When people with PTSD try to return to normal life, they are plagued by readjustment problems in the basic elements of life. They have difficulties in relationships, in employment, and in having families. A lack of caring attachments. A sense of a lack of purpose and meaning. Some chronically traumatized people lose the sense that they have a self at all.
Veterans report the feeling that they never really made it back from the war.
Formerly suicidal people feel they never really made it back to normal life. PTSD was aggravated for Viet Nam veterans because they returned to a country that had negative attitudes toward them. For sexual assault survivors, stigmatization is the second injury . When Viet Nam veterans returned home people were angry at them. They had shamed the country, they had done something wrong, they were potentially harmful to others, it was dangerous to be with them.