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FULL METAL LOTUS -- Returning California
soldiers
tap Buddhist meditation to overcome
war's psychological damage.
Some background on this...
http://www.vawatchdog.org/old%20newsflashes
%20AUG%2006/newsflash08-25-2006-5.htm
Story here...
http://www.laweekly.
com/news/news/full-metal-lotus/16799/
Story below:
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Full Metal Lotus
Returning California soldiers tap Buddhist meditation to overcome war’s
psychological damage
By NICK STREET
A BIG, PUSHY ALPHA MALE decided to air his dissatisfaction with his
cell-phone service provider as he stood across the counter from Jeremy
Williams, a wireless consultant with Sprint Nextel. To the outside
viewer, the testy exchange between the two men wouldn’t have looked
unusual, but Williams is a seven-year veteran of the Marine Corps with
three tours of duty in Iraq under his belt.
“I turned on killer mode,” says Williams, a 25-year-old Long Beach
native stationed at Camp Pendleton during his service in the corps. “I
wanted to beat him senseless. It would’ve taken one punch for me to kill
him.”
Williams says it took him about three hours — plus a beer, a few
cigarettes and a plate of hot wings — to calm down after his
confrontation with a fairly typical customer who nevertheless managed to
trigger his posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “That’s just what it’s
like dealing with PTSD in my daily life,” Williams says. “I’m very
uncomfortable about being a civilian.”
He’s not alone. According to testimony before the Senate Veterans’
Affairs Committee, which is reviewing legislation to fund suicide
prevention and treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder in vets
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, Veterans Affairs hospitals can
expect as many as 700,000 new cases in the next few years. It will be a
big challenge for Los Angeles, since L.A. County has the largest
concentration of vets in the nation, and the West Los Angeles Healthcare
Center is the largest VA hospital.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the Senate legislation is a
provision to support research into “best practices” for suicide
prevention and posttraumatic stress reduction. For troubled vets, those
two simple words open up a whole new world of possibilities, including
one field of therapy that might surprise people: meditation and other
“mindfulness” exercises.
The toll of war on the human psyche is nothing new. But the response of
mental-health workers to the latest generation of traumatized warriors
marks a novel turn in borrowing Eastern spiritual practices. The
National Institutes of Health is funding studies of soldiers in Atlanta,
Philadelphia and Boston involving mindfulness-based stress-reduction
techniques applied to posttraumatic stress disorder. In California,
psychologists and meditation teachers are developing similar strategies.
Jeremy Williams, the formerly camo-clad killing machine now manning a
counter at a Sprint Nextel, attended a retreat sponsored by the Coming
Home Project, learning skills that put him at the leading edge of the
trend. “A couple of times a week, I use relaxation techniques,” he says.
“I take some time to meditate by myself, just being aware of thoughts
and checking in with myself.” This from a warrior who counts the Iraq
invasion of 2003 and the Second Battle of Fallujah among the “high
points” of his career.
The retreat was designed by Joseph Bobrow, a meditation teacher and
psychologist who founded the Coming Home Project through San Francisco’s
Deep Streams Zen Institute in 2005. In the 1980s, Bobrow spent two
summers in Plum Village, a monastery in France where Vietnamese Zen
teacher Thich Nhat Hanh led retreats for Vietnam War vets. Fast-forward
to the war in Iraq. “I needed to do something to help me regulate my
feelings about the war,” Bobrow says. As soon as he announced the Coming
Home Project’s lineup of workshops, retreats and pro bono counseling
services, he started getting referrals from VA hospitals and military
medical personnel throughout California. “There’s a pretty big gap to
fill,” he says.
The stress-management techniques are carefully tailored to the needs of
each vet because “It’s difficult to use the body as the focus of
attention when the body has been injured,” he says. “In that case, the
emphasis is on breath counting or simply learning to ‘watch thoughts.’ ”
SOME VETS DO RESIST USING coping skills adapted from Buddhist practices,
mostly because the initial experience of mindfulness — and even the word
“mindfulness” itself — is so alien. For young vets used to video games
and pounding music — and the din of the battlefield — “Being still is
just too freaky,” Bobrow says.
But while some soldiers are leery of meditation, the Buddhist notion
that suffering is a shared experience can be a big help to their family
members. Spouses and children of soldiers are beginning to grasp that
vets aren’t the only ones affected by the trauma of war. “I realized I
have secondary PTSD,” says Tonia Sargent, whose husband, Ken, returned
to Camp Pendleton after he sustained a severe brain injury in Iraq. “I
get triggered because he gets triggered.”
Sargent, a wellness instructor, says that in the three years since her
husband returned to California, they and their two daughters have had to
deal with “emotional, mental and spiritual brokenness.” Yet, she says,
“The system’s not prepared to help us deal with what I call a permanent
bipolar situation. Every day has its highs and lows, but there’s never a
medium.”
At an event the Sargents attended in Houston honoring injured vets,
Sargent was shocked to see how blind the well-meaning organizers were to
the emotional issues faced by people like her and her husband. “Ken was
so overwhelmed by the crowds and the noise that he retreated to the
men’s room and started establishing a perimeter,” she says. The only
space for the vets to socialize between events was a hotel bar — “a
place for traumatized vets to hang out and self-medicate.”
Now, the Sargents are integrating elements of Buddhist spirituality into
a military and home life that also includes church groups and Bible
study. “The solution for us has to be a combination of Eastern and
Western ways of dealing with PTSD,” Sargent says. “Don’t just give me
pills! We need to learn to feel these emotions and let them surface.”
THE USE OF BARE-BONES MINDFULNESS practices to help traumatized Iraqi
vets and their families could lay the groundwork for a larger
reconsideration of the root causes of this kind of trauma. John Briere,
director of the psychological-trauma program at Los Angeles County-USC
Medical Center, says the medical study of mindfulness has changed the
way psychologists talk about suffering.
“Avoidance is our instinctive response to pain,” he says. “But if we’re
driven to avoid the feelings that hurt us, we’ll keep getting hurt. The
primary contribution of Buddhism to mental health has been to teach us
that to the extent that we’re not avoiding internal experience, we’ve
found the pathway out of suffering.”
Briere notes that just as posttraumatic stress disorder in vets
returning from Vietnam prompted the mental-health establishment to
acknowledge that “post-childhood events are important too,” studies of
veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to provide impetus for
change.
“The current event-based definition of trauma is an artificial
construct,” he argues. In fact, Briere believes that it is the overall
experience of war, and not the acute horror of seeing a buddy killed by
a roadside bomb, that creates lasting trauma in vets returning home to
Southern California. “It’s illogical to trace the kind of trauma we’re
seeing to a single experience,” he says. “It makes more sense to ask,
‘Did the war give you PTSD?’ ”
Briere’s iconoclastic notion, which is gaining quiet acceptance, helps
to explain a seemingly paradoxical fact: Many traumatized vets long to
return to war. That’s because the battlefield and the bunker are the
only places where the external world — filled with explosions, blood and
the threat of death — matches the tight bundle of fear and other
emotions inside.
“I’m still having nightmares and flashbacks,” says Jeremy Williams. “And
my wife sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night because I’m
patrolling the house in my sleep. But when I talk to friends going back
for their fourth tour or see a commercial for the Marine Corps, I just
feel like, ‘Give me my boots back, and my M-16, and let me go do my
thing.’ ”
With any luck, it will be his training in mindfulness — not cigarettes,
beer and his M-16 — that helps Williams adjust to life back home.
Nick Street is with News21, a Carnegie-Knight initiative in journalism
education at USC’s Annenberg School.
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Larry Scott --
