RE: The Struggle to Come Home

Glad I remembered to come back to this.

Super important and full of a lot of translatable points that would help non-vets also. I think that while most of us will never be soldiers, there is of psychological safety in structure and when that is gone (whatever form it takes outside military), we tend to become rudderless. For a vet, that is an extreme contrast after 20 years, but it affects all of us in some way.

Another interesting thing to note perhaps here is that in Finland, (nearly) all men go to the military for between 6 and 12 months and while that is a different path to a professional soldier, I think that the structure and hierarchy they learn gets translated into the way they work in business. There isn't a huge amount of hierarchy in Finnish business and a lot less than in the US, but there is a lot of structure and expectation, clear division of labour and roles, and responsibility to do the job. It is changing with the younger cohorts though.

From a personal perspective, I understand it from how I changed after the stroke, as it was like walking into a world I no longer understood. It was all familiar, but everything had changed. And like a civilian unable to really understand the transition of a soldier back into civilian life, I felt/feel that very few if any can really understand that the structure I relied on, who I was, was suddenly gone in an instant. No more safety, no more being able to rely on the process.

Thanks for sharing this.