PTSD as a spiritual identity disorder

I spent most of the last weekend attending a course that addresses the issue of PTSD, particularly focuses on veterans who have been having trouble transitioning to normal life. Many stories shared during the weekend retreat were very moving. Although it is very hard to understand, the soldiers of the modern days are going through a very difficult transition from the combat zone to civilian life without proper holdings from the society.

The combat zone is a place where life and death happen in split seconds,

and in the everyday civilian lives we take our lives for granted.

It is thus not impossible to understand that soldiers coming back from the combat zone are having trouble making sense of their warrior identity in the world of civilians.

Their lives were transformed and their world has become a different world, and there is no going back.

Therapeutically, finding a way to honor, to acknowledge, and to affirm the real, life and death, fight and flight combat experiences seems to be a properer way to address people suffering from PTSD.

Nevertheless, the manualized treatments that are operating in most of the VAs nowadays can in no way achieve this goal. very sad news for those soldiers who have sacrificed themselves for a larger cause. :(

Families and friends of soldiers also suffer from the residual effects that the soldiers brought back with them. They were rarely acknowledged and addressed.

I have my heart for all the warriors who have fought and are fighting,

with all the peaceful wish,

I would also honor their lives in those split second encounters with death.

I recommend a useful book on this issue, War and the Soul by Ed Tick.

Sweet students

Having sweet and appreciative students is always a boost to my energy.

A student of mine commented that when nobody cared about a specific class, it'd be hard for s/he to care about it as well. In contrast, because everyone was participating in this/my class, it has become more interesting and engaging.

Well, I'd say, allowing students to have some power/responsibilities for the degree of entertainment/engagement to a class that I'm teaching is quite important.

I was glad that at least some of the students have found my class interesting. :)

It's my first week back from spring break, tough and long week.

The Soul and the dark magic, the Other, and Harry Potter

I broke the neck of my acoustic guitar today.

Right after I made a new recording with it. Damn!

On the academically related side,

I finally watched Harry Potter 5, the movie, and was very sad to watch Dumbledore got killed.

There was an interesting point being made in the movie, that is, one of the dark magic can split an individual's soul into pieces and thus contain it in different objects. To do so, one must commit mass murder. Performing this dark magic with mass murder will allow an individual to live an eternal live. In the novel/movie, this was how Voldemore was able to continue to have influence in the magical world. His body vanished, but his soul lived on.

This point is similar to an idea that Ed Tick made in his book "Soul and the War" when he discussed the specific difficulties that veterans encounter throughout the war, from the training, the battle field, to their home return. One of the points that Ed made was that some soldiers' souls had to leave their body because they were committing activities involving taking away others' lives during war.

It is interesting to see that many similar "archetypal" points are made in academic books, as well as in movies and fictions.

Killing, regardless of the allegedly legitimate intention, is a dark magic.

Although lives of the killers are preserved, their soul has to be wounded.

I wondered if Snape was protecting Draco from homicidal actions by killing Dumbledore himself. Once your soul left your body, it is hard to come back in. And with regards to killing, it could be hard to stop once you tried it once. Snape clearly had more experiences in controlling and managing his magic.

Another point that was not such an emphasize in the movie/novel has to do with the idea of the "Other."

This is related to my research interest, the distinction between "pure blood" and "muggle,"

the differences between the light side and the dark side.

The idea of contamination, creating an enemy, etc.

You can see them everywhere even in today's politics.

The Obama administration has been trying to pass the health care bill,

but the "enemy" refused to be "friends or allies."

And the "enemy" tried to find more reasons (such as the distinction between pure blood and muggle) so that they are irreconcilable excuses to transform into friends (of their enemy). *

The Others are created and imagined, and they seem to always exist. Always.

In Foucault's term, "when there is power, there is resistance."

So from a Jungian perspective, can the Others be one of the archetypes?

* It seems to me that the friendly side to the bill has been trying their best to show that they are friends with the enemy side of the bill, but the enemy sees the friendly side to be their enemy nevertheless.

a loneliness

Working and thinking are routes of lonely journeys.

In fact, being in human realm is fundamentally lonely from both a Buddhist and existential perspectives.

My spring break has been going well, and I enjoyed my alone time of cooking, reading, getting works done, etc.

I even chose to be away from my partner.

What I did not realize is, even if I stayed with my partner, I would have still been lonely.

All the activities that I involve myself in require a fair amount of individual work, that is, working alone.

Reading, digesting, writing, grading paper, reflecting, even the instrument I play only takes one person. (I’m trying to think of some instruments that require more than one person to play… running out of ideas…)

So yes, I think I’m generally quite lonely.

Being with loneliness is like the path that everyone has to go through while trying to play the intricate game involving gender, race, class, and other categorization.

It is close to the experience of attempting to reach enlightenment but not quite there yet.

That’s it. If I get to enlightenment, loneliness is no longer a concept that requires a name, a pointing to, a referral, it will simply be. It is only because I’m not quite there yet that I’m working around it with words, language, expression, etc. and not able to get to the being quite so readily.

Hence the being of loneliness creeps out on me on the moments when I least expected it to.

It is always a humbling experience, always a nice little icky reminder.

Oh, that’s right. Regardless of the fact that I have a loving partner and lots of friends and family who care about me genuinely, I still feel lonely.

I’m not quite there yet.

The racist me

The profession that I’m involved with requires some face to face conversation with individuals who may share some personal things with me. Today I was meeting B, a young African American girl who was telling me some struggles she had at work when she was being bullied or talked behind her co-workers’ back. I have never met B before and I was trying very hard to figure out some essential points of her struggles.

Yet there was a burning question in back of my mind for quite a while during our conversation. That is, “are they (her co-workers) white?”

There was part of me wanting to defend this girl and assumed that she was being bullied “because” of her skin color.

Regardless of the level of involvement of her skin color, I was glad that I did not ask her that question.

I think that my burning question reveals some hints of the racist part of me. There was this part of me that was racist and it judges people based on their color, even in the situations when I was trying to protect or defend for the presumably oppressed ones.

I know very clear in my mind that if she were not to be black, I would not have had that inexcusably racist question in the back of my mind. And the fact that this question was burning behind me gave evidence to the racist me.

I am a racist, just like everyone else, knowingly or unknowingly.

It is not my job to point out her skin color as “perhaps part of her struggles.” In fact, if it is, she would have told me, given that I was doing the most fundamental part of my job well, that is, building a working relationship with her.

She did not tell me anything regarding her skin color, and we still had a good chat.

It is little instances like this that reminds me of the struggles and oppression that I have received on the other side of the equation.

This is a structural problem. It effects you, me, and everyone else.

Sometimes it comes out at places that we were not even paying attention to.

One day a colleague of mine was talking with me about a couple she had just talked to. As we were exchanging ideas, I made a comment about how her female gender role may have played into the dynamics of her chat with the couple.

She was offended and said, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

I often find my identification (or performance) of a feminist character a block for human connections. The above instance was one of them.

I was pointing out an obvious gender dynamic that was taking place, and yet, any comment about gender ought to be eliminated or shelved and thus no one gets hurt or offended.

It is moments like this that I find myself being caught in dilemmas.

On the one hand, I would love to talk about race and gender, they have real, embodied effects in the 21^st century of United States.

On the other hand, I should not be talking about race and gender, because that proves me to be a racist, a sexist, and a feminist (with a negative tone).

So how do we get to it?

For now, I will stick with the title of this rant, by discovering the racist, sexist, and classist me, and be honest and courageous enough to confront it, to bring it to light, to make it visible.

Spring Break

Spring break, march 3rd 2010, the beginning of a new blog.

I'm having a very good time enjoying my extra time during spring break, and this is how this blog was born.

I spent yesterday cleaning my house, cooking, doing laundry, watching French movies, uploading some grades for students, talking to a friend of mine and reading leisurely.

This is huge, because I have not cleaned my house for about two months.

I have not been able to watch French movie because my lover and I have some communication problems regarding our language ability.

Students grades are always the ones that I neglect till the end because I have so much other things to do, research, presentation, the classes I'm taking, meetings, etc.

I finally cooked a turkey bone that was in my freezer for about a month, with dried mushroom, a soup with chicken broth and mushrooms. Yummy. Sometimes I fantasize writing a dissertation about the kind of food I eat in the territory of north America. Yet in the end I always fall back to ethnic and gender study.

I chatted with an old friend of mine, who is not in Austin, TX, also struggling with his English and issues regarding ethnic discrimination. Experiences are shared, and he obviously works harder than I am. I felt very much like a content slacker.

What a

Goodday.