This website has connected me with people all over the country who dedicate themselves to helping veterans and their families heal from war’s traumas. Veterans Heart Georgia (VHG), based in Atlanta, is among the pioneers creating programs and assembling resources.  I envy Atlantans for being able to participate in VHG’s monthly Listening Circles where people speak their pain and struggles and find support and understanding.  Community is invaluable to healing PTSD.

One of VHG’s programs is the Children and Families of Veterans Initiative. As part of that VHG is partnering with the Counseling Certificate Program at Mercer University to gather data for a research proposal that seeks to understand intergenerational trauma.

VHG’s first step in gathering data for a pilot study is creating a blog. From the stories they can bring together from the blog, they will look at common threads and see how frequently those commonalities (qualitative data) occur.  Then they will form small focus groups (via conference calls, probably), followed by a smaller number of interviews. This data will form the basis for a proposal to study the prevalence of negative effects of war on adult children and families, as well as to develop an “intervention” or method to help end people’s suffering.

If you go to VHG’s website, www.veteransheartgeorgia.org, you will see the blog on the far right of the navigation bar.  Click on that and then register so you can leave your story.  This will increase the chances that families of veterans, as well as the veterans themselves, will have resources available to them for healing.

You can create a nickname when you register that will keep you anonymous, our use your own name.

Let us all help to create a groundswell of awareness and healing.

The Multigenerational Ripple of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)