PTSD is often called the invisible wound, a battle fought in the mind long after the war has ended. But for those who live with it, the struggle is very real. Kevin Macomber, author of Walking From The Shadows:  My journey With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder shared his personal path to healing on The Spark.

Asia: So, let's start off with your chapter called Accepting. You said that this book won't be focused on veteran -related PTSD and that you've come to the conclusion that trauma is trauma. Why did you take that approach?

Kevin: The book that somebody reads today is not the book that I started with. I think, you know, it's a natural tendency of all veterans to want to dive down and go into the detail of what they experienced. And you get into that, and it really is a somewhat narrow audience when you start writing that way. When I got into other chapters in the book, I needed people to read it. and I called upon people I knew, and I said, hey, I need you to take a look at some of the chapters I'm writing, and I wanted to see, you know, does it resonate with you? Do you relate to it? And it was really an interesting journey because people I knew I didn't really know. And they started opening up, and some of them just told me horrific stories about what happened to them in, you know, dysfunctional childhoods, abusive marriages. you know, I really had to do some self -reflection there and I said, you know, as bad as what I went through, I did not go through that. And there's probably as many as four chapters that were in the book and a lot of other content. I just took a pen and I whacked it. I just pulled all of it out and I said, my trauma is no worse than anybody else's trauma. I think as a society, a culture, and we see it on TV all the time, you know, exalting veterans, nothing wrong with that. It's great. but my book wasn't about the trauma, my book was about the healing. And we all share pretty much the same common healing issues and journeys as one another and it really doesn't matter what trauma you went through.

Asia: So, you said that the physical copy of the book today isn't what it was when you first began writing it. When did you first begin writing the book? And when did you make the change?

Kevin: Well, I didn't know I was writing a book. So, you know, back in the 90s, when I had a mental breakdown, and we just, I was in South Carolina at the time, which was probably a problem in itself. If you think that the mental health system now is not good, and you sometimes hear the criticism, oh, there's not enough counselors, or my insurance doesn't cover it, all these things, you still hear it. It's nothing compared to what it was like in the 90s. There was absolutely nothing. and culturally, it wasn't acceptable to talk about your weaknesses. There was a stigma to mental health, but particularly if you were a veteran, you wouldn't talk about, oh my God, I got really sick for my service. And so, you know, moving forward, I couldn't figure out a lot of the things. I was a smart guy, you know, I was a sales engineer by trade. I could pretty much sort of articulate on paper what I was thinking, what I was feeling, and I would just write and I'd write. So I journaled for about 20 years.

Listen to the podcast to hear the entire conversation. 

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