Archive for December, 2009

Happy Holidays!

A few days ago, I went to my daughter’s school to sing Christmas songs with the children.
growing up in Germany, the song “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” (Silent night, holy night) has a lot of meaning to me, as I remember vividly singing it at my grandfather’s house on, as we call it, the first day of Chrstmas (December 25th). This year, for some reason, it was especially moving for me. I then shared with the kids the following story, which, I think, reflects the spirit of christmas in a wonderful way.

By Victor M. Parachin

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (BP)–When World War I erupted in 1914 launching the first great European war of the 20th century, soldiers on both sides were assured they would be home by Christmas to celebrate victory. That prediction proved to be false.

The men on the fronts did not get home for Christmas as the war dragged on for four years. During that time 8,500,000 men were killed, with hundreds of thousands more dying from injuries. The “war to end all wars” took a horrific human toll and transformed Europe.

However, on Christmas Eve in December 1914 one of the most unusual events in military history took place on the Western front. On the night of Dec. 24 the weather abruptly became cold, freezing the water and slush of the trenches in which the men bunkered. On the German side, soldiers began lighting candles. British sentries reported to commanding officers there seemed to be small lights raised on poles or bayonets.

Although these lanterns clearly illuminated German troops, making them vulnerable to being shot, the British held their fire. Even more amazing, British officers saw through their binoculars that some enemy troops were holding Christmas trees over their heads with lighted candles in their branches. The message was clear: Germans, who celebrated Christmas on the eve of Dec. 24, were extending holiday greetings to their enemies.

Within moments of that sighting, the British began hearing a few German soldiers singing a Christmas carol. It was soon picked up all along the German line as other soldiers joined in harmonizing.

The words heard were these: “Stille nacht, heilige nacht.” British troops immediately recognized the melody as “Silent Night” quickly neutralized all hostilities on both sides. One by one, British and German soldiers began laying down their weapons to venture into no-man’s-land, a small patch of bombed-out earth between the two sides. So many soldiers on both sides ventured out that superior officers were prevented from objecting. There was an undeclared truce and peace had broken out.

Frank Richards was an eyewitness of this unofficial truce. In his wartime diary he wrote: “We stuck up a board with ‘Merry Christmas’ on it. The enemy stuck up a similar one. Two of our men threw off their equipment and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads as two of the Germans did the same, our two going to meet them.

“They shook hands and then we all got out of the trench and so did the Germans,” Richards said.

Richards also explained that some German soldiers spoke perfect English with one saying how fed up he was with the war and how he would be glad when it was all over. His British counterpart agreed.

That night, former enemy soldiers sat around a common campfire. They exchanged small gifts from their meager belongings — chocolate bars, buttons, badges and small tins of processed beef. Men who only hours earlier had been shooting to kill were now sharing Christmas festivities and showing each other family snapshots. The truce ended just as it had begun, by mutual agreement. Captain C.I. Stockwell of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers recalled how, after a truly “Silent Night,” he fired three shots into the air at 8:30 a.m. December 26 and then stepped up onto the trench bank. A German officer who had exchanged gifts with Captain Stockwell the previous night also appeared on a trench bank. They bowed, saluted and climbed back into their trenches. A few minutes later, Captain Stockwell heard the German officer fire two shots into the air.

The war was on again.

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/3750.htm

I just received this email from one of my Vietnam Veterans, who was a medic and then a first responder for many years.
He sent this out to his friends and Vet councelor, and gave me permission to post it.
To protect his privacy, I have changed his name to Robert. He is very excited to talk to other Veterans and practitioners about his experiences.
Please send me an email if you’d like to connect with him.

Here is “Robert’s” email:
Hi Folks,
Most of the people I’m sending this video to are vets or vet counselors, for reasons that will become obvious. To them I have this to say: Ingrid Dinter (on the video) did a 4 hour EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) session with me last week… those hours were filled with some of the most emotionally charged moments of my life.
I told her one of the biggest problems in my life was RLS (restless leg syndrome), mostly because I’ve had to take Vicodin for over a year to manage it.
The VA has had me on every drug available to treat this problem over the last 4 or 5 years… some worked for as long as 2 years, but then Vicodin (a narcotic) was the only thing I could count on to allow me to sleep at night. When the RLS began, I would go 3 days without sleep putting me at times at the brink of suicide. I actually thought of asking doctors to amputate my legs… yes, it was that bad. About 3 hours into the EFT session, the RLS in my legs had disappeared… and I hadn’t taken any Tramadol or Vicodin that day… the 2 drugs I use to manage my RLS.

This week I was schedule to meet with an ortho surgeon at the VA because my Baker’s cysts (fluid sacs behind the knee) caused so much pain when standing that I was starting to use a cane again. The swelling behind the knees was visible to both my doctors.
The cortisone shot that the surgeon gave me a year ago, which relieved the pain up until recently, then it came back. (The pain on standing and sitting was 8 on a scale of 1 to 10… 10 being the worst pain I’ve ever felt.)

I told Ingrid about the Baker’s cysts simply because I winced in pain when I stood up to go to the bathroom; the fact that the pain has disappeared is a side effect of our work together, and it was not a separate issue we adressed. Another thing that really blew me away was this: My pain when standing went from an 8 to a 1 or 2. I’m still baffled… and cancelled the surgery!

I had been taking an absolute minimum of 40 mg. of Vicodin a day to control the RLS (usually more like 60 mg). In the last two days, I’ve taken 25 mg each day and have had the best two nights sleep in as long as I can remember. (It’s 3:00pm and so far today I’ve taken 5 mg. I have never taken less than 20 mg at a time to get results.)

Now to another aspect of this 4 hour session: After 40 years of suffering from guilt and a feeling of inadequacy, I finally realized that my “job” as am medic with my first patient in Vietnam who was one of five victims from a direct hit by an RPG (rocket propelled grenade), was to be with him, comfort and reassure him while he was dying. I didn’t know that until a few days ago while doing EFT with Ingrid. I felt horrible that I couldn’t save his life, even though there was nothing I could have done for him medically. I drank, smoked pot, took acid, shot heroin, cocaine, speed, barbiturates, valium, demerol… in the early 70′s I put anything and everything into my arm to get relief from the guilt and nightmares. One of the main reasons I was chemically dependent (mostly pot and booze) until I was 36 was because I felt so guilty that I couldn’t save that kid who was full of shrapnel… not to mention the guilt because I was supposed to be with my crew the day all of them were killed by a mine.
When I just wrote that last sentence, I did not shake or feel any anxiety whatsoever; before this one EFT session last week, that wouldn’t be possible. In the past, I was sometimes able to hide the emotional turmoil externally, but internally I was always a nervous wreck.

EFT is not just for vets… it’s for anyone who has experienced any form of traumatic stress: traffic accident, spousal abuse, rape… for some it can come from simply witnessing a traumatic event. I’m thinking there are few people on this planet who would not benefit from this “miracle” of non-invasive treatment for certain psychological disorders… keep in mind, I’m not a therapist and don’t even play one on TV. Please don’t hesitate to write or call if you have any questions you think I might be able to answer.

In Kindness
“Robert”

Here’s the link: http://www.emofree.com/splash/video_vets.asp

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.

Most Veterans cases that I work with with EFT coaching are very complex, spanning over childhood trauma, often abuse, neglect, abandonment, through trauma with peers, boot camp, war experience, returning home and all the relationship and every day issues that result from this.

It never fails to surprise me to see how thoroughly and lastingly we can help with EFT. I hope that the following case also makes a strong argument that working with Veterans requires extensive experience in EFT and knowledge and understanding about war trauma, in addition to having done one’s own “homework”, so that the stories we work with don’t trigger us as practitioners.

As EFT coaches, we have to know and work within our professional and ethical boundaries and know when to refer.

I’d like to share the story of one of my Vietnam Veterans. “Joe” came to me with a huge load of trauma, from earliest childhood, neglect and abuse, a spiritual upbringing of undeservingness and fearing a punishing god, to a very traumatic deployment (even though he stated for a long time that Vietnam was the easiest time in his life…). Joe became an alcoholic and lived on the streets, went through two marriages and from one trauma into the next. When I met him, he had taken a very spiritual approach to healing and was determined to get well. He had used the VA system for 20 years. He actively participated in AA meetings and PTSD groups and treatment. And on top of all this, he suffered from a broken heart through a relationship with a lady who had survived unimaginable abuse in her life and was not able to return his feelings at the time.

Joe was far from being well. Even though we had agreed to work over the phone, as he lives quite a ways away from me, he insisted on having to see me first eye to eye, to check me out. This is very important for many of my Veterans, and I usually take at least two hours to sit down and let them ask all their questions and talk. If they don’t trust me, they don’t care how effective EFT can be. Trust and rapport are of the essence.

Joe had remarkable successes with our EFT sessions. However, no matter how much we got released, the broken heart haunted him. He simply could not get over that unfulfilled relationship.

Since Joe had so much on his plate, we addressed some Vietnam memories, with the intensity going to zero, shifting from rage and fear to compassion, but also did quite a bit of work on his abusive and neglectful childhood and his fear and rage of God’s punishment, as he found them to be more dramatic than his Vietnam memories.

In our last session, he told me that he realized that in 20 years at the VA, he had not once addressed a memory from Vietnam with his therapist. So I told him that it might be time to begin healing some of his Vietnam trauma that he was not ready to share until then.

I asked him if it felt safe to think about a traumatic memory early on in his deployment. He and I have excellent rapport and experience in working together, so this was a safe question. If he had been a “new Vet”, I would have been even more careful in not having him tune in.

He immediately brought up a memory of when he was just two weeks in Vietnam: He remembered sitting with in the back of a military truck, watching a petite, Vietnamese woman with a blue dress on a bicycle on the side of the road. He was stunned and full of admiration at her ability to gracefully balance a large basket with pottery on her head while steering herself through traffic.

He was shocked when he saw one of his buddies pull out his gun and “just for fun” tried to shoot the basket of her head. He missed the basket, and shot her instead. She fell against the truck, and “Joe” grabbed her hand, trying to pull her into the truck. She slipped away, disappeared under the truck and got rolled over.

His “buddies” were very angry at him for trying to help the lady. They immediately turned against him with a sharp warning: “If this ever happens again, you are a dead man!”

We tapped on every aspect of the trauma: His rage and anger about the soldiers, all aspects of the young woman, his helplessness, the feeling of her hand in his, the sound of her head hitting the truck, the shock of seeing her disappear under the truck, the helplessness. We also worked on his fear of his fellow soldiers killing him in his sleep, as violence was a frequent occurrence where he was stationed and more than once he tried to save Vietnamese women from violence and rape. He always saw himself as the protector, and more than once was threatened for that. He was surrounded by rage and numbness in overwhelming and scary ways.

One of the last aspects we tapped on was the vision of blue dress the woman wore. At that moment, he had a very powerful revelation: ”You won’t believe this! It is the dress! Guess who else wears a blue dress!” Through the tapping, he realized that the woman he is so passionately, almost obsessively (in his own words) in love with, also wears a blue dress frequently, as it is her favorite piece of clothing.

He immediately made the connection between the two women, and everything became very clear in his mind: He couldn’t protect the Vietnamese woman from the abuse through the men, he wanted protect his lady friend now. He tried to rescue her for what he was not able to do in Vietnam. This understanding was completely overwhelming for him. He shook his head in disbelief, stunned at what he had lived with all these years. He knew that it was now OK to let go of his obsession for his lady friend. He now felt safe to let it go, and the overwhelming “thing” that this love had become, released.

We could now work on finding peace with the Vietnamese woman and what happened, in a way that felt appropriate and right for him:

“Even though I might have made a vow back then that I would honor her memory with never ending grief and rage, I allow myself to find an even better way to honor her and what happened.” “Even though I am so sorry for what happened to her, what these SOB did, I tell her now that I am sorry and ask for forgiveness that I couldn’t save her – I wished all these years that there would have been something I could have done.”

“Even though I was shocked and scared when I realized what kind of guys I was surrounded with, I choose to see that I have been safe for many years now, whether I realized and felt that or not.”

TH: I am sorry for what happened – IE: I wish I could have done something – anything to stop it

OE: I still hurt and I never forgave myself UE: And I never forgave them

UN: These SOBs!!! UL: F…n SOBs

CB: I am so sorry! UA: I wish there was anything I could have done for you that would have changed what happened

TH: I would have sacrificed my life for you – but even that wouldn’t have made a difference!

TH: I honor that I did the best I could

IE: I ask for your forgiveness

OE: I honor that I never forgot you

UE: And I know that if I could have, I would have saved you

UN: I realize that You might have known that

UL: I realize that You knew I was trying to help

CB: And even though I never forgave me or them

UA: I see that you never held this against me

TH: You knew I was trying to make this undone, otherwise you wouldn’t have reached out and grabbed my hand.

And then came another healing:

“Even though I will never forgive these SOB for killing the little Vietnamese woman, I realize that I will never know what made him this way.”

“Even though I was just two weeks in country, and I was many years older than them, they were only 17 while I was already in my mid twenties, I know that they must have been through a lot of unspeakable things, or else they wouldn’t’ have turned out this way.”

“Even though I will never know what they were trying to overcome, what they had seen and endured to be so completely numb and brutal (according to my vets, this complete numbness to other people’s pain is very common with PTSD), I honor that it must have been more than they were able to take – it broke them.

When we tapped along those statements, he cleared up. He could now see that his buddies were severely traumatized, too, so much so that they had cut out everything human, they were raging.

He didn’t have to find excuses for them, or ways to condone what happened. Instead he could now see the other soldiers and himself, and the Vietnamese lady, as victims of a raging, brutal war that cost more that humanly imaginable. Even though there is no way to excuse what happened, he found a way to forgiveness that allowed him to see things in a broader light. The acknowledgement “Yes, they were very, very messed up, and I never asked myself why that was, what they had seen!” was huge for him.

He is still honoring the little lady and her death, and will always do so, but now not with all the rage that he was carrying all these years. And when he thinks about the soldiers on the truck, he continues to hold them responsible, but can see them in the context of their own trauma, which, just like himself, might have started many years before they joined the military.

It was beautiful to see the lightness around him, after he released this burden, and he felt that he wanted to go on now, and, after taking a good nap, tackle some other memories that have haunted him for more than 40 years.

I wish that I could find a place…
A place where I could heal and regain faith in myself, and again feel the joy and happiness that I so long ago lost – displaced by despair and hopelessness.

A place where my friends live, if only for awhile, for I sorely need to belong…where I am accepted without judgment, and where I am loved for who I am.

A place where forgiveness reigns…where the future will become clearer and brighter…and filled with hope.

A place where I can find spirituality and wisdom, and where I can be embraced by those who know and can show me the path.

This place existed only in my dreams – until now – and I am once again me.
by Randy Kautto, Vietnam Veteran, with permission

I have seen that many Veterans, their families and everybody who loves them, became victims of war in a way that many people will never understand.

Not because they were not capable or well trained, but because they were expected to deal with the trauma of their experience alone, to toughen it out, to simply get over it without ever being listened to, supported or helped.

I feel that it is time to take on the responsibility to help those who suffer from the consequences of the missions they have been sent to fight, whether we personally agree with the political and ethical background of warfare as a whole, a specific war, any war, or not.

War has always been part of human life and history. Wars have been fought for any reason imaginable and have been used to change just about everything people ever found important, often terminating one social system or realty and starting or supporting a new one.

The price for these shifts is being paid by those who have ended up being victimized by a society’s decision to go to war:

The horrors of war on both sides live on in all the civilians who didn’t have the power to protect themselves and change what war did to them, their lives, their families, their dreams and existence on all levels.

War lives on in those who have lost their soul, their trust, their feeling of safety. It lives on in the shattered bodies of those who will never walk or see again; those who can’t sleep without nightmares; those whose marriages are broken and whose children are traumatized. War is a constant companion of those who are forced to live a life that is far removed from what they had dreamed of, planned for and deserve.
And most certainly, war lives on in every Veteran and his family who doesn’t get the help to heal…