Getting In Touch With My History -usmc

[DuaneGoehring]

To start, I served as a Marine mortorman and gunner in Afghanistan for a tour before getting purple hearted out of service. Since then, I have been struggling with alcoholism, weed addiction, PTSD, self harm and two serious suicide attempts. This stems from an experience of seeing a child molested and not being able to do anything about it due to our ROE. Beyond that, I had the unfortunate experience of taking a life and sadistically saying "InshaAllah" when the guy begged me for his life. This has caused recurrent flashbacks and frequent nightmares. What's worse; I am engaged to a woman who is also living with PTSD and with my temper and calous nature at times I find it very hard to be empathetic. She loves me unconditionally and I want nothing more than for our relationship to last. We are both strong individuals and love each other very much. How can I work on myself while being open to her feelings and sympathetic to her needs at the same time? I would love any advice with regard to this, from a vet or not.

 

[Sighs]

Welcome to the forum and thank you for your service.

Are you aware of the sister site mycombatptsd.com? - vets only - not even us supporting vets can be on there - its a space for you guys to talk to each other without anyone eavesdropping.

My vet quotes an American who said "You join up and nothing changes. You do the training and nothing changes. You deploy and nothing changes. Then one day someone tries to kill you and you kill him instead. And nothing is ever the same again."

Are you in treatment? Is your partner?