My Dear Friends,
You've a right to be put-off. It's been too long. Today, I just got a back-channel message from
brightfeather wondering whether I was all right, and how Jane was, and I realized that I must post something short -- at least short for me.
Things are maniacally busy, mostly at work. I've been asked to do a training for mental health workers who are treating servicemen returning from Iraq & Afghanistan with PTSD, serious & debilitating and life-crippling PTSD. My community has had over 4,000 servicemen return in the past few weeks alone, and frankly, it's overwhelming. Most of our PTSD-experienced therapists are used to treating abuse/neglect PTSD, and they have little background in combat PTSD, which as I'm sure you can understand, has its own important & draining twists. This has meant several thousand pages of reading, literally, and a fundamental re-thinking of my own experience treating PTSD, especially combat and other life-crippling PTSD's, not to mention my own experiences growing up with a father who had combat PTSD from WWII. (He's the last man still living who helped carry up the flag on Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima.) These are things, frankly, that I feel are duties, just behind those I owe to Jane and my family. (Not that those Jane duties are grim -- mostly, they bring me love, even with everything else.
Jane continues to improve, steadily & significantly. Her reading, while not back to normal, is phenomenally better. She can read not only Newsweek articles, but some from the NY Review of Books. I hope, in the next few weeks, to post her first extended writing -- quite good -- since her fall, nearly a year ago. (Can it possibly be that long? it both seems so recent, and then like forever.) Her speaking, her memory, her ability to find words have all improved, too, again steadily & significantly.
And I must confess: I stopped writing, because I found that in both living Jane's struggles -- yes, she and we have very difficult days, too -- and even her successes and then writing about them, for some reason had changed from being liberating & healing to burning me out. As a long-time therapist working with very difficult clients, I've not only learned to recognize burn-out in myself, or as it's now called, Secondary Stress Disorder -- PTSD via Love or the Care-Giver's PTSD -- I've also learned that I need to act quickly, and in whatever way needed.
(I also confess that, for a break, I started writing some fanfic. That seemed to better ease out the stress. And curiously, it wound up dovetailing surprisingly well with all the PTSD stuff I'm facing.)
And then, as I've said, work crashed in on me.
I do sincerely hope that things go well with you and with all you hold dear. I am sad about being so out-of-touch,
With much love,
Jane, Les & avus