Mustang resident Dona Zanotti plucks at the guitar strings, struggling to reach the next chord, while the veteran players around her strum away with ease.
Together, the budding musicians belt out lyrics from their favorite Rascal Flatts' song “I'm Moving On.” “I've dealt with my ghosts, and I've faced my demons,” they sing. “Finally content with a past I regret ... I've been burdened with blame, trapped in the past for too long. I'm movin' on.”
This tune has become an anthem for about a dozen veterans in the Oklahoma City Veterans Affairs Medical Center's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder music lab. Zanotti said she believes her musical experiment is one-of-a-kind, and she is working on a manual to help other VA psychologists to find ways to use music therapeutically.
“Everybody has their own goal,” she said. “For some of them, it is to literally learn how to play the guitar and something new, which is a basic psychological need to do something fun and learn something new. For others, it's to rekindle something they have previously enjoyed. For others, it's to sooth them.”
Touching
musical roots
Zanotti composed the idea a couple of years ago when she was trying to reach out to a young Marine who was injured in a rocket attack in Iraq that killed eight of his closest friends. She could get him to talk about his rage but when she encourage him to try and process his memories from Iraq, words failed him.
The man suffered with a traumatic brain injury, constant ringing in his ears from the rocket attacks and flashbacks of his fallen comrades. It wasn't until he picked up a guitar between therapy sessions that he was able to shed some of his pain.
“That day he bonded for the first time with the older men in the group who were survivors of another war in another time,” Zanotti wrote in her grant proposal for the music lab. “Although their battles were waged in the jungle, rather than the desert, they listened as he sang of his blues and amplified the sting of his pain. The music reached all of them and offered a voice that had not yet been heard. Music bridges all generations.”
Zanotti was awarded a $4,000 grant to try her idea. She bought two acoustic guitars and a bass guitar with the funds. Later two left-handed guitars were donated to the program.
“It's kind of evolving,” she said. “I didn't have clear goals on what it was going to be about. I just wanted it to be about them and what they needed.”
Zanotti said she may come from an athletically gifted family, but she wouldn't call music her forte. Before the music lab started meeting a year ago, Zanotti, like most of the veterans in the group, had never played guitar before.
Slowly they have taught each other.
“I'll try and I play, and we get to do what I value, which is to talk about the lyrics,” she said. “We talk about how that connects for them.”
Struggling to
return home
Soldiers under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan move from one trauma to another without time to think. These young men and women face life and death decisions one after another that challenge the morals and beliefs that are a core part of who they are. Zanotti said they have to compromise these values to survive.
“You experience the trauma — you don't have time to process it,” she said. “So you say, I'll get back to that, and you store it, and you go on in combat because there is danger again down the road.”
Soldiers also learn to be constantly on guard, alert to possible dangers. After months of vigilance, Zanotti said it's hard to turn off the habit that saved their lives countless times when they get home.
Many soldiers returning home are paralyzed by their memories and fear. Zanotti said these veterans are terrified of crowded places that could hide gunmen or suicide bombers. They often drive erratically, dodging road kill and tires fragments, afraid the debris could be camouflage for an improvised explosive device.
Others obsess over securing their homes, checking and rechecking to make sure their doors and windows are locked. Zanotti said many own firearms and don't feel safe without them.
“Over there, you had to have your weapon with you, and now many will describe feeling naked without their weapon,” she said.
Soldiers who returned home from World War II, Korea and Vietnam faced the same obstacles, but no treatment was available for them. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder wasn't recognized as a diagnosis until the 1980s, and Zanotti said the older generations of veterans wrote off their nightmares and flashbacks as “shell shock” or “battlefield fatigue” and tried to push them away. Many were haunted by their memories for their whole lives.
Now, Zanotti said every veteran who receives any treatment through a VA facility is screened for PTSD, and if they show symptoms of the disorder, they are offered treatment. Sometimes, veterans have spent most of their lives avoiding their memories, and she said they refuse the counseling.
Many of the Vietnam War veterans whom Zanotti counsels have built their whole lives around the disorder. They worked nights to avoid people and turned down promotions because of painful memories from times when they had responsibility on the battlefield. Fathers avoided going to children's ballgames until within their families it became an accepted fact of life. Zanotti said in many of these families, the mothers went to all of the events and family gatherings, while the father stayed isolated at home, which further strained relationships.
Many tried to suppress their memories and numb their pain with alcohol and drugs and became addicted. Others re-enlisted into military service and sought another deployment because the battlefield became more familiar and comfortable than the home front, she said.
“I am grateful the younger veterans are coming in, because they are uncomfortable,” she said. “They don't want to get comfortable with it. They want to be able to go to ballgames. They want to go to concerts — they want to do what other men and women are doing at their age, and because of their PTSD, they are unable to do that.”
Learning to cope
There is no quick fix to PTSD, and there is no way to whitewash away the disturbing memories, Zanotti said. But by talking about their experiences and emotions, she said, veterans can begin to process what happened to them and the actions they had to take.
“Our program is committed to trying to create an environment where they can invite that memory back, talk about that memory,” she said. “They may share things they have never told anybody, that they have held onto, that they feel bad about or ashamed about or just extreme grief.”
Veterans start this process in a six-week intensive, outpatient therapy program, attending sessions for six hours each day. Then they graduate to the clinic's after-care program and can attend weekly support groups and activities like the music lab.
All the while, Zanotti said, veterans are encouraged to face things in their lives that trigger flashbacks head on. For example, she encourages them to go to fireworks displays and build new, safe memories in place of their fear. With repeated exposure to these triggers, Zanotti said fear and anxiety fade.
Many of the experienced guitar players in the music lab put away their instruments after returning home from war because certain songs were triggers. She said, together, they have confronted those tunes and built new memories while wrestling over the chords.
The music has also led to other breakthroughs as experienced musicians helped tutor the novices in the group. New friendships formed between the veterans, and they created bonds, which Zanotti said is important because many were isolated in their homes before joining the music lab. Now many of the musicians are taking private guitar lessons and getting together outside of the music lab to practice.
“I think it is a neat way for them to connect and be a part of something,” she said. “Incredibly strong emotional bonds are formed in combat. You will die for someone or sometimes your own life depends on the guy or woman next to you. That is a tremendous emotional bond and friendship that is formed. Then they get home and crave those intense relationships, and we are kind of a disconnected society.”
The veterans also get to show Zanotti their new musical skills and help teach her chords to songs they've mastered on their own. The music lab gives her a chance to spend time with them on more equal ground in a relaxed setting, rather than as strictly psychologist and patient.
“We ask them to talk about these things and really expose their vulnerabilities and their inner most fears and thoughts without really balancing that out,” she said.
A Vietnam veteran's story
Efton McAdoo has never slept through the night without getting up and rechecking his doors and windows since he returned from Vietnam 40 years ago.
“I have a lot of issues about being safe,” he said. “I know rationally there are no dangers here. I just have to have security. I can't stand to have the front door open.”
McAdoo served as a bomb loader in Vietnam and witnessed one of the worst ordnance accidents in history. While his wartime service haunts him, the hostility toward veterans he encountered upon returning home left a deep emotional wound.
When McAdoo flew into the Dallas airport, protesters were demonstrating at the terminal. Airport workers tried to sneak the returning servicemen outside quickly, but the crowds caught up and threw whatever they could find at the men.
“If you ever said anything about being a Vietnam vet, they looked at you like you have a third eye in the middle of your head,” he said. “I learned to keep it quiet.”
At first, McAdoo could only confide his fears and flashbacks to a WWII veteran who owned a gasoline station near his home. It wasn't enough, and McAdoo has been in and out of counseling since the mid-1970s.
“It comes out in anger, mine is mostly depression,” he said. “I will be home and stay home and won't get out of my house. This has really been a good deal to get me out of the house.”
McAdoo had never played guitar before the music lab but fell in love with it. Even when his depression traps him in his home for days at a time — he never misses a music lab session.
When the building's elevator is broken, McAdoo, who lost his left leg in a gun accident, will slowly scale the stairs, while other guys help carry his wheelchair and guitar.
“I will walk the stairs to get up here,” he said. “It means that much to me. It's a great thing, and this program and Dr. Zanotti's dedication to it is above and beyond. She's a super lady. I have nothing but the utmost respect. She helps us.”
Music lab's future
The VA music lab is rapidly outgrowing its home in a small group session room, and veteran Don Crabtree said he could envision the project growing into a free-standing studio. Other dreams include hosting local and renown musical artists, as well as helping budding talent from the group to continue pursue music.
McAdoo said they could also use more beginning guitar lesson books and guitar chord guides to help those who are just starting out. He said more instruments would be helpful if there was more space to store them.
Zanotti has plans to seek a second phase to the music lab grant for $8,000 to include a certified music therapist in PTSD treatment.
“We are using music in a therapeutic context, but it isn't traditional music therapy,” she said. “I purposefully kept it to learning how to play and things I can offer them psychologically.”