Birds of a Feather by Lorin Lindner

Author:Lorin Lindner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

SEVEN

A Sailor’s Story

The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.

—LEO ROSTEN, screenwriter, author, and political scientist

To understand the need for a place like Serenity Park, it helps to understand veterans and PTSD. That comprehension cannot be found in a diagnostic manual. Humans are far too complex to be defined by a set of diagnostic criteria.

When I taught Abnormal Psychology, I told my students that we never call someone by his or her diagnosis. “There goes that schizophrenic” and “Your bipolar patient is here” aren’t phrases any psychotherapist should ever utter.

There’s judgment in those phrases, and psychotherapists, of all people, should understand that a diagnosis is not a person, nor is it a source of shame. Why does the brain get blamed for things it can’t help? When we have biochemical disorders like diabetes, we don’t say, “Shame on that pancreas!” People who have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder also have biochemical disorders; it just happens that those disorders are in the brain instead of the endocrine system. The human mind is influenced by a combination of genetics, the environment, and all the things any individual has experienced, starting in utero. A person is never just someone with PTSD; he or she is a complex sum of all his or her experiences.

Matt Simmons is one such person. Matt grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, in an affluent area filled with country clubs. His parents sent him to private schools. Matt lived his entire childhood in the same sprawling, well-appointed house surrounded by trees. His father was a prominent attorney. Matt’s mother, too, was successful, not only as a nurse practitioner but also as a dedicated community member helping pregnant teens. She did her work while raising a son and two daughters. Matt was the eldest.

From the outside, it seemed that Matt’s childhood was happy and predictable. Matt’s parents had a close relationship, and they were observant Catholics who went to church every Sunday. In addition, Matt was close to his grandfather, a loving man and excellent role model. Matt’s reality, though, was not as idyllic as it appeared.

Matt’s father served in the Vietnam War as an interpreter. He rarely discussed the war. As a translator, he would have sat in on interrogations, and he may have been exposed to brutality. Matt believes he never sat with his back to the door. He thought he was too quick to anger. His father once told Matt that if he ever jumped out of a helicopter, he’d better make damn sure he was running downhill. He never explained what was behind that advice, but Matt knew it wasn’t a story with a nice ending. Matt suspected his father might have suffered some emotional wounds in the war but he couldn’t be sure because, to his knowledge, his father never complained or sought help. What Matt feels sure of is that his father would never hug him.

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