Coming Home from Military PTS(D), Moral Injury, and MST

This site was created by Veterans to help other Veterans end their inner wars. Everything here is free.

If you’re dealing with invisible wounds, or worried you might be, you’re in the right place. 

Your military stories matter.

Ready to understand why some still haunt you?

We Came Home to Disorder

Many of us came back to a world that didn’t know how to receive us, a culture still finding the language for what we’d been through.

In the military, life has purpose, structure, and dependable community. We wake up knowing exactly where we need to be, what we need to do, and who's coming with us.

This level of shared mission, aliveness, and mutual support is almost impossible to find in the Civilian world.

The unresolved intensity we carry can also make it hard to slow down, connect with others, and feel at home.

I left the service with an iceberg of buried rage, grief, and other emotions. I never learned how to handle the losses I experienced and spent years pretending my nervous system wasn't as tormented as it was.

My biggest mistake was thinking I had to carry everything on my own. It took finding the right community—of other Veterans—for me to fully come home.

My main challenge wasn't "trauma", it was carrying too much alone.

Boot camp initiated us into a life of purpose and belonging, where we went from being protected by the community to protecting it. But that initiation was never completed. And for the most part, the modern Civilian world doesn’t know how to complete it.

We came back to a society that wasn’t prepared for the aftermath of what it had asked us to do, or for what it meant to truly bring us home.

When we come home as Veterans, we can get caught between those two worlds: the Civilian world we’ve returned to and the Soldier's world we left behind.

Getting stuck in this gap can lead to challenges that often get labeled as post-traumatic stress or PTS(D). For me, the "(D)" stays in parentheses because what gets called a "disorder" is often just a healthy adaptation to an unhealthy environment. 

Adaptations like hyper-vigilance and emotional numbness kept us alive. They helped us stay alert, get the job done, and keep showing up. Even when our bodies screamed in fear.

In many ways, it’s the society we returned to that’s still struggling with disorder.

Only a disordered society would:

• Continue sacrificing the lives and sanity of its bravest youth in a 24-year (and counting) “War on Terror.”

• Ignore the widespread sexual misconduct suffered by service members—our brothers and sisters in uniform.

• Abandon the Afghan and Iraqi translators who worked and fought beside us. They joined a brotherhood the system refuses to recognize. We vowed to protect them. Now they are being hunted down and slaughtered.

• Take Veterans living through all this, label them “disordered” and numb them with medication. When in many cases, what is most needed is real listening and empathy.

Only a disordered society could call this normal for so long.

It’s also important to recognize that the VA defines post-traumatic stress as a “disorder,” because for many of us, working with that system is essential for getting support.

Disorder: an illness or condition that disrupts normal physical or mental functions.

That’s how the medical field uses the term, and sometimes using their words helps us get the support we need.

We're straddling two worlds here.

This Series is about Coming Home from Military PTS(D), Moral Injury, and MST—and building bridges between these two worlds. 

What to expect in this Series

I served as an infantryman and deployed to Iraq during the OIF invasion in 2003-2004. My world got rocked.

In the 20 years since then, I’ve tried just about every treatment for trauma I could get my hands on.

I’ll share the tools and resources that helped me and other Veterans reclaim lives worth showing up for.

If you or someone you care about is living with post-traumatic stress, you're in the right place.

While I often use examples from my own deployment, what I share can help with many kinds of military-related trauma.

We're going to learn how to put our hardest experiences into words.

We’ll also go over ways to deal with PTS(D) symptoms, such as:

• Memories that still haunt us: This is our body remembering what our mind tried to forget. It’s time our toughest stories were heard. Fully. We’ve carried too much in silence trying to protect ourselves and the ones we love from the hurt still living inside us.

• Chronic agitation and pain: Our restless nervous system can relearn that it's safe to breathe deeply and slowly, right here, in this moment.

• Buried grief, rage, shame—and everything else we learned to hide: Every emotion we've swallowed down deserves to be listened to and felt with respect.

• Isolation: True belonging returns through finding healthy connections within the Veteran community, and by reclaiming our natural place in the world.

And the transformation that started in the military needs to be completed.

It’s the mature warrior’s journey—one that roots us in something deeper than culture and helps us rejoin the communities that can only become whole again through our return.

As they always have.

And will.

Am I moving too fast?

There aren’t enough good years left to keep waiting.

Let's get to it. 

 Click below to start Chapter 1: The War Before the War