Bill McBean - Author

I’m New to Crypto Bitcoin Investments,But it’s been the best Occurrence in my life yet.
Thank you Crypto. 🥂

In the bleak mid-winter, I’m grateful for something that leaves me cold in more temperate months: TV!

The last Monarch butterfly has departed from our garden, and our neighborhood in Southwest Minneapolis is showing numerous signs of autumn…except the first frost, an inevitable event which I hope will defeat climate change again this year. The Cities suffered one of its driest Septembers on record.

Amen.

"I was pulled over today for speeding. The officer did not know me nor did I know him, but we each showed one another a mutual display of respect in our interaction. He was doing his job, and I had made a mistake in trying to hurry home to get started moving that lead to our path's crossing. He ran my information, and in the end we talked more about how our individual days were going, and the situations and circumstances within our society that have lead to interactions such as he and I's to play out much more negatively, some even deadly, than ours, than we talked about the situation that lead to him pulling me over. In the end we both thanked each other for our mutual displays of respect and agreed to take a "selfie" together to help tell our story. I can't stress enough that NO demographic and/or profession of people are all bad. Neither of us are the enemy. We can continue to fight against each other until we are literally "black and blue", or we can show one another the respect we inherently deserve, not as "black man" and "blue police officer", but as humans. None greater, none less... "
Credit: Greg Barnes Jr

Last night, while waiting to board our plane, Carter Jean was being her usual inquisitive self wanting to meet and say “hi” to everyone she could, until she walked up on this man.

He reached out and asked if she wanted to sit with him.
He pulled out his tablet and showed her how to draw with it, they watched cartoons together, and she offered him snacks.

This wasn’t a short little exchange, this was 45 minutes.
Watching them in that moment, I couldn’t help but think, different genders, different races, different generations, and the best of friends.

This is the world I want for her.
In a country that is so deeply divided by beliefs, I want her life to be filled with moments like this... not liberal or conservative republican or democrat, socialist or capitalist, just HUMAN.

Joseph from Samsungus in Oklahoma, if this should happen to find you.
Thank you for showing my daughter what kindness and compassion looks like.
Continue to shine your light in the world.

Credit: Kevin Armentrout

My “mission” is to make people aware of “the trans generational transmission of trauma” as it pertains to PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. If you live with a PTSD victim of any variety (sexual assault, natural disaster, military service), you may be infected with Secondary Trauma, which in turn could lead to more serious emotional problems. If you want to read more, check out my book “Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD’s Collateral Damage,” available on Amazon.com.

Amazon.com. Spend less. Smile more. Free shipping on millions of items. Get the best of Shopping and Entertainment with Prime. Enjoy low prices and great deals on the largest selection of everyday essentials and other products, including fashion, home, beauty, electronics, Alexa Devices, sporting goods, toys, automotive, pets, baby, b...

Urban moon

This woman, according to the info provided on the reverse side of the card, “dramatically improved efficiency” of France’s Soviba Le Lion meat packing plant when she discovered she could snap a cow’s neck “with a clamp of her thighs.” She met her death when she challenged the BoeufMaitre -a steam powered cow killing machine - to a duel. She didn’t “cower” before this machine, and gave the contest everything she had, slaying animals not just with her thighs but her elbows and teeth as well. However, she managed to kill just 50 animals compared to the BoeufMaitre’s 830. Her last moments were filled with grisly irony. An angry cow head butted our heroine Karenne into the BoeufMaitre’s kill zone, slaughtering her. After her demise, owners of the Soviba Le Lion found consumption of the woman irreparably damaged the BoeufMaitre “and forever secured her fame.”

I couldn’t confirm any of this story with a cursory internet check, but sometimes, there are good stories available elsewhere.

Remind you of anybody?

Desert stroll near Palm Springs. Note little girl lost, lower right.

This is my family minus my father. The portrait was shot circa 1958 for a local newspaper. Maybe it’s because I know them so we’ll, but I fancy I can see a hint of Secondary PTSD in each face, but especially in mine there is a smoldering anger.

There I am, Joltin’ Joe’s ultimate competition, gazing straight up the legend’s skirt. What can you say about guys like me? “Grow up!” seems appropriate but somehow inadequate. Maybe “get a life” would be better. However, I’ve got to say I saw lots of guys in my age cohort posing with Marilyn who showed even less good taste than me.

Feeding time at the Long Beach Aquarium.

This is my dad, serving with the Cannon Co of the 134th infantry regiment, 35th Division somewhere in France in 1944. He came home with bad PTSD, and thought alcohol was a proper treatment. He was dead wrong, but at the time, there weren’t any cures for so called psychoneurotics. If he admitted to shell shock, there would have been no way to for him to have a legal career, because no one would have had faith in his judgment. It took me decades to square my memories of him with the harsh reality he’d faced on the battlefield, and my book, “Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD’s Collateral Damage” was written as a sort of admittedly overblown amends to the man for all the time I wasted hating him. Recently, Kirkus Reviews published this:

TITLE INFORMATION
TRAUMA FAMILY
A Memoir of PTSD's Collateral Damage
Bill McBean
Climacteric (323 pp.)
$11.99 paperback, $4.15 e-book
ISBN: 978-1-63684-819-8
November 2, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
In this memoir, a man recounts a troubled youth under the mercurial tyranny of his father, who suffered from PTSD as a
consequence of his experiences serving in World War II.
McBean’s father, Peter, governed his family with an erratic style that “fused sa**sm and satire,” an amalgam of vituperative
anger, violence, and capricious despotism that weighed heavily on the author as the oldest of four children and the only
son. His father’s approach seemed guided by the urgent need to prepare the family for an inevitable tragedy of the kind he
encountered as a lieutenant commanding a cannon company during World War II. Despite the “terrarium of wealth”
McBean enjoyed as a child—Peter was a successful lawyer—his home life seemed intolerable, and he sought ways to
lash out against his father’s prohibitive rule, a rebellion he lucidly and powerfully chronicles. Years later as an adult, the
author’s life became a “persistent game of hopscotch on land mines, such an unconscious exercise in self-destruction,”
and he followed in his father’s footsteps and was overcome by alcoholism. In order to repair his own life, McBean turned to
a rigorous scrutiny of his father’s past, a project that included reading more than 100 letters the soldier sent to the author’s
mother, Mary, between 1944 and 1945: “Even as I struggled to understand life as a child, I never dreamed the questions
about my youth would deepen as I grew older. I never imagined I’d need to understand my father, and most of all, I never
suspected examining these questions in my old age would threaten my emotional stability.” McBean finally understood the
horror of what his father experienced overseas during the war and the suffering those events saddled him with as well as
the ways that emotional pain was bequeathed to the author as a matter of a “transgenerational transmission,” a
“secondary trauma.”
McBean’s remarkably forthcoming memoir mixes personal insights with psychological science—he provides an accessible
picture of the nature of secondary trauma, the study of which remains in its infancy. In addition, he furnishes a poignantly
thoughtful meditation on the havoc such trauma wrought on his life as well as his painful path to recovery. Still, at the core
of the book is a memorably sensitive portrait of his father as someone brave and intellectually astute, if also cruel and
capable of a “perverse levity.” After the war, Peter returned to the United States with a bevy of problems he could neither
adequately manage nor communicate: “He came out of World War II with his ideals pulverized, and that made him
angry—ferociously angry. He couldn’t talk about it with anyone, because no one understood what he’d been through, even
my mother.” McBean’s remembrance concludes with illuminating advice regarding how one can identify the signs of such
trauma in others as well as the resources available to those in need of help. The author’s recollection can lose its direction,
meandering into the kind of granular autobiographical details that are more minute than necessary, but nonetheless
remains as moving as it is gripping.
A deeply intelligent personal account, both dramatically captivating and scientifically edifying.
EXCERPTING POLICIES
Please review Kirkus Media’s excerpting policies before publishing any portion of this review online or in print for any use.
To learn about proper attribution and to ensure your use is in compliance with our guidelines, we invite you to visit
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/indieexcerpts.
Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 2600 Via Fortuna Suite 130 Austin, TX 78746
[email protected]

Having just had a wonderful meal, Marna are about to see the Central Square Theater’s production of “Queens Girl in the World.” It’s gotten terrific reviews!

Write. Just write.

A Tribute to My Mother

One night, when I was very young, I had a terrible fever that accompanied some sort of adolescent flu. With the fever came a horrific dream that someone was trying to stuff me in our clothes dryer. I got up and flew down the hall to my parents’ room, where my mother consoled me. Her distinct odor of Vicks VapoRub remains with me after all these years.
That night, she was a warm presence, but make no mistake, she was stretched very thin. She had five children in seven years, four girls and myself. She had a husband with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from WWII. My book, Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD’s Collateral Damage deals with the problems Dad’s illness caused, but it didn’t deal sufficiently with the damage done to my mom.
My father had a tyrant boss who made a tryst with him a condition for partnership. Every night, after her brood had been fed, the kitchen door closed and they talked. I’m not sure of the exact subject matter, but in all likelihood they spoke of whether or not Dad should capitulate. They discussed the shenanigans of their children. They must have talked about how they would stretch their limited funds to keep their upper middle class existence going.
During this discourse, they drank. Just guessing here, but I’ll bet their alcohol intake equaled roughly ten ounces daily, each. During the day, Mom drank Gallo dry sherry from a juice glass she kept hidden next to the cookies in the kitchen cupboard. For the most part, I think Dad’s drinking began with scotch on the evening commuter train. Dad drank to control his PTSD, and Mom drank to keep Dad company, because she liked it and because of the mess in which she found herself.
I don’t understand how she tolerated the noise, the chaos, the demands on her time, the day-to-day drudgery and the horrendous workload of dealing with that large a family. I’m not surprised she drank. Actually, I’m surprised she didn’t drink more. We’re lucky she didn’t cut and run.
I know her upbringing in no way prepared her for the situation in which she found herself. She attended St Catherine’s School in Richmond, a fine boarding school for upper crust young ladies. She graduated from Swarthmore College, and considered having a professional career. But getting married to my dad in 1942 scotched that idea. In a letter she wrote my father while he was fighting in Europe, she broached the idea of attending law school but was put in her place by return mail. There would be only one lawyer in our family.
She must have been terribly disappointed. She had a good mind and for me, she proved to be the family’s intellectual leader. One day, when I was eleven or twelve, I returned home from school and found she had “arbitrarily and capriciously” thrown out my beloved comic books. When I objected, she took me down to our local bookstore and bought me my first book, Johnny Tremain by Ester Forbes. It launched me into book after book after book, a golden path that remains just as rewarding today as it was after that thrilling first experience. She also taught me the craft of expository writing at our kitchen table. She provided a pencil and a yellow pad. I didn’t like it then; in fact I hated it and I hated her for making me do it. As it turned out, she provided me with a skill that allowed me to earn a living.
It wasn’t until after her death in 1993 I appreciated her loneliness, shame and isolation. My sister gave me her journal, and in it I read about her last twenty years on this planet. She lived in her dream house on a magnificent Vermont hillside. The problem was she tried to balance her alcohol problems with type one diabetes and an inability to give up smoking. During those twenty years, she was found comatose several times due to low insulin. At one point, a few years before her death, she noticed her nose had somehow been bloodied. She couldn’t imagine how it had happened. She decided to get a checkup, and her doctor did blood work. On her return visit, the doctor told Mom her liver function wasn’t good, and she should stop drinking. She told him she’d cut back after Christmas, but she told her journal she felt sure her doctor understood this was ultimately an “adult decision.”
Mom was an active churchwoman in Vermont as well as in our suburban New York village. In the Brattleboro Episcopal Church, she participated in a woman’s group which she mentioned in her journal. The group had homework, written exercises aimed at helping the ladies understand themselves better. On one occasion, they were asked to analyze their shame. Mom said she tried, but just couldn’t do it. She stopped attending the group.
It's a pity that appreciating your parents requires walking in their footsteps. During my “intellectually advanced” years – in my twenties, before alcohol beat me to a pulp – I scorned my mother to her face. When I quit and visited her Vermont home on vacation, she left bowls of candy around the house, knowing that recovering alcoholics crave sugar. I see that candy now as symbolic of her lasting affection for me. Although many alcoholics would have been threatened by my sobriety, she just wanted to assist my recovery. No love is greater than a mother’s love for her child.

Thanks to all the people who reached out to me about my Tribute to my Father. Here's a review about my book, "Trauma Family - A Memoir of PTSD's Collateral Damage." In my next column, I'll talk about how my mother suffered because of Dad's PTSD.
https://1drv.ms/w/s!Am4mBYdnBfYWfn2QAYHYi1UqJuQ

Trauma Family-Louwes review.docx

Thanks to all of you who posted about my column on my dad’s WWII suffering. It’s the biggest response, by far, of any column I’ve ever published. I think that’s because I underlined the positive in a negative situation. When I first published “Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD’s Collateral Damage,” my intent was to warn people about the dangers of Secondary Trauma. People who live around people with PTSD are effected in much the same way as the PTSD victims themselves. My audience, I hoped, was families of soldiers coming back from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of those people have undoubtedly read the book and benefited from it, but the audience most viscerally effected were people like myself, and of that group, more people were apparently damaged by alcohol than PTSD. I’m not sure how important the distinction is, because so many PTSD sufferers still treat themselves with alcohol, with catastrophic consequences for all involved. In any case, my next piece will be about my mother and how she made herself sick by trying to go drink-for- drink with my dad.

A Tribute to Dad

I wrote my book, "Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD’s Collateral Damage," (Available at Amazon.com or Billmcbean.net) so I could understand how my life had gone so wildly off track. Now that the writing and publishing process is over, the Secondary Trauma I’d hoped to wipe away is still very much with me.
Now, however, I dwell on images that must have inhabited my father’s memory in the three decades between the war’s end and his untimely death in 1974.
Peter C. McBean served as a combat artilleryman in WWII’s European theater. He came back with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and a case of PTSD, which he controlled with alcohol. My book is primarily about the effect his alcoholism and PTSD had on his family.
The background for his shell shock is established by quoting from the 100 letters he sent home during 1944 and 1945. In some of those letters he tried to couch the grisly details in humor, giving the events he depicted a cartoonish sheen.
The account he presented of the horror of Gardelegen, however, was stripped of all jocularity. In April of 1945, elements of the 35th Division captured a town in which over 1,000 mainly non-Jewish prisoners were killed. It was the last massacre of the war.
He wrote:
"You have probably been reading a great many articles on the state of things in German concentration camps which have been overrun and you are probably wondering, as I used to wonder, just how true these reports are. My doubts are at an end. Yesterday I had the opportunity to view the remains of an as yet undetermined number of Polish and Russian political prisoners and prisoners of war. Now that I have seen the grim evidence of German brutality and be******ty with my own eyes I feel justified in saying that the newspaper reports understate the case if anything.
The place which I visited (Gardelegen) is not a concentration camp but a special slaughterhouse. It was a large stone barn with a corrugated roof and sliding doors. The Germans herded up to 400 prisoners at a time into this barn, closed the doors and burnt them alive with gasoline, phosphorous grenades and flares.
When I arrived, there were still some 350 charred corpses lying in the barn. A few in their agony had managed to squeeze out under the doors and the Germans had machine gunned these. I think that barn was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.
Behind the barn in a long trench were buried the remainder of the victims. Up to the time I arrived some 1,100 blackened corpses had been exhumed out of the one pit and as near as I could determine, there was still no bottom to the pit. All of the bodies, despite being badly charred, showed evidence of extreme starvation. The arms and legs were mere sticks. The smell of the place was beyond description — a combination of roasted flesh and decay.
The Army had every civilian in the nearby town at work digging out the corpses and reburying them in a separate place. Old men, young men and boys were all at work in that pit, digging out the burnt and rotting corpses with their hands and carrying them to their new place of burial. The officer in charge had Poles and Russians who had escaped from the same group as overseers, and were they doing a good job! Each one had a leather thong quirt and every time a Kraut stopped to rest he would get the quirt across the face or on the back. They also had a captured SS officer, one of those responsible for the massacre, working in the pit. We all derived tremendous satisfaction out of that."
The man who wrote this letter tried very hard to function as my father, and as father to my four sisters. Scenes like the one at Gardelegen, however, convinced him the idea of the “brotherhood of man” was an illusion. He told me so on many different occasions as I grew up, but he didn’t convince me, thanks primarily to various Episcopal Church ministers. But he had been totally convinced that any man, pushed far enough, became an animal and showed his be***al instincts.
That belief made him not the perfect dad, but the effort he put forth is notable. He quit drinking and lived a sober, unhappy existence for his last year on this planet. Prior to that, he forced himself to go to work every day at a law firm that might easily have been run by the Roman emperor Caligula. The reasons he chose to endure this are many, but the end result was he provided more than enough money for his family to enjoy an upscale lifestyle, including the educational opportunities that came with it.
What I think about most these days is how he kept going with the stench of death always fresh in his nostrils. So many wartime images must have flited through his head, yet instead of abandoning ship, he stuck with it. I think a thank you is in order, so this column is my belated tribute.
Thank you, Dad.

Snippet from "Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD's Collateral Damage," available at Amazon.com or at billmcbean.net:"

"For much of the time when we were young, an unearthly sound somewhere between a scream of terror and a bellow of aggression awakened us in the night. Sometimes it would last five minutes, and although we knew Dad was the culprit, the house was very dark and it was hard to convince ourselves there was no danger.
At first, the sharp eruption of a man in imminent fear of death reverberated through the walls. Then there would be desperate snarling, the kind made by an animal caught in a leg trap. Sharp commands that didn’t take the form of words but nonetheless sounded like warnings were broadcast from their bedroom, followed by the soft incantations of my mother as she tried to get him back to bed.
Then silence would once again settle over our house, and we children would wonder if Mom had prevailed or if the troll that seemed to live just behind my father’s eyes had triumphed. Yet when the early sunlight again set the tree limbs in relief, they’d both appear, dressed and ready, as if nothing had happened."

SNIPPETS FROM "Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD's Collateral Damage.

"He stood in the kitchen, the inky stubble of his unshaven, ruddy face upturned at the barbeque fork he held in his hand. He’d skewered a rat through its midsection with the tool we used to toast marshmallows. He held the wiggling rodent high, staring at it, his eyes swelling.
Because I knew I’d witnessed something forbidden, I couldn’t take my eyes off the writhing rat. The animal’s blood poured off Dad’s fingers and down his wrist. My eight-year-old mind flipped like a circuit breaker. My father had been transformed from the bedrock of my life into a seething killer, and I just didn’t get how that could happen.
This scene led the highlight reel of my childhood. It spotlighted how Dad passed his trauma on to his brood. It would be decades before anyone understood that the trauma of war could be passed on to the family of the warrior. Naturally, no two of us became traumatized at the same time or in exactly the same way. Yet all five of the McBean children eventually suffered from at least one symptom of Secondary Trauma Stress: panic attacks, anxiety disorder, alcoholism, depression, and attention deficit disorder.
Today, millions of American soldiers just like my dad have returned home from Middle East battlefields, many with PTSD. They are having children, some of whom won’t have the sheltering resources of the McBean clan. They will face homelessness, prison, addiction, and untimely death."

Trauma Family is available at Amazon.Com, Barnes and Noble and at billmcbean.net.

This is my family, sitting for a local newspaper portrait, in the mid-1950s. Everyone in this picture suffered from some variant of Secondary Trauma at the time. Missing from the portrait is my father, Peter C McBean. He was in lower Manhattan, earning his living as a Wall Street lawyer.
I loved this picture because it presents my family as they wanted to be seen. No one in this portrait was smiling because the photographer discouraged it. He worked for a newspaper and he wanted to present the reality of family life in Bronxville, NY, not a bunch of smiley artificiality. I’m sure my mother agreed. The photograph would represent the McBean family for those looking back on it from the 21st Century, so any goofiness was discouraged. It needed to reflect what fine, upstanding people we were.
Of course, neither the photographer nor my mother could possibly have had the prescience to know the family’s oldest son and sole male would write a book about our difficulties with PTSD. Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD’s Collateral Damage was published last fall and is available on Amazon.com or at Billmcbean.net.
My mother would have been scandalized by the volume, and in truth, I wouldn’t have written it had she been alive. I published the book not because I thought there was anything so important about the McBeans, but as a cautionary tale for anyone living with a victim of PTSD.
What most people don’t understand about PTSD is that it’s highly contagious, but not in the way one contracts a virus. Individuals who regularly interact with PTSD victims are at risk of developing secondhand PTSD, which mocks many of the primary victim’s symptoms, including numbness or avoidance, hypervigilance, anger, depression and anxiety. I found myself soaking up my father’s symptoms like a sponge absorbs water.
Since I’ve suffered so much at the hands of Secondary Trauma Syndrome (STS, as it’s known in the psych biz), it’s a great temptation to blame my father for all my problems. I did, in fact, blame him for many years – probably for most of my life. One of the great emotive benefits of writing a memoir is pulling together all the loose ends and out of those scraps finding the truth. The truth about Peter C McBean is he pulled himself together enough to provide his family with a very good standard of living. Despite frequent nightmares, he forced himself to stay focused. A senior partner at the firm – a man who controlled whether my dad became a partner – forced him to commit sexual acts as a precondition of partnership. He had five children and my mother insisted he have a “relationship” with them all. Through all of these trials, he held on and performed the duties his family took for granted. It’s true he drank entirely too much Scotch whiskey and became the sort of sadistic drunk that is hard to be around. On the other hand, he might have been an alcoholic even if he hadn’t been firing howitzers at the Germans for eighteen straight months. One aunt told me he had a good start on a drinking problem while still in Bronxville High School.
The other problem with blaming my father for the STS that so devastated our family is it removes me from a position of personal responsibility and sets me up as a person still ragging on his parents when he’s nearly 75 years old. It’s a perilous path upon which to tread, saying you’re responsable for your past while explaining how the household atmosphere contributed to learning problems, or expounding on how the sight of your father drinking every night caused you to become an alcoholic.
At the same time, holding oneself up as a posterchild for STS doesn’t work unless one gets into the ins and outs of how one contracted such a horrible ailment. Thus, I’m stuck the conundrum of saying I’m taking full responsibility for my life while appearing to be complaining about it. This problem can only be resolved by expressing profound gratitude for finally understanding what happened to me.

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/trauma-family-a-memoir-of-ptsd-s-collateral-damage-bill-mcbean-da5ece3b-f9e2-4110-96e8-fc9cb8ab2d02?utm_medium=email&utm_source=transactional&utm_campaign=mandrill

Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD's Collateral Damage by Bill McBean - Reviewed by Jennie Louwes Review: A book that is revelatory and revolutionary! Words of woundedness, coupled with this book's last lines, gift a balm that lingers and haunts.

CASCADING TRAUMA

The “transgenerational transmission of trauma.”

Quite a mouthful, huh?

The phrase is used by psychologists interested in the tendency of emotional problems suffered by one generation to cascade onto later generations.

Put simply, if you grow up in a household in which one or both of your parents acts crazy, you’ll probably grow up with a few problems of your own.

The first studies concerning this phenomenon were done on the children of Holocaust survivors. Often, the children weren’t told about the camps, but still showed their parents’ symptoms: depression, anxiety and other signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The concept of transgenerational trauma is discussed extensively in my book, Trauma Family: A Memoir of PTSD’s Collateral Damage. It’s available on Amazon.com or at https://billmcbean.net/. It’s the story of how my family battled its way through exposure to a WWII veteran’s PTSD.

Soldiers and Holocaust victims aren’t the only people who suffer from this problem. African-Americans are often beset by PTSD because of racial discrimination and police brutality, and their experience is often passed down generation after generation. There are children and wives of cops, firemen and front-line caregivers. The list is extensive.

Although therapy and medication can help with the primary symptoms of PTSD – anxiety and depression – not everyone can afford treatment, and not everyone would take advantage of treatment even if they could afford it. The traditional medication for people who feel bad about themselves or their lives is alcohol.

When people treat themselves with booze, the outcome is uneven at best. Sometimes, people afflicted with Secondary Trauma (another term for the transgenerational transmission) use alcohol moderately. There’s no way to generalize about people who drink. Once people have experienced the glow, they crave it. Even if they don’t drink alcoholically, they stoutly resist any attempt to change their drinking habits.

That’s why I just talk about my own experience with alcohol and Secondary Trauma. If there’s one commonality I’ve noticed about my drinking habits and those of my parents, it’s this: Love of alcohol made us selfish. When I was a parent, I’d live for the moment I could take the edge off without some child wanting something. Much of the time, I’d begin drinking well before I got them to bed, so I’d want to expedite the process so I could drink my fill.

I never became violent with my children as my father was with me, but I certainly showered them with sharp commands and sarcasm. I cooked them many nutritious meals, but only because I felt a duty to do so. Often, the pork chops were deep-fried in the grease of resentment.

When I finally stopped treating my Secondary Trauma with alcohol and began a medication and therapy regime, things changed significantly, but it took decades for my attitude to adjust. I confess all of this because I want to emphasize how baked-in my referred PTSD made my “entitlement.”

I thought a few speed bumps during my early years entitled me to have a good life and anyone who disputed that claim was met with a barrage of hostility and sarcasm. It’s taken me most of my life to learn the elemental lessons, the most basic of which is you need to give love to get love.

I’m sure most of the above will seem absurd to people who grew up in normal households offering appropriate levels of affection. Yet I grew up in a family in which my parents – especially my father – was hurting so badly he had little love to give. My mother, understanding as she did the pain WWII inflicted on him, saw her primary duty as propping him up. He was the sole wage earner, and if he went off the rails – and he could have very easily done just that – we all would have crashed into the all-consuming fire of poverty.

Out of five children in our family, one managed to avoid divorce. Three of us had families and bore children who survived the divorce(s) with varying degrees of success. One, sadly, succumbed to alcohol and died in her fifties. That sister was very close to my father and witnessed first hand the final days of his alcoholism. She tried sobriety, but when diagnosed with cancer, left this world on a high tide of vodka.

There’s a lot of very helpful information on Secondary Trauma at https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/care/toolkits/provider/workingWithTraumaSurvivors.asp

If there are aspects of Secondary Trauma of PTSD you’d like to discuss, please email me: [email protected]

Bill McBean – Author A trembler is another name for an earthquake, but I’m hijacking the word for my new blog. My trembler began more than 70 years ago, when I was a baby. My father recently returned from World War II with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He was badly shaken by his experience in combat, and his ...