You are totally welcome man; I wish I could do more for you. Thank you for your sacrifice as a veteran. If it was not for people like you, our country would not have as much freedoms as we have. Veterans don't hear this often enough, so thank you!

Her response just leaves me speechless...here you are, been overseas to help protect her freedoms, going through hell because of nightmares and the like....and she is angry because you are waking her up because she has to go to work the next day. I would understand if you woke her up, because you were hungry or something and wanted her to make you breakfast....her response would be rational then...but for her to have this sort of response to you after what you're dealing with just leaves me speechless and angry.

I deal with some things from my past as well, that make me hyperventilate when I think about them. Something I've found very useful is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is basically focusing all your awareness on your breathing; while you are doing this, you are using an equanimous attitude towards yourself (accepting, loving, overall positive).

So, you may be in the kitchen, making a sandwich or something, and have one of these flashbacks from the war...you would close your eyes, and first accept that the flashback is occurring....don't try to change what IS happening. Next, begin to start focusing on your breathing...IN....OUT....IN....OUT, and it begins to "hijack" your mind from thinking about the flashback, to thinking about your breath....then just notice the feelings you are having, and accept them as a part of who you are. There is a saying that I really like, and has really helped me in my own life: "What you persist resists; what you accept, you gain the power to transform."

If you want to know more about mindfulness meditation, I highly recommend Thich Nhat Hanh, he wrote the best books on mindfulness I have ever read. If you want to start dealing with some of the issues you are facing (in time, don't rush it), I highly recommend Igor Ledochowski's "Beyond Self Hypnosis" stuff, because in it, you'll be working directly with your uconscious mind through archetypal forces that symbolize things that are unresolved.

It's okay; the WORST thing you can do right now is to now focus on how you let her use you, because then you'll just need to self-medicate more, in order to escape those painful feelings. What you need is a whole paradigm shift.

Think about it this way: imagine that you have two circles of paper, and you lay them down on a table. Imagine that these 2 circles of paper are alive and have awareness; but they only exist in a 2-dimensional world. They would only be able to perceive length and width (what they can directly experience). Now, imagine you, having an additional dimension (space in the sense that you can move through space and not just be anchored to a table top or floor). Things that seem to them to be very difficult (such as looking directly up) are very easy to you, because of your difference in perspective. That's what a paradigm shift is...shifting your perception from what is going wrong to what you want to go right and what you do want in your life is a similar shift in perception.

I know you are hurting and unfortunately, I cannot do anything to alleviate that pain; I wish I could, because you have been through enough. But begin to change the meaning of that pain. I had no dad growing up, my mom is a complete narcissist, , I doubted myself and my own abilities for most of my life. Once I began to change the meaning of my past, from how it limited me and made me inferior; to how it made me stronger and more compassionate with others who are going through things, I began to see a shift in my feelings as well. We change meaning by changing our perceptions of things...usually, this shift is changing from looking at the short term perspective to looking at the long term persepctive (for example, from how much it sucked to go through something - to what's possible now that you've had these experiences).

Something that might help you, is what I did to avoid going back to my ex-wife when we finally separated. We had been in an on-and-off again type of relationship for years, and I determined that I would never go back to being with her again. I got a voice recording app on my phone, and made myself a voice entry, and was very passionate about why I knew it would never workout between us, and why she was not the woman for me. Whenever I'd get lonely and wonder if I was doing the right thing, I'd play that voice note, and it solidified, in my mind, that I was doing the exact thing I needed to do. It worked for me, happily divorced for years now.

Whenever you are FORCED to change your perspective on something, it can feel overwhelming, because you are otherwise blind to it until you have that shift in perception, and then everything you had believed is now under suspicion....if I was incorrect about that, what else am I missing?? This is totally normal, and it's a huge mind **** (I've been through a lot of these). The best way through them is to accept yourself (mindfulness again) for your lack of knowing these things ahead of time, and begin to realize that as you begin to listen to your intuition more and more, you'll be aware of more things than you consciously understand.

Again, I hope this helps.

aklimatize