Return to the emptiness

At home in civilian life, people looked far removed from the war or the military. “It was anti-climatic coming home after doing some incredible things,” Mary-Ann says, wiping persistent tears from her eyes. All the Army routines were gone. In just a year, she had forgotten her civilian routines. She ended up in an argument with her partner, feeling he was not looking after the house properly. She lost her sleep. Feeling shocked, she created a routine consisting of cleaning up the house and going to the gym, even in the middle of the night. “I just started plugging away. Slowly, I started cleaning, picking up things, bagging trash in bags and throwing them away. I wasn’t sleeping, so I just cleaned. I was quite productive. I got a lot of things cleaned up,” she grins with tired eyes. 

Mary-Ann focused on finding a new job, so she didn’t pay attention to the intrusive thoughts about her everyday routines in Iraq that unsettled her. “They were little things like looking for my hat and weapon as soon as I stepped out of my house. I would get hyper alert when I saw trash blowing up on the side of the road. The worst was cleaning stuff in the garage. I loaded a big black bag with trash. All of a sudden I got a flashback and a vision that I was carrying an amputated leg in the bag, because it had the same weight and vibration. I was overcome with repulsion and I just dropped the bag. I realized I could not use black trash bags any more. It was too much like the body parts I had bagged up. That was what we did in Iraq. We bagged them up in trash bags and put them in the trash,” she recalls. 

In her dreams, Mary-Ann was packing limbs in bags. In one repeating nightmare, she found herself sleeping on a bag of limbs. Only after a year did she receive help. She had already found a new job and had to leave it, exhausted. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs, VA had refused her application for care due to a bureaucratic mistake months earlier, but a friend from her old unit encouraged her to persist and correct the situation. 

But the road to therapy has been hard. Like so many veterans, Mary-Ann has battled to accept different forms of therapy, feeling many of them are unhelpful and not individual enough. The first attempt was cognitive behavioral therapy. “The therapist asked me to do homework assignments. She wanted me to look at rational responses. Is there another way of looking at the situation? I thought no, there really is not. If something horrifies you, it horrifies you. What other way is there?”  

She also tried a VA residential group program, but left it in anger. “I felt I had gone backward and went out from there in a rage,” Mary-Ann describes. She felt the program restrictive and inflexible with no space to express her feelings. “They told me I had got used to being in charge, and I should let go and trust the process. They tried to make me fit in their little blocks and squares,” she says. 

Other things bothered her as well. The VA services for veterans looked to her biased towards men. So was the behavior of the community as well, she noticed when taking part in Veterans’ Day celebrations.

Another therapist based healing on talking, listening and discussion. Mary-Ann found this useful. She also met with artist Monica Haller, the founder of The Veterans’ Book Project. The project helps veterans to express their memories in writing. For Mary-Ann, writing her own web-based book in the project has helped with healing.