This is Chapter Eight from Overcoming Post-Deployment Syndrome: A six step mission to health.

Understanding Emotions

In the last two chapters, we have established that mindfulness and continuum movement practices are important healing resources for you. They help you participate with and encourage nature’s restorative forces and prepare you for the healing powers of both traditional and nontraditional health care. When we become more skilled in the art of seeing and encouraging flow, our minds and bodies become healthier and our emotions become lubricated and move through us more easily. This is a good thing. It means we are more alive and are becoming more fully integrated. In some cases, emotions we didn’t even know we had may fl oat to the surface of our consciousness. In other cases, the true nature of the things that are affecting us becomes clearer. That’s what you want to happen. You want to learn what your emotions have to teach you, to figure out how to process these feelings, and then to move on. The final goal is to have everything that happens to us and everything we feel about it to be appropriate to the present moment we are in and to flow through us in that moment. Your feelings, thoughts, and sensations should be seen as moving through you and should be recognized as temporary. This understanding can give us better control over how we react to these feelings, how we behave when we experience them, and how we can act in a way that creates the life we want. On the other hand, if we allow our feelings to become more than simply transient occurrences, then those feelings will be too strong and they will just push us around. Even if you happen to have the strength to try and resist or ignore these feelings, then they will only be pushed down deeper into our system, ready to resurface again and again. They will weigh us down from within, just as too much weight can weigh us down from the outside, no matter how fancy a set of clothing we wear. All of these feelings can make us seem out of control or, just as bad, if we repress them, they can make us incapable of feeling anything at all. That’s hard on you and the people around you.

Being in war means you have been exposed to extreme situations that bring up correspondingly extreme emotions. There is a good probability that you have experienced many things that were too difficult, too painful, or too inappropriate to experience fully at that moment. If you lose a buddy in the middle of a battle or see some horrific things, you may not be able to fully deal with the rage and grief you feel at the time. If you had dealt with it, it would probably have put you on hold, or even paralyzed you to the point where you might not be around to be reading this now. So, you had to suck it up and drive on, just as you had to keep moving and staying on mission if you had a physical injury. Even if something didn’t happen directly to you or your friends, living with the anxiety and fear that something might happen at any minute, which is a common feeling when you’re in a battle zone, can be just as overwhelming. Actually, being in war also means that these strong emotions, like anger, hate, and rage, have been purposely ignited and even cultivated to get the job done. Although it may not be hard to stir up these feelings when the heat of battle is upon you, it is hard on your mind and body to continually be at this fever pitch and also hard to eventually rid itself of these extreme feelings. None of these emotions are easily shed when the job is over. So how can you begin this process?

The next step in your healing mission, getting a better handle on emotions, requires you to learn another set of skills. Unlike most of the exercises we’ve shown you up to this point, this one can only be done right with the help of experts. People who can partner with you to get this process started. Just like no matter how handy you may be around your car or your home, there are some things that just need to be kicked up to the specialists, so you don’t end up with a bigger problem than you started (or a bigger bill) — just think about the last time you messed with your plumbing or your transmission. You need to work with an expert to understand what makes you tick inside your head. That’s the work of psychotherapy and, to be done right, it should be done with a licensed psychologist.

You’ve already begun the process of preparing yourself for the next part of the mission. Two of the things we’ve already learned about, meditation and continuum movement, serve as a foundation for the work of psychotherapy. Learning how to better question yourself and look inward for answers, giving your body and mind the needed rest by improving sleep, putting healthy nutrition into your tank, exploring the healing power of movement, adding regular exercise to your routine, making sure you had the right clinicians helping you, and giving the right kinds of medicines a chance to work have all been necessary steps in recovery that you could be responsible for. All of these self-care tools have been necessary to prepare you for this next, harder step. Even if you’ve tried before and failed, armed with the tools and resources you’ve reviewed in the past several chapters, you can now more fully engage and benefit from therapy. Now it’s time to take advantage of all of the tools you have been equipped with so far and to partner with a professional to take you even further along the path. Even if your problems feel mostly or all physical — like pain, dizziness, or poor coordination — therapy is a vital step in recovery. As we said before, the body and the mind are so interwoven that it’s really quite impossible to separate them.