Getting Her Life Back in Tune After MST
3-minute read
Getting Her Life Back in Tune After MST
3-minute read
Air Force Veteran Taylor shut down emotionally and lost her sense of safety and trust after experiencing military sexual trauma during her decade of service. Therapy from VA proved to be the key to regaining her sense of control and rediscovering her voice. Music—a constant in her life since she was a teenager—accompanied her on the road to healing.
A soaring intro to service
Taylor started her Air Force service on a high note.
“I stepped outside, saw this really awesome airframe flying around that looked like, I said, the Batman plane! And from that moment on, I was absolutely in love with serving in the Air Force,” Taylor recalls.
But while her love for serving continued, Taylor’s day-to-day life in the Air Force soon took a darker turn. It wasn’t until many years later, as a Veteran, that she discovered the keys to restoring harmony to her life.
Finding Purpose From Pain: A Veteran’s Path to Recovery From Sexual Trauma
Not a safe place to be
In Taylor’s first days of service, a fellow service member who had been assigned to drive her around the base assaulted her. Then, when Taylor deployed, her assailant was on the same deployment, and the assaults continued. There were assaults by others as well and sexual harassment.
“It wasn’t a safe environment to be in, so I kind of just suffered alone,” she says. She began to wonder, “Is this what life is going to be like? Who can I trust?” Taylor attempted to cope by throwing herself into her work. She even got married in the hope that it would provide her with some protection.
A lingering dissonance
Taylor left the Air Force after 10 years, but the trauma she’d experienced there remained, providing an unwelcome soundtrack for her civilian life. “I didn't realize I was experiencing symptoms, but hindsight is 20/20,” she says. “Bouts of depression and anxiety. It impacted my marriage. In the middle of the night, if my husband would touch me, I would freak out.”
She was also feeling anger and frustration. Now with three children, she says, “I felt very incapable in terms of just taking care of myself, let alone a family. I started to recognize that I had a problem.”
Regaining harmony—and bringing it to others
Taylor sought help and got into therapy: first talk therapy and then EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) for PTSD. “The great thing about EMDR is I don't have to sit in detail out my trauma, but I do have to sit with what it feels like inside of me,” she says. Therapy helped Taylor understand that the trauma she’d experienced was not her fault but that she has the ability—and responsibility—to overcome it.
Taylor found music to be a valuable accompaniment to therapy: “It was like meditation and prayer and a place just to process emotions,” Taylor says, “and that brought a lot of support into my life, and to my family’s life.”
Taylor—who learned to play guitar at 16—now teaches other Veterans how to play. In addition to teaching and performing, she wrote her first song in 2024. She also advocates for Veterans and, with her children, for their families. “My children and I have discovered you can't heal a Veteran and not their family,” she says.
“These are conversations we need to have,” she adds. “We need to talk about mental health. We need to talk about getting help.” Reflecting on her own journey, she says, “I’m so surrounded with support now that I know that no matter what happens, I'm not alone.”
