{"id":140406,"date":"2023-04-23T08:03:05","date_gmt":"2023-04-23T12:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=140406"},"modified":"2023-04-23T02:36:32","modified_gmt":"2023-04-23T06:36:32","slug":"veteran-not-victim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=140406","title":{"rendered":"Veteran Not Victim"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This is one in a series of short discussions of the myriad ways our society in general, and the mental health field in particular, fail to understand the veteran culture. That there is a such a thing as a \u201cVeteran Culture\u201d as something unique is itself a hotly contested when not summarily dismissed concept. <\/em><\/p>\n

I saw an advertisement for a t-shirt with this simple phrase, \u201cVeteran Not Victim\u201d and realized these three words encapsulated everything I believe. This concept, the assignation of victimhood, is arguably the source of much of the resistance to mental health treatment in the veteran world.<\/p>\n

Veterans are not victims of military service, or even the experience of war. That simple statement is abhorrent to many in the civilian world. How can someone train to kill others, then actually go do that and not be traumatized? They must be victims. Otherwise, they are monsters who need to be made aware of the errors of their thinking. Any resistance to this re-education is a sure sign they need to be medicated into a stupor, to make us all safe. I wish I weren\u2019t quoting, almost verbatim, what I\u2019ve been told by\u00a0 supposed professionals in my field.<\/p>\n

What these academically educated yet devoid of common sense individuals seem willfully incapable of understanding is why the concept of being a victim is so vociferously rejected by veterans. They view victimhood, with its implication of helplessness, as a virtue to be celebrated. There is simply no awareness that helplessness is something military training is intentionally designed to overcome. It sincerely fails to register that telling a warrior they are a victim, which they intend and would accept as a statement of empathetic support, is received as an insult. This contemptuous refusal to accept victimhood is taken as proof the veteran is dysfunctional in some fundamental way; they\u2019re in denial and so damaged they can\u2019t see how much help they truly need, the poor dears.<\/p>\n

A further proof of this assumption is the statistic that shows 30% of all veterans have challenges adjusting to civilian life post service. The fact that statistic comes from the agency whose budget relies on veterans being damaged, an agency primarily run and staffed by civilians, doesn\u2019t seem to call into question the validity of that number.<\/p>\n

The primary challenge, not to just that number but to the concept of post-service transition issues, is the definition of \u201cissues.\u201d Not being able to sleep in the weeks and months post service is natural and expected, and is the most common complaint of veterans.<\/p>\n

Sleep disturbances are not a result of being \u201cvictimized\u201d by the experience of military service; the victimization is the misunderstanding of the primary cause of sleep disturbances. It is the misperception, the assignation of \u201ca problem\u201d by the civilian world to which the warrior has returned that is the real “issue.”<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s break down a common example of what is actually happening with sleep disturbances post service.<\/p>\n

When a warrior returns home to their own comfy bed, the sleep, the peaceful, blissful rest they dreamed of while on deployment is often illusive. The civilian world, and the VA in particular, pathologizes and medicates this common experience. Their solution is a little white capsule full of zolpidem tartrate. The fact this little pill frequently does not work, or does not continue to work, is justification to re-categorize a simple sleep issue as a symptom of something bigger, of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Because every veteran, of course, has PTSD.<\/p>\n

Lack of sleep has cascading effects. Edginess. Irritability. Generalized anxiety. Depression. Over- or under-reactivity. Hypervigilance. Problems with concentration. Reckless \u2013 read careless \u2013 behavior. Increased use of substances, both legal and illegal.<\/p>\n

These are the symptoms anyone can expect with prolonged sleep deprivation, but if this person is a veteran, this same list is diagnosed as PTSD. How many salesmen for Acme Widgets go to the doctor because the stress of selling widgets, of making sales quotas, of making widgets sound anything other than deathly boring, has them tossing and turning all night, would get diagnosed with PTSD for that same list of symptoms?<\/p>\n

Here’s a novel thought. What if we addressed the most common complaint of returning warriors as the natural continuation of habits outside of their conscious awareness? Those habits were a part and parcel, a direct consequence of their duties. Of course, that would require a greater, or even a basic understanding of military service. Since that is unlikely to happen, or at least it has not happened yet, veterans must educate both themselves and the civilian world.<\/p>\n

On deployment, or even in a stateside barracks, the warrior knows when it is his turn in the rack, others who are similarly trained are on guard. Now he is at home and since he is the only one with that training, who is on guard? He is consciously aware there is little chance an RPG will crash through the bedroom ceiling, yet he can\u2019t shut down.<\/p>\n

In the dark, his mind wanders and wonders, and remembers his most recent experiences. Among those are memories darker than the night he is trying to get through. It is strange that now he is home, he thinks about those things more than he did in the immediate aftermath, while he was still there. The less he sleeps, the more he thinks. The more he thinks, the less he sleeps. Some of this is the natural processing, the re-ordering of memories that occurs for all of us each and every night. Much of this is a consequence of a change in routine of which he is unaware.<\/p>\n

His subconscious was accustomed to a bedtime ritual of sorts that included the transfer of duties to another who will remain awake, on guard, throughout the night. His subconscious is looking for activation of those routines, and without them, prods him to a state of alertness that interferes with sleep. Because we don\u2019t recognize those routines are missing, we search for problems, for causative agents. This is part of our survival mechanism, to give the most weight to negative thoughts; paying attention to danger is what keeps us alive.<\/p>\n

This inability to fall asleep or wake frequently during the night does not make our post service warrior a \u201cvictim\u201d of sleep issues. It is also not a reflection of his opinion of the wife\u2019s ability to remember to lock the doors and windows, something she has managed quite well, thank you, during his absence. It is a reaction playing out, without forethought and outside of awareness. The good news is, if this is something he is made aware of before habits are formed, the chances of it resolving in short order are high. If bad mental habits are formed, they can be dismantled. Even if many years have passed, addressing the fundamental quality and quantity of sleep significantly impacts that long list of secondary symptoms, even the thoughts and memories that became the dreaded nightly mental dance in the dark.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this resolution is not the reality for too many warriors who struggle with sleep post service. This is not a result of military service, something that must simply be endured because of a choice to put on this Nation\u2019s uniform. It is about too many having a vested interest in the brokenness of veterans and no interest in recognizing the veteran reality, the military experience, as fundamentally different from that of the civilian world.<\/p>\n

In this society everyone is a victim of something, and preferably of many things. If veterans are not victims, that would infer there is something unique and different, even of value in military service. That might even mean those who choose military service are not inferior, perish the thought. And too many in the civilian world, particularly those who have been educated beyond common sense, simply cannot allow that challenge to their thinking. Hence, veterans are and must be victims. Their livelihoods and their entire world view depend on the continuation of that narrative. In the world they deny exists, it is only the lives of veterans that are at stake.<\/p>\n

If you are struggling, reach out to a buddy or call 988 and press 1 if you want to identify as a veteran. If you are not struggling, reach out and be the buddy to someone else. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is one in a series of short discussions of the myriad ways our society in … Veteran Not Victim<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":670,"featured_media":140407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[478],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-none"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/670"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140408,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140406\/revisions\/140408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/140407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}