Page 263 - Total War on PTSD

should be inadequate to describe any of man’s works. The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. The problem was less one of “language” than of gentility and optimism; it was less a problem of “linguistics” than of rhetoric. . .The real reason is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn’t have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty. (Fussell, 2013/1975, p. 184, italics in the original)
We all have a need to sense that our experiences are shared by other people around us, and our primary tool to achieve this is discourse (Echterhoff, Higgins, & Levine, 2009), and particularly narratives. The incommensurability of military life and civilian life critically undermines this need and may lead to a deep sense of isolation. Journalist Sebastian Junger (2016), who accompanied American troops in Afghanistan, argues that our modern individualist society just makes things worse in this respect. Veterans who are used to never being alone, always having at close reach someone to speak to who has shared their strife, return to an alienated society wherein each person is out for him or herself. This alienation makes Veterans long to go back to their units, where they are understood and where they belong. Thus, the loneliness at hand is experienced within the Veteran’s family, but ultimately also vis-à-vis one’s community and society at large. When war becomes traumatic and PTSD develops, this adds additional strata to this experiential isolation and thus exacerbates the Veteran’s loneliness and deepens it. As George Atwood poignantly stresses:
The loneliness of the trauma victim is of the most extreme kind that one can imagine: It has as its essential feature that it is felt as absolute, never to be relieved. The loneliness is cosmic, rather than terrestrial. It extends throughout the universe and seems, to the person suffering it, to be eternal. It is not conceivable that it can ever be addressed, diminished, soothed, escaped. It is damnation. (Atwood, 2012, pp. 128-129)
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