Negative thoughts

Before my assault, I was very

fun loving and free and happy

and I had trust.

I trusted individuals completely.

After my assault, I didn't trust myself,

let alone anyone else.

So I worked hard

to gain anything,

to gain a personality,

to gain being whole,

and it never worked.

It was decades, and I never felt I measured up.

I never felt that I was worthy,

that I had purpose.

I didn't have hope that anyone would ever love me

the way that individuals should love another person.

Yeah, I thought I was worthless.

It, you know, it made me feel like,

well, you know, what was I doing here?

You know, why?

You know, I'd be better off if I wasn't here.

And, like I said, that's the first time

I tried to commit suicide.

You know, I didn't have any friends,

all my relationships were gone.

I was drinking like a fool.

I didn't have any hobbies.

Everything I enjoyed

just disappeared, I just let 'em go.

I just figured, I don't know what I figured to be honest.

That...

There is no, you know,

no point in doing anything that I enjoy

because I didn't enjoy doing it.

And trying to

figure out why,

I couldn't come up with an answer.

And it was just,

for years it was like that.

I actually, I turned to alcohol.

It was a great coverup and so it wasn't quite

as much of an isolation.

It was sort of I guess an isolation

because you can't really have deep friends in that sort

of a fashion and it's really easy to get rid of friends

and it's really easy to push people away, all of which I did,

so that could be isolation.

Later on it turned more into that.

The drinking and the partying, it only lasts

so long before it becomes serious issues

and that's what it did for me.

It started causing serious life issues.

Constantly losing jobs and all sorts of stuff,

not being able to keep friends.

And so at that point that's when I did start to isolate

and I pretty much lost all my friends.

I ended up getting married which was a very,

very tumultuous marriage but other than that,

other than my wife, I pretty much didn't have any friends

for quite a few years.

Didn't want to go out to crowded events,

didn't want to have too much of a social life

for the same reason I was talking about before.

I don't want to have to try and explain it to people

and I didn't want to have to go

over my experiences every single time to try

and let somebody know and so it was much easier

to just not to have friends.

I mean, I just thought it was, it was me.

I mean, everybody has problems, so...

In fact for a long time,

up until, again, I retired and realized,

I was at times thinking these Veterans who had PTSD,

they were just using it as a cop-out

because I was functioning.

And then I realized that's really not true.

Looking in retrospect after getting treatment,

I can see where, in my early life,

in my working career and what not, I had a problem.

That was after learning what was causing it and what happened.

When I came back, I was 20 years old when I

came out of Vietnam, I was very troubled by my experiences

and I didn't know how to deal with those feelings.

Feelings of guilt, I had extreme guilt for surviving,

and I took it as a weakness on my part,

that I wasn't a good enough Marine.

One example of my homework assignments

making a breakthrough for me was I realized I was sad

when I thought about my old friend.

My old friend's name was Karl Soto.

He was my Gunner in Iraq, and he was shot by a sniper.

It made me sad to no end, and I understood that much of myself

before I started Cognitive Processing Therapy.

After I had started doing it,

they wanted me to talk more about him.

They had me do a whole homework assignment on him.

And they wanted to know how he died,

and I went through that with him, and that was

different for me because I had never thought about it.

You know, I understood that he was dead, but I hadn't really

thought about what upset me so much about it.

After a while, I realized that what I was feeling

wasn't sadness that my friend died, it was guilt.

I felt guilty that I wasn't there for him,

that I wasn't there to protect him from a sniper's bullet.

Or that if I had been there, I'd probably be dead, too.

I've been through it and I can tell you that most of the fears

and the sickness about, make myself sick about going

out there the first time, I look back and I have to chuckle

because I'm so glad it happened.

I've got a life today that I'm very happy with

and it just seems to get better all the time.