In unearthing my father’s PTSD I recognized my own.  Then, as I began exploring how that repressed trauma had shown up in my life- how and when it had surfaced, percolated, erupted, and twisted my perceptions and motivations- I began to see my relationships differently.

Like my boyfriend during my mid to late twenties with whom I broke up many times and went back to many times.  He refused to get angry, always took me back, yet was never willing to engage himself fully.  I was the identified patient, as he refused to look at his part.  After all I’ve learned from veterans and their children, I think about that boyfriend’s father, who was an alcoholic and committed suicide in the mid 1970’s.  He was a WWII veteran.  His wife left him twenty-six years after the war, telling me that she had come to fear for her life, as his rage was surfacing with increasing violence.

That boyfriend refused to think about his recurring dreams where his father’s body threatened to fall out of its hiding place.   Instead, he blamed his mother for leaving his father.

Another boyfriend had a secret life.  He tired to hide not only his cigarette smoking from me but his obsession with a past girlfriend. How he often drove by her home, parked on the other side of the street, and watched the house.  He told me he had fought in Vietnam, that he hated the smell of Oriental cooking, but only years later from a mutual friend did I learn he had been a Green Beret.

He retired at age 50 so he could travel, though the only places he traveled to were Cambodia and Vietnam.  Two years ago he died in Cambodia, suddenly, the cause of his death never made known.  The memorial service announced in his obituary never occurred.

Another friend could not trust himself to be good to any woman.  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he told me after a weekend riding horses in the Rockies.   “And so I can’t see you again.  I’m just not healthy for women.”   He was also a veteran of Vietnam.

With all these men I blamed myself for the relationship not working.  I was not desirable enough, not light hearted enough, not loveable. Now I see that it was our wounds that attracted us to one another.  On some deep nonverbal level, we recognized a fellow sufferer. But what caused the attraction also made a real connection impossible.  We were desperately expending our life force keeping the anguish below the surface, deep within, and that cut off the flow of any other emotions.

Plato’s cave- we see only our own shadows and think they are reality. PTSD is a prison.

The Multigenerational Ripple of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)