The Military Afterlives Project used a method that is called life story narrative. Life story narrative is a method were interviewers will ask the participants to give a personal account of their life experiences. In the case of the Military Afterlives project we posed the question ‘Tell me about your life in civilian street’. This enabled the veterans and families who volunteered for the project to tell their story in their own words.
This same method has been used when telling the research teams stories. To get a sense of who we are as a research team it is important for us to explore our own life narratives. These narratives inform our choices in how we carry out past, current and future research, our motivations to go down this career route and how our experiential knowledge informs and helps us as researchers understand the veterans and families we engage with. For this blog we are going to explore two moments in David’s life narrative that give some sense of what motivates him to carry out the ground-breaking research he is involved in. Over to David:
It has been said to me on many occasions that I should write a book about my transition. I am a navel gazer and since 1996 when I first started my training as a psychotherapist I have kept journals. I write all the time whether that is making notes and writing the questions that pop into my head at meetings, conferences and other events or as I follow the wise words of my therapist ‘It is better out than in’ and write about my struggles with my mental health disability and other life events. To tell my life narrative would undoubtedly be a major writing endeavour. However I would like to focus on the moment when I realised I wanted a voice as a war veteran and a recording of the podcast NAAFI Break I was interviewed for recently. My life narrative has not been an ego based ‘look at me aren’t I great’ but a long process of finding my voice and then using my voice as a veteran in a hope it would resonate with other veterans. In the beginning I had no way of knowing this. I know for certain that when you sit in the shadows of having a mental health disability you feel you are the only one who feels the way you do. There is also feelings of shame and an irrational fear of being judged by the very people you went to war with.
A moment on a train journey that freed my voice
In life you have those moments where they feel like yesterday. The emotions felt in that moment increase and enable those experiences to be remembered. If you ask me the best concert I have been to I will go back there, stood two rows in front of the mixing desk at Earls Court watching Pink Floyd on the Pulse tour. It was mind blowing but of course I am bias being a complete music nerd. However the same can be said for the moment when I started the journey to find my voice. In May 2001 I wrote in my journal:
On the way home that weekend as I gazed out of the window of the train on the journey to London from Norwich I realised I was tired. I was tired of hearing others speak for me. What do they know? What do they care? I realised that I had a voice and I could speak for myself. I was a veteran of the Falklands conflict who had been labelled as having PTSD. I was also a counsellor and a counsellor’s client. More importantly I had been and still was a man who was very quiet about his experiences. Each of these differing roles had appropriate masks, which were used to display David to the world. Perhaps it was time for that multi-masked me to speak up. So what did I want to say? Who did I want to listen to me? On the train journey the hypnotic sound of wheel on track sent me into a slumber.
A moment 22 years later: Finding my voice to reflect on my life story narrative
NAAFI Break: NAAFI Break with Dr David Jackson on Apple Podcasts
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6OLM3YzgA4QklG1eOx27E8?si=wMJ0T4n1QrC2gQ0rYgy8MA