Page 256 - Total War on PTSD

Conversely, people may be lonely in very different ways. I therefore argue that in order to understand a given experience of loneliness one must identify a) the social identity of the experiencing individual (e.g., widow, orphan, bullied adolescent, bereaved parent, ostracized immigrant, stigmatized mental-health patient, Veteran, etc.); b) the relational needs and provisions that are compromised (e.g., romantic love or intimate companionship, friendship, parental care, etc.); c) those who are expected to fulfill these relational needs (e.g., friends, family, colleagues, etc.); and by extension d) realize the mode of isolation that must be attended (Stein & Tuval-Mashiach, 2015b). For instance, Weiss (1973) discerned loneliness of social isolation, denoting the sense of isolation within social networks, from loneliness of emotional isolation, denoting a sense of loneliness within intimate relationships. Others have added collective isolation, the sense of being detached from a greater collective (J. T. Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2012), and existential isolation, which connotes a detachment from all being or existence as a whole (Ettema, Derksen, & Leeuwen, 2010; Mijuskovic, 2012; Moustakas, 1961). From an existential perspective, to paraphrase John Donne’s aforementioned assertion, “every man is an island.” Against this backdrop, we may now explore the loneliness of Veterans, and more so that of traumatized Veterans.
The Soldier Comes Marching Home... Alone
As I was conducting research with the aim of understanding the Veteran’s loneliness, one Vietnam Veteran send me an e-mail with the following disclosure. I think his words capture the multifariousness of the experience, albeit in a nutshell:
In an abbreviated sense, being lonely is fighting for acceptance in your original world, being ripped away and then enduring the same process in a new world but under horrific circumstances, then returning to your original world only to discover that you are not understood, do not belong there the same way you did before, and the new world you have just left no longer exists, leaving you alone. Even when there are still the trappings of the world you once knew, they are no more, and there is no one to comfortably talk with about these things, so you keep
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