What Serves Us
Susan Barrera
My husband was an angry man. He came back from his military service filled with rage and anger. He spent over two years as an inpatient at the VA Hospital on his return home, and had a lot of trauma surrounding the hospital. Knowing he had an appointment coming up would throw him into a bad mood for at least a week before and a week after. If someone there said the wrong thing to him, he would get into a fight with them.
He would get into a fight at the least provocation. He would lose control and put his fist through a wall, or smash something. If someone would cut him off in traffic, he would stop and get into a fight with them, and would be in a foul mood and depressed for days to weeks after. The flashbacks and nightmares kept his adrenaline at a constant high level. He felt out of control, and he isolated himself as much as possible to keep himself away from people and situations which would provoke him. He was in such emotional torment that he was frequently suicidal. Many veterans with combat-related PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) behave this way.
Living with someone who is like a powder-keg with a very short fuse can be very traumatic to their family. It is also very traumatic to the individual who is suffering from PTSD. They feel as though they can’t help themselves; that’s the way they are. And in a way that’s true. That may be the way we are today, but we can change; and if someone who is as bad off as my husband was, can change; I believe just about anyone can.
Spouses, please remember: you cannot have a discussion with someone who is in the middle of a rage. It is the same dynamic as trying to reason with a two-year-old who is having a temper tantrum: they can’t hear you. The trick is to choose your moments. Granted, with some of them and at some times, those relatively rational moments are few and far between. But that is the only way to communicate. You have to wait until they can hear you. Trying to justify your (to any normal person) harmless actions or words while they are in a rage only serves to throw gas into the flame. Trying to make them see reason while they are in a rage is a colossal waste of time and only serves to make things worse. Trying to get them to step back and take a look at their actions has not, in my experience been at all successful; not until they can get to a relatively calm place. A problem with that is that many of them frequently don’t take their meds regularly and even if they do, it is a long hard task to get them on the ones that are best for that individual. So their moods will go up and down like the river.
But one day, I got my man at the right time. I mentioned how he had been in a fairly good mood until someone had ticked him off; that a book I had been reading talked about how we give away our power. I pointed out to my husband that he had been ok, then the driver did whatever he did, and then Adam was angry and upset for the rest of the day. He gave that person the power to control his mood. He let that person yank his chain; make him jump and react. When my husband gave that some thought, he didn’t like the idea at all. He is one of those guys who hates being told what to do, and the fact that he was letting someone else control him didn’t set well with him.
He started to change his thinking, little by little: to pay attention to when he was reacting to someone else’s actions. He occasionally came up with an excuse for the other drivers’ poor driving. Maybe he had a family emergency and was desperate to get home Maybe that driver had stomach flu or something, and needed to get to a bathroom in a hurry. He came up with all sorts of creative reasons why that person might have been driving that way; none of which had anything to do with him. He was able, eventually, to catch himself when he would get an angry thought about someone else’s behavior; and talk himself out of it. I was so proud of him when he started to be able to come home and tell me about a situation in which he reacted in a different way than he previously would have. He wasn’t able to catch himself all the time at first, but as time goes on; he is able to do it more and more.
In other words, his previous actions and reactions, when he took a good hard look at them, no longer served him. We never do anything that doesn’t serve us at some level. We stop doing what doesn’t work for us. Everything that occurs is a matter of choice or reaction. Will we choose how to act; to do and be exactly what we want, or will we go through life just reacting to the actions of others and situations around us?
I grew up believing in fate and destiny; that made me feel helpless and hopeless, as though there was no such thing as choice. What happens happens; if I am ill, there is nothing I can do about it. Eventually I learned that there is no such thing as destiny or fate. Our thinking determines our choices, which create our situations. Change how we think: we see other choices and make better ones and our situations improve. I learned to take responsibility for my own life, my health and my issues and to do something about them, and my life changed. We can change our lives for the better if we so choose. We have to catch ourselves when we start in with that “victim” mentality and make different, better choices. In my experience it takes two things to create change in our lives: we have to desperately want to change, and we have to be willing to do the hard stuff it takes to heal our traumas and to change our thinking. I know you are all made of tough stuff. You can change your life to a better one. Will you?
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