Ruth W. Crocker

How best can we meet the challenge of being helpful/supportive to friends, co-workers and employees who may have experienced deep and lasting wounds from traumatic experiences? In fact, old emotional wounds can cause numbness, rage and anxiety and may be invisible to the rest of the world. For example, when 1st Sergeant Louis McShane received his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in 1947 after World War II, he remembers throwing his duffel bag over his shoulder and walking out into sunshine after a handshake and hearing the words: “Go home and get a job.” Fifty years later, after his wife’s death, Louis broke down. He began to speak about the horrors he had heard and seen on the beaches of Normandy where he witnessed comrades impaled by bayonets and others drowning as they tried to swim to shore wearing ninety pounds of gear during the Allied Landing. “I don’t know how I made it back alive,” he repeated. “I always carried a kind of guilt.” For years, Louis kept the burden of what he had seen to himself. His employers, family and even his close friends knew only that he had been in the army and that he was a workaholic when he returned.  No one except Louis knew that he woke most nights in a cold sweat. Working long hours was his way of coping with obsessive thoughts and nightmares. Direct experience with traumatizing events has the potential to evoke a lasting stress reaction. Besides war – motor vehicle accidents, plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, child and spousal abuse, being a victim […]