Dr. John A. King and Melissa discuss how PTSD triggers often show up as raised voice. She learned not to take it personally and uses cues like moving closer, offering a hand, and saying "I hear you." King explains: "I scream to be seen. Volume is never about Melissa." Recovery takes daily practice from both partners.
Well, let me ask you this, because I know that last week you talked a little bit about blowing up, that PTSD triggers cause you to get louder, basically, and to understand— and maybe it was in your book I read that— to understand that when they're getting louder, they don't realize they're getting louder. Their heart rate's going, their blood pressure's up, and that they don't realize it. So how did you handle that?
I spent a lot of time early on learning not to take that personally. And we developed, just between us, what's gonna work for us, what are the physical cues I can give him that I hear him, I see him struggling, and I hear what he's saying? Because if he knows that I can hear him and that I'm cued into him and paying attention, then the volume comes down. So those things for us that worked were I would move toward him, not away from him. And it's really, I mean, it's a discipline To move towards a person that's yelling. You want to run away from that person. So move towards him, not away from him. Maybe put my hand out like I'm going to hold his hand. I would say things like, I hear you, I see you, I see you trying. And so I try to do those verbal and nonverbal cues that will help him go from 100 maybe back down to like 75 so he can talk to me.
Well, and those are good things to know. How long did it take you as a couple to work through getting to where things are that new normal? Where did you get— how long?
We were working on it this morning.
Yeah, we still do it every day.
And I think that's one of the misnomers is people think you get to a place where it's like Disneyland again. It's not. We are committed to each other as a couple to manage whatever it is and make a life together. And I think that's the biggest commitment that you can do. Because I wrote a very simple piece of poetry, you know, amongst— my first book was a poetry book. It says simply, I scream to be seen. Volume is never about Melissa.
Right.
Volume is about this broken feeling in my soul and it grates like glass and it just hurts so much and that it's like screaming if you cut yourself or in your pain and it's like, My soul gets broken sometimes and it just gets volume to try and get rid of this angst. And when Mel came to understand that, and we spent a lot of time, we still talk about that, it's— I'm never screaming at her. Never scream. I'd never raise my voice at my wife. I raise my voice at the rest of the universe. And she, because she's my wife, is often in the vicinity.
I'm in the path sometimes of the storm and even in the midst of it, because you I mean, you could get really ticked off if somebody's yelling at you and they're saying things that aren't very nice. And in the midst of it, if I can say, no, he's not upset with me, he's just upset. And so that helps me. I mean, do we get it right every single time? Heck no.
We get it right a lot more now.
We do. We are getting a lot better about that.
