About IAVA

Feeling Keyed Up

The battle is over for you, but you can’t let go yet. There may have been moments when the adrenaline of survival mode kicked in and you felt more alive than you’d ever been. Nothing gets you that amped up anymore. So you look for a rush, try to recapture the feeling of being in the red zone.

But tapping into the battlefield mentality at home can backfire in a big way. Targeted aggression can become untargeted – driving erratically, getting into fights for no good reason, lashing out. After two tours of duty in Iraq, an Army vet says he felt tense in public. When a man was rude to the vet’s wife at a movie theater, the vet went into a rage and pummeled the man until staff pulled him away.

“Sometimes, I’ll just blow up about something,” one vet says. Tactical awareness can become hyper-vigilance and paranoia. “You are on point all the time, definitely.”

It isn’t easy to switch off the fighting instinct, but you have to learn to see when you’re getting aggravated, and let a cool head prevail. One vet describes watching his non-military friends for reassuring cues about how he should react to certain situations. Another vet says he excuses himself from stressful conflicts and goes somewhere quiet where he can breathe deeply and “decompress.”

Home is not a war zone. You don’t need to be locked and loaded anymore.

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