Raw & Beautiful Reminders

Almost three years ago the TV show Army Wives started my healing process of life effected by PTSD.  While the characters are fictional, it is such a sense of relief to be able to relate to lives being effected by PTSD on the show.  It plays tricks on your mind when there is no real person who can truly understand what you're dealing with when your husband develops PTSD.  It's not just a disease that surfaces one day, is treated and then normal life presumes.
You have to learn to live with PTSD and the new person it's created.  PTSD is not the person, just as a cancer patient is not cancer. When cancer enters your life it changes the rest of your life, as does PTSD.  You have to grieve the person before PTSD. You learn to cope with flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, lack of support from people you expected devotion from, battles and stabs in the back from the system that was once for your hero. 
I watched a recent episode of Army Wives and it brought tears to my eyes, it was due to familiarity of the scenes playing out. It showed the story of a young couple, in love and so full of life.  The solider went off to war and developed PTSD. When he came home he was not the person the wife met, fell in love with, married and sent off to war.  He became distant, angry,testy and displayed 180 degree turn around in his personality. 
Watching the marriage and the individuals worlds fall upside into a terrifying free fall was all too familiar and not too long ago really. I'm not sure of the fate of this young couple on Army Wives but I know ours because it's wrapped up in God's hands.
God can be trusted as your only strength. God can be trusted that His time is perfect. You can trust Him that He makes all things work together for His and your good.  He is the only one who can make the ugliest, darkest and scariest moments on this side of Heaven into something beautiful.  

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