nasc
  • Home
  • EDUCATION
    • Resources >
      • Community Activists
      • Medical Professionals
      • Alternative Practitioners
      • Educators
      • Psychotherapists
    • What are Constellations?
    • Systemic issues
    • Organizational Constellations
  • COMMUNITY
    • Founding Members
    • Members
    • Events
    • Directory
    • Volunteers
    • Ambassadors
  • Next Conference
    • The Field
    • The Journey
    • Conference Team
    • Press & Media
  • PAST CONFERENCES
    • 2017 Conference
    • History of Conferences >
      • 2005-2017 PHOTOS
  • About Us
    • Building Blocks
    • Connect with Us
    • NASC Mission
    • Non-Profit Board of Directors
  • Newsletters
  • Blog
    • Blog Instructions

Blog

The “ancestors” who inspired my career as a veterans’ doc

11/9/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
By Ed Tick, Ph.D.
 
As a psychotherapist for more than 40 years, I have found my strongest calling, met my greatest challenges, and learned and matured the most in my work with troops and veterans suffering the invisible wounds we now call Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Moral Injury. 
 
I began working with returning Vietnam veterans years before PTSD became a diagnosis in 1980.  My enduring model for the service I wanted to give, the role I sought to fulfill, was “home front doc.”   It was born and shaped by family and ancestral relations.
 
My Uncle Stan was my mother’s only sibling, four years older than her.  An aspiring artist before service, he went to war as a combat medic and fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II.  Afterwards he and his unit were missing behind enemy lines for months.  My grandmother prayed for him constantly, and her hair turned white almost overnight. 

Stan came home a changed man, no longer an artist.  He could function and even became a professional, but he always shook and stuttered, hardly able to utter a complete sentence.  I have worked with thousands of combat veterans.  Stan’s was one of the worst cases of functioning PTSD or walking shell shock that I have known.  In the military he had been a “doc,” as medics are known.
 
My parents made Stan my godfather.  My godfather, the traumatized doc.
 
In 1961, at ten years old, I pored over a book called “Great Battles of the Civil War.”  One full-page color picture showed a grizzled Confederate soldier stooping over a fallen federal soldier, cradling him and giving him water on a field strewn with Union fallen. This soldier was 19-year-old Sgt. Richard Chamberlain from South Carolina, who did climb the walls protecting his troops, at night, loaded with canteens, to doctor Union wounded. 
 
No one else joined him, but no shots were fired and both sides cheered.  Sgt. Chamberlain is known as “the Angel of Fredericksburg.”
 
I framed his picture, hung it on my bedroom wall, and spent endless hours contemplating his story.
 
I came of age during the Vietnam War.  I hated that war but always supported and feared for our troops.  My opposition overrode my desire to serve.  Deeply troubled, I was protesting and preparing my conscientious objector plea.  I decided that if drafted I could only serve as a medic, a doc. A high lottery number erased that crisis, but something in me was missing and I still ached to serve.
 
As a beginning psychotherapist in the late 1970s, troubled Vietnam veterans came into my nascent psychotherapy practice.  Life was giving me the chance to become that home front doc.  I specialized in working with our vets even when our country scorned them.  I gave all to earn my place in their brotherhood and help them come home. 
 
Willy, my best friend of those years, had been a reconnaissance patrol leader in the jungles.  One day he told me, “I judge men not by whether they were in the bush with me, but by what they would be like if they had been. You?  I’d make you my medic.”
 
Since then I have searched the world learning to heal these invisible war wounds.  I have worked and studied with Native Americans whose warrior traditions are wise and ancient.  To the Plains people, PTSD was being bereft of spirit.  They affirm that it was in essence a wound to the soul.
 
Of the many roles that the Lakota chief, warrior and shaman Sitting Bull filled, he declared his most important was Medicine Chief of the Hunkpapa Warrior Society. Sitting Bull was responsible for the spiritual health of warriors and for restoring them when depleted from combat.  He was a soul doc and has been my role model. 
 
Sgt. Chamberlain, Uncle Stan, Willy and Sitting Bull – an ancestral line of docs in a crushing series of wars – I humbly and gratefully claim them as my lineage, and I feel proudest when our warriors address me simply as “Doc.”


Picture
About the author
 
Edward Tick, Ph.D., was one of the keynote speakers at the 2015 North American Systemic Constellations Conference in San Diego and presented a well-attended workshop on healing veterans at the same conference. He is co-founder and director of
Soldier’s Heart and author of Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul after War and other books and articles. He is an internationally recognized educator and expert on veterans, PTSD and the psychology of military-related issues. He has conducted trainings, retreats and workshops across the country and overseas and has lectured and trained staff and worked with wounded warriors at West Point, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Fort Hood, Fort Knox, Altus Air Force Base and other Department of Defense facilities.

Join us for the 2017 North American Systemic Constellations Conference Oct. 5-8 in Virginia Beach, Va., for health professionals, educators, executive and life coaches, consultants, community activists, change makers and others interested in alternative health and innovative practices. More info here. We'd love to have you subscribe to our e-letter here.

1 Comment
Sara link
1/20/2017 10:52:29 am

Ed, I was fortunate enough to witness your work at the US Constellation event in San Diego 2014. I was deeply touched by the way you held space for the 'warriors return'. Reading your story affirms your passion and commitment in recognizing and validating the medicine of our warriors.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Our blog

    Welcome to our blog, which explores what people are doing with Family and Systemic Constellations here, there and everywhere throughout North America.

    In addition, we pay attention to the many intersections of constellations with ancestral healing, indigenous practices and emerging alternative methods of change.

    Your editor is Judy Melanson.

    Interested in contributing a guest blog article? See instructions here.

    Contact blog editor Judy HERE. 

    Archives

    July 2020
    February 2020
    November 2019
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016

    Categories

    All
    2017 Constellations Conference
    2017 North American Systemic Constellations Conference
    African Americans
    Ancestors
    Autism
    Bert Hellinger
    Bridging The Divide
    Canada
    Charlottesville
    Children
    Christmas
    Community
    Concussion
    Croatia
    Current Events
    D.C.
    Diversity
    Donald Trump
    Ed Tick
    Engineering
    Family Constellations
    Family Trauma
    Germany
    Hanukkah
    Heinz Stark
    High School
    Hillary Clinton
    Hoiliday Season
    Horses
    Immigration
    Indra's Net
    Intergenerational Trauma
    ISCA
    Learning
    Marketing
    Marketing E-book
    MInd Body Spirit Living
    National Museum Of African American History And Culture
    National Museum Of The American Indian
    Native Americans
    Nature Constellations
    Orders Of Love
    Phobia
    Politics
    Pre-Conference
    Psychology
    PTSD
    Relationships
    Shamanism
    Social Change
    Social Justice
    Soul Retrieval
    Systemic Constellations
    Teacher
    Teenagers
    Training
    Trauma
    Travel
    U.S. Election
    Veterans
    Virginia Beach
    Washington
    Women's March
    Yoga
    YouTube Video

    RSS Feed


Picture
Home
Blog
​Contact

​Copyright © 2017 - North American Systemic Constellations (NASC) • ​Last update 07/26/2021

The purpose of North American Systemic Constellations (NASC) is to organize educational conferences and other learning experiences that support the growth and development of Systemic Constellations as a healing modality so that the far-reaching benefits of Systemic Constellations can be shared with the public.  ​

Website design by Michaelene Ruhl, PsyD
  • Home
  • EDUCATION
    • Resources >
      • Community Activists
      • Medical Professionals
      • Alternative Practitioners
      • Educators
      • Psychotherapists
    • What are Constellations?
    • Systemic issues
    • Organizational Constellations
  • COMMUNITY
    • Founding Members
    • Members
    • Events
    • Directory
    • Volunteers
    • Ambassadors
  • Next Conference
    • The Field
    • The Journey
    • Conference Team
    • Press & Media
  • PAST CONFERENCES
    • 2017 Conference
    • History of Conferences >
      • 2005-2017 PHOTOS
  • About Us
    • Building Blocks
    • Connect with Us
    • NASC Mission
    • Non-Profit Board of Directors
  • Newsletters
  • Blog
    • Blog Instructions