How do we make sense of the horrendous killing of five soldiers by another soldier. at a counseling center in Iraq?
The simple explanation is that soldiers' minds are broken down in basic training/boot camp and rebuilt into minds trained to kill fellow human beings in service of THE mission. However nothing trains them to confront the horror when you kill someone that looks more like your brother or your father or your mother or your sister or even your dog than they seem like the enemy. And even if they are your enemy before you kill them, when they lay dead at your hands they most certainly return to their human form.
Here's how the journey goes.
A young recruit volunteers for service from some small town with the chance to become a hero fighting for God and country and to go from anybody, if not nobody, to become a somebody, one of the Few, the Proud, the Marines. As if that's not being pumped up enough, they enter boot camp all juiced up with adrenaline and testosterone and unfocused energy. They start out loosie goosie with their three brains - their lower, reptile, "fight or flight" brain; middle, mammalian, emotional brain; upper, human, rational brain - bouncing loosely against each other like an old Ford pick up truck. Then they are broken down and built back up into a lean, clean Porsche of a "fighting machine." Think of the golfer John Daly who can the hit the ball a country mile and even win an occasional tournament, before he spins out of control and off the road. That's what uncontrolled and misdirected power looks like.
Boot camp then proceeds to break down those young recruit brains and reconfigure and rebolt their three brains into a Porsche that grabs onto a mission as sure as it can grab a curving rode. Think of Tiger Woods whose three brains are so strongly bolted together that every other golfer is daunted by his presence.
Then it happens. As hard wired and prepared as that brain is for war and to kill without flinching in service of THE mission is as unprepared as it is to confront the debasement of humanity that constitutes the horror of war. What happens to your brain when who you're told is the enemy or suicide bomber or sniper nest that you just killed or ran over with your humvee turns out to look more and more like your kid brother, your dad, your mom, your sister, your grandpa or even your dog. As awful as it is when those enemies looks so unthreatening after you see them dead, it's unfathomable when you discover they are innocent. Collateral damage is how you're told to view them. But in your heart, they're mom, dad, little bro', sis and fido.
At that point your welded brain begins to fragment. You go from a confident Porsche into a shaky jalopy, never telling your fellow soldiers how you've lost your nerve (maintaining the code of silence that keeps you from sharing the horror and shame between you) and are now just trying to make it through your tour. Only to be "stop lossed."
You've trained well enough to make it through your tour or even a subsequent one, but you're never the same again. That original trauma or repeated traumas pull your three brains apart to the point where it's all you can do to make it through the day. You're convinced to your very core that if another trauma happens, you won't make it through the next one. Instead you believe that your three brains will pull apart and your head will become a neurological Humpty Dumpty, smashed on the ground, where all the king's horses and all the king's men (and psychiatrists) won't be able to put you back together again.
You live your life constantly in the "fear of re-traumatization" because if it happens you're gone. Every symptom of PTSD is a way of mentally avoiding that re-traumatization - the drinking, the withdrawal, the depression (pulling away as far inside as you can), the anxiety/panic (feeling that you're on the brink of another trauma), the psychosis (believe in a different reality, any other is better), the increased startle and nightmares (lash ditch warning that alarm you into preparing yourself for the worst).
When that state of fear of re-traumatization reaches a panic level, your brains are on the brink of functionally coming apart you really are: "at your wits end" "take leave of your sense" "come unglued" and "see red." All of this makes causes your mid-brain to boil over and cause an amygdala hijack that makes it impossible to engage your upper human brain in a meaningful way. And it is in the prefrontal cortex of the upper brain that your mirror/empathy neurons reside. These are the neurons that may be responsible for empathy (and empathy is the greatest deterrent to hurting another human being). Trauma makes it difficult to access these empathy cells (interestingly dysfunctions in them are also seen as a possible site to explain autism and sociopathy).
What if we reconceptualized PTSD as simply the fear of re-traumatization and see all its symptoms as serving to protect you from one? And then what if we directed all treatment as more effective and less dysfunctional ways to deal with that fear? If we did, we might be able to make sense out of the hodgepodge that PTSD treatment has become and get traumatized (vs. disordered) soldiers the care they need.
READ ABOUT PTSD from the Inside Out
READ MORE at: PTSD for Dummies