What It’s Like to Be the Haunted
By: Benjamin Sledge
Tags: Veterans, Mental Health, Self, Military, PTSD

A friend of mine was sex-trafficked until she was eighteen years old.

Several years after helping her get out of the environment, I sat in a room with a lawyer and FBI investigator as she recounted details. The stories were some of the darkest and most horrific instances of child sex trafficking I’d ever heard, but what shook me most was when she finally broke. After an hour of questioning, she shut down and couldn’t continue. Looking at her, I saw myself years earlier during the fireworks display. Her posttraumatic stress (PTS) had kicked in and she couldn’t forge forward. Recalling the details of the trauma became too much and her voice went from strong and confident, to mouselike, to nothing.

We’ve both talked at length about what life is like living with PTS, despite having polar opposite experiences. We both understand how sights, sounds, and images can beckon like old flames, only to set your whole mind ablaze. She once called me from her car in the middle of nowhere because she’d blacked out. I spent hours on the phone talking her down, working through what I’d learned in my journey toward wholeness.

But even when you’ve found that healing, it’s still hard being the haunted.

These days, I work in the veteran space and she works in an anti-human trafficking organization. Through hardship, endurance, and struggle, we’ve both emerged and found purpose from our pain. But stepping into those spaces can exacerbate old scars.

I think the misconception about PTS is that you either completely get over it or never heal, and neither are helpful (or true). As I’ve said in other articles, who in their right mind would want to indefinitely stay in pain and trauma? On the flip side, there are those who’ve suffered very little in their life and know nothing of the misery of this world who believe with enough change and willpower you can conquer any mental mountain. While a broken leg may heal, you can still walk with a limp the rest of your life. But if you keep walking on a broken leg, it’ll never heal and only get worse.

My first foray into healing happened after an intervention. While I was ashamed and angry, I eventually realized my family and friends were trying to help me. Later in life, two friends took the time to listen without judgement to my conflicted, rambling emotions and provide social support for me. They never forced me to talk about it, but let me open up while we did normal things like hiking or meeting together at a sports bar. This is perhaps the greatest thing a friend can do — make your experience seem almost normal as opposed to out of place. The same way you’d comfort a friend going through a rough breakup is often the best thing you can do for someone struggling with PTS. Let them open up and take the lead. Keep eye contact, comfort them, and lend an empathetic ear.

I still remember the day I told a close friend a particularly harrowing story. He didn’t smile or act repulsed. Instead, he leaned forward and said, “I imagine a lot of the scenarios you were involved in were hard to navigate on a level I could never understand. Sounds like you’ve had a rough go the past couple of years.”

That simple statement allowed me to open up more and more, exploring treatments ranging from CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). I started getting better, growing and maturing, and even began doing my own exposure therapy where I learned to desensitize myself to fireworks by introducing them in small increments. Instead of accepting PTS as a way of life, I learned to manage it and live a fuller life.

One of the most important things I discovered was that I had to become more concerned with living life now, instead of running away from it because of my past. I had to come to terms with the ghosts that haunted the crevices of my mind and realize that life is a special onetime opportunity. Far too often I took that for granted. Life was just something I did while I endured the demons. And yet, there were all these fun and beautiful moments around me I assumed I could never enjoy again. It took other people to set me on the right track, but I also had to learn to stand on my own. To face the past. To face the triggers, ghosts, and hardships.

Sometimes, they still lurk in the shadows. Other times they still beckon like a siren calling to shipwreck. But these days I’m a little calmer, a little quieter, and have even learned to enjoy a sunset.