The fireworks of the mind…
This night is the night for celebrating the freedom of the country; the apprehension of a terrorist before he managed to bomb the Houses of Parliament.
Tonight we set alight effigies of Guy Fawkes and let of explosions of colour and noise to add to the celebrations. And as the guy burns and the explosions bang and bash away overhead, we drink warming soups and hot cups of tea.
We so often are warned and advised of the effects of our celebratory cacophony of noise and light can have on animals; on farm creatures, wildlife, as well as our dogs and cats in our homes.
What, however, of the effects on those for whom explosions are far from a happy celebration?
What of the elder in their home, hearing loud explosions and reliving in that moment the fear and grief of war? For whom the anticipation of falling bombs and the deaths of friends and neighbours is rekindled by our frivolity?
What of the more recent war veteran, who is brought to a state of paralysis with the first whoop of a firework? The terror real and right-here-right-now… Or who finds themselves in the middle of actively fighting for their lives as a response to hearing shots fired…. Only they need not do this anymore, what they heard wasn’t shots fired, and the fighting now involves their wife or husband?
What of the former infantryman who, in a state of increasing anxiety in the run up to this time of year, believes they have no other option but to drink to excess in an effort to reduce their panics?
How do we serve them best?
We have asked our armed forces personnel to do the ultimate, to put aside their own morality, their own code of right and wrong, and to not only put up with desperate situations, but to take the lives of their fellow human beings; people they have never met, and have no direct quarrel with. We ask them to accept this, and to carry on afterwards as if that was simply just another day at the office.
When their service is done, they re-join the rest of society, us, and we expect them to simply adjust to this life we have. This life that we are able to have because of the actions of many, who will perform the ultimate actions if called on to do so.
But when they’ve done their time, we then judge and reject them because they find they are unable to turn their learning on their heads and somehow innately ‘know’ that they need not expect to be shot at every day… we stand away from that man who flinches and panics at fireworks, who cannot go out due to life-altering anxiety, who drinks to excess just to shut their brain down for a few hours.
We ask them to sacrifice their free-thinking minds when we ask them to serve, and when their minds later do not allow them to relax, we judge them and we fail them.
We fail them through not providing meaningful support and understanding.
We fail them when we separate them from the rest of society so that we can train them in exquisitely detailed ways to accept being stripped down so they can then be ‘programmed’ to obey, to go along with, to not question, to kill… we almost remove their humanity, and then we fail them by not providing equally detailed de-programming when they have completed their service.
We train their brains to be on hair-trigger alert, to be running on a heightened sense of awareness, on amber alert…. Their nervous systems primed and ready at a moment’s notice to run, to fight, to call on all parts of their physicality to perform feats of extreme action and violence, their minds honed in to the details of the task at hand, ignoring any sense of wider morality…and we wonder why this finely tuned mind-body system does not just turn off the minute they leave the compound.
We fail them by discharging them from service when they become mentally unstable; we reject them when they show the effects of their humanity battling to be known through the military overlay, deemed to now not be fit for service.
We may even fail them by not challenging authorities who say the figures don’t show a problem within the service community.
So this evening, when the sun goes down, and the bonfires are lit, and you are warming your hands holding a cup of hot soup, spare a thought for those for whom this night is anything but a joyful, happy occasion.
And if you are a serviceman or woman struggling to gain meaningful support, struggling to keep tabs on your mind, struggling to keep your reactions within the limits of what those around you can accept, do get in touch.
This counsellor is ex-service, and knows what you have endured.
Rosalyn Young is a qualified mental health nurse with 30 years
Experience in govt and private agencies helping those in crisis
and in recovery. She has studied counselling to degree level,
and specialises in working with survivors of childhood abuse
and neglect, PTSD, DID, and emotional regulation problems.
She lives in Lincolnshire with her husband and a variety of
companion animals, is a brewer of mead, and student of
growing things in the garden.
