The Foreign Service Journal, January 2008

we handled food and disaster assistance in that office. I worked with nongovernmental organizations that were distributing humanitarian assistance, finding temporary housing for displaced persons and assisting torture vic- tims from both sides. One morning in 1981, my Salvadoran counterpart, Dr. Rosa Judith Cisneros — a spectacular woman whom I had grown to admire greatly — was brutally murdered in the driveway to her house. The previous day a photo of her accepting a family plan- ning grant from the U.S. ambassador had appeared on the front page of a local news- paper, El Diario de Hoy. Also during this period, some colleagues and I were carrying out a survey of the needs of displaced persons. As we moved by helicopter between northern rebel-held territories, we were fired on by guerilla troops. More times than I want to remember, I came upon dead and sometimes mutilated bodies in the streets of the city and along the highways outside of town. There were shootings and bombings daily. Reliving the Trauma In late 1981, after two-and-a-half years in this war zone, I returned to Washington. It took several weeks before I realized I wasn’t getting back to normal. I still jumped at loud noises and saw dead bodies on desks at work at the State Department. Strong emotions would come and go without any relevance to what was happen- ing around me. I had regular nightmares about running away from uniformed men with guns trying to kill me. Sometimes I would also have what I called “daymares.” I would encounter a person at work in a meeting and see them suddenly fall victim to some horrible trauma — a car wreck, a shooting, a bomb explosion. These day- mares struck quickly, then disappeared, leaving me sit- ting in a meeting not knowing what I had missed. As I tried to regain normal functioning, I noticed that my mouth wouldn’t work right; I couldn’t talk properly and could hardly communicate with people around me. There was a great deal going on inside my head, but it had no relevance to what was going on in the world around me. I could answer a direct question in a few words, but then could not say anything more for long periods of time. I didn’t feel sad; I didn’t feel happy. Often I didn’t seem to feel anything at all. Gradually, I became aware that something serious was wrong; what I was experiencing wasn’t normal. The experiences I was having — the inability to talk, the nightmares and daymares, the visual hallucinations — none of these experiences were normal. Nor were they going away; if anything, they seemed to be getting worse. I went to my boss and told her I thought I was going through some postwar emo- tional problems and asked if the State Department or USAID had some counseling services available. She said she was sympathetic but thought senior people would probably frown on my having emotional problems, and advised that disclosing my con- dition might negatively affect my eventual tenuring with USAID. So it would be best to keep a “stiff upper lip.” Her advice was to see a private therapist, for which she would give me as much administrative leave as I needed. That is what I did. After a couple of sessions, the therapist told me that I was suffering from “post-trau- matic shock syndrome,” which is what I think they called PTSD in the early 1980s. It helped me a great deal just to know there was a name for what I was feeling and that my symptoms were, in the words of the therapist, “clas- sic.” It also helped to be told that it would eventually pass. I continued to see the therapist for six months, though I doubt the sessions helped me much more. My own sense now is that the treatment of PTSD was not very developed in 1982. However, I did slowly begin to feel better. I started to talk again, stopped seeing dead bodies and jumping at loud noises. I started to feel real feelings. The nightmares were fewer and the daymares disappeared. Eventually, I terminated the therapy. My husband and I went into marriage counseling soon thereafter and ended up separating and divorcing. Our divorce may or may not have been related to our Salvadoran experience. F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 43 After returning to Washington, it took several weeks before I realized I wasn’t getting back to normal.