STEPS TO HEALING

It’s not what happens to us, it’s what to do about it.

Socrates, that wily old philosopher, left us with the thought that: “Within every poison lies the cure.” The way to recovering from combat trauma is to use what it left you with: emotional pain, terrible knowledge, and the psychological Survival Rules that guided you then and still do now. 

The goal of recovering from doing war is to make all you have learned—painful or not—useful to your life in the present.

• Be absolutely honest with yourself about what is happening in your life. It doesn’t matter is you are recently home from war or have been home for years, take a good look at how you life is going.
• Recognize that you learned things about life and survival that most people usually don’t learn. If it’s a burden now, it is also your source of wisdom. 
• If you do and feel things you absolutely don’t know why they happen and they look like any of the PTSD symptoms, realize those essential Survival Rules are still at work.
• Start thinking it’s possible to use war’s Survival Rules to change the pain and to get the good you want in ways that are workable in your present life. This is different than believing that to readjust you have to hammer these basic lessons out of you.
• Learn to recognize times you have fear by noting the tensions in your body, and the times fear comes up.  It’s a good start on getting a handle on other reactions, like rage.
• Ask around for professional people helpers who are knowledgeable, practiced and competent with war issues and with trauma. Ask what their version of healing is, and how much experience they have with those who have been in combat. Whomever you choose, it should be someone you like, as well. 

WHEN YOU DO:

1. Know that the emotional bleeding should and can stop. Let out the emotional anguish and grief of your personal story of war with that person or person you have determined is safe enough to trust.
2. You will gain insight into yourself by going over your inner ground with this safe person. Your personal story carries a terrible knowledge that haunts you in ways that you could not have anticipated. 
3. Though you might cry all you want and gain as much insight into what made you act, think, and feel the way you did then and do now, you want to change what does not work. If, after all that, nothing in your behavior changes and you still do things that sabotage what you want and still keep hurting yourself and others, you will be down on yourself worse than before. The habits of pain continue and that’s what now needs attention. Healing alone is not enough.
4. The last—and usually missing—step is to transform war’s psychological Survival Rules that act like symptoms of PTSD now that you are home. This is possible by uncovering the life-giving intention and purpose behind each Rule and practicing the new way to use the Rules in peacetime. This is the final key to healing. Once you know the Survival Rules and can appreciate what their goal was you could choose to use them in helpful ways so that you can make your life work the way you want to now. It’s never too late. 

Honor the deep lessons of life and of survival. Be proud of the strengths that have come from all of it.