Life Under Fire

by Jason Fox

  People are generally more resilient than they think. And while no one’s invincible, everyone’s brave enough to ask for help. In times of serious trouble we should reach for the comms to contact our friends and family. When it gets really serious, everybody should understand the importance of involving a professional. Sometimes a helping hand is all it takes to get a chaotic life back on track.

  UNDERSTANDING ROCK BOTTOM

  All operators are taught to watch out for ‘combat indicators’: signs that trouble is nearby or that an enemy attack is imminent. These clues could be subtle. Piles of dirt or rubble by the side of a road or pathway might hint at the presence of a recently planted IED. An unusual lack of activity in a normally busy town could suggest the locals have been tipped off about an impending ambush. Nine times out of ten, the pile of rubble by the road is the result of a burrowing animal or a rockfall; the unusually quiet town is nothing more than a coincidence. Nevertheless, those combat indicators are always taken seriously because to ignore them is to tempt fate, and the consequences of a booby-trapped pathway or unexpected sniper attack are too horrific to ignore.

  Telltale signs of this kind are also applicable to our mental resilience. Having spent a few years helping battle-broken men and women with Rock2Recovery, not to mention some of the recruits on SAS: Who Dares Wins whose lives had taken shocking and unimaginable twists (and led them to a point where they were strong enough to test themselves against the military’s toughest selection process), I’ve come to know the combat indicators for mental health. It’s sometimes easier to spot them in another person because the brain can become so stressed out and fatigued that it doesn’t always recognize an ambush closer to home.

  My own experience of mental health issues followed a common pattern: I became withdrawn, angry and fuzzy-headed. I could be very forgetful, too, to the point that, having told a friend one night that I was driving around looking for a tree to hang myself from, the following day, when that same friend called to check on my state of mind (luckily I’d been coaxed home), I couldn’t remember my behaviour or the frantic conversation we’d had. (I was stone-cold sober, before you ask.) Despite those emotional warning signs, it would be a while before I sought help. For months I shrugged off people’s concerns; I ignored the danger I was in because I couldn’t really see it myself, and I was only fixed once a work colleague had actively nudged me in the direction of a good therapist.

  Cleared of the stress from my misfiring head, I became aware of a series of signals that would have encouraged me to seek help at a much earlier stage, had I understood them. Of course, these warning signs can vary from person to person (for example, some people self-harm, others embark on dangerous booze and drug benders), but over the following pages I’ll detail some of the symptoms I’ve become familiar with. Should a serious emotional ambush strike again, I know exactly which combat indicators to watch out for. Learning about them might assist you, too, or at least help you to spot any conflicts in those closest to you.

  #1 Hyper-vigilance

  A troubling symptom of intense stress, the hyper-vigilant mind is an overly busy one. Following an extreme event – a physical assault or a car crash, for example – our brains can go into self-protection functionality: we look for danger when there is none, such as in a crowded supermarket or pub. We become stressed in situations where there’s nothing to worry about unduly; danger status is applied to innocuous settings and we become constantly fearful, tense and anxious. It’s not uncommon for the person affected to lose their temper at the drop of a hat. In my case, the issue was intensified by my vocation. In war I’d been trained to protect myself and the lives of the lads around me. A neurological fight-or-flight programme was hardwired into my mind and it became tough to snap out of it once my service was over. I couldn’t settle into a normal routine at home.

  Life experiences don’t have to be as harsh as the ones I endured for them to be incapacitating. Someone unfortunate enough to have been involved in a shocking event, such as an earthquake or a house fire, can be upset by loud noises and unexpected movements long after the initial incident has passed. In the aftermath, their memory can overload with a library of sights, sounds and smells associated with the original trauma. Anything that later resembles those sensory cues can be enough to kick-start an unpleasant emotional response. Some of the blokes I knew in the early phases of my career were old enough to have served in Northern Ireland. They’d been subjected to mob attacks, petrol bombs and group protests that had turned incredibly violent without warning. Having retired, some of them were affected negatively by a normal occurrence at a civilian event: a raised voice in a party, a crying baby in a pram or the sound of two shopping trolleys colliding in a supermarket were among the catalysts for responses ranging from deep depression to violence. The most innocent of happenings would emotionally transport them straight back to 1980s Belfast, working amid The Troubles.

  I’ve also met people who have been deeply affected by an outbreak of violence in a peacetime setting. My colleague at Rock2Recovery, Malcolm Williams, was once beaten up by a mob of West Ham fans after a game against his football team, Luton Town. He was walking to the train station, minding his own business, when there was a tap on the shoulder. A voice called out to him.

  ‘Oi, mate …’

  When he turned around, Malcolm was smashed in the face. He dropped to the ground and a volley of boots and fists rained down on his head and body. During the beating itself he felt immune to the pain, and at first none of the blows seemed to have any physical impact, but as the shock of being assaulted subsided in the hours and days afterwards, his ribs ached, his jaw throbbed and whenever he went for a shower he noticed the cuts and bruises marking his body. The mental wounds were more severe, however. For a year, Malcolm was unable to attend a game of football without experiencing a minor breakdown. (It probably didn’t help that he was a Luton Town fan.) He felt unsettled in large groups of people. Whenever there was a loud noise, he was nervous and fearful – even if the sound carried a positive association. Malcolm told me that whenever Luton Town scored and the people around him celebrated loudly, his anxiety skyrocketed.

  Malcolm’s mind was in a phase of intense self-protection because his brain had stored a recording of what the attack had felt like. Whenever he was at a football game, he became hyper-vigilant, overly aware that a physical assault was possible. Psychologically, Malcolm was now conditioned to experience fear, and his new emotional injury was acting as a warning sign: Mate, you could get badly hurt here – you might even die if things get really out of hand. If I were to simplify his experience, I’d say Malcolm’s brain was acting like a crashing comparison website search engine; it had taken an unpleasant past experience and it was drawing parallels to the now, and every football match he attended recalled the memory of bruising pain.

  Luckily, Malcolm was in a position to seek help. As a younger man he’d experienced several tricky personal issues until a period of professional emotional counselling turned his life around. He was no stranger to the type of therapy required for healing in the aftermath of his assault and he happily went into a period of recovery. Eventually, Malcolm was able to heal to the point where he could watch a football match again without stress or any fear of attack. The broken comparison website search engine had been fixed; Malcolm had unlearned his fears. Once sorted, Malcolm became interested in learning more about therapy’s emotional benefits. This eventually led him to become a therapist himself and he often helps others to work through anxieties and traumas of their own.

  #2 Anger

  This is one of the most distressing and dangerous symptoms of an emotionally frazzled person – both for the individual involved and the people around them. Sufferers become unpredictable and volatile. At the low end of the problem, they might develop unusual shifts in body language – for example, a psychoactivity that manifests as a nervous tic, or twitch. At the high end, they become violent and incredibly short-tempered, emotionally raci
ng from zero to a hundred miles per hour at the first sign of a flashpoint. These people are sometimes dangerous to be around. I know, because once or twice I veered towards the high end at the peak of my own emotional distress. I didn’t become actively violent, but I had a short fuse and at times I fantasized about doing some damage to one or two annoying colleagues in a civilian job I’d taken. Luckily, I was able to keep control of this.

  So, where does the anger come from? Well, rage is the obvious ‘fight’ in a fight-or-flight response, a surge of adrenaline that primes the body for action. Even the digestive system is temporarily switched off in order to give the person all the power they’ll require to survive in a conflict or retreat. Problems arise when there’s no real danger to rail against and the anger is used as a disproportionate response to an everyday situation, such as a minor dispute over a restaurant meal or a domestic tiff. In those situations, the person suffering from mental distress will flare up to a point where they become incredibly aggressive, or worse. As with hyper-vigilance, the mind reacts to a normal event in an extreme way because it hasn’t rationalized the initial source of trauma.

  This response is particularly common in people unlucky enough to encounter hardcore violence, as many people do when working in the military or emergency services, where all sorts of grim situations unfold. Although people functioning in these roles are highly trained to deal with outbreaks of extreme behaviour, the consequences of social disorder or the sort of injuries that can occur in high-impact accidents or fires, they’re still human. They have tolerance limits like everybody else. And if an individual’s tolerance limit is broken, the person breaks, too. When life has been rendered almost insignificant, in a war zone or crime scene, it becomes a challenge to return to a normal, family environment.

  In the emotionally injured, anger also arises out of habit. While elite operators are expected to control their emotions, the brain still responds in ways that nudge us towards extreme behaviour (though we understand the importance of keeping a lid on this). For everyone else, however, anger can become a reflex response to certain situations, like the anxiety experienced by Malcolm at football matches; it’s habitual because it’s set off by fear. That habit has been borne in understandable circumstances, such as within military conflict, but when the individual affected is then placed in a safer environment, they’re unable to differentiate between risk and routine. The slightest challenge becomes a call to extreme action. Think of it in terms of someone who has been bitten by a pit bull terrier. If they tend to go into a panic every time they see a dog in the street, it’s because they’ve developed a fearful sensitivity to a type of animal that’s previously caused them serious harm. Similarly, a person that once associated shouting and loud noises with military combat – or, in Malcolm’s case, football-related violence – might struggle to shrug off those emotions when any shouting or loud noises happen at home or in the street.

  When we’re born, our emotional system works perfectly. In fact, we arrive with only two fears: of loud noises and falling. In 1960, ‘The Visual Cliff’ – a study of babies aged six to fourteen months old – determined that the fear of falling was a survival mechanism instilled in us all at birth. (Though the report doesn’t claim to prove the fear is innate, the author’s tests on animals suggested that it is. This study might also explain why I first developed my fear of heights, but it doesn’t give a reason for why I wasn’t able to overcome that fear as a kid while my mates could.) Meanwhile, loud noises trigger our fight-or-flight response from day one, thanks to our ‘acoustic startle reflex’, and it’s the reason we jump during films or when a plate crashes to the floor. According to Seth Norrholm, a translational neuroscientist from Emory University, Georgia, this circuitry is ‘innate’. Other than that, we’re like a new smartphone, psychologically at least – box fresh, with unaltered factory settings. Over time, life experiences change those settings in different ways, and at their most extreme, certain events can cause neurological damage. Our systems crash.

  Trauma of shocking proportions, such as losing a mate in horrible circumstances, has the potential to cause so much damage that the emotional wounds might take a long time to heal, if at all. Unless help is called in, these wounds can leave permanent scars, eventually causing the victim’s hard drive to freeze. When people have flashbacks to shocking life-incidents, it’s because their system has crashed and they’re unable to process the incident. The lessons they needed to draw from the moment go unlearned and can’t be stored as intel for future decision-making responses. Worse, whatever’s taken place seems to float in their immediate consciousness, constantly gnawing at the edges of their thinking.

  Calling for emotional reinforcements is the only way forward.

  #3 Numbness (and the Inability to Ask for Help)

  It’s common for the partner of an emotionally wounded individual to be the first to approach us at Rock2Recovery, and often this can be a heart-breaking introduction.

  ‘He’s emotionally numb,’ they’ll say. ‘He can’t even deal with the kids laughing. I don’t know what to do about it.’

  Or, ‘She’s not the same person that went away. She won’t even communicate with me. It’s like she’s a ghost.’

  Psychological numbness is an extreme reaction to a highly emotional event. In times of heavy distress, the brain loads up on what could be described as emotional anaesthesia. It administers doses of mental painkillers in order to silence the anguish that’s taken place. This is an act of self-protection: if the person can’t feel, they won’t hurt any more. But without feeling, people become oblivious to their predicament. They know something’s not right emotionally, but they’re unable to comprehend or express exactly what’s wrong. Numbness then crushes them and everyone moving within their orbit.

  One step towards recovery is for a therapist to detach an individual from their initial trauma through a series of disassociation techniques. This process allows the client to fully understand their experience without the usual negative emotional response. Eventually it’s an incident that can be recalled without pain, panic or grief; with work, they’ll ‘watch’ rather than ‘live’ the moment, like a film or TV show, until it’s ultimately reduced to basic information. To illustrate the process, here’s an extract from a transcript of a session with a Rock2Recovery therapist and an individual who had experienced a violent, potentially life-threatening assault thirty years previously. We’ll call the person involved Client X. (The assault wasn’t the cause of their trauma and Client X happily agreed to their transcript being used for the purpose of this book.)

  Client X was beaten up in a violent mugging on a packed bus. Knives were put to his throat; another knifepoint was stuck at his back. The assailants stole his money, trainers, belt and jumper. At the time, he was fourteen years old and he recalls feeling ‘angry’ that no one stepped in to help him. For a while, the incident affected him greatly. His schoolwork suffered and he felt vulnerable. He says the upside, however, was that the attack gave him a sixth sense. ‘Where previously I would have been naive about certain situations, it taught me when to be on my guard,’ he said.

  During their meeting, the therapist employed what he and Malcolm Williams have described as the ‘Doctor Who’ technique. Having listened to Client X’s description of the event, the therapist asked him to mentally revisit the experience as he was then, a naive fourteen-year-old kid on a night out with mates. He then asked Client X to reframe the incident, returning to it not as a teenager but as a forty-something bloke, picturing the scene in the clothes he was wearing that day for his counselling session. In effect, he was asking Client X to project his current self on to a past experience to see what emotional differences he might notice.

  ‘I use the TV character Doctor Who as a metaphor,’ explained the counsellor. ‘So Doctor Who gets in the Tardis with his assistant. They set the controls of the Tardis and they time-travel. And let’s say it’s 2025 and they time-travel back to 1990, so they go back in time thir
ty-five years. When they step out of the Tardis they’re exactly the same people, in the same clothes that they were wearing in 2025. They don’t regress. If Doctor Who is fifty years old when he steps into the Tardis, he doesn’t become fifteen by travelling back thirty-five years. But metaphorically, that’s what happens when we go back to an unhealed memory: we go back to the time that it happened as the person we were then. Someone who was a child-abuse victim might be forty now but neurologically, whenever they think about it, they suffer the experience as a six-year-old.’

  When asked to describe the differences he was noticing, Client X claimed he would have acted more rationally during the heat of the moment. Rather than putting up a fight – an action that led to him being beaten up – he would have worked harder to maintain his composure. ‘I’d say, “Right, what is it you want? The money? Have it …”’ said Client X. ‘They had knives! Instead, I put up a struggle, which is what got me the beating. With hindsight, I could have been a bit more pragmatic because there were moments where I thought, I’m going to get my face carved open here.

  ‘With hindsight it’s much easier to rationalize the situation and think, Well, in terms of value, what’s been taken? A hundred and fifty pounds’ - worth of clothes and money? In the grand scheme of things, who cares? I wouldn’t have wanted any of my mates, or someone stepping in, to have got stabbed or seriously hurt for a hundred and fifty pounds.’