It's very rare for me to get super angry these days, but not long ago another adoptive parent said something that made me so angry I had to just stop the conversation cold and walk away.
Sometimes that's all you can do, if you don't want to feel your blood pressure skyrocket, as you verbally battle the two worst foes of any parent: ignorance and delusion.
I pointed out that all of our children who are adopted as older children have PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] to some extent. His response? "Oh no, that's only for soldiers returning from war."
What made me the most angry was that he has several adopted children (adopted as older kids, not babies) and all have PTSD, but he refused to even admit the possibility. He had the belief that religion would save his children from any unpleasant aftereffects of their unpleasant early lives. I disagreed.
My children both have PTSD. It manifests differently in each child, too.
My daughter got very upset one night when somebody at dinner waved a butter knife while talking. When she had calmed down she said as a small child she saw her birthmom and grandfather in a fight where a knife was used in a threatening manner, and it terrified her, of course.
Small children who experience things like that ARE going to do one of two things, generally: either block that trauma out entirely from their minds, or get very upset or triggered by similar (though not the same obviously) situations, like the dinner knife incident, for the rest of their lives, in many cases.
It makes sense, right? If you've ever been driving and had a car accidents you've got some idea of PTSD. You drive along the same road, make the same turn, approach the same intersection, and fear or anxiety grip you because your body recalls how it felt to have that wreck at that place.
We all want to avoid people or places of situations that have caused great fear or pain or anxiety. That's part of being human.
I bring all this up because seeing someone you love suffer with PTSD is one of the hardest and most painful things in the world, as I well know.
Some soldiers return from war and do not have PTSD, or they somehow manage to deal with it on their own, and return to normalcy.
Many soldiers have a hard time with it though.
Even though soldiers are highly trained before they are put into combat situations, many return with PTSD.
It used to be called "shell shock." In the movie Patton, there's a scene of General Patton slapping a soldier in a hospital and berating him as being a coward. I remember watching that scene and being horrified by Patton's behavior. That sort of macho posturing has always made me queasy.
Making fun of someone who is in pain or distress over something that happened in the past? My opinion on that involves a lot of profanity.
That old school disdain for PTSD created a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts.
I do not claim to be an expert on PTSD. I'm sure even among mental health professionals there may be disagreements about how to deal with it.
I am pretty familiar with what doesn't work though.
Denial seems to be the method a lot of people use to deal with PTSD. It may seems to work for a while, but it doesn't work in the long run. Medication doesn't really work, either, IMHO. I think it just masks the underlying issues.
I think the only thing that really works is to process the pain.
There's a therapy technique called EMDR that has been used successfully on people who have been through trauma. A friend whose adopted child did this explained it to me as "She sat there doing something with her hands while at the same time recalling the trauma." That may be overly simplistic and/or inaccurate but the EMDR was somewhat successful with that child.
When I was trying to teach my daughter to sing, I found if she beat time on something while trying to mimic the notes, she was far more accurate.
My takeaway is simply that distracting yourself while trying to do something difficult, like recall trauma, somehow makes it less painful, more bearable.
My children aren't my only experience with PTSD.
I went through an incident when I was a child that gave me PTSD. I recall it very well. Took me years to get past it.
I used to watch my mother, when she was upset, go in the living room and play the piano. Her hands were busy. She would stop crying. She would calm down. (We heard a lot of piano music when my dad was dying of cancer.)
All of this is to say when I first learned about Jon Jackson and Comfort Farms, I got so excited I nearly wet my plants. [pun intended]
Gardening has helped me through some really tough times in the past 11 years. It made perfect sense to me that it would help vets with PTSD or other issues.
Jon returned from war suffering from PTSD and a TBI [traumatic brain injury] and he soon realized the way to healing was through farming. Keeping your hands in the dirt. Raising animals. Battling Mother Nature.
Keeping your hands busy produces all sorts of results.
He passed on this knowledge to other vets. So far, over a thousand veterans have been helped at Comfort Farms.
There's so much more to do, though. Many vets are still committing suicide, every day. This needs to stop.
My partner Carlisle Kellam -- who is an amazing photographer and filmmaker -- and I have teamed up to make a movie about Comfort Farms, to raise awareness and help Jon expand the program.
You can visit the movie website HERE. You can view the beautiful trailer. Hopefully, you feel moved to DONATE because making movies (even modest documentaries) isn't cheap.
If you're not interested in films but you want to support Comfort Farms, check out the Stag Vets website or the Comfort Farms Facebook page.
