The National Intrepid Center of Excellence, located on Bethesda’s Walter Reed Campus, has a unique four-week intensive outpatient program.
Our multidisciplinary staff works diligently to “get on track” active duty military personnel who have suffered at least one traumatic brain injury with sequelae such as chronic pain, sleep deprivation, or PTSD.
Participants included team neurologists, psychiatrists, physical therapists, optometrists, audiologists, speech-language pathologists, art therapists (with treatment mask creation), music therapists, neuropsychiatrists, and family therapists. Physician, RN, and Team Physician.
Themes emerge during the course of over 100 appointments, often expressed in the therapy masks created.
Complex ideas about patriotism. emotional compartmentalization. Real life dreams of normal life and unfolding. Parental roles and mission roles collide. The horror of armed conflict and the embrace of home.
If you listen in during these meetings, some of the personal stories about combat and moral choices will make your toes curl and you won’t be able to sleep.
When tough men and women get in touch with emotions they thought were buried overseas, their inner demons emerge. They found that while wounds are temporary and can heal, scars are permanent.
The National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) has two walls and hosts some of the hundreds of masks created by participants over the past decade. The mask merges into the cacophony of human experience—joy, sorrow, fear, nightmare, failure, triumph.
Spouses can participate in the program during the fourth week. Staff occasionally take the opportunity to spend time with both active participants and their spouses (usually male participants) in front of a masked wall.
We first describe the powerful symbolism of the masks made by the participants. Spouses are then asked to consider how deployed active-duty members focus on the combat mission at hand at the expense of thinking about family, emotions and responsibilities at home. .
The mask represents a silent, protective shell in the form of armor that is protection from immediate terror during deployment.
No one wants to pollute their homes after a combat deployment, but removing the deployment mask after returning home is easier said than done. Even if bullets and bombs are no longer an imminent danger, flak are still flying around and need to be dealt with.
Finally, flip it over. The mask also represents the mask of a spouse left at home, keeping the house fire burning.
Spouses also have to hide their emotions in order to maintain the front of the house, doing housework while pretending they aren’t living with pins and needles, thinking about the aura of death while talking about their kids’ homework at the same time, thinking about the aura of death, and being in foreign countries. dies confronting his spouse in — in secret. I’m wondering if I need to identify anyone in the body bag.
Homefront spouses wear their own armor. They protect their families, ensure the home’s “mission” is completed, work creatively to maintain family morale, and discover strengths in themselves they never knew existed.
Some spouses are asking you to make your own mask while attending NICoE in Week 4.
Once their masks are placed on the mask wall, active duty troops are prevented from choosing their spouse’s mask from the crowd. The theme is the same. Struggle is the same. the mask is the same. Fear is the same. The spouse does not have a weapon filled with ammunition.
Many tears were shed at the wall of masks.
Frederick is full of active duty and veterans. Many of them are deployed.
Let us not forget the sacrifice of the couple. If you know or have met one of them, thank them for their service.
And don’t wait for the national holiday to tell them.
Dr. Edward Thompson, a former emergency room physician, was one of the coordinators of the NICoE physician team. If you’re interested in masks made by soldiers struggling to find closure, type “veteran therapy masks” into your search engine. (This site is not intended for children.)
