Our nation’s veterans come back from war as different people. This is the inevitability of the return phase of the mono-mythic hero’s journey

The Warrior’s VisionOld Self / Innocent

Self

Answering the Call

Initiation:Boot CampAdvanced training

Descent:Assignment, Deployment,Arrival in War

Zone

Ordeals: Chaos,Trauma, Loss,

Fear, Guilt, Rage, Shock

Encounters with Darkness:Soul’s Departure, Loss of Meaning

Berserk or Not

Brotherhood SisterhoodMaster of DarknessTransformation in

Warrior

Leave taking

HomecomingGrief, Loss, Anger, Disappointment,

Confusion

Making MeaningSeeking Forgiveness

Grace

Restoration of Community

Returning veterans experience their own Odyssey, sometimes living through decades of ordeals such as:

- repeated difficulties with intimacy, community and employment

- perpetual grief over lost comrades

- inner belligerence and numbing

- experiencing the outside world full of threats

- grief, loss, anger, pain, displacement, numbing, confusion, alienation Jonathan shay

I M A G I N E

Issues of Identity

Text

Who am I now?

Who was I before?

What part of self died?

What new self introduced?

Unhealed combat trauma disables the basic social and cognitive capacities required for democratic participation:

-being able to show up at an appointment time and place, possibly in a crowd of strangers

-being able to experience words as trustworthy

-seeing the possibility of persuasion, negotiation, compromise and concession

-seeing the possibility of winning without killing, or losing without dying

-seeing the future as real and meaningful

Jonathan ShayOdysseus in America

May Choose To Return

The effects of battle

continue to rage.

soul

heart

brainbody

family

moralspiritual psyche

aesthetic

cognitive

death

relational

Despite the human capacity to adapt and survive, combat-related traumatic experiences can alter people’s psychological, biological and

social equilibrium to such a degree that the memory of events comes to taint all other experiences, spoiling appreciation of the

present.

Unregulated Body Experiences: a cascade of unmanageable strong emotions and physical experiences, triggered by the reminders of traumatic events, replays endlessly in the body.

It is often the chronic physiological arousal that is at the root of recurring post-traumatic symptoms. The recurring traumatic activation continues to create a somatic sense of threat or speechless terror.

Trauma and the BodyThe symptoms of traumatization are

primarily physical with psychological features.

Bessel A. van der Kolk

Hyperarousal:Elevated startle response; tremors; increased

heart rate; sweating; pupil change; loss of speech; goose bumps; dry mouth; dizziness;

high sensitivity in skin and muscles; high blood pressure accompanied by panic and overwhelm;

flooded with adrenaline; fight or flight.

Hypoarousal:Freezing behaviors such as spacing out or going

numb by dulling inner sensations; slow muscular/skeletal responses; diminished

muscular tone; reduced capacity to sense or feel significant events; inability to actively

defend against danger, system overwhelmed by traumatic response activation.

Episodic alterations between avoidance and reliving symptoms is the result of dissociation: traumatic events are distanced and dissociated from usual conscious awareness in the numbing

phase, only to return in the intrusive phase.

Psychological Symptoms:

anxiety, intrusive memories, disorganization, learning disablilties, emotional flooding, depression, phobias, hallucinations, eating disorders, feelings of helplessness, lack of healthy boundaries, addictions, relationship and sexual problems, panic attacks, suicidal feelings and behaviors, self-mutilation, dissociative disorders.

Many of these symptoms are a compensation for arousal. They let off steam so the system can keep running but discharge does not complete.

The unresolved traumas of battle rattle the sleep of entire families. Post traumatic stresses readily become inherited forms of anxiety. The terrors and traumas of war don’t simply disappear but become a troubled inheritance for an entire society.

•Michael Mead says, “until the inner initiatory process can be brought to a conclusion that matches the intensity of battle, the common world can remain awkwardly foreign and coldly unwelcoming for those who try to return from the underworld of war.”

TREATING ONLY THE SYMPTOMS OF PTSD CANNOT FULLY REPAIR THE LARGER CONTEXT AND DEEPER LEVEL OF VETERANS’ LIVES.

-sense of self and identity disrupted-experience of society challenged-soul scarred and wounded-spiritual connection to self and universe damaged

HealingTreatment of Symtoms

-Medication-EMDR-Exposure Therapy-Virtual Reality

It is the specific lived story that takes shape inside each soldier that becomes both the tale of the trauma and the potential source of healing. Michael Mead

Oh, I have been stuck

in the underworld. Now I know I can return

from it.

You might just be willing to make the effort and endure the pain it takes to complete the journey.

To heal, the survivor must revisit experiences of war in a way that tells the truth and frees the heart from the bondage of the past.

Years after combat is over, a veteran’s soul may still wander in the horrors of the ordeals.

Even as war and violence are disowned, the original call to service must be reaffirmed, and the universal pattern of the warrior that has been damaged must now be restored.

Along the way, the veteran studies the history and meaning of warriorhood, practices its traditions, and evaluates his past experiences in this light.

He faces those people, places and memories he most fears.

He stares his demons in the face without resorting to violence.

He does service that redresses the wounds he’s caused.

He reshapes his identity in ways that include both the mythic dimensions and the difficult realities of his experience.

The new reality that emerges constitutes a rebirth.

He eventually receives an initiation through both inner change and outer deed and ritual.

Ed Tick War and the Soul

The Formula for Successful Return

Judith Herman’s Stages of Recovery

•Establishment of safety, sobriety, and self-care

1.Trauma- centered work of constructing a personal narrative and of grieving

•Reconnecting with people, communities, ideals and ambitions

-Authority over the remembering process-Integration of memory and affect-Affect tolerance-Symptom mastery....-self-esteem and self-cohesion-safe attachment-Making meaning

Mary Harvey’s Dimensions of Recovery:

Grieving is an essential element of the journey home. The process of constructing a narrative invariably arouses intense emotions, particularly of grief.

GRIEVING FOR:

-the particularity of own experiences

-the course her life has taken

-comrades lost during the war and since the war

-irretrievable losses of prewar relationships with parents, siblings, wives and children

-lost youth and health

-lost innocence

-surviving when others did not

Cleansing and Purification

- to feel qualified to return to society

-must penetate moral and spiritual dimensions

We can extract wisdom and principles from world spiritual traditions about how to support a veteran on her moral journey home.

forgiveness of self

forgiveness of others

asking for forgiveness

asking for divine compassion and release

If the war-wounded soul is to move forward on the path home to inner peace.......many dimensions of FORGIVENESS are necessary:

Telling the stories

Stories need to be told in a way that transfers the moral weight from individual to the community.Story telling can be facilitated in a way that encourages the story teller to dive deep and experience the release of related emotions, the accurate reordering of history, or the making of meaning....all essential to the recovery from PTSD. Edward Tick, War and the Soul

RESTORATION OF COMMUNITY

Battle wounds suffered in service of a community require community involvement

for genuine healing.

WAR TEARS THE

FABRIC OF THE SACRE

D HOOP

We can look at war-related PTSD as being stuck in an unfinished initiation. After returning home, the ordeal stage continues;-overwhelming and unresolved memories-emotions-anxieties-conflicts-feelings of being alien to one’s own family and communityIf a meaningful return does not happen, the torment of war continues to rupture not only the fabric of the individual’s soul, but the life of the community.

A genuine rite of return involves an open and compassionate community that fully

acknowledges the courage and the wounds of those who return from battle as well as fully

grieves those whose lives ended in the unforgiving fields of war.

Edward Tick

You Killed For Me

I Killed for you

Transfer the responsibility from warrior to society.-You warriors did these acts in my name

-I pledge myself to hear your stories-I take responsibility and help carry the burden

-Genuine healing happens when a veteran becomes able to incorporate the skills and

knowledge learned from treating their symptoms and deeply integrating in ways that

allows them to rebuild relationship with themselves, their families and the community.-

Veterans regain a sense of belonging and purpose in their lives, find meaningful work, and establish conscious and healthy relationship to

their family and community.

The Warrior’s Vision- a New Identitya new place-integrated-wiser -effective return

VETERAN BECOMES WARRIOR: -When he learns to carry his skills and his vision in mature ways.

-When she has been set right with life again.-When his priority is to protect life...not destroy it.-When she uses the fearlessness she developed to help keep sanity, genorosity and order alive in the culture-When he disciplines the violence within himself.Initiation as a warrior is the final step in the long journey home. War and the Soul Ed Tick