Ruin

“Shoulds' come only from leftover thinking. If we are truly in this moment (the only one there really is), we don’t should on ourselves.

It’s a great freedom.”
― Kelly Corbet, BIG: the practice of joy

“Here the veterans grapple with the question of moral luck: Can any workings of bad luck produce cruel or evil actions in a good person?”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“Democratic process embodies the apparent contradiction of safe struggle. Combat veterans with unhealed PTSD have the greatest difficulty conceiving of any struggle apart from killing and dying. Passionate struggle conducted within rules of safety and fairness simply doesn't make sense to them or seems a hollow charade. For them it is psychologically impossible to win a struggle without killing or to lose without dying, and they do not want to do either. Many veterans' response is to withdraw and not participate. Democracy embodies safe struggle over the shape and implementation of a future. An unhealed combat veteran cannot think in terms of a future. Democratic political activity presupposes that the future exists and that it is meaningful. Combat taught the survivor of prolonged combat not to imagine a future or to want anything. Prior to seeing the point of one's voluntary participation in a social process, one must feel that it is safe to want something.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character

“The overwhelming majority of combat veterans whom I have known are painfully aware of the absence of intimacy, tenderness, light playfulness, or easy mutuality in their sex lives. For many, sex is a trigger of intrusive recollection and emotion from Vietnam as the sound of explosions or the smell of a corpse. Sex and anger are intertwined that they often cannot conceive of tender, uncoerced sex that is free of rage. When successful treatment reduces their rage, they sometimes report that they have to completely relearn (or learn for the first time) the pleasures of sex with intimacy and playfulness.”
― Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character