The Battlefield Brought Home
War veterans are not the only ones feeling the effects of PTSD years after returning home. Spouses, children, and loved ones of war veterans can all fall victim to PTSD. A father who returns from war with PTSD exposes their family to symptoms like flashbacks and outbursts. The victim can be very quiet and negative, and suffer from hyper arousal and hyperawareness. But the father’s symptoms aren’t transmitting to his family directly. Symptoms are internal, something we can’t see. It’s the way the father acts because of the symptoms, the manifestations, that is the transmitter. The family can see him break down in tears for no apparent reason. They can see him suddenly snap in anger and frustration at the slightest thing. They see the shell of a man they once knew to be strong and who never cried. The manifestations shock and stun a family, traumatizing them. The symptom of anxiety isn’t being directly transmitted to the wife. The way the father acts because of the anxiety, like yelling or being overly emotional, is what causes the wife trauma.
A vet at home flinches every time the toaster pops, and cowers when a loud motorcycle passes the house. The home becomes a battlefield for the family because the father acts like it is one. For example, because of the constant exposure to explosions and gunfire from his two tours in Iraq, sudden loud, sharp noises scare Dad, and are a trigger for his flashbacks. His son accidently drops a cup onto a tile floor, creating a sharp, shattering sound which triggers one of Dad’s flashbacks. Dad immediately freaks out, reacting as if the noise came from a bullet hitting the side of his Humvee. His reaction unfolds in front of his son who cowers in fear and is upset because he hurt his dad. To Dad, his son is the enemy in the middle of an ambush because he created the loud noise, so he may even unintentionally yell at his son because the sudden noise has startled him and makes him feel as if a threat is incoming. The son is now scared, confused, and worried. After the flashback passes, Dad tries to console his son and apologize, but the damage has already been done. The Dad’s unpredictability, and the new connection between creating a loud noise and getting hurt, makes Dad an enemy to the son.
When overseas, Dad was also very rough with his buddies and the prisoners of war. When he is home, he sometimes treats his wife and children the same way because he forgets they aren’t his war buddies or criminals. During arguments he gets rough with his wife, and sometimes wrestling with the kids goes a bit too far. He doesn’t mean to, sometimes he doesn’t even realize what’s happening, but the shift from living a life with soldiers and criminals to a life with a wife and children is too much to quickly adjust to. He is unintentionally hurting his family because he sometimes forgets the difference or thinks he’s still at war.
These scenarios aren’t just made up stories that may happen. They are real, and are happening in many PTSD families. A revealing Mother Jones article, Is PTSD Contagious?by Mac McClelland shows us what life with a victim of PTSD is like. Caleb Vines suffers from PTSD, and his symptoms are spreading to his family. His wife Brannan has never been to war yet suffers from the same symptoms as he does. Six-year-old daughter Katie overreacts at things, yells, and anxiously picks at sores on her legs. Caleb isn’t intentionally making his wife and daughter this way. He can’t help it. His wife and daughter are constantly exposed to his symptoms. Katie gets her yelling from her father’s outburst and nightmares, and Brannan gets her hyper arousal and hyper vigilance from Caleb constantly being on edge, creating a tense atmosphere in the house. The Vines family is only one of thousands of families suffering from this effect of action and reaction.
Impressionable children are easily traumatized by a parent’s flashback at the dining room table. When a parent has a flashback, the house becomes like a battle zone for the child, and the parent like a fellow soldier who is in need. Dad is having a flashback in front of his son again. The son immediately jumps into action and tries to calm Dad down because if Mom learns that Dad is having another flashback she’ll have a worry fit. The son can barely handle one frantic parent, let alone two, so he has to fight through his fear and confusion to try and console Dad. It is this kind of situation that causes trauma in a child.
According to Family of a Vet, young children will fear flashbacks because they cannot understand what is happening to their parent. Older children may become defensive, and think they need to protect the PTSD victim. In both younger and older children, flashbacks can be a confusing thing that causes anger at the unknown and not being able to help, and confusion because they don’t understand why it is happening.
PTSD victims can also be very quiet and withdrawn. To a child, this can be seen as that parent not wanting or loving them anymore. This causes confusion, guilt, anxiety and frustration because the child doesn’t understand what is wrong with the parent or what he or she is doing wrong to make the parent pull away from them. Emotional stresses such as anxiety, grouchiness, and feeling constantly on edge affect children in waves. Teens become confused and angry, and will run away or avoid their parents to separate themselves from the source of these confusing emotions. A spouse may feel alienated because of the way the husband or wife treats them. They may begin to worry that the family will never be normal again, and devote much of their time and life trying to help their loved one, neglecting themselves and the other members of the family.
Brannan Vines has never been to war, yet she has detailed nightmares of horrific battle scenes and suffers from various PTSD-like symptoms. It’s difficult to think she’s never seen battle first-hand just by looking at her. We don’t have to go to war or witness a traumatic event to get PTSD. Like Brannan, all we have to do is be constantly exposed to the symptoms and behavior of a PTSD victim; the repetitious traumatic stress from the victim is enough to give us our own PTSD-like disorders.
Works Cited
McClelland, Mac. “Is PTSD Contagious?” Mother Jones. N.p., Feb. 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2014. (New Source)
“PTSD: National Center for PTSD.” Effects of PTSD on Family –. PTSD: National Center for PTSD, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2014. (New Source)
“Secondary PTSD in Children.” Secondary PTSD (STS) in Children. Family of a Vet, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2014 (New Source)
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Counterintuitive Fall 2022 
Rough draft, if I could get some feedback, (am I on the right track as well?) before Thursday I would greatly appreciate it.
Feedback provided. —DSH
Check the spelling of your post name.
The “many people don’t know this” opening gambit smells of ego. I know you don’t mean it—you drop it immediately with your second sentence—so avoid it with something more inclusive. You and we, all of us, find this a little hard to believe. In fact, it never occurred to us. Who’s the expert? Not you and I, those unlucky family members. So? According to the spouses, children, and loved ones of war veterans, it isn’t just the soldiers who suffer with PTSD for years after the war. See? Now we’re all learning from the people who know and you’re a conduit, not a know-it-all. Again, you’re not bragging and I know it; you just didn’t have the little trick in your bag.
This one also does not sound wrong in your head yet, but I have faith: A parent . . . brings with them?
The flashbacks or the parents “can be very quiet”?
Hmm . . . the transition is very awkward: You name the symptoms, which are mostly feelings, not actions. Only “outbursts” are visible. You try to bridge to action with “these symptoms and actions,” but that they cause stress, depression, and nervous children is hard to justify. If you move from the internal conditions, to the outbursts which are the symptoms, then you can make the outbursts (and the jumpiness, the quick and unpredictable movements, the sudden mood changes) all of which are experienced by the loved ones, the causes of their stress, depression, and bad nerves. See?
The language of action and reaction is certainly appropriate to a causal essay, but it invokes a physics laboratory more than a battlefield.
I’d rather see the introduction end with war. (And maybe change your Title too.) It’s as if the vet has brought the war home and the loved ones are doing combat every day with someone still fighting in a war zone. No wonder they develop traumatic stress.
P2. Well, there you go. As I requested, you do just that in P2. Wonderful. Now substitute a bit of battle shock language for the action/reaction language and your paragraphs will transition beautifully.
This is marvelous material and you will find your own ways to organize and transition it, but I do have one suggestion. Dad reacts to those noises mostly because they represent the threat of incoming. He looks at his son instinctively as the enemy. Very quickly, Dad’s unpredictability (and the connection between his loud noises and the kid getting hurt) make Dad the enemy to the son.
P3. It would have been tempting to start your essay with a little scene of domestic tension from the Vines house. I’m glad you didn’t. You established your own voice and credibility first. Now the MJ article and the Vines material amplify and resonate your own claims. This is the more persuasive sequence.
P4. A flashback certainly would be traumatic for the child, but remember the child doesn’t experience one. The child witnesses a parent experiencing one. They’re not reacting to a war experience, they’re having one in which the vet is the unpredictable other that can hurt them OR is the fellow soldier whose terror and outbursts need to be addressed. I’m imagining a scene in which the son has to calm Dad down before Mom learns Dad is flashing-back because the episodes disturb her so much he’ll have two frantic parents. That’s a recipe!
P5. the child doesn’t understand . . . THEIR parent? or what THEY are doing wrong to make THEIR parent pull away?
Unclear how “acting out” helps the child “get away”
A spouse . . . THEIR husband treats THEM?
P6. Make a positive rather than a negative claim whenever possible. “PTSD doesn’t affect” is negative. It would be very powerful to say “PTSD doesn’t affect a single member of the family.” But you mean to make a positive claim that it does affect every member of the household.
PTSD victim . . . they are close with?
Again, be careful about your terms and claims here, Benjamin. You lose the cause and effect argument if you blend “every action” with “every symptom” with “every emotion” and have them cause “similar actions” and “similar emotions.” That’s too vague to be persuasive, even as summary.
The vet’s disorder is the internal stress and the psychological imbalance of sensing danger in safe situations. Those result in behaviors. Decide which are the symptoms. For the family, the behaviors are fresh episodes of peril and fear that are the repetitious traumatic stress that give them their own PTSD-like disorders. That can be said simply, but it has to be said clearly.
Yes, you’re certainly on the right track. I welcome the opportunity to help you distribute your cargo before you take the tight curves.
The father’s symptoms aren’t transmitting to his family directly. Symptoms are internal, something we can’t see. It is the way the father acts because of the symptoms, the manifestations, that we see. That is the transmitter. The family can see him acting strange. They can see him yelling or crying or being quiet. That causes the family members to have their own traumas, because they are feeling in response to the father’s actions. The symptom of anxiety isn’t being directly transmitted to the wife. But the way the father acts, like yelling or being overly emotional, because of the anxiety causes the wife trauma.
–Attempted to create a paragraph explaining the manifestations vs symptoms that we talked about today in class. How is it? I don’t want to put it into the essay and have it be completely wrong and ruin what was already there. Does it need more, less? Completely missing the point?
It’s good, Benjamin. It covers the concept clearly. I think that extra term, manifestations, works very well to explain the perceptible behaviors that traumatize the family. This sentence, which should communicate the terror of the family members, is very bland: That causes the family members to have their own traumas, because they are feeling in response to the father’s actions.
What you describe sounds troubling, but not like a war zone. Remember, the children and spouses develop very severe syndromes themselves, as if they had spent months in combat. Seeing Dad yell and “act strange” probably wouldn’t be sufficient to create a mental illness in them. Don’t be afraid to use pathos (like logos and ethos?) to your advantage. Readers should be frightened for the family and feel their anxiety.
The Battlefield Brought Home
Our war veterans are not the only ones feeling the effects of PTSD years after returning home. Their: spouses, children, and loved ones can all fall victim to PTSD.
I like your title and first sentence, if you don’t mind I’ll slide em into my essay. The first sentence I had I wasn’t so sure about but couldn’t really think of something else. Thanks!
If I could get some feedback on this version, so I can edit it before the big paper is due next Thursday, that would be great.
Feedback provided. —DSH
P1. Our war veterans.
Your first two sentences confuse the veterans who feel things “long after returning home” with their families, who feel things “long after THEIR FAMILY MEMBER returned home.” Combining them gets confusing.
Since you shortly identify the vet as male, the father, you may as well do so in the third sentence instead of creating number disagreement. A (singular) parent exposes (plural) their family. Must be fixed. The father exposes his family?
Eliminate the “It is” and the “That is” for fluency and clarity.
These are too abstract, Benjamin; so is the “manifestations cause the family to have traumas” later. They’re bloodless whereas the traumas bleed. Dad’s weeping. He’s snapping. He’s a lightning storm. Those don’t “cause a person to have a trauma.” They are trauma. They are traumatic. Better yet: they verb. They traumatize. They shock and stun like mortar fire. They rain down like ordnance. They explode along the highway like IEDs.
P2. “A victim taken . . . creates an atmosphere”? OR? The vet at home flinches and starts at the toaster or a passing motorcycle as if . . . and in so doing he makes the home a battlefield for his family.
You get to this in your example. Prep for it with evocative language that is not quite anecdote, so that that anecdote illustrates what the rhetoric of its introduction has prepared.
Break out the second example into a paragraph of its own (Another situation is when). And don’t identify it so bluntly as a second example. Just start a paragraph with: When Dad was overseas, he was rough with his buddies. At home . . . .
P3 (or is it now P4?).
NEVER say these kinds of scenarios unless your entire point is to distinguish kinds from one another. Such is not the case here. All you mean is the much more appropriate: These scenarios. OR, if you must: Such scenarios aren’t just stories; they happen in many PTSD families.
P4. Wordy: Children are very impressionable and are greatly influenced by their parents’ actions around them, so witnessing a flashback can be a very traumatic thing for a child.
Less Wordy, more personal: Impressionable children are easily traumatized by a parent’s flashback at the dining room table.
The detailing of the poor boy balancing the needs of his two parents is heartbreakingly good, Benjamin.
P5. Try that “de-wordifying” exercise on your first sentence here too.
Work on “running away or avoiding to get away.”
Do what you can to reduce your inventory of nouns and adjectives here: quiet, withdrawn, confusion, guilt, anxiety, frustration, arousal, anxiety, grouchiness, hypersensitivity, confusing, on edge (again), confused (the trifecta! confusion, confusing, and confused!), angry, hurt, alienated. You probably don’t feed this barrage after all your rewrites, but it overwhelms your first-time reader.
P6. . . . followed by stress, uneasiness, confusion and fear.
This conclusion is unnecessary since its points have been made more than once already, Benjamin. I recommend ALWAYS a new insight. This is a causal essay, so how about a new and stunning cause/effect surprise? The one that occurs to me is that Brannan, never having been there, has detailed and visceral nightmares of war. Yes?
Regraded following your mid-April revisions.
No more regrades here.
Improvable in the Portfolio.