Combat veterans often have to live with the pain of PTSD for years, and their loved ones are right there with them, for better and worse. Depression has many ways to damage a family, from emotional withdrawal, to anger and blame, even suicide. Complex PTSD includes depression along with a level of unpredictable behavior that can not only be debilitating but also violent. Spouses and children experience every moment of these shifts and spend years trying to preserve a semblance of normality under the constant pressure of the veteran’s pain.
I’ve referred to a few of the blogs and memoirs of combat veterans who decided to open up about their lives with PTSD. A great many veterans’ spouses - almost always wives - also write about their experiences helping their partners through recovery. Most emphasize the positive side of that life, like Tracy of The Priceless Journey, and focus their anger and frustration on the maddening government bureaucracies they have to rely on for help.
Other wives, like Sarah of Sitting, Waiting, Wishing, Hoping and the writer of The Life of a PTSD’s Spouse, tell quite frankly and openly the dark as well as bright sides of life with their seriously injured husbands - and all their own reactions of pain and periods when they just can’t cope. In doing so, they may be criticized harshly for breaking the unwritten code of conduct of the soldier’s wife. That code demands submerging one’s own feelings and needs to the veteran’s since he has so much more to deal with and has been through combat experiences that those at home can’t begin to understand.
I’ve been reading a lot of these blogs that record the ups and downs of life with PTSD. Here’s a brief summary of some of the problems. I’m drawing on stories from the blogs and videos I’ve found, and you can see two of the videos and links to several sites in this recent post at my blog, Storied Mind.
Depression is a big component of PTSD. The writer of Lima, Oscar, Victor, Echo (L.O.V.E.) describes her husband’s emotional flatness and inability to communicate and share emotion. Emotion is what she most craves from and has to keep reminded herself of the nightmare inside him he’s living with. He’s exhausted from being hypervigilant all the time, and she has to live with what he can offer when he’s feeling better.
A child playing and raising her voice even slightly can set off a reaction of smoldering anger or a sudden outburst. If a wife leaves a door open that’s usually closed, she might face a raging stranger. There are shouts, threats, blame for causing all his problems, and he’s out the door. Or she might meet him head on, and they’ll fight each other, as the woman finally lets off some steam.
Many vets can’t get the most violent scenes out of their heads. They wake in the middle of the night to relive the moment when a closest buddy is dying and calling for help, and they can do nothing for him. Night after night, the nightmares scare the spouse out of bed, and she can’t shake him out of his dream. Perhaps he’s on his feet searching to find his dying friend. When it’s over, he’ll just say it was a bad dream, no problem.
