Though they didn’t realize it, I learned about rules of survival from soldiers themselves.

I am a psychotherapist with professional and personal experience dealing with war’s psychological aftermath, now called PTSD. I have an insider’s point of view of war’s effects on men because I’ve lived through private aspects of PTSD and have practiced psychotherapy with men and women who have warred and with their families since 1982.

There was a time war was the furthest thing from my mind. Now, I have learned to see things from the combatant’s view of the world and it has humbled me.

In the early 1980s I had an intimate relationship with a man who had warred in Viet Nam, and for almost twenty years have been married to a combat veteran from the same war. Though I once didn’t think it mattered, I grew up with a father who had been a combat correspondent in WWII in the Pacific. Because of these things, I have learned more about men and war trauma than any book could teach.

The first relationship woke me up. It set me on a course of finding out what was going on when startlingly unexplainable behaviors and moods began to emerge. The shock of not being able to pin down what I was seeing (it looked like so many other mental-health diagnoses) made me curious to know more. None of the common thinking skills and communication styles of my profession worked to make things better, and I began taking what I thought was his madness seriously.

By observing, listening, and noting connections between abruptly odd reactions, mood swings, and outbursts of troubling attitudes, and tying them to his scattered references to a war that I thought was long over, I began to see that his baffling behavior made perfect sense--if you were in war. Defensive patterns emerged when it came to certain kinds of interactions and events in daily life. It took some time to realize that he was hyper alert to being safe: emotionally, physically, and even mentally.

Connecting these dots gave me a picture of another kind of reality than the one I was used to - an inner landscape shaped by war and unconsciously governed by war’s harsh rules of survival. His reactions came from emotional pain. I was surprised because he went out of his way to act as if nothing was wrong. I had not known how deeply an otherwise ordinary man could suffer from warring.

That is how I discovered there was such a thing as war psychology and that war’s rules for surviving lasted into peacetime.

More than that, there is a basic wisdom to these rules. I later learned that other men who warred also had an uncanny sense deep in their gut about what worked and what didn’t to protect and maintain life. They had a hard time letting themselves know that because of the emotional pain that haunted them.

It turns out that the poison of war carries it’s own cure. Over time, I learned to work with the Rules to help men recover from warring and use the lessons of life they didn’t know they had learned.

Since then I’ve practiced psychotherapy with hundreds of men who have warred, and with their wives, girlfriends, children and, sometimes, with their parents. For all the differences in their personalities and backgrounds, these Survival Rules were the common thread connecting all the men who had warred. The most useful tool for all was learning that there were Survival Rules, where they came from, and the life-positive intentions behind them. They then took it from there.

In 1980 I received a MA in psychology from the California State University at Northridge. While co-founding a home care Hospice in 1977, an organization that is in existence to this day, I completed my thesis work on the psychological care of the dying and their families. This understanding of trauma in peacetime settings prepared me for realizing the contrasting issues that dying in war calls up. I’ve since been rid of the notion that all traumas are the same.

From 1985 to 1991 I did individual and group counseling with combatants at the Viet Nam Veterans of California organization in Santa Rosa, and continue seeing veterans in my private practice since that time.

In 1988, I traveled to the former Soviet Union with a small citizen diplomacy group of Viet Nam vets, psychologists, and the then professor Walter Capps (later a Congressman from Santa Barbara, California) at Gorbachov’s request, in order to prevent “another Viet Nam.” In Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, I held what appears to have been the first women’s group for those married to veterans returning from the war in Afghanistan. The ideas for treatment using the Rules of war survival were given to the practicing psychologists with whom I met in Moscow.

In addition to trauma recovery work, I focus on marriage, family, and personal issues, with life transitions, grief and loss, relationships difficulties and problems of modern society and, not the least, with issues of spirituality. Perhaps inevitably, I also focus on women’s concepts about their own nature.

My office is in the bay area of San Francisco, Ca.