not a new problem, you are not weaker and the world needs people who have been broken by trauma. Tattoos are culturally ubiquitous in our generation but they can be a kind of cognitive therapy. An idea that you choose to embrace, even when you don't initially feel it, that changes patterns of behavior and eventually emotions. We can only spend so much time with our therapists, but our greatest resource is ourselves. So fight for yourself as hard as you fought for your country.

I would urge others to share their tattoos stories in the comments.

Combat Veterans Bring the Monster of War Home: The Story of SGT Travis Triggs

Image via Wikipedia

Welcome home my brothers and sisters, welcome home. Thank you for your service and continuing sacrifices. I pray that you have a blessed Veterans Day. Below I mention Sgt. Travis Triggs who had lost his way home from spiritual and mental wounds of war. Sgt. Triggs is fast becoming the norm when counting the revolving doors and tours of duty. Imagine having lived through the horrors of war and in going home knowing that in all probability you will run with death again.

How would you release the demon raging in your mind?

I was just reading about Sgt. Travis Triggs again, for those that do not know who I am talking about he was the soldier who had 5, yes FIVE tours of combat, that shot himself and his brother in the head after a police car chase. He went to Iraq 4 times and Afghanistan once. He had never been in trouble before that day even though the media had portrayed them both as having violent criminal histories. Sgt. Triggs volunteered for the extra deployments,

My symptoms went away. After all, I was going back to the fight, back to shared adversity, where the tempo is high and our adrenaline pulses through our veins like hot blood (as cited in Times Online, November 23, 2008).

The article gives an account of a lost soul that had left everything over in a far away land where the blood runs thick as the bonds of brotherhood. He had assumed a culture of killing and the persona of a "combat self," a subsumption of the "Soldier's Heart," shedding all of the remnants of his civilian identity and connections to self and home. He had become the perfect soldier, much too perfect.

There is disconnection between everything that is human and the necessities of killing and what has to be done in combat. Imagine being in an unimaginable situation and having to do the unthinkable. How can this be done? A disconnection between everything human and having to do the unimaginable resounds in combat. For we must wholly demonize our adversary and in the process we dehumanize ourselves, whereas the monster must die. A neurological reprogramming engaging dissociative states and a compartmentalization splitting. In doing so some veterans and soldiers lose their way, not only on the inside of our mind but now they become outsiders in society. Everything at home had become foreign to him, he had become lost within a once comfortable environment.

The parallel contrasts to my article on identity and dissociation and Sgt. Triggs? On the night where I had lost myself into psychosis, if the police had shown up, or if someone had confronted me on my abnormal behavior, it would had became real and the psychotic break would have been complete. I was convinced that everyone was out to get me and I would have responded with violence to "protect" myself due to a warped conception of a perceived threat.

I ran out of that house and jumped into my car and drove away; drunk, high and out of my mind. Easily I could have been in an incident that probably would have resulted in a similar outcome. My death, an innocent bystander and possibly the police.

To survive war is not a relief, it is a sentence of grief, guilt, pain and shame from killing and surviving.

Let me ask again, How would you release the demon raging in your mind?

Who Develops PTSD from Combat

I received this comment at A Soldiers Perspective yesterday. My first reaction was to say, "What are you kidding me? Have you even read any of my posts?", along with a bunch of other really negative explicatives. But I had to back up and think about where this person was coming from, and some things my girlfriend has said to me. She told me that sometimes my writing is a bit obtuse (my words--yes a dense thick and hard to understand word to address exactly what she said about my writing, lol--I just love irony). I can get off into jargon and wordy wording of worldly...whatever.

So, anyway. I had to take a step back and realize that,

• one, my obtuseness can tend to be intolerable at times
  
• two the fact that I think from a practitioners perspective can further lead to speculation
  
• and finally, I have magical mystical thinking

which all could and maybe would be evidence that this guy might be on to something as far as someone making sense of what I write. Sooo, I had think about my message; to address the public and speak out about my life with PTSD and how that relates to my everything else.

His comment,

I really appreciate what you are trying to do for our fellow veterans. That said, I am not quite sure that I understand all of your writings. Are you saying that virtually all combat veterans will eventually get PTSD? There is no prevention. There is no cure. Furthermore, we need to hire someone to monitor all veterans for the rest of their lives to make sure that they don't commit criminal acts upon themselves or others in society?

My response,

I do not think that I said or implied any of what you suggest. An individuals reaction to any given trauma has a direct and indirect relation to their development, genetics, upbringing, environment, level of support, culture, level and number of traumatizations and a multitude of other considerations. Most trauma reactions will not lead to a pathological reaction. The implications of reactions to extreme stress have considerable ramifications to those of us who manage day to day with PTSD.

Structural Dissociation of the Personality

Relationship Between Dissociation and IdentityPersonal Attachments, Before and After Combat

Combat Attachments Born of Blood

Dissociative Spectrum

Do I think prevention is a viable cause? Yes, we can do much more to prevent PTSD than we do. Will this prevent everyone from getting PTSD? No, we train to drive a car. Does it prevent all accidents? No.

Fully Train Our Soldiers For the Rigors of War

As to whether a cure is to be had or found, that depends on the severity of the traumatization and the individuals response to it. Most with PTSD (simple PTSD) will become symptom free, others more chronically affected in all probability will not. Every person afflicted with PTSD can find considerable relief from major symptoms. Do I think that chronic, complex or combat PTSD can be cured? For most, no I do not. Do I think that we can find relief from major symptomology? Yes. I have had three years of extensive therapy (20 months in an in-treatment facility) and have resumed therapy again, with probably at least two to three more years to go.

None of the questions you pose brings an easy answer, if it did then we would not see the problems we see today. An attempt to fully answer your questions could be a dissertation topic, to say the least extremely time consuming and cumbersome. If you truly want to understand more, then read these articles. They address your questions,

Statistics, Effects and the Realities of Multiple Deployments

Combat Saturation

Experiencing PTSD

These articles tie together all the above,

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: From A Combat Veterans Perspective

Dissociative Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Influences on Criminality

Combat Veterans and Institutions: A Systems Analysis

Why a Combat Veteran or Soldier Does Not Have Patience

When a combat soldier or veteran exhibits little to no patience with family or society, he or she has been stripped of all the interpersonal intricacies that society thrives on. That which seems mundane and abhorrent to the combat veteran or soldier lubricates the interactions of civilization and serves to engage and breed closeness, familiarity and possibly the formation of trust by way of a gradual process of self-disclosure.

Through the proper revealing of information in a contextually rich environment; the person weighs the customs, personal values and boundaries against one another to assess whether or not they might seem compatible with others. If this seems so, then a person might incrementally reveal more of themselves after establishing a level of trust where common or shared revelations can lead to closer relations.

The Combat Values Theory I propose, has to do with a value structure that replaces or overrides our civilian values schema. They consist of primitive instinctual defensive mechanisms of survival and the disintegration of our inhibitions of taking a human life. Identity, cognitive dissonance, hindsight bias, attachment structures, memory and dissociation all have component features in trauma based disorders with evolutionary and cultural considerations. "The culture of combat veteran is formed by a shared experience, often traumatic and rooted in the work of soldiers" (Hobbs, 2008).

The combat veteran's or soldier's organization and structural dissociation of the personality has both defensive and survival motivated components governed by an "combat othering" internal values system. When a persons principles conflict with necessary actions to preserve life, the memories become encoded, an integral part of the combat self. The disconnection of idealized experiential meaning cordons off the memories and render them inaccessible to the conscious mind, but still influence unconsciousness through intrusive thoughts, emotions and sensory intrusions, due to the lack of integration leading to the structural dissociation personality. Decompressing and integration of compartmentalized memories could be the difference between a soldier or veteran becoming dissociative later.

Combat PTSD has its own sense of self, a survival system separate from the person and has a regulatory feature that intrudes upon the combat veteran or soldier relational interactions. An evolutionary defensive mechanism with purpose of get a person through survival situations and PTSD is like a button stuck on survival and when in combat or such, the person seems to be "normal" it is when they return from war that the problem becomes apparent.

The combat veteran's or soldier's value structure and sense of self have been fundamentally altered and do not match that of society. They have been conditioned to react to visual and auditory stimulus in the environment and to tune out that which poses no threat. Since societies interactions greatly differ from the combat zones, the combat veteran's or soldier's reality has been torn asunder by having been removed from the troop-organism. The closed circuitry of the troop-organism blocks out all attempts of interpersonal communication and interprets this function as an attempt to penetrate the boundaries of the now completely dysfunctional identity of the combat veteran or soldier.

Hobbs, K. (2008). Reflections on the culture of veterans. American Association of Occupational Health Nurses, 56(8), 337-341.

To The Soldier or Veteran Who Has Lost Their Way

I can understand and appreciate the precarious position you find yourself in. It can be a horrendous feeling to loose a powerful position such as being a soldier. Professions that hold a high public trust have plenty of prestige and respect as part of the package. The loss of identity tied to a vocation that commands an elevated sense of purpose due to a psychological malady can impinge upon the individual. The public can deny forever the stigma, we who live this know the doubt and disappointment in the eyes of former colleges and even strangers upon learning of the wounds received.

You deserve to be a complete person, to enjoy life, to find your true self, to be who you are. Your past life is a part of you, not who you are, just who you used to be. Mourn this loss, doing so can help you let go of your past personage. Look deep into self and find who you were meant to be, this can become an opportunity to explore and discover your destined path. When we take the journey God has laid for us, he will provide the opportunities to expand our composure and place those who comprise our spiritual communion of endeavor to assist us so.

Accept what has happened to you, take responsibility for your feelings, it is OK to feel the way you feel, you are not your feelings. You do not have to act upon your emotions, they are what they are, they are not you, but only a part of you.

Our illnesses and pain, physical or otherwise, seeks to hold us up inside of ourselves and our homes. This will only increase our grief. You will have your pain wherever you go, so go, do something for yourself. You have served and done your part, let others do the sacrificing, now you have your journey to begin.

I have found my former anguish to be a strength today, people who go through the fires of hell develop a unique set of skills. Beware for they can become a burden if we succumb and enmesh them within without transcending.

Find people that have had similar experiences, they have been waiting for you, they are there, look for them.

Integration of all our skill sets, beliefs, values and potentials entails a lifetime journey, the sooner we accept this the sooner we can embark. Reject nothing of yourself, for without all that you are, you cannot move forward and begin to find hope.

I am here for you, come back when you can.

We Cannot Make it Through the Confines of Our Minds Without the Help of Others

I am a Gulf War I vet, I felt the same as you when I returned home from combat. For me it was the total sense of feeling alive and being apart of my squad that I missed, although I did not figure this out until after 15 years of insanity.

In the mix, blood pounds through the veins and I received a powerful sense of completeness that I still chase today. The intensiveness of combat will never be matched in the civilian world, all the mundane things we did before seem totally a way to piss us off today. When faced with survival we let all the silly shit slough off of us and become one with the universe.

Our field of vision opens completely to encompass all within our sight, the tiny reflection in the corner of the eye becomes a sharp focus without having to direct attention its way. Time becomes suspended and we know and feel what omnipresence really means. How can anything else ever compare to this experiential endeavor?

I finally received help after 15 years, I could not drink enough alcohol, smoke enough weed, or seek out enough violence to get past the feelings of emptiness. I felt such an utter and complete loss of self and sense of identity. We were trained to feel invincible, and it may even have seemed that way at times, but we did not get through combat without the help from the soldier next to us. We cannot make it through the confines of our minds without the help of others.

We could not do it alone in combat, what makes you think that you can make it alone today?

Follow the links in the sidebar and see how I came through to the other side (under the heading "A Suggested Guide to PTSD Management).

The Combat Veteran and Police Assisted Suicide

The Blood Runs Thick as The Bonds of Brotherhood 
On November 8, 2008, I wrote an article about identity and dissociation and the relationship between the two. Since then I have struggled with writing more, actually I have been having difficulties writing in the last month as I have only composed 7 articles this month so far. Granted some of the issue has to do with my having to write butt loads of papers for school about crap I do not want to write about. Uhh, professor(s) (they say that they have been here), if you happen to read this then I did get something out of the writing assignments, but I still did not want to.

So, anyway. Identity, dissociation and a connection to some kind of topic. Yeah, ok. Here it goes.

I was just reading about Sgt. Travis Triggs again, for those that do not know who I am talking about he was the soldier who had 5, yes FIVE tours of combat, that shot himself and his brother in the head after a police car chase. He went to Iraq 4 times and Afghanistan once. He had never been in trouble before that day even though the media had portrayed them both as having violent criminal histories. Sgt. Triggs volunteered for the extra deployments,

My symptoms went away. After all, I was going back to the fight, back to shared adversity, where the tempo is high and our adrenaline pulses through our veins like hot blood (as cited in Times Online, November 23, 2008).

The article gives an account of a lost soul that had left everything over in a far away land where the blood runs thick as the bonds of brotherhood. He had assumed a culture of killing and the persona of a "combat self," a subsumption of the "Soldier's Heart," shedding all of the remnants of his civilian identity and connections to self and home. He had become the perfect soldier, much to perfect.

There is disconnection between everything that is human and the necessities of killing and what has to be done in combat. Imagine being in an unimaginable situation and having to do the unthinkable. How can this be done? A disconnection between everything human and having to do the unimaginable resounds in combat. For we must wholly demonize our adversary and in the process we dehumanize ourselves, whereas the monster must die. A neurological reprogramming engaging dissociative states and a compartmentalization splitting. In doing so some veterans and soldiers lose their way, not only on the inside of our mind but now they become outsiders in society. Everything at home had become foreign to him, he had become lost within a once comfortable environment.

The parallel contrasts to my article on identity and dissociation and Sgt. Triggs? On the night where I had lost myself into psychosis, if the police had shown up, or if someone had confronted me on my abnormal behavior, it would had became real and the psychotic break would have been complete. I was convinced that everyone was out to get me and I would have responded with violence to "protect" myself due to a warped conception of a perceived threat.

I ran out of that house and jumped into my car and drove away; drunk, high and out of my mind. Easily I could have been in an incident that probably would have resulted in a similar outcome. My death, an innocent bystander and possibly the police.

To survive war is not a relief, it is a sentence of guilt and shame from killing and surviving.

PTSD Can Evoke a Sense of Safety

My blog is about what I deal with on any given day, the continuing battle wrought by one man attempting to overcome PTSD again, and again, each day. Sometimes I achieve just that and others I succumb to its ravages; the chronic struggle that most combat PTSD sufferers deal with on a continuing basis.

Identity issues prevail throughout the mind of a PTSD host, so to speak. When I think of a cure my mind almost reels in horror, because of my survival instincts having defeated death as a result of having PTSD, and its shaping of my life. I would not be who I am today without it, this device of PTSD that engages in the survival defensive mechanisms that has sustained my life on a persistent basis.

What would I do to replace the safe feeling I receive when I am vigilant in my personal protection? How would I deal with life when I am used to coping from minute to minute and occupying myself with this endless game of self absorption? An attachment of the self to the self that is the identity of one who sufficiently succeeds in suffering.

PTSD is not only about personal protection or self preservation but in its essence a mechanism of such endeavors, thus becoming a self-perpetual entity in of itself. Almost as if it has become self-aware and not only will it steer me away from danger, but also away from its own demise; a seemingly serendipitous supra-intelligent guidance of the subconscious (I do love word play for sure).

Tis no wonder that we who suffer from combat or complex PTSD have existential identity issues intertwined with the usual symptoms, and at times, exhibit this as a personality crisis while occasionally leading to psychosis and neurosis.

Soldiers Who Kill Can Become Imprisoned by Their Experiences

A Prisoner of My Beliefs
Soldiers and veterans with full blown PTSD usually have low personal self-esteem, a self-constructed foundation of self-affirmations grounded in positive thought, word and deeds, reinforced through values and principles. Esteem manifests in an outward appearance of honor and moral mastery, integrity and humility as others would know a consistency of character established through words, deed and actions. Where all of these principles were meet and mastered in the field of battle they no longer apply to a civilian life or civil society.

The combat schema, a defined preconditioned set of beliefs and values enabling the warrior to navigate efficiently through the adversity of combat without a detailed consideration of consequences. To engage in a mortal fight with the enemy this schema spells out our actions in a given situation as being preoccupied with survivability of the moment can get you killed. The warrior with PTSD has grown accustomed to the value and belief systems of war and feels threatened when they become faced with having to let go of this security to reintegrate back into society.

Without a proper identification of values and a conceptualization of a solid schema we can become lost to the reality of a situation and possibly lose out on our interactions necessary for relationship building. Combat critically changes our value systems, mostly to the detriment of constructing and maintaining significant relationships with family and friends. A disconnect happens between the soldier or veteran that leaves everyone feeling as though an insurmountable wall has been erected.

By an identification of values, along with acknowledging and deconstructing the combat schema one could find the ability to critically analyze in the moment, the validity of said beliefs as required by situational reflection enabling readjustments and disallowing an inflexibility of position. An underpinning of empowering schema and a reevaluation of ethical morality allows one to find plasticity in the moment producing a positive self-efficacy; a confident and self-assured person.