Page 271 - Total War on PTSD

Friends and family may be the most critical circle of support, and thus may benefit from various strategies for empathic engagement with their beloved Veteran (Lyons, 2007). They too should educate themselves as to the military culture, trauma and its aftermath with an emphasis on PTSD and comorbid symptomatology (e.g., depression, substance abuse, anxiety, suicidality, traumatic brain injury, etc.; Recommended in this respect for both Veterans and their families is the book “Once a Warrior Always a Warrior” by Charles Hoge, 2010), and most of all engage Veterans with sincere invitations to share whatever they choose of their war experiences. That said, it is also imperative that family and friends respect Veterans’ desire not to speak. They will do so when they see fit and feel ready.
Notwithstanding, much of Veterans’ escaping of the entrapments of loneliness remains up to them. Sherman (2015) speaks of the development of self-empathy. Veterans must find ways to minimize their own misunderstandings of what happened and what that means, reduce their self-stigmatizing and come to terms with what has happened. In this respect, Paulson and Krippner (2007) recommend that Veterans embrace their loneliness as an existential predicament and thus reconnect with themselves.
Alternatively, Veterans may educate themselves about trauma and PTSD so they may better communicate their experiences, or otherwise learn and exercise manners in which experiences may be better communicated to others e.g., Stein & Tuval-Mashiach, 2017). Finally, seeking professional counseling may be essential in reducing Veterans’ loneliness and gradually facilitating reintegration into civilian society, regardless of PTSD (Castro, Kintzle, & Hassan, 2015).
Conclusion
War ultimately and irrevocably changes a person (Gill, 2011). This change must be acknowledged in order to overcome the alienation of the returning Veteran (Hoge, 2010; Schuetz, 1945; R. T. Smith & True, 2014), who retains his or her well-entrenched military identity years and decades after the shooting is well done. As I delineated above, this identity – constituted by experiences of the past and the present, as well as various
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