Therapy Helps Marine Veteran Heal After Trauma
Being on the Navy ship, you learn the different alarms that they have, and one of the first alarms we heard was the collision alarm. Before you know, we felt the ship rock through a few of us. So we ran on top of the flight deck. The ship we were on collided with one of the resupply ships. That experience made me a lot more alert.
Hi, I'm Arafat. I was a motors transport operator. I was in the Marine Corps from October of '96 until August of 2005. In 2001, we were getting ready to deploy and after 9/11, we had to push up our training for special operations and we were on the flight deck watching, I think it was the Marine Raiders. They were doing their training operation and we watched as the helo landed on the ship. But as it went to take off, the legging got caught around a netting and the helo ended up backwards. Submarines and sailors, they lost their life that day. You know, not a good way to start the deployment, but we know that we had to keep moving forward the mission.
So you fast forward, it had almost been nine years and my feet were killing me and I thought it was just time for the next step of my life. At the time, I was dealing with PTSD, but I wasn't aware of it. I couldn't deal with fireworks anymore. Absolutely, 4th of July would all shut myself down. Kind of avoided everything, was drinking heavily. I think at one point, I was drinking maybe a liter or something a day. My relationships with my family and my ex, you know, really soured. Bought a motorcycle, was driving recklessly. So I was doing a lot of things that I didn't notice was related to PTSD. I just was like, okay, this is just who I am now.
I went to medical assistant school. I started working at Mass General Hospital. And as a medical assistant, at that point, I had a thing where I had a three strike rule. And my three strike rule was, you disrespect me twice, that was a one and the third time, I'd rip your head off. And I had a coworker who, me and her were very thick-headed, stubborn. She had spoken to me in a manner that I didn't like and I actually went off on her in the clinic. And I had my nurse manager, Peg. Peg grabbed me by my earlobe. Put me in her office and told me that I need to seek help and therapy because the short temper wasn't gonna work in the medical field. So that was the first time I got pushed towards therapy.
So I did the VA for a little bit. I had a therapist who I saw two years ago at the VA. One of the things she had me do is do a recording. So I would see her go home and re-listen to the recording that we did, and then she would have me replay something and talk about it. Kind of relive it at my own pace to where I was more comfortable with it. I've learned through therapy that you don't have to apologize for everything, especially your own reaction to things 'cause your reaction to things are based off your life experience. I thankfully, have a very tight support network. I think my wife being my biggest support network. Her being a social worker, she notices things. I have a teenager son, so my life the last eight or nine years has been basically focused around him. Being a minority, we've always looked down on therapy. Therapy is not a bad thing, and it can be helpful. It's okay to seek help. It's okay to let go. It's okay to talk about these experiences. Even though you never fully recover from what you experience, you can still take those steps forward to start the healing process. I look at what I was able to accomplish because of therapy.
One of the first times I actually opened up about my therapy and what I've gone through was actually at a Veterans Day breakfast. I was a guest speaker for it and I remember I was working on the speech and I was like, okay, I'm nervous about it. And I remember looking in the crowd and my wife was there, but then I noticed like my mother and my sisters were there. But I look at the therapy and what I had gone through to get to that step to where I'm talking about my own story. I know that I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't taken the steps.
