Hey 1016, no doubt you will do well deployed because that's what you do, as my wife put it years ago. It's coming home and learning to live with the intrusive thoughts and feelings in a civilian environment that's the challenge. I deployed to Desert Storm already diagnosed with PTSD. Hypervigilence is a good thing in the combat zone, just not back home. Most of our symptoms are things that help us survive in the combat zone, but seem to get us in trouble when we come home. Mindfulness, awareness of our symptoms and how the intense intrusive feelings generate behavior is a good place to start. The goal is to be sufficiently aware of the intrusive thoughts and feelings (and how they are triggered) that we become able to chose to act on them when appropriate (in the combat zone) or not (back home). At home we need to be very aware that when the intense intrusive thoughts suddenly explode in our current situation, we need to not act on them and use self-talk to make ourselves act appropriately in our current situation even though everything feels wrong, buying ourselves time for the intrusive thoughts and feelings to pass harmlessly.
They do pass. And when they pass without generating inappropriate behavior in our current situation it feels good, and life feels good.
Ted
