(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . My PTSD Story, the Healing of Animals & You [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-19 I Think This Is a Problem I close my eyes, but there is no rest. I see the picture in my mind with every blink. Dead, blown-up bodies. Blood everywhere. It’s a still-life black and white photo that never moves and is always there whenever I close my eyes. Each day, every day, a steady diet of these things - horrible images. Even among the terrible there is worse. And it makes no sense which ones stay with your forever. But they do. It was a few years before I realized what I was doing, or even that I was doing it at all. I always sat near an exit but facing a door. I appraised every person who entered the room. Suicide bomber? Not suicide bomber? Were they wearing a jacket in warm weather? If it was cold, was their midsection big and bulky, not fitting the rest of their form? Where’s the glass? The goal of a suicide bomber is to shatter glass. During a suicide attack more people are killed by flying shards of glass than anything else. The purpose of the nails packed into the vest is to break glass. I would appraise every room for an estimate of maximum kill. I made a survival strategy for each one, every time. In the parking lot of a grocery store, I saw a license plate with the name of a prominent, but largely unknown, terrorist. I said to myself “act normal, don’t let on.” I didn’t know what to do, so I thought I’d at least write down exactly what I saw and the make and model of the car. So when I left with my groceries I took a good look. It was a real estate slogan. My mind had projected the name onto something completely innocuous. I couldn’t believe that this stuff had seeped so completely into my mind. I got to get out of there, I thought. I lost a job because I was frightened to leave the house before 9:15 a.m. If there’s going to be a major terror attack on an urban transit system, it will have happened by 9:15 a.m. and I wanted to know it was safe to travel that day before I left the house. The sound of typing on keyboards made me very upset and enraged. I couldn’t take it and panicked, feeling the need to escape. It’s like Chinese water torture, it just escalates and escalates. I worked in cubicles and can’t tell you how many times I had to refrain from screaming at a coworker in later jobs to stop making that typing noise. Of course, it’s ridiculous to think of it. People have to type to do their jobs. That’s what working in an office is, which is why I can no longer work in offices. The typing sound is too much associated with the content I had to digest at the National Counter Terrorism Center. However, working with dogs for a year and a half really helped me overcome these reactions to my previous work. I could see the world through their eyes and not be bothered with the nonsense that goes with working with humans. The emotional baggage from working at the National Counter-Terrorism Center was with me every day. It still is. It affected my relationships, my reactions to other people, my feelings of safety, my movements. There’s a lot of reasons I used a classified blog to denounce waterboarding as torture, the foremost being that eroding the rule of law - and our values - was a threat to democracy. I had no idea that Presidential election results would be forcefully challenged and people would die or commit suicide. But here we are. For several months after getting fired, I wrapped myself in a comforter and watched American Movie Classics for hours on end, every day. Applying for a job in an office sent me to bed for days until my husband assured me that I didn’t have to work in an office if I didn’t want to. Out of desperation and no idea how I would earn a living, I landed on the idea of walking dogs for money. I had no intention of starting a dog walking business. I just needed some money and walking a dog four times a week for half an hour would give me $60 more per week than I would otherwise have. That’s all. It would force me to get out of the house. I was in a pitiable state at that time. My career was destroyed. There was no going back to that means of earning a living since I was blackballed everywhere. Not that I wanted to return to the intelligence community, but that obstacle extended beyond those folks. At some point I realized I would have to do something, The craigslist ad for a dog walker in a sketchy part of town was something, as opposed to nothing, which is what I was doing at the time. So the idea was that at least I would get out of the house and get a little money, besides. The exercise would do me good. During the time I walked that dog, people were shot on my walking route five minutes before I got there, I got a mention on a neighborhood e-mail list as a great dog walker, the burned-out house on the corner became an upscale coffee house and center of neighborhood culture, a farmer’s market started up on Sunday afternoons, and I made many friends, some of whom walk on two legs. Here and Now Amidst the cluck-clucking of academics and the commentariat, there’s a lot of bitching, but not a lot of solution. That’s why I created this substack. It is about healing and drawing a line to connect it to all aspects of our lives: interpersonal, societal, digital. In coercive control, propaganda and AI, our reality is warped. I wanted to start a journey towards reality by exploring differing aspects of how that warping happens, and to find a like-minded group to join me. Thank you. 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