Love: The New PTSD Battlefield
For all the broken-hearted, still asking, "Why?"
Love: The New PTSD Battlefield
For all the broken-hearted, still asking, “Why?”
“He is an asshole” or “She is a narcissist” in my books just doesn’t cut it. To satisfy anything more than a raw desire for vengeance, genuine answers—to what has left our hearts in the cold—must involve more critical examination than simply calling someone a name.”
I am not a bestselling author, nor have I been featured in leading publications. I do not possess a master’s degree or PhD, and I highly suspect that most, if not all, Fortune 500 companies have never heard of me.
Yet helpful advice about love these days is almost as rare as innocence, so let your conscience (and not the crowd) judge the worth of my work—and by the end of this article, see if you don’t consider yourself lucky to have found me!
If you are suffering from love PTSD, there is a good chance you also have a thing for a good mystery, and if so, today, you’re in luck.
My Substack channel is a rare and valuable place where you might finally discover the answers to those questions about love that have haunted you…
Why People Who Are Genuinely in Love Can’t Stop Hurting Each Other
How (and Why) Men Have Been Psychologically Broken
What Women Must Do to Grow Up
Who is to Blame
No more long hours of desperate rumination tearing yourself apart, despairing at why your hurt feelings only anger the person who once made you so many loving promises:
He is an asshole” or “She is a narcissist” in my books just don’t cut it. To satisfy anything more than a raw desire for vengeance, genuine answers—to what has left our hearts in the cold—must involve more critical examination than simply calling someone a name.
How many ways can a relationship be torn apart? How many times can a heart mend itself after being broken?
As my father—the humble family doctor—liked to say, “An accurate diagnosis is more than 90% of the cure.”
So, first, let’s correctly identify the ailment.
PTSD = a particular type of trauma
I once met a woman—Jane—who had been raped and almost murdered by two nasty thugs on the side of the road.
When Jane’s car broke down in a dark laneway in the countryside, she made the—nearly fatal—mistake of getting out.
Despite the extensive physical and emotional wounds the ensuing attack left on her mind, body and spirit, Jane did not experience PTSD from this encounter.
Instead, her boyfriend Dave, sitting at home safe on the same night, later suffered severe PTSD from this episode, with his worldview and identity shattered.
What Causes PTSD?
The first time I ever heard PTSD described was in an audio file embedded in an article titled, ‘How PTSD Treatment Can Learn from Ancient Warrior Rituals’.
Speaking was Karen O’Donnell from Durham University, who talks about PTSD trauma being similar to an earthquake that rips through the landscape of a person’s inner world. The trauma ruptures a person’s sense of identity, altering their perception of time, beliefs, and ability to communicate.
‘A person’s belief system is at the core of the damage. When you think about trauma and belief, what this type of trauma does is pull belief completely apart. You can’t talk about what has happened to you because it just doesn’t make sense.’
Karen O’Donnell - How PTSD Treatment Can Learn from Ancient Warrior Rituals.
After helping raise two younger siblings—when Dave’s less responsible father died—Dave believed in himself as the world’s most responsible and protective son, brother, and boyfriend—someone who could—and always would—protect his loved ones from danger.
Yet when Jane called home on that fateful night, Dave could only listen to what was happening to Jane and shout down the phone line at the offenders.
Dave calling the police may indeed have saved Jane’s life—by cutting short the attack—but to him, this was of little consolation. In an isolated area, Jane’s attackers knew their terrain, where they could hide, and that anyone coming to intervene would take a long time to get there.
While—to this day—Jane suffers flashbacks and heightened anxiety, alongside her physical injuries—and many would claim this to be PTSD—every woman knows that you must beware of nasty thugs on the side of the road at night. Jane, additionally, already felt like a victim of life, so despite her hyper-sensitised limbic system, physical and emotional scars and new unwelcomed memories, her sense of identity and worldview remain intact.
On the contrary, Dave’s trauma destroyed his sense of identity and position in the world. And because he could not quickly revise the limits of his genuine ability to protect Jane, their relationship did not survive the damage.
Although separated, Dave still works to protect and provide for her, and I trust Dave will fully heal one day.
PTSD Symptoms
This story is not the stock standard Love PTSD scenario that I will detail in my following article, Why Men Are Broken. Instead, it serves as a valuable example—provided up front—to quickly demonstrate how more experienced PTSD experts delineate symptoms of trauma.
Has heartache left you confused and even feeling you no longer know who you are?
Do you feel an almost constant need for external reassurance and validation?
Have you lost your ability to communicate honestly?
Do you obsessively search for answers, sometimes in places that don’t make logical sense?
Do you suffer from free-floating generalised anxiety?
Do you struggle to know what it is that frightens you?
Do you feel something wrong with you that you can never get to the bottom of?
Do you find your mind constantly walking in circles and that moving forward in your relationships is almost impossible?
Do you feel that your happiness lies entirely in someone else’s hands?
Is It Me, or is it my Spouse?
Even more confusing, PTSD can cause us to lack empathy for other people, and so living with another person suffering in this way can also cause heartache.
Worse, so many people are suffering from PTSD—or the fragile mindsets that lead up to it—that the finger-pointing and name-calling are now entirely out of hand. Forget sharing your problems with your friends; I’m telling you now they are past caring.
The Importance of Our Worldview
Instead, the easiest path back to solid ground may be to reexamine your position within your worldview.
In Dave’s case, he is learning that it is okay to sometimes say no to his mother and siblings and prioritise the new goals he is establishing, and Jane is doing okay. Without Dave’s constant care, she is learning where to seek trustworthy support and to look out for herself better.
Dave’s codependent worldview is giving way to something more genuine and balanced.
Some Worldviews Are Made to be Shattered
On the narcissistic side, a person raised believing they are superior to others will come to live in what feels like a fragile bubble, reacting defensively and aggressively to any person—or simple piece of information—that does not support their inflated opinion of themselves.
Eventually, this person’s life will undoubtedly deliver an experience (or two) that completely shatters their unrealistic image of themselves. Unless a person is utterly oblivious to hurt or rejection, a superiority complex will, eventually, almost always cause PTSD.
Seen from another perspective, PTSD is the destruction of an unsustainable self-image.
In men, this is commonly known as a midlife crisis.
(If asked, I will post more on this crisis in a piece called The City of Failed Emperors, based on the brilliant novel The Never-Ending Story.)
If the narcissistic subject is lucky, this crisis will happen early, and although painful, they will successfully piece together a more humble and accurate worldview and self-image. This occurs in comedies where we laugh and watch as the protagonist faces their major flaw. As painful as this is for the leading actor, it always leads to a happy ending.
On the contrary, a story is considered a tragedy when nothing manages to alert the protagonist to their arrogance and insensitivity. Their lack of self-awareness does not bring them down until late in the story when they experience an irreconcilable crash and burn.
Better Education
The problem today is that our education system generally does not teach us how to explore our innate talents, flaws, ancestral legacy, and cultural alignments to gain a healthy sense of who we are and where we fit into our world.
Instead, we are taught what facts to believe to be considered part of the winning team.
School also teaches us to compete by working harder and being more intelligent to succeed.
Parents and teachers believe they are doing us a favour when they tell us we are prettier, more handsome, and in every way wiser and brighter than others. This when our elders are happy with us, but when they’re not, oh no! Suddenly, we are much worse than everyone else!
Yet, as The Desiderata teaches,
“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”
Instead of seeking information that will help us develop an understanding of life and a balanced and productive relationship with ourselves and the people around us, we are taught instead to be very cautious about what we are seen to believe so as not to end up part of ‘the losing team.’
All knowledge is judged as ‘educated’ or ‘uneducated’.
Yet, knowing yourself and your place in the world requires an inquisitive nature and the courage to explore new ideas. Given this, what will membership in this ‘superior’ team likely cost us? What parts of ourselves will we need to lock away to remain on the team of winners?
In my purview, it is much better to write to get to know myself and maybe only find a small audience than to write for the crowd and, in doing so, lose my soul.
Loving respect for just authority is important to our education, especially if this authority teaches us to think for ourselves, hopefully doing more than just handing down a list of prescribed ‘facts’.
Obedience alone can never genuinely protect us from the trials and sorrows we will encounter in life.
“A belief system based on rigid doctrine can be harmful and leave a person more prone to PTSD. For example, if you are told always ‘God works all things for the good of those who love him,’ and you are a woman who has experienced miscarriage after miscarriage (or the recurrent heartbreak of family conflict), how can you believe that to be true? “What does that mean about me, then?” this woman might ask, “Am I not a good person?... Does God not want good things for me?”’
Karen O’Donnell - How PTSD Treatment Can Learn from Ancient Warrior Rituals.
Instead, we must develop our emotional centre, learning what our emotions are signalling, even if this means our ego must sometimes take a hit.
Our loved ones can support us through this but should not try and protect us.
For instance, teaching our children that our peers are “only jealous” when they mock or exclude us teaches nothing about finding a comfortable and productive place in the world. The message is, “Don’t worry about rejection, connection, or balance; all that matters is that inside yourself, you know that you are superior.”
Instead, sometimes, we must dive deeper and determine what defence or connection requires us to sacrifice or change.
Perhaps we have been running our lives like a business headed towards bankruptcy, trading the wrong products to the wrong people at the wrong price.
A Path to Healing
Presumably a Christian, Karen O’Donnell suggests we give people overcoming PTSD a really wide space in which to reconstruct a new way of thinking about their faith. If you have experienced a trauma, you can’t go back and hold on to the things you always believed to be true—because they’ve been proven not to be true, or at least it seems that way.
The space needed includes much more than religious faith; it includes the space to reconstruct our faith in all aspects of our existence.
“The most important part of recovery is the construction of a narrative [a new way of looking at the world] that makes sense of what you’ve experienced. That narrative needs to be personal; it has to be written by the person who has experienced the trauma, it can’t be imposed by the official beliefs of a church (or community).
The other stage of recovery is being part of a witness community that believes what you have said,”
Karen O’Donnell - How PTSD Treatment Can Learn from Ancient Warrior Rituals.
This type of healing often involves an extended exploration period, allowing ourselves the time and intellectual freedom to review and reconsider things we once held sacred.
We must find the courage to switch off the public narcissistic talking heads who suggest that we must work tirelessly to create a majority, proselytising others to accept the latest social dogma. To heal, we should avoid all religious, political, or scientific evangelism. Instead, we should give ourselves liberty and find the courage to explore what truth genuinely makes sense of our experience.
Courage to Leave the Herd
Ideas change, new information emerges, and life moves on. If we want our later years to be filled with love and our lives to be rewarding and productive, feeling part of a superior group is not the great mindset it is made out to be. Groupthink is almost synonymous with NPD.
Yet how many of us are still impressed by the cocky and confident guy?
As a child, do you remember the kids at school who used a mocking tone to make themselves look cool and funny while making fun of less popular classmates? Did you know this behaviour is the most public face of The Narcissistic Personality?
No matter how common it has become to mock other people—to make oneself look clever—this is not how healthy or mature people treat each other.
Quoting highlights from a brilliant and inspiring online interview with Les Brown that we encourage you to watch in full:
“There are things that we pick up that we think are our choices, but they are programs we have been programmed by life to do… if you don’t have a program for your mind, then your mind is going to be programmed
and you’ll find yourself doing things—affected in you through marketing techniques and strategies—that will create a thirst within you…
You’ve got to get to know yourself; you want to spend time reading, and you have to transform your mindset and continuously upgrade your relationships…
Many people never achieve their goals because they have too many toxic, negative, energy-draining people in their lives…
You have to have goals outside of your comfort zone that will challenge you, because in order to do something you’ve never done, you’ve got to become someone you’ve never been…
you need to have a mentor who is experienced, who has been there and done that… because you can’t see the picture when you are in the frame… you’ve got to have someone who can see something in you that you can’t see, that can take you to a place within yourself that you can’t go by yourself… because life is an adventure and it’s going to be a challenge and you better get ready because you are going to fail your way to success! You’ll get slapped around by life, but don’t spend time complaining about it and telling everyone about it. Eighty per cent don’t care and twenty per cent glad it’s you…
You don’t know enough about yourself to become a cynic and so you have to challenge yourself to access the power that you have within you.”
Les Brown on Impact Theory:
“You have to read and take time to get to know yourself”: excellent and essential advice from Les Brown, ‘The Man!’
PTSD and War
Steve recently showed me a clip of returned veteran Bill Ehrhart talking about his experiences while on duty in Vietnam. While not about love, Ehrhart describes the experience of PTSD so clearly—along with its healing—that I feel compelled to share this clip. We will get to how the alienation he describes relates to love shortly.
Ehrhart talks about going to war, believing that he was on the side of good, expecting that the Vietnamese would view his actions as heroic and liberating.
Instead, what Bill Ehrhart experienced completely shattered his worldview.
Ehrhart says he did not have enough ‘cards in his deck’ to understand what he had experienced. He could only describe his time in Vietnam as “crazy”.
It took many years for him to gain the missing information needed to make sense of the situation and resolve his trauma.
When Love is the Battlefield
PTSD in war veterans was more common when people genuinely believed that wars are fought on high-minded principles and there are truly good guys and bad guys.
Since the advent of Wikileaks and other military whistle-blowers, most people have grown wiser and now understand that, shockingly, wars are fought purely for profit.
More often than PTSD, returning veterans’ depression these days is often based on the loneliness and loss of companionship and camaraderie they experience when returning home from active service. This may cause irreconcilable inner conflicts. War is hell—but civilian life too often nowadays—even in families—can be lonely and isolating. Compared to the teamwork and clear command lines these servicemen experience while on duty, civilian life can feel lonely, unstructured and unsatisfying.
How do these veterans explain the hole they feel when they return home to their friends and family?
The average person associates PTSD with war, but in our times, family life has become the more common PTSD battlefield.
Lonely, lost and broken-hearted families are everywhere.
This shouldn’t surprise us, given that the military spends billions on systems that encourage people to work together. At the same time, parents leave their children unengaged at home, staring at games and apps (paradoxically developed by the military).
Yet don’t blame fathers and mothers! For more on who is isolating and dividing us (and why), check out this series, which may offer your new personal narrative a few important missing pieces:
Who is to Blame?
If you continue digging on this channel, you will soon discover that many external forces have historically opposed family teamwork and comradery.
The truth is that family leadership requires genuine courage and training. Who in our neo-colonialist world is offering help with this?
Where do we start putting a new story together, and how can the heartache be healed and prevented from reoccurring?
Bill Ehrhart finally removed his shattered rose-coloured glasses by learning the United States was not promoting freedom and liberty but using war as a brutal and nasty means of commerce.
Do these ideas still shock you?
Accepting life’s unpopular, cold, and complex realities, including the deceit and betrayal we have suffered at the hands of our rulers, might upset standard social protocol, but while at first shocking, it can also be protective and healing.
The presenter in the podcast with Karen O’Donnell (that I have been quoting from) states,
“So it is easy to see how dogma can undermine a person’s ability to recover. There needs to be room for doubt, for questioning and reconstructing your belief system. This space is crucial in the three stages of recovery.”
Karen goes on to expand on these three stages;
‘The first is needing to be safe and not in a place where trauma is still occurring.
The second is having to construct a narrative that makes sense of what has happened to you
and, thirdly, a reconnection with society.’
Recovering from trauma, Karen says, is not a linear process;
‘We jump around from point to point—sometimes visiting each one of these ‘houses’ four times in an hour—through our period of recovery, putting our beliefs, identity, sense of time and ability to communicate back together, slowly and simultaneously.’ - Karen O’Donnell - How PTSD Treatment Can Learn from Ancient Warrior Rituals.
PTSD Expert Karen O’Donnell
https://theconversation.com/how-ptsd-treatment-can-learn-from-ancient-warrior-rituals-69589
Healing Takes Time
Finding the space to put a new belief system together in our highly specialised and judgemental world is difficult. A world where our doubts and fears—especially those in our hearts—are not encouraged to be spoken about in any real way. With everyone so divided, who dares to wear their heart on their sleeve?
We will continue to describe the trauma we believe has caused our collective love PTSD in the articles posted on this channel. Helping you find the missing pieces to create a new and more realistic worldview.
Together, coming to an understanding that love is created as a byproduct of valuing and trading our genuine usefulness as we joyfully balance our day-to-day exchanges with each other.
We must arrive together at goals worth working towards that everyone can contribute to and benefit each of us equally.
But to heal, first, we must create a safe space where trauma no longer occurs. To do this, please use the steps in Back From the Looking Glass and the Love Safety Net Workbook—in the paid subscribers area of this channel—to implement a zero-tolerance of abuse policy in your home.
I will try to find time to summarise these steps in the free section on this channel shortly. However, if you need them, don’t wait for me. A paid subscription here is the least expensive way we have ever offered access to these, our two best-selling titles.
Once tangible limits and consequences have been set on the abuse, next there must be room for doubt, questioning, and reconstructing our collective belief systems concerning love and families.
As Karen O’Donnell describes, to heal, we must construct a narrative that makes sense of what has happened to us and enables a reconnection with our families and society.
This channel aims to help you achieve this second goal by presenting a new and broader narrative that might explain what has happened to all of us.
The comments sections on articles behind this channel’s paywall are further offered as safe spaces for conversations that might encourage a new and better understanding.
Ultimately, we must reconstruct our narratives to the point where we can begin to share our stories, finding a community of people who will accept and validate our experience.
It took many years for me to gain the ‘cards’ I needed in ‘my deck’ to arrive at a solid and workable worldview. Finally, facing and addressing my fears helped heal my social anxiety. I was no longer laughing and smiling because I knew I should (aka masking) but because I had genuinely addressed my inner demons.
Genuine emotional healing may take years—simply because finding the information needed to understand and comprehend what one has experienced may take time.
The most important thing to understand is that this is a personal process.
Others may provide support while we work through our fears, but our life experiences are unique. Most importantly, we must learn that romantic love cannot heal us.
We should never expect another person to relieve our fears and insecurities.
I was guilty of this destructive misunderstanding, a faulty belief that resulted in me hurting many people.
For me, the social and sexual revolutions I grew up with in California in the 1970s conflated with other fear-inducing realities of my childhood.
These included my parents’ very differing worldviews and the fear I experienced with the Golden State Killer (then known as The East Side Rapist) active in our neighbourhood. As a child, there was no way I could comprehend the reality of the chaos that was circling around me.
It is heartening that Candace Owens has been giving so much publicity lately to Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and The Secret History of the Sixties.
The release of this book and the capture of The Golden State Killer a few years ago gave me some ‘cards’ I needed to finally heal.
Like the soldiers in Vietnam, growing up in California in the late sixties and seventies, I could only conclude that the world around me was crazy. While also being programmed by music and films that one fine day, romantic love would magically heal my insecurity and trauma.
Sadly, this faulty belief resulted in me hurting many people in Australia by the time I was old enough to start dating. A long distance in space and time from California, there was no way a romantic partner could help me resolve the terror and confusion I had experienced.
Maybe one day, I will feel safe enough to tell the story of how I believe I was personally targeted.
Self-love is never second best; give yourself the time to make sense of your story. Continue seeking, and all the clues you need will eventually become available. Life can be brutal and terrifying, but it is still an incredible mystery.
My next article when I get the time…