'After 11 years of trying to outrun depression and PTSD symptoms, I have finally concluded that it's faster than me. That I have to stop running, turn around, and confront it,' Jason Kander tells LesterHoltNBC.
When night fell and everybody else in the house was asleep, Jason Kander went on patrol.
“One of the things about the monster is the monster convinces you that you haven’t earned the right to have it,” he said, referring to PTSD. “So, I spent about 12 years explaining away all the reasons why this all must be attributable to something else — and then feeling shame because I was just that way.”
“My job was to do anti-corruption and anti-espionage investigations within the Afghan government,” he said. “Basically figure out which bad guys were pretending to be good guys, which meant I was frequently going out with a translator” to meet with “folks who were sometimes unsavory characters.”“I was in situations where I thought I might be about to be kidnapped or killed,” he said.“I mean, just violent nightmares every night,” he said. “A lot of nightmares about being kidnapped.
“She knew I was on edge all the time,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was breaking news to her … She was sleeping in bed next to me every night and felt me waking up every night.”"If you live with somebody with PTSD and they have all the symptoms that they have, you can't help but be affected by it," she said.
“Okay, you were an intelligence officer, you were out talking to contacts all the time, just you and your translator,” Jason Kander recalled the therapist saying. “And I said, yeah, and I explained that, you know, I have buddies who were in firefights.”“And the more she explained it to me, the more it occurred to me, like, that actually sounds pretty traumatic,” he said.
In fact, Jason Kander said, his first inkling that he was on the mend was when he realized he could “sit with my back to a door” for half an hour, that he could sleep through the night, that he could actually feel things again.
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