I became who I am at twelve on a frigid day in 1975. Trauma doesn’t tiptoe in, it crashes your life like a wrecking ball. Forget neat narratives; trauma interrupts the plot and leaves you with scars you can’t scrub away.
A Rough Introduction
On my first day as a staff psychiatrist at the Boston VA in 1978, I hung a copy of Breughel’s “The Blind Leading the Blind” in my new office. No sooner had I admired its irony than a massive, disheveled man exploded through my door. His name was Tom, a former Marine from Vietnam, and he smelled like last weekend’s regrets mixed with cheap whiskey. I half expected him to drop a profanity-laden tirade before even sitting down.
The Raw Reality of Trauma
Tom had once been a high-school valedictorian, a star pupil destined for greatness. Instead, he became a battle-hardened vet whose nightmares replayed like a broken record. He’d survived hell in Vietnam, leading his platoon through mud and machine-gun fire, but now his nights belonged to relentless flashbacks. Every damn sound reminded him of the war, and he’d storm out of his own home like a furious beast, desperate to avoid hurting his family.
He confessed that his drinking wasn’t mere escapism. Hell, he refused his pills because they’d erase the memories of his fallen comrades. He wanted to keep the honor, even if it meant living in a perpetual state of rage and numbness. It’s a tragic, f**king mess.
Echoes of the Past
Listening to Tom, I couldn’t help but see my own childhood amid bombed-out ruins in postwar Holland. My dad, a passionate anti-Nazi, masked his seething anger behind a facade of piety. My uncle, a POW in the Dutch East Indies, rarely spoke of his horrors until his rage exploded unexpectedly. Tom’s story echoed these dark legacies; trauma is less a moment in time and more an ugly inheritance that distorts lives.
Confronting the Nightmare
I zeroed in on his nightmares. With my stint in a sleep lab and a growing faith in modern medicine, I prescribed a drug to ease his terror. Of course, Tom skipped the pills. “If I wipe away these nightmares,” he grumbled, “I’m betraying my dead brothers.” His stubborn loyalty to pain was almost laughable, if it weren’t so heartbreaking.
In that raw, unscripted moment, I realized trauma doesn’t just scar your body, it rips apart your soul. Veterans like Tom carry the ghosts of war long after the fighting stops. Their anger, fear, and numbness aren’t character flaws; they’re brutal, unfiltered consequences of living through hell.
A Brutally Honest Lesson
Tom’s story and those of many veterans I met, reveal that trauma doesn’t just fade away. It hijacks your mind, rewires your brain, and locks you into a nightmare of your own memories. His flashbacks weren’t just bad dreams; they were replays of unspeakable horrors that kept him from truly living. Even when life tried to move on; college, law school, and marriage, Tom remained shackled to the past.
These experiences remind us that PTSD is no moral failing. It’s a physiological beast, a remnant of survival mechanisms gone haywire. Trauma etches itself into our biology, twisting our hormones, our stress responses, and our very sense of being. The journey toward healing isn’t neat or linear. It’s messy, defiant, and often filled with bouts of anger, numbness, and desperate attempts to cling to what once was.
