I'm not talking here about people so blown out psychologically from something that happens that they don't speak to anyone anymore ever.
I'm trying to talk about what happens to all of us in various ways during the course of our lifetimes.
I think the best way to start this is to say, "There was no one that I ever met that survived World War II whether they were in the war or not that didn't have some kind of form of Post Traumatic Stress disorder.
I could make the same statement for anyone who was there surviving the assassination of President Kennedy, His brother Bobby or Martin Luther King.
I could make the same for anyone who saw 9-11 in real time on TV or in person or who lost someone in one of those buildings or near those buildings as they fell or burned up.
Things happen in our lives that wound us all like World War I and II and the assasinations and people we are close to that die by accident or in war or in any way and we have to find a way forward anyhow.
One of the best ways to survive anything is to be able to acknowledge your experience of it. Often, if you stay in denial that it ever happened then how are you going to survive what happened to you?
For example, my older daughter told me her mother (my ex-wife) had said that she had been in shock for 20 years.
I could have told here that but eventually she had to come to that conclusion herself.
In my own life when I was in my late teens I was in love with more than one woman at the same time. As a young man I didn't believe that was possible then so if you don't believe that is possible it is really going to screw you up until you deal with something like this.
So, when the first one and I broke up and then 2 years later the second one and I broke up my solution was suicide. (luckily I'm still here) now. But then it was really touch and go for about 5 years (from 21 to 25 or so. Luckily, I got married and had a son by 26 and then it didn't really matter about me anymore I had to raise my son to adulthood in a good way. So, having my son and being married likely saved my life at that time.
Was I really traumatized from all this? Yes. I was traumatized in a way I didn't believe I could recover from.
Did I recover? Yes. But I had to become a whole new person to go on with my life. I had to completely reinvent myself to go on.
One of the methods I used was to date many girls sequentially (at least 25) until I met my first wife and we had a son. But, I found a way through to staying alive and by 30 I was pretty happy with my life just in time for the physically happiest anyone gets in their lifetime (33).
However, I must say the most spiritually happy times for me have been the last 15 years or so since I was about 50.
Now, we are witnessing a group genocide that I don't remember seeing much since Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Serbia and Bosnia in the 1990s.
The boy holding the head of the soldier who is 7 years old dressed like a kid you might meet in any Western Country is pretty upsetting to people sort of like 9-11 was for people too.
So, I would say for Western Civilization we now have another group PTSD to deal with and hopefully to get over eventually from too.
And maybe we will find some kind of answer to all this that will help us all go forward too.
No comments:
Post a Comment