Page 490 - Total War on PTSD

The following are stories about two Soldiers who have attended REBOOT, to give you a more personal view of what the program is all about and how it made a difference in their lives.
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SGT Mitchell: “Through REBOOT, I learned that others felt the way I had felt and that I wasn’t alone in my fight.” I graduated from REBOOT Combat Recovery earlier this year and would like to congratulate everyone here today as you complete an important milestone and join me as a graduate.
I’d like to say that war was the only place that in my life that I encountered trauma, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. When I first began attending REBOOT, I attended due to the wounds I had encountered during combat. War is what led me to attend that night, but that was just the beginning.
During the first week of REBOOT, the instructor told us “You may experience healing from trauma that happen to you long before war.” As the words came out of his mouth, it was as if he had hit a nerve. Through all of the struggling, the thought hadn’t really occurred to me. Could my struggles have started prior to my military career?
As I sat there, I could feel my blood pressure rising as distant memories rushed to the front of my mind. I fought the return of the memories, but it was as if they were dying to escape the secret cave where they had been hiding.
When I was a child, for many years, I was sexually molested by my cousin. This is a secret I had kept from everyone, including my own wife. I had dealt with it. I was over it. I couldn’t change it, so what was the point in reliving those dark moments? I simply
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