Sometimes Feel Like Having Been In A War (though I Have Not)

[Friday]

Ditto @Kaia. No rational human being wants those things to happen. On the scale of real fears versus silly fears, rape & torture & war are some of the most real fears out there. It's ugly. And it's real. And it happens. It's happening, right now, in places all over the world.

One of the big differences though, between imagined fears, and fears you live through? Is that it's very different from what one imagines. It's both worse, and better, and completely different from how you imagined it... All in one fell swoop.

I learned to laugh, really and truly laugh, when I was being tortured the first time. Not because I wasn't screaming until I had no voice. Not because I wasn't begging for someone to just f*cking kill me, already. Not because I wasn't trying to choke myself (did you know most people can't? I tried to break my own neck, tried to choke myself out/ crush my larynx... A lot of us tried, come to find, and none of us could. Some can, maybe. Guess you don't talk to them, later. But the moment the pressure got hard enough, my arms fell limp. Or shot out from my body. I was so f*cking pissed. I couldn't break my neck. I couldn't choke myself. I tried, and tried, and tried. It wasn't mental. Death would have been lovely. I wanted it. Whole body wanted to die, was at peace with dying.). I wasn't laughing to be strong, or to infuriate my captors (you ever get taken? You scream. You scream before it hurts. Because they won't stop until they want to. And they want screams. Sometimes, it can make things end faster. Sometimes not. But any sometime helps). Not even because I was hysterical. Laughter & madness are pals. This wasn't that. I was laughing because that was the day people stopped being able to "make" be angry, afraid, scared, etc.

Does this mean I'm grateful for the experience? Or think it was a good thing? f*ck no. Some people make the mistake of thinking terrible things are "good" for people. I do have some terrible things I'm grateful for, because they made later -worse- things more manageable... I'm grateful I learned to laugh. I'm grateful I learned that no one has complete power over me. Man is never truly free, until one has the freedom of their own mind & heart.

However, those lessons could have been learned elsewhere. Most people learn them elsewhere. The ends don't justify the means in this sort of bullshit. Being tortured wasnt "good" for me. Even if I managed to take a good piece from it. That doesn't justify it. That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it good.

But the inverse is true as well. As yucky as a lot of this stuff is? It's also better & different than our fears imagine.

If what you fear most happened right now? You'd find it a very different thing that what you fear. Some parts will be worse. Some parts will be better. All of it would be different.

 

[joeylittle]

Take that example of the old woman I wrote about who was raped by russian soldiers - just like every women in her village. Why did this happen? Well because soldiers from my country had raped their women... back then in the 1940s that was.
This story is just so sad... and makes me feel sick... and at the same time ashamed to come from such a country....Now this stories have become ingrained in my memory AS IF they happened to me... like I can see the russian soldiers who hold down the women and rape them at gunpoint and hear their screams...

@Lemontree, I spent some time a few years back doing research on your country and the cumulative effect of world wars I and II (and the cold war) on the collective psyche. A number of very good books are written filled with first-person accounts from both then and now. It is not hard to make a clear case for there being a very sharp sense of collective guilt, trauma, and loss. Really, those wars were not that many generations ago.

There is also a common theme of confusion and anxiety - how it must never be allowed to happen again, but there were so many people (the vast majority, by many accounts) who did not grasp what was happening for quite a few years. This confusion gets passed down, in stories and in families, same as the guilt, the trauma, the loss, the fear.

I cannot understand this at all from my perspective - it's something I can barely fathom. There are things my country has done that I feel shame about, real shame, and grief - but those are incidents. For your country, we are talking about a series of events that actually went on for (in all fairness) three quarters of a century. It's a lot.

Your country isn't the only one to suffer collective guilt, I'm sure. I just am most familiar with it from research. And I'm not saying that it's wrong, or right, or deserved, or not - nothing political in this statement (as you requested). Only that, from a human perspective, the consequences were catastrophic and long-lasting.

 

[Deleted member 28812]

@LemontreeThis confusion gets passed down, in stories and in families, same as the guilt, the trauma, the loss, the fear.

As for me... In my family they did not talk much about this. They did not want to burden the younger generation. I used to be blissfully ignorant of that kind of things. Of course I knew about them from my history class but I did not feel there was much of a connection with my personal life - until two things happened: 1) I moved to another part of the country - one that has been free for much longer... and suddenly I felt so not-normal. So very different from them, so much older.
2) I started asking people about that kind of things because I wanted to understand my husband better. They asked me if I really wanted to hear and I said "Yes" and that was stupid.
I realized that those things had happened to people I know and what it must have been like. Well, often I did know X and Y and Z happened to a family member, but I did not know what it was like, because they never talked about it. I never asked. It was better like this.

Anyway I want to snatch out of it and actually I am searching for advice on this.

 

[Ronin]

I'm bit confused as to what sort of advice you seem to need, though?
How to get something you've heard out of your head?
How to cope with a change between oblivious & safe world x a world that seems to be full of danger, always has been?
How to prevent XYZ things and spot issues before they escalate?
Something else?

 

[Deleted member 28812]

How to get the pictures of that our of my head, feel less watchful and have more trust in the world being a safe place.

 

[Ronin]

Well, you can try replacing them by exposing yourself to something super fluffy, and good news, and things like that. That's still up to you to find things that don't distress you and that calm you.
A world being the place where only good things happen... to anybody... is unrealistic expectation that's bound to fail in the real world. It just doesn't work, anywhere. (Come on, fairytales start with informing about it, across cultures. Nice and kind princess is abused by her family and then disappears in fourty different variants.)

 

[holdenmonty]

@Lemontree it's a very real thing for you to pick up on their stories and with your husband having PTSD there are cases where the spouse ends up having the exact same symptoms as their spouse. But to get to the real answer of your question is the thing that has helped me the most is something my first sergeant shared with me who is a medic and has deployed as a medic and has seen some really nasty stuff. She told me that you just have to remember that it is just a memory of the past and it is in the past and not to judge yourself for having these memories. Also I tend to do stuff to ground myself when I have very vivid memories I guess you could call them flashbacks but I like to call them vivid memories but anyway. I remind myself where I am and what the date is and what year it is.

 

[Deleted member 28812]

@holdenmonty: I heard about this. It's called "secondary PTSD" and scares me.

http://www.familyofavet.com/secondary_ptsd.html

I don't want to end up with that. Thanks for your tipps, guys. Basically you are right @holdenmonty. Why worry about the past. You cannot change it anyway, can you?

 

[holdenmonty]

I have heard about secondary ptsd and it scares me to I really don't want my wife or my boys to end up getting it. I think subconsciously that is why I try to hide my symptoms from them so they don't pick them up. You can't change the past just try to learn from it to make your future better

 

[Deleted member 28812]

I adressed the topic of "secondary PTSD" the other thread :)