We know little about where trauma starts in the psyche. Yet, do we know where it leads? I was contemplating today – where does it end if it goes untreated and unaddressed?
There are so many veterans who come back home, and many of them unfortunately suffer terrible consequences of trauma, even suicide. What must a soul endure for it to come to this devastating conclusion? Why is dropping the physical body seen as the only relief?
What follows is raw and unpolished, but I give this idea a chance to live here.
Trauma in adults usually starts with a devastating event or a chain of events that have some kind of rupturing effect on the psyche. For military personnel, it is, of course, most often events connected to combat. However, many go through combat, come back, and don’t develop anything anywhere close to PTSD. There is something on the inside of a person, inside the psyche, that has to contribute to the collapse. External events don’t necessarily cause PTSD. External events land on us all the time. It is how an event lands within the psyche and the predisposition of a soul to take it one way or the other that triggers potential psychological difficulties.
What could that internal thing be, that gets distorted or ruptured, or damaged internally?
It may be plural, not singular, but what if I could nail one thing to start with?
And then I recalled this idea of ‘meaning’ from some spiritual material. Here is my speculation, possibly a hypothesis:
What if one of the major shifts that happen within a psyche during a harsh external event is a collapse of meaning? We live with various meanings of life, big or small, and they do matter for the soul. I would argue that a fabric of various meanings is what forms a layer or multiple layers of a soul, and even our entire individual cultural conditioning. If a reasonably deep and important meaning collapses, a soul takes a long time to reconcile.
When military folks sustain both – a tough external event and a subsequent collapse of some personal meaning – they come back fractured internally. And then this fracture of meaning stays there and takes resources and causes all sorts of problems within the psyche.
Then additional factors kick in: adjusting to civilian life conditions, various relationship difficulties, different routines, a different lifestyle, values, but also DIFFERENT MEANINGS.
And what if that one major meaning collapse now pulls in additional layers of meaning distortions during the military-to-civil life adjustments? It is like a snowball of collapse, where the soul is unable to reconcile and have peace with that one major event, and now it is facing various ongoing challenges to the meaning of life, relationships, job, health, camaraderie, routine, etc.?
It would be sort of a ‘compounding meaning-lessness’.
What if this collapse of meaning within the soul has a cumulative effect? At some point, life itself becomes meaningless because a person cannot recover their structure of meaning anymore?
The internal devastation from this collapse is difficult to put into words. It is gradual, so it is not easy to spot from the outside. In some cases where a ‘taboo’ topic is involved, like sexual or moral injury, it is difficult to seek help or find avenues to speak about it, which, in turn, exacerbates the condition.
This trajectory looks like doomsday for a soul from my perspective. The first event or series of initial events that cause trauma are already hard to reconcile. Then, all the additional layers of meaning distortions accumulate and take even more resources. And then, it is challenging to seek help due to cultural constraints or a particular injury stigma. I can imagine spiraling into pain and internal conflict that is often only internal. Oh, that must hurt.
I do acknowledge that there are many other factors internally and externally, but I am looking forward to uncovering, testing, and understanding this one. My intuition tells me there is a lot of wisdom to it. If only we could build a capability of identifying this trajectory clearly, tracing it, and somehow rehabilitating it, it would save many lives. I am on it.
There are so many veterans who come back home, and many of them unfortunately suffer terrible consequences of trauma, even suicide. What must a soul endure for it to come to this devastating conclusion? Why is dropping the physical body seen as the only relief?
What follows is raw and unpolished, but I give this idea a chance to live here.
Trauma in adults usually starts with a devastating event or a chain of events that have some kind of rupturing effect on the psyche. For military personnel, it is, of course, most often events connected to combat. However, many go through combat, come back, and don’t develop anything anywhere close to PTSD. There is something on the inside of a person, inside the psyche, that has to contribute to the collapse. External events don’t necessarily cause PTSD. External events land on us all the time. It is how an event lands within the psyche and the predisposition of a soul to take it one way or the other that triggers potential psychological difficulties.
What could that internal thing be, that gets distorted or ruptured, or damaged internally?
It may be plural, not singular, but what if I could nail one thing to start with?
And then I recalled this idea of ‘meaning’ from some spiritual material. Here is my speculation, possibly a hypothesis:
What if one of the major shifts that happen within a psyche during a harsh external event is a collapse of meaning? We live with various meanings of life, big or small, and they do matter for the soul. I would argue that a fabric of various meanings is what forms a layer or multiple layers of a soul, and even our entire individual cultural conditioning. If a reasonably deep and important meaning collapses, a soul takes a long time to reconcile.
When military folks sustain both – a tough external event and a subsequent collapse of some personal meaning – they come back fractured internally. And then this fracture of meaning stays there and takes resources and causes all sorts of problems within the psyche.
Then additional factors kick in: adjusting to civilian life conditions, various relationship difficulties, different routines, a different lifestyle, values, but also DIFFERENT MEANINGS.
And what if that one major meaning collapse now pulls in additional layers of meaning distortions during the military-to-civil life adjustments? It is like a snowball of collapse, where the soul is unable to reconcile and have peace with that one major event, and now it is facing various ongoing challenges to the meaning of life, relationships, job, health, camaraderie, routine, etc.?
It would be sort of a ‘compounding meaning-lessness’.
What if this collapse of meaning within the soul has a cumulative effect? At some point, life itself becomes meaningless because a person cannot recover their structure of meaning anymore?
The internal devastation from this collapse is difficult to put into words. It is gradual, so it is not easy to spot from the outside. In some cases where a ‘taboo’ topic is involved, like sexual or moral injury, it is difficult to seek help or find avenues to speak about it, which, in turn, exacerbates the condition.
This trajectory looks like doomsday for a soul from my perspective. The first event or series of initial events that cause trauma are already hard to reconcile. Then, all the additional layers of meaning distortions accumulate and take even more resources. And then, it is challenging to seek help due to cultural constraints or a particular injury stigma. I can imagine spiraling into pain and internal conflict that is often only internal. Oh, that must hurt.
I do acknowledge that there are many other factors internally and externally, but I am looking forward to uncovering, testing, and understanding this one. My intuition tells me there is a lot of wisdom to it. If only we could build a capability of identifying this trajectory clearly, tracing it, and somehow rehabilitating it, it would save many lives. I am on it.