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Open Wound: Slow Healing and Peer Support
By Norm DeLisle
When I got off the jet on December 17, 1969 at an airport near my home town of Midland, Michigan, I was on top of the world. I had survived Vietnam, I was seeing snow for the first time in three years, and I thought I had nowhere to go but up. But over the next few days, months, and years, I learned that my experiences in Vietnam had damaged my character, my emotions, my ability to form relationships, and my capacity to direct my life.
The lack of peer support (and my lack of understanding of the idea) would drag out my recovery for 15 years, and require me, (as it required so many other people) to reinvent the healing wheel through painful trial and error.
One of the major symptoms of my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is called hyper-vigilance. Each time I left my apartment, each time I socialized with people (at least without drugs), I felt as wired and frightened as I had in combat. I used drugs and social isolation in my apartment to fight this awful feeling. While these activities reduced my symptoms, they drove me deeper and deeper into depression.
At a local crisis center, I met another combat vet. We shared our stories and our losses and tried to support one another in solving our life problems, without any real understanding of why that was important. We struggled to control our symptoms together. We had both tried therapy. Frankly, no therapy I ever received held a candle to the real understanding that comes from what I now understand as peer support. When I ran across the idea in the Independent Living Movement, I instantly understood it, and I also understood why my earlier collaborations were so critical to my recovery. "Peer support is an unbroken story that we tell to one another, to support each other, and to also remind ourselves that together we can make any kind of future we want, no matter what our past, if we are willing to create community together."
Today, there would be a place for me to go, and a framework for working through my recovery. Today, there would be peers ready and waiting to provide support. In my turn, I have tried to offer support to others who have experienced life events similar to mine. I now pass on the lessons I have learned–and the ones others have shared with me.
In the Recovery and Independent Living movements, peer support is a historical legacy that we develop together, and that we will share down through the years with those who want or need it. Peer support is an unbroken story that we tell to one another, to support each other, and to also remind ourselves that together we can make any kind of future we want, no matter what our past, if we are willing to create community together.
