Primal Therapy and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

 This is from a former patient who saw combat duty in Vietnam.  He is discussing PTSD and how, as I have written, it is the background childhood that helps determine PTSD.  
He looked around at the wounded at his camp and shouted, "I can't help you," which is what he wanted to say to his sick mother.  It effected his whole life. It is a moving story but with Primal therapy's help he is now a recording artist.  As they say in France…."Chapeau!!"   art


"When I came for Primal therapy in 1980 I had a pretty full plate of Primal pain. My mother had been in and out of mental institutions since I was seven diagnosed with clinical depression.  She was  a highly intelligent and sensitive woman.  I always thought she wasn’t made for this world. I needed love desperately from a woman too damaged by life herself to fill my needs not to mention my siblings.
Yet she tried. I have a an old photo of her and I in front of some church in New Mexico standing  behind me with her arms over my shoulders, touching my chest with her hands when I was a child.
I was always trying to make it ok for her. If I could somehow help her then of course she would be able to be the mother I needed her to be. During the times she came home from the hospitals she would mostly stay in her bedroom with the door always shut. Then she’d be gone again for months at  a time.  Once I heard her yell my name from her bedroom and went into to see what it was.  She awoke and my hope that she needed me to help her disappeared when she told me she was having a bad dream. She was calling out in her sleep for her older brother who I was named after. He had died before I was born of Leukemia and from what I understood my mother adored him.
On a Sunday morning 2 years before she took her own life I had a premonition that something was wrong. I was twelve years old and this odd feeling was based on nothing but my own inner voice.  My father was not home and my grandmother was visiting. I went to my mother’s room and when I asked her if she was ok she didn’t respond but somehow I knew she wasn’t sleeping. She was unconscious from an overdose of barbituates. I tried to shake her awake and yelled for my grandmother.

 I remember my grandmother lifting her arm and just letting it drop which has always seemed strange to me. It was a cold unfeeling act. My grandmother resented my father marrying such a weak woman I learned when I was older. She despised weakness.
I walked out onto the open porch off her bedroom and stood there at the railing while my grandmother called an ambulance.  My mother survived because of me. I had saved her. It was a temporary measure that only delayed her death from suicide 2 years later. In my therapy I realized I was better off with her gone than alive. A harsh reality because I truly loved her. I believed my having saved her that one time set the stage in my becoming a medical caregiver when I joined the Navy at eighteen.
Navy training as a Hospital Corpsman was like academics had been throughout my life which was difficult. Focusing and concentrating had never been easy for me. What is now referred to as ADD.

 I enjoyed working as a Navy Corpsman which because of it’s reputation I could finally be proud of that achievement.  After 4 months at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego we were sent for another 2 months to train with the Marines at Camp Pendleton an hour north. It was a modified boot camp with Marines training us for combat duty in their Field Medical Sevice School.  Sidenote: The Marine Corps is a department of the Navy and the Navy supplies their medical care and needs.
After  working on the east coast at Bethesda Naval  Hospital where I was assigned to the emergency room,  I learned practical nursing skills. Along with the training of caring for the wounded  at Camp  Pendleton it was only a matter of time before I got orders for Vietnam. This was 1969 and all the corpsmen I knew at Bethesda seemed to  get  orders on a regular basis until it was my turn.
I arrived in Vietnam in March 1970. I was put in the Combined Action Platoons near Danang. It was somewhat different from regular infantry in that we provided security to the villages in our area of operation living out in the field 24/7. As a medic I held clinics with the villagers.

We also trained our Vietnamese counterparts who were like their National Guardsmen who lived in the area. We ran patrols, ambushes and  a few operations.  I can say I saw enough of the horrors of war that I came home broken with severe symptoms of classic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Unfortunately,  it wasn’t being recognized  by the veteran’s hospital at that time up to the late 1970’s. I was turned away when I went in for help and told I was psycho-neurotic by the intake nurse.  I began having suicidal feelings that I was so immersed in that I planned my death a number of times.
My being a corpsman was all about helping others. I put my life at risk to help others but in war it’s so crazy and chaotic that the opportunity to actually save a person’s life was rare at least for me.  People were beyond help or dead by the time I got to them
I ran out one night at the call of  “corpsman up,” when we got hit by small arms fire from the Viet Cong at the edge of a village. An RPG or rocket propelled grenade  had blown up the corner of a Vietnamese home near where we were sleeping.  The person I pulled from the rubble by the wrists had no lower half of their body as I watched the light leave his eyes under the glare of the parachute flares.
I survived ten months of combat duty as our unit was being disbanded and I was transferred around to several platoons from Chu Lai up to Hoi Anh. I had experienced a breakdown while in my 10th month and went into the rear to seek medical care for the immersion foot and jungle rot sores I had on my lower back. I weighed 142 lbs at 6’3”. I was really leaving to save myself. I couldn’t function any longer and felt tremendous guilt at abandoning my platoon. I realized on some level that I was of no use to them any longer. I was sick in my soul being both mentally and physically exhausted.

Saving myself. I have understood through” feelings” in therapy that my act-out to help others is about giving the help that I needed.  I learned recently of something my father told a friend of mine when he asked him ( my father ) about helping people as a doctor. My father said he did it for himself. It made “him” feel  good. He got the adulation and prestige of being a doctor from his patients. For him it was all about himself which makes perfect sense to how I knew him.  I was quite different. I was as smart as he was but I was never given a chance to succeed in life. He hated me for being different in creative ways and I never gave up trying to be myself though it cost me dearly.
I wanted to be a doctor but it was as far away as a distant star for me in reality. I would have been quite different  from my father without all my pain. I found that I cared deeply about those who were under my care in the Navy particularly in Vietnam.
This brings me to a scene in group therapy that Dr. Janov was conducting. I had been  connecting to feelings about the traumas of  war. I’ve discussed it with him and  the fact that traumas laid down at the age of 19 in war are just another layer of Primal pain.  He asked me once if I believed there was combat neurosis. I wasn’t in touch with these traumas until I’d been active in therapy for a number of years.
I was relating a scene or scenes from Vietnam in group therapy and how hopeless I felt trying to save anybody when they were dying while in a firefight or on an operation. I was sobbing as this feeling  descended into how I’d spent my childhood trying to help my clinically depressed mother. This “feeling” culminated in a gut wrenching realization that all my efforts were hopeless both in Vietnam and with my mother. The feeling was:  “ I can’t save you Mother!” And I couldn’t save my pals.

I have continued for many years feeling about how broken I felt when I came home from Vietnam and needed my father’s help which never came.  Not even the V.A. system was available to veterans of that era unless they were psychotic and locked away on some ward. I found temporary help through a very kind, private psychiatrist who kept me going until I discovered Primal  therapy.  I made it out here from Chicago on my own private pilgrimage over thirty years ago and though not fully functioning am enjoying a quality of life that never would have been without it."