1. You may not see the cliff coming

I had thought I’d seen the cliff coming for six months before I eventually fell off it, and I felt that I had prepared myself well.

I was wrong.

Having spent the preceding 14 years in the army, the last five of which with special operations, I was looking forward to a slower-paced and simpler life with my young family. As a doctor, job prospects post-army were good and promised wages significantly higher than what I had been earning during my military service. We would be moving back to a newly built house in my wife’s hometown which meant more social support for the family, and I had accumulated a significant amount of leave which would allow me to ease back into a civilian life without the pressure of needing to immediately find work. As a precaution to stave off boredom and to have a structured focus in my life following my immediate discharge, I had enrolled in a Master of Business Administration online.

I was physically relatively uninjured from my service, and while I had experienced a significant degree of psychological trauma during my four tours of Afghanistan with Special Operations, at that point I was seemingly largely un-affected by symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress. I had naïvely anticipated that the void that would be created in my life by leaving the army could be neatly filled by increased family time, post-graduate study, a new job, and increased income.

Within six months of transition from army to civilian life the cracks were well and truly beginning to appear in the armour. Demons from my service, centred primarily on the memories of soldiers I couldn’t save, began to infiltrate my conscious thoughts, and caused my palms to sweat and my heart to race. My sleep was regularly disturbed by vivid dreams of my family members drowning and me not being able to save them despite my best efforts. Crowded places caused me to become highly anxious and the smell of raw pork started making me gag.

As a doctor I of course recognised these symptoms as those of Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS), it just seemed odd that they were occurring at a time when I was safer than ever, home more than ever, and earning more money than ever. Surely, you’d think those symptoms should have been happening in the thick of it, when I was being regularly exposed to stressful situations and trauma. It got me reflecting deeply on what the protective factors were at the time when I was in the army, that allowed me to stay resilient despite the stress and exposures. What metaphoric armour had I lost when I took off my literal armour for the last time and walked away from the military? Maybe if I could figure that out it would provide a roadmap of sorts back to a resilient version of myself as a civilian1.

As time progressed, I became convinced that PTS was only a small component of what was at play. As I reintegrated into the workforce as a fly-in, fly-out doctor on a mine site it became clear that the process that had derailed my life was as much a grief response as it was PTS.

I was grieving the person I used to be and had absolutely no idea how to be the new person that I had become. I had lost my identity. I was grieving the loss of my previous army support structure, who I had shared experiences with and who truly understood me. I had lost my tribe.

I had hopped off the fast-moving army special operations train and my pace of life had slowed abruptly. I felt unsettled and unstimulated. I was bored shitless. I felt a cavernous divide between me and the civilians that now surrounded me, with no obvious way for me to traverse that divide and become one of them. Furthermore, I had absolutely no desire to become one of them; I was caught between worlds with seemingly no way back and no way forward.

All of this was happening in the context of me discharging from the army by my own choice, in relatively good physical and mental health, with an intact marriage an