Veteran Shares How Support Groups Helped Her Cope After Trauma
I was scheduled on this flight for a sign-off. One of my supervisors had contacted me and said that I needed to get off the flight. Well, that flight ended up crashing in the Atlantic Ocean the next day. Everybody lived, thank God, but we didn't know. I was already having so much fear of flying, and then I was afraid to tell anybody I was afraid.
My name is Bridget. I was in the US Navy. I served from 2000 to 2005. I was a helicopter air crewman, and my rate was Aviation Machinist's Mate. I went into the military with a brain injury already that I had disclosed to the military, and I had to go through SERE School, which stands for Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape. It was like a badge of honor. You felt like you were this elite person 'cause you went through this program. You don't even know when it's gonna end, and when it does and you realize it's over, like every single person in there, I'm an 18-year-old girl, and there's men in there that like not a dry eye. It was like, thank God this is over. So, what like real prisoners go through is unimaginable. Immediately after that experience, I started having a relationship with somebody I was serving with who also went through SERE School, and he went through it before me. And within four months of our relationship, he started physically abusing me. And that was my first serious relationship, and it really destroyed my life and love and relationships. I took, between SERE School and that relationship, probably 100 blows to my head.
I was 18 when I went in, and I was 22 or 23 when I got out. But then I got out, and I was just like no guidance. I didn't know what to do. I didn't even ever use the term Veteran. For many years, I didn't really think of myself that way. I didn't know how to access any resources or anything. It took me years before I found out that I could use the VA. I moved to New York. I had met a girl in an acting class who happened to be a Veteran as well, and she worked at the VA, and she's like, "Oh, you know, there's a women's clinic there," and I did not know, nobody told me. So, I called and got signed up there. I've been with the same primary care doctor since.
When I first went into mental health care at the VA, I saw a therapist, and we did psychodynamic therapy. That was a year of therapy. It definitely was the first therapy that pushed me in the direction of figuring out what was going on. I hadn't been diagnosed with PTSD yet, and I didn't really understand it. That therapist had referred me to DBT therapy, which that's when I really started to understand PTSD and what I was going through. And I really found that therapy extremely useful even though a lot of what it is seems like common sense, it just so much of how I behave and people behave is not intellectual. It's an emotional response to things. So, this therapy, DBT, it gives you tools to access when you are experiencing those moments, you have those tools to access. So, you have something like DBT, which is the practical side of your mental health, then you have something like EMDR, which is the somatic side. It's bypassing the thinking brain. It's getting into the body where a lot of the trauma lives. This stuff is gonna live with me for my life, but I know now how to find the tools when I need them instead of burying it and feeling so much shame about it.
I am in the creative arts, and that also really helps with my mental health because it helps me get outside myself. I've spent the last few years very isolated, and there's a comfort in that isolation. There's a safety in it, but it's at the expense of relationships. That discomfort might live with me forever, but I am accessing these tools to at least face some of these fears. There is something going on in your area that's a Veteran's group that's doing something creative. So connect to the community because that's something that changed things for me drastically. Find that in your region and just connect.
