My military disability award was approved. Yay! Only now I have a nightmare to deal with.

I managed to hide from the father of my children the sexual assaults, physical assaults, threats and harassment. In fact, he was actually one of my aggressors. A military man he himself was an aggressor and predator. He would laugh at some of the treatment he did know about. Heck, he himself was charged for inappropriate behaviour towards female subordinates. I couldn't possibly at the time seek consoling from such a man and thus remained silent about my suffering.

Fast forward to today...

To my horror I have discovered the local Veteran's Affairs Canada office shares space with the Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre. Guess who the Commanding Officer of that is?

[Open Eyes]

(((justafriend))), congratulations on getting the military disability award approved. Good for you for fighting for that and seeing your effort rewarded. Sorry that you happened to find out someone who is a predator is active in an area that is close to the Veteran's Affairs office, that can be very triggering. I am sorry to learn that you were a victim and you could not even seek support and caring from your husband who was also abusive and toxic.

I think some individuals join the military/services not so much to protect and defend, but to become skilled aggressors. These individuals are more inclined to resent a female presence in what they do and often act on that resentment. Individuals who want to become skilled aggressors are often individuals who simply do not have the capacity to respect anything other then the need to perform aggressive acts. These individuals do not see women as anything other than an object to control and they tend to interact in aggression only because that's what they are "aggressors" and they are not emotional intellectuals.

I read articles about how military training had to be changed because they discovered that once many of the men who went through training got on the field and had to perform, they often hesitated. This hesitation contributed to the loss of lives and that meant they had to find ways to make sure these men did not experience this problem with hesitation. As you know yourself, once you go through training you actually do become a different person. The only individuals that can understand that change are individuals who go through this training and serve. Also, as you know most of these individuals begin this training at very young ages. We now have learned that the human brain is not fully developed until around age 25, so most of these individuals are going through intense training "before" their brains are even fully developed. And many individuals are recruited and are trained without the knowledge of what these individuals were actually exposed to before they signed up.

Through research, and how we have advanced in what we are slowly learning, we are slowly discovering how some individuals can be more "sensitive" than others, we are learning how some individuals may be at higher risk in developing PTSD than others too. We are learning more about human uniqueness and how there is no true "average/normal" where human beings should just be expected to fit into a certain mold where they will be the "same" if taught the same.

If a person has the capacity to experience more emotional intelligence, that person can be traumatized when they witness/experience someone who doesn't have that ability to experience life with the same kind of emotion. What you have shared is how you yourself struggled in that individuals you thought you should be able to "trust" showed you no respect and instead treated you very badly and abusively. It's very hard to see a person you "know" can be abusive functioning with freedom and given a position where that person interacts with others and even holds some kind of power as you mentioned when you said "Commanding Officer". For someone who struggles with PTSD, often the reaction triggers one's personal inventory where they personally experienced just how toxic an "aggressor" can be.

What your response to that has been is to "vent" what you experienced here in this forum. It is this response that has been the core of building the strong desire to find out "what" goes into how these toxic people evolve and how these individuals can interact in society without being detected or labelled so they cannot cause harm to others. It is this kind of awareness that is behind how we have gained in our knowledge about human nature and the ways human beings can be a threat and also be "victims" too.

Your being triggered where you can recall the inventory of how you were personally affected by someone who can be a toxic aggressor doesn't mean you are "weak" or should feel "shame". Instead, your reaction is meant to encourage you to "want" to share and warn of the danger you personally experienced.