cromsworld,

Welcome to PC. Keep in mind we are not professionals here, we struggle with PTSD ourselves and many of us read a lot about PTSD and have worked on it through therapy.

I had a conversation with my T this week that kind of touched on what you are asking. People will react to trauma by either avoiding anything that reminds them of the trauma, or actually pursuing things that are related to the trauma.

My question was about sexual abuse and hiding or avoiding. My T told me some women react that way while others go the opposite way, pursue it to a point where they use sex to empower themselves.

So IMHO, what you are seeing is a man who is pursuing whatever traumatized him. He wants to go back and fight to gain a sense of "power" over the very thing that traumatized him. He also may have been sexually abused or just abused as a child too, so he has developed an obsession with going after pedophiles.

His hard line conservative rants are just another way of him expressing "extreme" anger and unfortunately it is people like him that give conservatives a bad reputation.

He does sound like he has PTSD, and he sure has a lot of anger. And he may have seen many of his comrades killed and wants "justice" for them. The way he talks about "hunting" and killing other human beings IMHO, he has a lot of anger.

Don't get into a political debate with him or IMHO don't do anything that will trigger his anger to get even worse.

OE