War and the Soul: A Pagan ReView

War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by Edward Tick, Ph.D. — A Pagan ReView

As a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), I’m always interested in people’s spiritual approaches to healing in this field. Edward Tick, from the title of the book onward, tackles PTSD as a spiritual problem of moral trauma, soul-loss and soul-wounding. His approach is Jungian and New Age, with all the advantages and flaws inherent in those methods. His language is monist and he treats all spiritual entities as archetypes, which is not a problem if one takes spirituality as a psychological complex rather than, as many Pagans do, a complex series of relationships with deities, ancestors, or other spiritual beings.

Tick postulates the problem of PTSD as a failed warrior initiation. This failure is not entirely the fault of the veteran but, he says, of society as a whole. It is the fault of the technological changes in warfare that have stripped war of its mythologized meanings and resonances. In treating PTSD as the potential result of a warrior initiation, he specifically positions it as the result of a male adulthood rite gone wrong. Of course, this framing ignores women’s service entirely. In framing PTSD as a “failure” he, perhaps inadvertently, places blame on men and women who are already struggling with issues of responsibility, reintegration, and physical and emotional traumas. In his own words:

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a constellation of fixated experience, delayed growth, devastated character, interrupted initiation, and unsupported recovery. Many veterans who cannot get on with life are boy-men stuck in the psychic war zone, lost in an incomplete and horrific rite of passage. … Many of their symptoms – lack of impulse control, confused sexuality, drug and alcohol abuse, intimacy and employment problems, emotional explosiveness, mistrust of authority, alienation – characterize adolescence in our culture. Many veterans with PTSD are, psychically, shell-shocked teenagers unable to enter adulthood with its demands and rules.

(pp. 107-108)

In one sense, some of this is true. PTSD is certainly aggravated by “unsupported recovery,” though the Veterans Administration is slowly beginning to deal with this problem. Unfortunately, even now, a great number of veterans are deliberately misdiagnosed with underlying “personality disorders” and brushed off so that the government, which has damaged us in the first place, is absolved of the expense of treatment, pensions, and rehabilitation. Civilian society has a long way to go in dealing with its damaged veterans and rarely even knows where to start. One important thing Tick ignores is the different patterns that women’s PTSD often takes, which include the turning of anger and violence inward to oneself. This is particularly prevalent in women suffering military sexual trauma (MST), who usually have further levels of difficulty in even believing they deserve help, or that they can get it if they do go seeking it. Stories of women blamed for being raped or assaulted are familiar enough to be a devastating cliché in both the military and civilian worlds. It doesn’t help at all that he takes an almost dismissive attitude about PTSD in the face of ritual. He says:

When the survivor can accomplish this [initiatory] work, post-traumatic stress as a soul wound evaporates.

(p. 7)

“Evaporates.” Think about that for a minute. He’s claiming that after an initiation, there will be no more nightmares, no more flashbacks, no more physical symptoms. I’m a firm believer in the efficacy of ritual, but there’s only so far ritual can take us. I certainly believe ritual can help with PTSD, with reframing our traumatic experiences, with self-understanding. I also believe that such profound transformations take time to root and grow. We have to remember that an initiation is, technically speaking, a beginning. It’s a place to start and a finger pointing along the path. It is not the path in itself.

In this book, the author’s primary focus is on combat veterans, specifically Viet Nam era vets. While there is nothing wrong with this relatively narrow focus, it is problematic in that he claims his theories and approaches are universal, that his work applies not just to combat vets, but to non-combat veterans, women veterans who experienced MST, genocide survivors, draft resisters, peace activists, and members of military families and the civilian community as well. Certainly he offers a few stories from people in several of these categories, but within a sentence or two, these experiences and stories are left behind and the book carries on with its theme of Viet Nam combat vets, presumably because these men constitute the bulk of his counseling practice.

Tick’s suggestion of a solution to the problem of PTSD is the ritualization of going out and returning from military service. I certainly agree that this is a good idea and have done work in my own community around precisely this issue. Because he is operating from within a Jungian, monist worldview, he does not have a great deal to fall back upon in his envisioning of these rituals; in fact, he advocates (generic) “Native American” sweat lodge practices as a cathartic purification upon return from service. I find this a somewhat problematic suggestion for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the assumption that just anyone can participate in this ritual if they are spiritually “ready” for this purification, and the political and spiritual issues surrounding cultural appropriation, particularly in the shadow of the October 2009 deaths in an Arizona non-Native sweat led by James Arthur Ray.

This is not to say that purificatory ritual is unnecessary. I think it’s obvious that such things are desperately needed, particularly (but not solely) for veterans who have seen combat and who have killed during their service. Being in the military separates us from the usual rules of civilized life and makes killing an imperative, something to be commended; returning from that world and leaving behind that necessity can be a terrible struggle with a constant state of hyperalertness and inappropriate responses to situations most civilians would regard as harmless and safe. Our own bodies are instruments tuned to destruction, to fight or flight, to the instant assessment of threat levels and vulnerabilities. A significant marker of purification and the return to civilian society is, in my opinion, imperative as a first step.

One significant component of Tick’s approach to the treatment of PTSD in combat veterans is a return to the place where the war occurred. While this can be possible for some Viet Nam vets, and vets from other wars now over – those who can afford plane fare, obviously – it is problematic for veterans of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afganistan today. It is also problematic for those of us who served during the Cold War era. When one’s service consisted of maintaining readiness for the Mutually Assured Destruction of the planetary population in a potential nuclear holocaust, to whom do we make restitution? Where do we return? When PTSD is the result of sexual harassment, rape, or assault, particularly by fellow service members, what then?

Fortunately, Tick also addresses in lesser detail the ideas of art and storytelling as potential paths to healing, and these are much more broadly applicable tools. When we are able to express our experiences, to speak of what happened, of what we did and of what was done to us, and when we are able to do so in the presence of those who have never been through such experiences, the acknowledgment of these things can be profoundly transformative. Yet none of these are a one-time cure. The causes and symptoms of PTSD are complex and multilayered; the treatment of such things is also complex and multilayered. It’s not as simple as embracing an identity as a “warrior” rather than a soldier, sailor, airman or marine. Nor is it as simple as going through a gateway ritual upon our return from deployment or separation from service. We are prepared for military service through eight weeks or more of what is essentially brainwashing and indoctrination; it takes more than an hour’s ritual, an overnight vigil, a weekend retreat to undo what has been burned into us by this deliberate change. Even those small, inadequate things, however, are more than the military gives us upon our discharge – an exit interview and a DD-214.

Tick does call for civilian society to take up a moral responsibility for its service members and veterans and notes, in my opinion accurately, that much of society regards veterans as scapegoats for the responsibility of war. Military members go where they are sent and follow the orders they are given, frequently even if those orders are immoral, because disobeying orders is made as difficult as possible. Given that US society passes for a representational democracy, warfare is waged in the name of each of us and the military serves US governmental goals and agendas; we the people are as much responsible as any service member firing a missile, but we are so insulated from the realities of war that we can, if we choose, entirely ignore what is going on in our names.

I suspect that if society took more responsibility for acts committed in our name and under our flag, the return from service would be somewhat easier and war would be much more rare. It isn’t enough for someone to say “thank you for your service.” It’s hard to hear those words if you believe that what you were doing was wrong or immoral, or if it put you in a situation of being assaulted by your co-workers.

All these things said, Tick’s book does raise some excellent questions about the nature of modern warfare and of PTSD. Many of his suggestions will be thought-provoking for Pagans both in the military and in the larger community who interact with military Pagans and Pagan vets. As Pagans, we have a significantly larger tool set for dealing with ritualizing the going out and return of our service members, and for dealing with the psychic, physical, and emotional wounds that service members so often suffer during their service. Those of us practicing reconstructionist paths, which often have an honored place for the warrior within their social and spiritual structures, are perhaps best equipped to deal with these situations and to offer models of departure, purification, and return to the larger Pagan community.

What I found particularly moving and useful about the book were the stories of the veterans themselves. There were a number of points where I found myself in tears because these stories resonated so strongly with my own emotions around military service and PTSD. Each of these people were engaged in struggles with isolation, guilt, anger, and a constellation of other emotions with which I’m intimately familiar, even though our individual stories are very different. Each of us deals with trauma and its results in very different ways. There are many ways to heal from trauma; it’s important to recognize spiritual work as one of those paths without implying that it will work for everyone in exactly the same ways.

War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Edward Tick, Ph.D.
Quest Books, 2005