Women, Families and War

A SECONDARY STATE OF CATSTROPHE

The first place post war trauma shows up after war is in intimate relationships and in the family. Emotions, the very things that have to do with intimacy and family, are the time bomb in the psychology of men who have warred.

Without knowing what is going on, one of the most powerfully entrenched Survival Rules that comes from warring—DO NOT FEEL—is violated. It’s a violation that immediately but unconsciously triggers danger for a man who has warred. Once that happens all the defenses for staying alive physically and emotionally come into play. These magnificent defensive survival skills become psychological Survival Rules.

But who knows that there are any Rules, or that the peaceful ways of interacting and getting along have this kind of effect?

Post war trauma affects those of us who have never warred and who may never have given war a thought. The ripple effect of war is the most ignored and downplayed part of the whole story. The emotional and attitudinal effects are devastating to women, children, and even the ex-combatants who, deep inside, never again want to be the cause of pain to anyone the way they were in combat. This ripple effect is widespread. People don’t realize what hit them.

And, so, women’s psychology, the well being children and, eventually, of society is influenced by the inner war that comes home.

Inevitably, however, it starts with the women.

“I think I am going crazy.”

This is the first and most consistent thing women—living with men who have warred—say whenever they come into psychotherapy sessions.

When the problems are fresh women know their men have been in combat they talk about feeling crazy. They feel this way even when years and often decades have passed and the war has long been forgotten.

They feel this way when relationship problems and work issues come up, when moods and attitudes are not understandable, and after the common communications advice about getting along doesn’t work. They feel this way because they don’t think that a war in the past should have anything to do with the present, and because much of the time the problems don’t look like the more sensational descriptions of PTSD we’ve all heard about.

When women believe that love is the answer to everything, they get even more crazed. They persist in being patient and tolerant and nice only to find that their mate’s symptoms get worse. Women have no idea that the rules they assume are universal are very different from their mate’s Rules when the inner distress of having warred is up, or, making matters worse, that they are actually violating some of the Survival Rules their man is acting on.

In the world of combat trauma, to love means to die. Unlike what most of us think, loving violates the Survival Rule, DO NOT FEEL. Feelings like love put cracks in the emotional armor that was needed in combat. While love and comfort may be what men seek, it also makes them weak, and when they are weak they are vulnerable, and when they are vulnerable, well, they know they die. The conflict alone triggers more symptoms.

Women—and men—usually have no clue about this.

Women are left not knowing what to do.

Some relationship problems after warring can be:

• Sudden changes in mood and activity
• being cold and emotionally distant
• being one-way streets and always wanting their way
• being hyper critical of a mate’s and/or a child’s behavior
• wanting sex all the time, or with a lot of women, or not wanting sex at all
• being intolerant of emotions in others;
• becoming highly controlling
• being a workaholic
• disappearing for hours sometimes days at a time
• rarely responding to communication
• seeming indifferent and more

And it all can be expressed with a smile and a nice face as well as an angry one.

Emotional armoring in relationships does not make anyone feel good.

• Some women report being pushed or shoved by their mate if they get in their way or try to stop them from abruptly leaving. I have heard reports of men hitting women but I have not seen or heard this from any of my clients and believe it is rare.
• Sexual roughness can recreate the war’s violence in ways that titillate a woman or can scare her into hysteria.
• In the privacy of their homes and bedrooms, war trauma will be expressed in ways that baffle, hurt, and demoralize both the women living with men who have warred and the men themselves. Women are ashamed to talk about these things.

This armoring and subsequent re-enactment of war events can hold on for a long, long time until, eventually, it looks like it’s a natural part of a man’s personality.

ATTENTION: The danger to those who are intimate and open with a man (or a woman) who has warred is the risk of falling into a secondary state of catastrophe. This is an unconscious reaction to a combatant’s war trauma, however low keyed it may appear, that causes similar symptoms of delayed stress without ever experiencing combat.

It can be crazy making because you just don’t know what hit you. You may not even believe such a thing can happen.

People who are intimate with each other are vulnerable to each other’s energy. They can be touched by the “war within” and not know it. Some women have the same troubled dreams as their mate’s dreams; others report having symptoms of distress they have no known reason to have.

Because women believe they are responsible for holding relationships together, women get a little nuts wondering what they can do to make things right. When the usual relationships advice doesn’t work, they wonder what is wrong with them and begin falling apart.

In this secondary state of trauma women can express a range of emotional and behavioral disturbances similar to war’s PTSD, for example:

• They may cry easily, have trouble concentrating, have trouble making decisions, become jumpy, irritable, and listless, have small accidents, and find themselves lacking goals.
• They may become unusually defensive and fearful, and may give in to a mild paranoia that someone is out to get him or her. They, too, will become depressed, withdraw and isolate.
• They may have interrupted menses, headaches, aches and pains, and a host of physical problems.
• Women may become very angry and bitter and not realize it.
• Any prior traumas a woman may have had will become active again.

Women’s “job” is to take care of her family, and PTSD in the home influences how well that is done and if it can be done at all. Many families fall apart from this, and children suffer when they grow up in conditions of chronic tension, stress, anger, harshness, neglect, and erratic behavior from one or both parents.

Children growing up under the influence of PTSD patterns never know it. Their basic psychology, however, takes on the coloring of their parent’s emotional map.

Children are left with a legacy of war’s traumatic patterns always accept how things are even if they don’t like it and never know they have grown up under the influence of war’s Survival Rules. Their basic psychology, however, takes on the coloring of their parent’s emotional map. Later in life they may demonstrate symptoms of distress similar to that of war and never know it.

Never should women try being a therapist to their spouses. They can however, learn to respond in ways that have a therapeutic effect. You can’t talk a mate or person who has been in combat out of their Survival Rules system when, for any reason, the ex-combatant is feeling threatened or endangered.

The best thing spouses or mates can do is:

Learn how work within the Survival Rules when symptoms come up

And

Learn how to care for themselves when the symptoms become too much for them.

WOMEN IN COMBAT

Despite the differences in women and men’s biology they are not a different species. Women who have experienced combat have the same kind of PTSD as men. Women who have been nurses, cooks, journalists, Red Cross, or VSO helpers in war also suffer PTS and PTSD.

Women with combat PTSD are in an emotional pickle. They fall through all the cracks of caring for people after war.

• If people avoid thinking about war and it’s traumas, they also do not know what to make of women in combat because it goes against the gender stereotypes they have been taught.
• Some people think of them as whores or lesbians because they are hanging with a lot of men. What else would motivate women to be in or around war?
• Women who have warred also find themselves isolated from other women because other women can’t relate.
• They also are unable to share those same problems as men have with men just because they are not males.

Yet, women have always been involved in war, and though many may never be involved in battles, they come pretty close. They face the grim realities of blown away bodies, tension-wire stresses, men’s suffering, and the overwhelming emotions of loss, helplessness, and grief as they do their jobs.