What people of the past can teach us about recovery from war.
Silence was long the norm for returning combat veterans.
Military leadership added to the horror by assuring soldiers that everything was fine. “You saw horrible things. But you have to forget them. Just do not think about it anymore.”
A cluster of symptoms occur after someone is exposed to death, serious injury, assault or the threat thereof. Symptoms include reexperiencing the trauma, as in nightmares or intrusive memories, avoiding talk or triggers, negative mood and thoughts and unusual patterns of arousal, such as hyper vigilance or problems concentrating.
“Something has happened in the brain and in the central nervous system that has caused a permanent change, or a relatively permanent change, in how they feel, how they think and how they behave,”
Moral injury refers to a betrayal of “what’s right”, no matter what that might mean in a particular culture, by a legitimate authority figure in a high stakes situation. Moral injury in combat is an issue dating back at least to Homer’s Iliad, the epic poem about the siege of Troy dated to around the eighth century B.C. The poem opens with the commander of the Greek army, Agamemnon, taking a captive woman, Briseis, from the warrior Achilles. Achilles, offended by this betrayal of “what’s right” in Greek military culture, refuses to fight.
Restoring trust
Cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness meditation, and therapy that challenges skewed thinking patterns are all crucial tools for the treatment of trauma.
So much of what happens in a war zone is chance. It is almost random and it is out of individual control. It is difficult to recover from thinking ‘Bad things happened, therefore it was my failure’ .
Reducing the social and moral implications of events, such as war or genocide, to a biological set of consequences may unintentionally and paradoxically decrease social and moral responsiveness to these events.
Soldiers who lived thousands of years ago can give us a deeper understanding of psychological trauma.
Source: How Old Is PTSD?