Soldier for life

I have an intuition about why a 34-year-old client dropped out of therapy after three sessions. Though young, he had served more than ten years in the Army where he experienced excruciating moral injury, near death and witness traumas. His life was changed for the negative by these crises while he “loved” the “feeling of Iraq, where I mattered.” The client did not join the military after high school. He had experienced more than ten years of physical abuse in his childhood home and his first escape was to sex, “narcissism” and alcohol in college. Then it was time to fight.

 

“Broderick’s” presenting problems were Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and anger, which would manifest in spontaneous black-out (or “red-out,” citing the domestic violence literature) blow-ups. He wanted to know how to prevent these berserker explosions that happened at the speed of heat and light. Third session, we had digressed to a discussion about his pervasively cynical view of life and people. In the last few minutes, to redeem the hour, I brought up the anger issue.

 

From the session Progress Note: “Client wants to return to work on his ‘anger’ and the near-impossibility of intervening before it carries the day destructively. I provided one point of view, having to do with allowing oneself to be vulnerable. That is, to feel hurt rather than rageful in the face of an insult.”

 

In the previous session, I had cited a case of mine, twenty-three years earlier, of a domestic battery client in mandated group counseling. I told Broderick that the man, a Viet Nam War veteran, had cried when he described the physical abuse he had suffered at his father’s hands. He cried but did not rage, though rage had long been his medium of exchange in difficult situations. Rage would have seemed natural, because he could now feel the power of his adult precarious status and of his broken childhood and all the years of loneliness that followed.

 

But being vulnerable to the pain of loss beneath the rage of injustice was what saved him. Collapsing in his child grief, head on his arms in the middle of a group of ten other tough and injured men, gave him the voice and the listeners to his life. Collapsing gave him strength, the strength of his true self.

 

This is what the last three minutes of my client’s third session was meant to convey. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second before hurt turns to blind, destructive fury, fall. Be hurt. Weep. Bleed thirty-four years of pain. That is the cure.

 

The cure he didn’t want to know.