Ruth Clare from the veteran family webinar - I'm here to chat with you!

Thank you for sharing @Appleblossom . I'll have a look.

In answer to the question

I am separated nearly 2 years, and there's still a lot of trauma that I deal with. I walked on egg shells, endured violence and had to deal with my partners anxiety and deep depression until I could no longer stay with them. I am finally seeing a new me come to the surface where I can finally express myself and I am excited but also very cautions and still withdraw to isolation. My question is why do I still have the gut wrenching feeling that I abandoned him? What ways can I overcome this and find that confidence not only for myself but for my child as well?

I am so sorry to hear you lived through this. It sounds like you have all had a really tough time.

In relation to your question, "why do I still have the gut wrenching feeling that I abandoned him?" For a start, I think when you have loved someone and your relationship included a caretaking role, it is natural to feel a lingering sense of responsibility for the other person.

When my mum became an alcoholic when I was eleven, I did everything I could to buoy her up, letting her know how important she was to me and how much I loved her. I went out of my way not to be a burden. I never told her anything about my struggles or asked for help or money.

Once I moved out of home, I called her all the time, having hour-long conversations. I read books on alcoholism and depression and played the role of therapist to try to help her. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that it dawned on me that she never called me or asked me about myself. I also came to realise that despite my best efforts, Mum hadn’t stopped drinking and her feelings of self loathing hadn’t improved.

One of the most difficult things I have had to accept is that, much as you might like it to be different, you can’t do the healing work for others or make them change. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. They have to make the choice for themselves.

But the intensity of the word “gut-wrenching” in your question makes me wonder if your feelings might go deeper than that. Do you know anything about the fawn response? While a lot of people know about fight, flight and freeze, less people are aware of the fawn response.

Fawning is a strategy where you attempt to appease or placate to avoid harm. The fawn response is a primary nervous system response in many people who are exposed to repeated, ongoing and interpersonal trauma. Fawning happens when the biggest survival threat isn’t a moment in time, but a person who is unreliable, unpredictable, critical, rejecting or abusive.

In fawn mode you disconnect from your own wants and needs and constantly adapt to what others need from you. You scan faces and gestures and listen intensely to tones of voices, always on the lookout for cues that people are displeased with you. You take on responsibilities for other people’s problems, feelings and responses, people pleasing, putting up with bad behaviour, not considering the toll it is taking, because the way you feel safe is to avoid conflict of any sort, even if it comes at a cost to yourself.

But I think once you have kids, things change. Hopefully, at least. You see things differently. At least I did. You realise the things you may have been willing to put up with when it was just you, you are not willing to inflict on them. Or you simply don't have the time or energy you once did.

You mention “a new me coming to the surface where I can finally express myself and I am excited”. Excitement is a great sign that your energy is returning. I wonder if, two years into your separation, your nervous system might be beginning to feel safe? You also say you are still “very cautious” and “withdraw to isolation”.

I think this is pretty normal (at least I strongly identify with this pattern!). Your nervous system is always trying to protect you. When you have taken the risk of being yourself, you are stepping outside of your comfort zone. This often brings up fears that make you want to hide. The process of rebuilding self-trust and forging relationships where you feel truly safe to be who you really are, takes time.

One of the things people breaking out of a fawn response need to learn is how to set boundaries. One practice I have found really helpful for boundary setting and giving yourself permission to have needs of your own is The Boundary Bubble visualisation. It goes like this...

Imagine you are in your own bubble of light and the person you need to set a boundary with is in their own bubble of light. Picture their needs and wants coming at you like cords of light, bouncing off your bubble. Send yourself light and cut the cords of light, then send them light to their bubble, saying in your mind, ‘I wish you the best but I am caring for me right now.’

I have included quite a lot of information on how to shift out of the fawn response in my book Beyond Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn if you want to read more, but continually coming back to your body, recognising that you have the right to take up space and have thoughts, feelings and desires of your own, is a great place to start. Also, regularly reminding yourself that there is only so much of yourself to go around and you are doing the best you can.

I think taking this approach will ultimately help with your confidence too. I hope some of this is helpful. Very best of luck to you 🧡.

Thanks so much for your kind words @Appleblossom and for sharing more of your story. My healing in my dad's relationship was mainly done with spirit, not in person as well. It's bizarre to realise that I have lived longer without him than when he was alive.

I think you are likely right that your dad's war PTSD triggered his earlier CPTSD, and also the possibility his pneuomonia was related to medication. He was very young for there not to have additional factors of some sort involved.

Like you, I take diagnoses with a grain of salt. I feel like they are a good short-hand sometimes, and they can be helpful in giving a person a new frame of reference. They can also help people have compassion for people who think, react or behave differently (well, in an ideal world!). But I think a lot of therapists put people in boxes too quickly. Also, Bessel van der Kolk thinks the DSM is just a big money-making exercise and I think he's great, so I am with Bessel.

Having said that, it has been really helpful to my understanding of myself to know more about the way trauma and neurodivergence impacts the brain and body, but I think we are kidding ourselves if we think we really know how it all works. We have a long way to go!

It has been really nice getting to know more about your family story. Thanks so much for your openness and honesty 🧡

In answer to the question:

Could you please comment on healthcare providers' skills and knowledge (their health literacy level) when consulting with veterans or their family members?

I think there is quite a way to go on this. Best trauma-informed practice means that the procedures and environments used by consultants would be adapted to accommodate the different needs/ challenges of those who have been exposed to prior traumatic experiences. Trauma-informed organisations support safety, healing, empowerment and recovery while also aiming to reduce practices that may cause stress. I don’t see this happening in many places.

Systems often seem to be set up to make it hard to get the help you need. If a person becomes frustrated by this, they are often labelled as the problem. When people advocate for change, or try to explain why a system is difficult for them to navigate, or the specific issues their trauma history creates that makes something hard, this feedback often falls on deaf ears.

Sometimes you just don’t have the energy to do any of this self-advocacy. It all becomes too hard and you feel like there is nobody who cares about you and no help available to you. This is when it gets dangerous because then people can simply give up and fail to get the help they need.

I think veteran and veteran family support services should be co-created with people with lived experience and that there should be broader awareness and education across the board. But the webinar I did with Sane is the first I have heard of focusing specifically on families of veterans. My memoir ENEMY is the first in the world that even talks about children of veterans as a group (as far as I can tell).

People don’t think specifically about the experiences of veteran families because we have never really even spoken about it before. There are a lot of assumptions made that there is a "wife" (in inverted commas because there are many female veterans too!) to do the work of helping a veteran. This is a huge, unrecognised burden and not a sustainable model, especially given the rising cost of living and increasing need for both partners to be working.

We really do have a long way to go, but I think if we keep talking about it, change can happen in this space.