Reflections From the Therapy Room: What Combat Trauma Taught Me About Humanity

Every November, when the poppies reappear and Remembrance Sunday edges closer, I notice a familiar internal shift. It arrives quietly, not as ceremony, but as sensation, a heaviness behind the sternum, a heightened clarity around what really matters. It is not a flare of nationalism or nostalgia. It is recognition and memory. A reverence for stories most people will never hear.

For a significant part of my clinical career, I have been lucky enough to have worked alongside serving personnel and military veterans both through Combat Stress and within my private practice. The therapy room became a landscape holding more emotional truth than any documentary, memoir, or textbook could convey. It taught me quickly that combat trauma is not one thing. It is a constellation of experiences, identities, losses, vows, survival strategies, moral conflicts, and the quiet psychological mathematics of what it cost versus what it saved.

What struck me most, early on, was that the world often imagines trauma as the moment a person breaks. But in the consulting room, I rarely meet broken people. I meet brilliantly adapted nervous systems that have been asked to operate for too long in conditions the human mind was never designed to endure. Their trauma responses were not failures. They were evidence of capacity. Exquisite, costly, intelligent capacity.

Hypervigilance, for example, is not irrational paranoia. It is the residue of a mind that had correctly that danger can arrive without warning, without sound, without pattern. Emotional numbing is not detachment or coldness. It is psychological triage, a mechanism to keep functioning when feeling fully would have shattered operational capacity. Anger is not volatility but unfinished energy, a survival reflex that has protected life in contexts where hesitation could mean death. Each symptom is a biography written in the language of survival.

And so, reframing trauma not as pathology but as adaptation became one of the most important therapeutic shifts I ever made. Because the work was never to dismantle the survival response. It was to help someone gently discern between then and now, between the battlefield and the present moment, between a world that demanded constant defence and one that might, slowly, allow the nervous system to stand down.

Yet, for many, the deepest wounds were not the near-death moments at all. Combat trauma carries the weight of threat, yes, but moral injury carries the weight of meaning. Again and again, I heard versions of the same truth spoken differently: I survived because someone else didn’t. I gave the order that brought us home, and I don’t know if I can forgive myself for the cost. I did what I was trained to do, but not what my conscience could live easily with. These were not memories asking to be desensitised. They were ethical fractures asking to be witnessed. Moral injury is not healed by revisiting the moment until it hurts less. It is healed slowly, relationally, often imperfectly, and only when a person’s actions are contextualised, understood, shared, and held by another human who does not flinch away from complexity. It begins to soften when self-blame no longer exists in isolation.

In sessions, many arrived carrying the hope of erasure: If I talk about it enough, will it go away? If we process it correctly, will I stop remembering? But healing is not subtraction. It is expansion. Recovery was never about amputating memory. It was about widening life around it so that trauma no longer occupied every corner of internal space. The grief did not necessarily shrink, but the world around it gently grew. What many ultimately wanted was not freedom from memory, but freedom for a life that could hold both the truth of what happened and the possibility of joy, peace, sleep, humour, belonging, or purpose again.

Trauma is not simply what happened. Trauma is what happened in the absence of adequate witness. It is pain without a relational echo, fear without regulated presence, horror without human accompaniment. The moment a story moves from secrecy to shared ground, something neurological shifts. Not because the past changes, but because isolation does.

People often believe the opposite of trauma is safety. But in truth, the opposite of trauma is connection. Safety is one of its pathways, but connection, steady, accepting, non-shaming connection, is its counterforce. Regulation is relational long before it becomes individual. Consequently, this is why Remembrance Day matters psychologically as much as culturally. It is not simply about honouring the dead, though we must. It is also about consciously acknowledging the weight carried by the living. Collective silence at 11:00 is powerful, but collective understanding at 11:01 is transformational.

We do not honour veterans by imagining them unscarred. We honour them by understanding that scars are not evidence of failure, but proof of having lived through something most people are never asked to face. We honour them not with pity, nor with pedestal narratives, but with dignity, complexity, care, and a healthcare system that recognises that trauma is not a personal malfunction but a collective responsibility.

From the therapy room, I learned more about humanity than any lecture theatre could teach me. I learned that bravery and fear are not opposites but companions. That humour is often grief translated into sound. That anger is sometimes love with nowhere to land. That survival is both ordinary and astonishing. That healing requires witnesses, not judges. That the stories which hurt the most are the ones people trust you enough to whisper. And that strength is not an absence of breaking, but the presence of meaning that made someone endure the unendurable.

Most of all, I learned that trauma does not diminish humanity. It reveals it.

This Remembrance Day, I will bow my head for those who never came home. And I will keep equal space in my heart for those who did, carrying memories they did not ask for, surviving wars that did not always end when the deployment did. Not as clinical cases, not as symbols, not as tragedies or triumphs, but as human beings who trusted me with their truth.

For that profound privilege, I remain deeply grateful.

#rememberanceday #military #militarytrauma #trauma #ptsd #cptsd #therapy #treatment #psychologist #traumapsychologist #anxiety #fear #neverforget

Photo by Bart Ros on Unsplash