A while back we wrote that not only veterans have their own personal Vietnams. One of the key elements in that story is the idea that significant emotions, such as profound grief, strike the individual suffering through them as almost "too powerful" to experience fully in the moment, out of a fear that they will be overwhelmed with such a powerful flood of emotion, and incapable of coping. The defense mechanism then is to block experiencing so much painful emotion (i.e., grief). Of course, the unfortunate truth is that grief doesn't go away...it just waits for another, inconvenient time to intrude -- because it must be dealt with to actually move on (by moving through).
Interestingly, Arthur Egendorf has something to say about this, too, and how it gets folded into a diagnosis of PTSD, perhaps unfairly:
"At such times, vets may decide to let go, to allow a sensitivity that was formerly taboo. What happens for some, however, is that they then fall prey to a long-held belief that once they let themselves respond [to something] emotionally, the flood of feeling will be too much for them to handle. Believing that if they really open up they’d be overwhelmed, men worry all the more over emotional outbursts and haunting memories. The various correlates of this distress, from troubled sleep, to loss of interest in life, to guilt and other complaints, are now lumped together and called “stress disorder.” [now, PTSD.] What the diagnosis doesn’t say is that if you’re convinced that extremely strong feelings are a sign that you’re sick or weak, then the only options you’ve got are to make yourself numb, or let it all out and think of yourself as crazy…"
-- Source: Healing from the War: Trauma & Transformation after Vietnam, by Arthur Egendorf. Boston: Shambhala Press (1986)
Egendorf returns to this same theme of veterans freeing themselves up to cultivate a healthy sensitivity to what they've experienced when he writes:
“The tendency among many veterans and the public is to respond to talk of “stress disorder” with the seemingly logical but mistaken idea that what veterans need is to reduce their level of stress. This idea has the unfortunate effect of encouraging veterans and well-meaning supporters to think that men in pain should shrink from life. Or one might think that veterans need to change or reprogram their responses, when in fact their horror, rage, guilt and desperation may be quite genuine, [as well as] the signs of a re-emerging sensitivity. Taking the direction implied by Jung and others, we can simply invite troubled veterans to revise their notions of what kinds of responses are admissible. For once a man grants himself the freedom to be appropriately upset by what he has seen and done, his reactions subside quite naturally, and he experiences himself as “more himself.”
Sounds promising...especially since often the veteran's tendency is, to wall one's self off from life and from others, rather than proceeding gingerly, tentatively but nevertheless purposefully -- in a supportive, loving, accepting and nonjudgmental environment -- to begin to process what's actually been experienced -- at ever step, checking to see whether it's too much, too little, or just enough to integrate. For rather than seeing him or herself as separate entities -- the pre-war and the post-war selves -- whatever gets integrated allows the veteran, as Egendorf writes, to experience him or herself as "more" of who they really are. Wonderful...and the goal.
