Well, I talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about it
Talk about it
- Funkytown
When it comes to finding the most effective therapy for PTSD-identified soldiers, the lyrics of the hit single, Funkytown by the disco band, Lipps, offers some pretty sage advice: Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it... then talk about is some more–but only with someone you trust (admittedly made a little more difficult after Ft. Hood). Granted, the lyrics are hardly profound. Yet according to Jim Dooley, a former combat veteran and now a mental health counselor with the VA, talking about the terrible things you've seen is the only way to navigate oneself out of the dark tunnel of quiet despair.
Dooley is not alone in that advice. The Journal of Traumatic Stress (not something you'd read from to your child at bedtime) just published the results of an interesting study that more or less concluded that for soldiers to truly heal from their emotional war wounds, they need to talk about the specific act of killing. This is opposed to simply dancing around the issue–something most mental health counselors and others apparently tend to do, alleges the lead researcher of that study.
In the spirit of that study, I thought it would be a good conversation starter to include this excerpt from a PBS Frontline interview with Dooley. I have my own comments to add to Dooley's dialogue. Look for that on tomorrow's blog! I welcome your comments as well.
Q. Talk to me about killing and what it means.
A. I've talked with people recently about the individual act of killing someone else. ... I've talked with individuals as well as several groups. A group discussion is very interesting, because men began to talk about how they felt about killing others. And the consensus was that it had to be done, because [if they didn't do it, they would be killed]. But there was also a sadness about it. They experienced it as a profound experience, each and every one of them. As we get distance from people, it becomes less and less.
Q. The people that we've spoken to, if they have killed someone, those images in particular are the most haunting, which I thought was a little bit counter-intuitive to me. [I thought that] seeing your buddy die or seeing other horrible things that you could imagine happening [would be the most traumatic image], [but it] is really the act of actually taking another person's life that in the long run had the most emotional strain on them. Have you found this?
A. I think it is a very important thing [to understand] that when your friends are wounded or dead, it's a real loss. It's a loss of your friend that you trusted and you loved in a very intense way. When you personally take another life and you go up to that lifeless body with a hole in it and you look down on it, and you say, "I did that," I think it is a loss of yourself at the same time, and I think that [once] they understand that, they can't go back again. They can't say that it didn't happen, or [that] maybe somebody else did it.
The enormous firepower that were are currently expending in our modern wars, from Vietnam onward, blurs the line considerably, because if there's a massive fire and 2,000 rounds are going out at one time, who knows who shot who[m]? But all we know is there's a lot of people in front of us that are dead. That absolves you of the responsibility of looking at that lifeless body and [seeing that] some mother, some son, some father, some uncle, is now dead. And that's different than not knowing. Knowing, I think, is the Rubicon. And they talk about it with sadness. It's not something that they're prideful of; it's a profound sadness.
Q. But its seems the military doesn't even address it, doesn't even ask about it. [On the post-deployment questionnaires] they ask questions like, "Did you see dead bodies? Did you see combat? Did you see anyone die?" They don't actually ask about a soldier doing the act of killing and the kind of emotional impact that would have. What would you say about the military's edict on that? ...
A. Well, I think that the military avoids it. I think the cursory questions that they're asking–let's call them hallmark questions –are like] "Are you developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?," but the questions are so vague that if you had images in your head that you didn't want to think about and you didn't want to talk about, it would be very easy to blow past those questions.
A questionnaire is a very impersonal way of doing it. The entire effort of assessment post-deployment is at best cursory. There are a lot of Web sites; there's a lot of literature; there are questionnaires. But there's no live human being sitting in front of you asking the questions, and that really makes the difference, because who would want to report something that you don't want to have? But if someone asks you directly in front of you -- a live human being -- it's a big difference. I don't think the military is doing that. I think they're avoiding that. It's expensive. It's expensive to have me and tens of thousands of me, and that's what's needed.
At some point, if we're going to go to war, and we value our young people, what better way to help them to be reintegrated into society, to have a positive life? ... I say that as a person that came back from war, and that didn't happen to me. And I had to struggle with my own memories and sort it out by myself. It wasn't easy, and I don't think it was fair.
Q. So basically the military just ignores it ... the actual subject of killing?
A. The issue [of] the aftereffects of killing, personal killing, I believe isn't understood. I don't think the military understands how to deal with it. It is the effects of personal responsibility for taking another life. How do people react to that? How do they look at the spiritual issues? How do they look at the societal issues? How do they look at their family values?
We have been always taught not to hurt others. I know when we go to war, we're taught to kill directly. The current war in particular will have a profound effect on people, because of the very nature of the directness of the killing. We're not talking about distance killing. We're not talking about an atomic bomb or a firestorm, [like the one] in Dresden that killed 200,000 in a night. We're talking about disintegrating someone in front of you. That needs to be addressed by acknowledging that it does have an effect on people. That is what it means to go to war, but that person will [need] some support in understanding themselves better and not to have a silence about it.
The silence is really the damaging part, and I would strongly encourage people to talk to people that they trust about it. And if that isn't possible, then they need to figure out who they can begin to trust with [it], because they shouldn't just sit on it. They shouldn't just try to make it go away. It won't go away.
Blogged by: jenni keast
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