Edward Tick On How The U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers
by DAVID KUPFER
Edward Tick began counseling Vietnam veterans in the 1970s, at a time when the nation was trying to put the Vietnam War behind it and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) wasn’t yet a diagnostic category. Since then he has treated veterans of numerous conflicts, from the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to the Iraq War of today. His methods are based on his study of worldwide spiritual traditions, indigenous cultures, mythology, and the role of the warrior in society. Key to the healing process for veterans, he says, is for them to experience the emotions that they could not allow themselves to feel in the war zone and to address the spiritual damage that they suffered during combat.
Tick turned eighteen in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, but he had a high lottery number in the draft and did not have to serve. Though he was against that war and active in the protest movement, he says he felt compassion, not anger, toward the soldiers who came home. In 1975 he moved to rural New York State and began working as a psychotherapist. He had not planned on specializing in veterans and trauma, but the region he had moved to was home to many who had served in Vietnam.
Tick has an M.A. in psychology from Goddard College and a Ph.D. in communication and rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is also an ordained interfaith minister and has undergone a thirteen-year apprenticeship with a medicine man. He lives in Albany, New York, where, along with his wife, Kate Dahlstedt, he directs Soldier’s Heart www.soldiersheart.net, a nonprofit initiative to establish veterans’ safe-return programs in communities across the nation. “Veterans need a safety net when they come home from Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says, “so they won’t crash and burn like so many Vietnam veterans did. People in the community should be waiting to catch them.”
Kupfer: Do you encounter much resistance to your methodology from more-macho veterans?
Tick: Some deny the ptsd wound altogether, believing it to be evidence of cowardice or weakness. One veteran left a phone message for me recently, saying all my theories were “bullshit” and “the only cause of PTSD is losing.” Some think PTSD is real but don’t want to risk revealing their true feelings.
I often have to prove myself to veterans. They need to see that I am not afraid of them, that I have done my own form of service and walk in solidarity with them. I must accept the rage they sometimes direct at me, which they often feel toward society or protestors. I have to demonstrate that I will not break or abandon them. I strive to live up to their highest standards and to be worthy in their eyes of serving them and serving with them.
Kupfer: You write that war inverts good and evil. How does that affect a soldier’s understanding of right and wrong?
Tick: Almost all of us want to be agents of good. For many soldiers the motive for being a warrior is not to kill and destroy, but to preserve and protect. Then they find themselves in immoral wars where they are forced to be agents of destruction. I was recently discussing this issue with army chaplains, and I asked what they did to counsel soldiers who have just come back from a firefight or have committed atrocities. One chaplain said, “I teach my soldiers that they have to renegotiate their covenant with God.” The assumption that God’s going to forgive us for, say, killing a child just because we had no choice doesn’t wash with many soldiers. Their relationship with the divine is quite often damaged. As the chaplain said, they have to renegotiate it. Veterans and soldiers have to find ways to reconnect with the divine and undo that moral inversion and become again agents of creation.
Kupfer: You’ve written a book about dream healing. What is it?
Tick: Dream healing is practiced in many cultures around the world, but the tradition that I studied and wrote about is the ancient Greek version, well over three thousand years old. The Greek god of healing was Asclepius, and he visited his patients through dreams and visions. There was an extensive network of three hundred Asclepiad sanctuaries around the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Portugal, and from the Balkans to North Africa.
Dream healing was reserved for people for whom no other healing methods would work. They could travel to the sanctuaries of Asclepius and participate in a ritual process called “incubation.” First they were cleansed, purified, and treated with hydrotherapy, nutrition and exercise, acupressure, color therapy, and so on. These were used not as healing methods themselves but to prepare the patients for the vision quest. Then the patients would enter into incubation chambers, which in the earliest times were caves or holes carved into rocks. In later years the patients were swaddled on couches. Either way, they were put into intense isolation to fast, pray, and wait for a dream or vision in which the god of healing, or some surrogate, came and either healed them in the dream or gave them a prescription for how they could heal themselves later. We have records of more than a thousand of these prescriptions dating from 600 b.c. to 500 a.d., when the tradition was destroyed by the early Christian church. Then the church started to do its own form of dream healing, but now it was Christian saints who came instead of the Greek gods.
Kupfer: Have you found dream healing useful in your work?
Tick: Yes, I lead trips to Greece for veterans and nonveterans, and I use Asclepiad dream healing there. The healing dream is not an ordinary dream. It is a visit from an archetype. Jung said most of our dreams are minor, but occasionally we get a major one, which is a visit from an archetypal power or presence. Veterans often experience some form of warrior or war chief or medicine man coming to them.
The word psychotherapist comes directly from the Asclepiad tradition. It means “soul attendant.” Psychology literally means “the order and meaning of the soul.” It didn’t become a science until Freud and his followers arrived out of the medical tradition. Modern psychology left the soul far behind and has not yet reconnected with its spiritual roots, though it needs to, because psychological healing occurs at a spiritual level.
Kupfer: What is an “archetypal power”?
Tick: In neo-Jungian psychology there are four formative archetypes: the warrior, the magician, the lover, and the king or queen. All archetypes have their light and shadow sides. We need mentoring and initiation in order to become spiritual warriors. The shadow side of the warrior is violence and aggression and force and selfishness, all of which are rampant in our culture. Gang members are shadow warriors initiating themselves in the absence of an initiation by the elders. But the shadow warrior doesn’t always take the form of criminal activity or abusive or addictive behavior. Men in our culture, by and large, feel lonely, disconnected, and disempowered. That, too, is the shadow warrior.
Kupfer: And the archetypal warrior is betrayed by modern warfare?
Tick: Yes, our soldiers are not taught to behave as mythic warriors. The principles of the mythic warrior are that you never kill for vengeance or out of emotion. If you have to fight and kill, it is always for a cause that is morally sound and higher than yourself, such as defense of home and family. I know Vietnamese veterans who were at war for twenty-five or thirty years against the Japanese, the French, and the Americans. They are now healthy, happy men with no ptsd. I think this is because they were only defending their homes against invaders. PTSD seems to be more severe in the side that invades rather than defends.
Men’s-movement leaders, such as Robert Moore, Robert Bly, and Michael Meade, have been trying to bring back the idea of initiation and restore the spiritual warrior to American men. I have worked with Native American veterans who failed to find healing in the va system, so they went back to their reservations and worked with their elders and did achieve healing. There aren’t enough people working to bring spiritual warriorship to our young men, our veterans, and our inner-city populations. We need more.
Kupfer: Now that women are on the front lines, how can they fit into the traditionally male warrior role?
Tick: Many women are suffering terribly in the combat zone. One woman veteran I’ve met returned home from Iraq in a horrible depression because she had machine-gunned women and children. She refused help and was redeployed. She told her family she wanted the Iraqis to kill her as punishment for what she had done to them.
Some women veterans suffer because they feel they were created to be life givers, not life takers. So the moral trauma of war is more severe for them. But if we understand the warrior’s role to be not destroying and killing, but preserving and protecting, then we can find many women serving honorably in our military. Some of the most admirable women I have ever met are combat nurses, chaplains, and career officers.
There have been traditional cultures with women warriors and chiefs. Some Northwest Native American tribes had women warriors who were combatants. Among the Iroquois, clan mothers were given the ultimate power to declare war, because they were the ones who’d given birth to those who would be sent into battle.
Kupfer: Do you think war is innate to the human character?
Tick: Yes, in the sense that competition is built into nature, and we are a part of nature. Darwin said that if you want to understand war, look closely at a square foot of English lawn and see how the creatures there fight and devour each other. But the way we practice war is not the same as the competition for survival that we see in nature, because nature does not destroy more than it needs to in order to preserve itself. We’ve taken the competition and strife that is inherent in nature and inflated it to massive dimensions. And war is so damn seductive, because many of our primitive needs are met in its pursuit. We need to transcend both our innate tendencies toward competition and our socialized love of war.
Kupfer: What impact has this work had on you personally?
Tick: I have learned through all this that wounds are initiatory. When young men go through rites of passage, they need to be wounded in order to understand the fragility of life and to develop the powers and skills of full men. I’ve also developed secondary ptsd along the way. Psychologists can be traumatized by exposure to other people’s trauma. For a decade I had nightmares of war, sometimes intense combat nightmares. They helped me understand what veterans experience and what moral issues they have to work out. I can now tolerate even the most horrific war stories and stay connected to the heart and soul of the person telling them.
Kupfer: War is such a painful subject. Does it really help to keep talking about it?
Tick: Ironically, the way to heal pain is by diving deeper into it. Most of the pain we are in is caused by our resistance to and denial of it. To get off the suicidal path we are on, we have to feel the pain that we are in, that the earth is in, that our communities are in.
I fear for us, because the way we practice war is destroying everything. When we keep our mouths shut and don’t do anything about it, it damages every one of us, which creates more pain that has to be buried. It’s either dive into the pain or die from refusing to face it.
There are signs that people are coming to this realization. I am meeting activists on the Left who, frustrated that we have not been able to successfully protest this war and this administration, are turning their energy instead toward helping veterans. I also see people concerned about helping Iraq restore itself right now, and not waiting several decades, as we did with Vietnam.
Some in the military are saying that we need a military-civilian coalition to address the enormous problem of caring for veterans. That is good, because it truly is our responsibility too. Healing needs to be, in part, taken out of the hands of specialists and put back into the hands of the tribe, which can do a lot of things that specialists can’t. There is now less long-term isolation of veterans and hopefully less alienation among them. The public is more aware of ptsd and its consequences, such as veterans who commit suicide and homicide.
Kupfer: It must be hard to do this work. Why do you stick with it?
Tick: After the first Gulf War, I didn’t want to work with its veterans. I was war weary. I still am, but I am part of a brotherhood, and I have to keep serving. As I’ve gotten to know and respect veterans, their situation has become intolerable to me. They are home in body, but they can’t come home in mind or heart or spirit. My goal is to provide a road map to lead veterans and other survivors of trauma back into society.
So much love comes out of this work: the brotherhood that I share with veterans, the incredible forgiveness that we experience when we go to Vietnam. There are flowers in the depths of hell. Sometimes people have to walk through hell together in order to reach the deepest level of love and connection. That love is bigger and stronger than the anguish we face.
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