Health

I Inherited My Dad’s PTSD

“You’ve gotta be ready for anything,” my father said to me when I was 12 as he packed the trunk of our Chevy Cavalier with camping supplies—a tent, emergency ponchos, hunting knives, blankets, boots, socks, gloves, a waterproof sleeping bag, several gallons of water, and a box full of freeze-dried army rations.

He’d accounted for everything we’d need for a week long camping trip in a remote jungle location completely cut off from society. Except we weren’t going camping in the jungle for a week. We were going to dinner at Chili’s in suburban Philadelphia. 

Once he’d deemed us ready to travel, my mother, sister and I would pile into the car and wait while he went back inside the house to check that all doors and windows were securely locked, that all burners on the stove were off, and that the doors and windows were securely locked again. Then one more review of the supplies in the trunk and we were off.

“So hot out tonight,” my mom might say, trying to lighten the mood with a little inoffensive small talk about the weather. “So humid.”

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“This isn’t hot,” my father would snap back. “The jungle is hot.” 

When we got to the restaurant, we had to wait until the “good booth” in the corner was available before we sat down—the booth where my father could sit, his back to the wall with a clear sightline of all exits and entrances.

“That way no one can jump out at you,” he’d say with a smile, like he was joking. But he wasn’t joking.

I smiled back, just hoping we could get through the meal without him exploding with rage over undercooked food or a slow waiter or me letting my guard down and resting my elbows on the table. He wanted me sitting “at attention”—back straight, not slouched, feet flat on the floor, napkin across lap. No fidgeting. No elbows. 

When we got home, my dad would watch a war movie in the den with me draped across his lap, my arms around him with my head on his chest, desperate for connection. Maybe he would awkwardly rest a hand on my back as we watched battle scenes from Patton or The Longest Day or Gallipoli. I’d watch anything to be a little bit closer to him. I’d do anything to try to understand what was happening to him—and all of us—just a little bit better. 

I’ve been watching Gallipoli, the Australian war drama that ends in a massacre at the Battle of Nek, since I was six. My father is a Vietnam War veteran—an Airborne Ranger infantryman who served for a year in 1970. He has post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in combat. And so do I.

Secondhand or “secondary” PTSD, sometimes referred to as intergenerational trauma, is a condition recognized by the National Center for PTSD in which children of a parent with PTSD experience PTSD symptoms without having directly experienced any trauma themselves.

PTSD results from experiencing a life-threatening situation. Sufferers often have flashbacks of the event, nightmares, angry outbursts, emotional numbness, feelings of isolation, insomnia, exaggerated startle responses, and hypervigilance—a heightened state of sensitivity in which the body and mind are constantly scanning the environment for any potential threat—hence my father’s insistence on the “good booth” at restaurants and the trunk full of survival gear. 

Research on children of combat veterans with PTSD (primarily conducted on children of Vietnam War veterans) has shown that they may exhibit many of these exact same symptoms as well as an additional layer of attachment difficulties from growing up with a parent who they fear is unable to care for them. 

Children of PSTD sufferers have also sometimes been known to mimic their parent’s behavior. “The symptomatology is very similar,” says Hector Palencia, a professor in UCLA’s Social Welfare Department. “I’ve worked with clients who’ve had severe amounts of abuse, physical or sexual abuse, and now they have children. Unconsciously, whether they like it or not, they’re passing on those same types of symptoms. If you look at it in terms of attachment—where are you getting your modeling? Where are you getting your safety from? From your caregiver. And that’s what your caregiver’s modeling for you, so you mimic it.”

Recent research also suggests a biological component to intergenerational trauma. A study of children of Holocaust survivors has preliminarily shown that traumatic experiences can be inherited by the next generation through epigenetics—changes in the ways genes are expressed, in this case by a chemical marker on the stress-related gene FKBP5. 

One of the primary differences in the experiences of firsthand combat PTSD and secondary traumatization is that those who directly experienced a trauma can point to a specific incident in which their life (or the life of someone they cared about) was in mortal danger. Children of veterans with PTSD cannot. 

I have no idea what happened to my father in combat. He won’t talk about it. I’ve asked him many times. I was 26 years old before I even knew that my father had sustained a traumatic brain injury during combat due to a rocket-propelled grenade. I didn’t know he had a Purple Heart or a Bronze Star. I only found out when I was 26 because he experienced a spinal fluid leak at the base of his brain which may or may not have been related to the injury 32 years before.

I do know that I’ve had severe anxiety my entire life. I know that I wet the bed until I was ten because I was afraid to take the 20-foot walk from my bed to the toilet in the middle of the night and that I had no idea why. I sometimes have random thoughts that someone is going to jump out at me and stick a gun to my head or slit my throat. I have a tendency to avoid talking about experiences that upset me, to bury them and try not to think about them because I found them too intense to bear.

I’m 40 now and I’ve been battling my father’s Vietnam ghosts my whole life. I started getting treatment after two suicide attempts and subsequent psychiatric hospitalizations at age 21. I’ve fought it for years with prescribed psychiatric medication, self-medication with alcohol and marijuana, individual and group psychotherapy, meditation, and a host of alternative treatments. Most recently I’ve pursued EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a psychotherapy intervention based on research that eye movements can sometimes reduce the intensity of disturbing thoughts and memories. Palencia says this may be my best bet. 

“Everybody is unique, but for me, the most successful intervention with my clients has been EMDR, with trauma in general and with PTSD. The most radical changes I’ve seen have been from using EMDR, almost like night and day,” he says.

I hope he’s right. My son is nine months old now and I hope it’s not too late for me to avoid passing this trauma on to him. Forty years at war is more than enough. I am ready for peace.