16 Quotes Tagged: ptsd

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.

The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

Our tears are trying to serve a purpose, but we rarely let them. I don't know how we got started with subverting that purpose.

These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn’t bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there’s something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn’t go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child’s face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling.
The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence.
The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back.

Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils
within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of
peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I
say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of
ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is
only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room
which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a
mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy
of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to
follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark
power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection
of ourselves.

we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)

The part I wanted them to understand is that these equations can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you're sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an airhole with a straw and wondering, 'Now? Now am I safe?

Do they matter? — those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.

It is more like carrying something really heavy, forever. You do not get to put it down: you have to carry it, and so you carry it the way you need to, however it fits best.

When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.

Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror.

There is a shock that comes so quickly and strikes so deep that the blow is internalized even before then skin feels it. The strike must first reach bone marrow, then ascend slowly to the brain where the slowpoke intellect records the deed.