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War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

by Edward Tick

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War and PTSD are on the public's mind as news stories regularly describe insurgency attacks in Iraq and paint grim portraits of the lives of returning soldiers afflicted with PTSD. These vets have recurrent nightmares and problems with intimacy, can't sustain jobs or relationships, and won't leave home, imagining "the enemy" is everywhere. Dr. Edward Tick has spent decades developing healing techniques so effective that clinicians, clergy, spiritual leaders, and veterans' organizations all over the country are studying them. This book, presented here in an audio version, shows that healing depends on our understanding of PTSD not as a mere stress disorder, but as a disorder of identity itself. In the terror of war, the very soul can flee, sometimes for life. Tick's methods draw on compelling case studies and ancient warrior traditions worldwide to restore the soul so that the veteran can truly come home to community, family, and self.… (more)
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This was an amazing book that combined the first person stories of veterans (mostly from the Vietnam War) with a psychologist's description of PTSD as a soul disorder rather than a "stress" disorder.

He describes the experience of going to war as an initiation -- one which in modern times is almost never successfully completed. As a result, those who go war undergo the first part -- the tearing down of the previous personality and the transformation into a soldier -- but seldom receive the support to integrate their experiences into becoming a mature warrior after the war: a person who has faced and dealt with the horrors of war and the ethical issues, who can release their fear and anger, and become an elder, a guardian, and an advocate against senseless violence.

Author Edward Tick uses myth and archetype -- the language of the soul -- as the language of this work, which resonates deeply with me. Our culture still responds to the ancient mythic power of war, but the way we wage war (mechanized, large scale, with more tolerance of "acceptable loss" and collateral damage to civilian targets than used to be the case) makes the fulfillment of those dimensions very difficult, and increases the soul wounding for those who participate in it.

Through individual counseling and the work of his organization "Soldiers Heart," Tick has been using these techniques successfully for more than 20 years to help veterans, their families, and communities, heal from the wounds of war.

Five stars not just for strong writing and a fascinating topic, but because I've joined Soldiers Heart as a result of reading it. ( )
  jsabrina | Jul 13, 2021 |
Post-traumatic stress disorders afflict almost all veterans of modern warfare. The impact is not just on the veterans, but their families, and their communities in which they work. Dr Tick urges recognition of the mythic dimensions of war to heal a disordered identity caused by war’s violence.

Ed Tick, Ph.D. is a clinical psychotherapist and worked with war veterans and survivors for over 25 years before writing this book. One of the Founders of PTSD recovery programs.

Did other cultures, past and present, have effective ways of helping their wounded veterans heal and reintegrate into their communities? The author examines them, and us.

In Part One, he carefully documents the mythic arena of war in different times and places, always relating to current contexts.

In Part II, he examines the relations between the myths and the realities of war, exposing the "soul wound" of a warrior's identity wasted in sacrifice, suffering, and witnessing Hell's particulars. The book presents hard, and surprising data, on the scale of war,

In Part III, "The Long Road Home", the healer sets the "wound" in its mythic and signed context, looking to the transformative role of the Soul in healing. The bridge to the "irrational" is invoked; if humans were rational, War would have ended long ago. Specifically, he describes and compares the rituals of purification and cleansing, and looks to using techniques such as story-telling, restitution, theatrical drama, dance, and initiation rites.

The final chapter is the author's heart-long plunge into "Religion" and spirituality--noting that "war and religion have been linked since the beginning of time". [269] War as a sacrificial altar, on which our children are slain, and our future scarred. [271] And as Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt as she witnessed the destruction of her Sodom, we are all petrified by terror and our tears solidify. To avoid this, we must reshape our identity from the experience of the fire.
The author presents Abraham as a helpful guide. During the war of the Nine Kings, Abraham avoids going to war for the sake of gaining land, power or resources. But when his nephew is taken captive, Abraham fights and frees him. Yet he refuses the booty, taking only what was necessary to replace goods lost in the fighting. [275] Deuteronomy 20 seeks to limit the destructiveness of war, millennia before the Geneva Conventions.

Of course, one of the reasons veterans suffer from PTSD is that they become witnesses and agents in the practice of war, where all humane limits are regularly surpassed. [276]

An example of the power of the author's vision of healing is the way he pulls in the ancient Greek tradition posing guidelines of reason against the mad pursuits of the Furies bent on punishment of the guilty. After King Agamemnon returned home from the Trojan War, his queen, Clytemnestra, murdered him. She took revenge for his disenfranchisement of her rule, and for his sacrifice of their daughter in exchange for favorable winds which took his fleet to war ten years earlier. In turn, Orestes their son, killed Clytemnestra. And he was pursued by the Furies--representing the inner powers of psychological torture. "They are the spirit of a soldier's heart, of what today, without the poetry that provides soul, we call PTSD". [276] As Orestes voiced it "These are no fancies of affliction. They are clear, and real; the bloodhounds of my mother's hate". [Citing Aeschylus, "Eumenides", 276] The author notes that it is Athena, the rational power, and without her spear, and not the Furies, who ultimately decides the fate of Orestes. Athena declares an end to "an eye for an eye", and orders Orestes to stand trial. The jury of citizens of Athens presided over the first described trial of Western civilization--establishing "a court for all time to come". Instead of the vengeance of the Furies, the fair and impartial adjudication process was set up, and Persuasion shall take "her sacred place". [277] This book is part of that mythic substitution of persuasion for conflict.

American veterans are going to Vietnam and Afghanistan to clear mines, build medical clinics, and help those orphaned and disabled by war. He concludes with a report of Viet Cong children bringing gifts to the PTSD crippled veterans who had volunteered to build a school for them in the jungle. Plug for "Veterans for Peace". Examples of successful reconciliation of the deepest moral and spiritual convictions we share. Heal the soldier, heal the planet. ( )
  keylawk | Dec 1, 2015 |
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder affect about 20 per cent of returning veterans. The author asserts that it must be treated as an identity disorder. He uses ancient methods from Greek, Native America, Vietnamese and other traditions to restore the soul so the veteran can return to normal life.
  PendleHillLibrary | Feb 28, 2014 |
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War and PTSD are on the public's mind as news stories regularly describe insurgency attacks in Iraq and paint grim portraits of the lives of returning soldiers afflicted with PTSD. These vets have recurrent nightmares and problems with intimacy, can't sustain jobs or relationships, and won't leave home, imagining "the enemy" is everywhere. Dr. Edward Tick has spent decades developing healing techniques so effective that clinicians, clergy, spiritual leaders, and veterans' organizations all over the country are studying them. This book, presented here in an audio version, shows that healing depends on our understanding of PTSD not as a mere stress disorder, but as a disorder of identity itself. In the terror of war, the very soul can flee, sometimes for life. Tick's methods draw on compelling case studies and ancient warrior traditions worldwide to restore the soul so that the veteran can truly come home to community, family, and self.

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