Date: November 15, 2012
Time: 1500 Hours Pacific
Topic: Thirty Days with My Father:
Finding Peace from Wartime PTSD
Listen Live Online: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lawenforcement/2012/11/15/thirty-days-with-my-father-finding-peace-from-wartime-ptsd
Listen in Archive: http://www.hitechcj.com/americanheroesradio/peace_from_wartime_ptsd.html
The November 15, 2012, Episode of
American Heroes Radio features a conversation with Dr. Christal Presley, Ph.D.,
the author of Thirty Days with My Father: Finding Peace from Wartime PTSD. Christal
Presley, PhD, is the founder of United Children of Veterans (www.unitedchildrenofveterans.com),
a website that provides resources about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
in children of war veterans. She obtained her PhD in education in 2009, and is
an instructional mentor teacher in Atlanta Public Schools.
Publisher’s Weekly said of Thirty
Days with My Father: Finding Peace from Wartime PTSD, “A soldier's
return home from war is often just the beginning of another, more internalized
battle. In her memoir, Presley recounts 30 days of interviews with her Vietnam
veteran father—conversations in which she attempts to understand her father,
his PTSD, and her own lifetime of vicarious traumas. Each day is given a
chapter, and each chapter concludes with a "Journal" entry that
revisits Presley's tumultuous childhood memories. What emerges from this format
is a harrowing portrait of the past's ability to haunt the present; Presley's
descriptions of the troubled child she was blend all too easily into the
confused and searching adult she becomes. In some cases, she is compelled to go
to a Veterans Affairs hospital and even to Vietnam. The book's division into 30
days feels increasingly forced and fragmented with the passing of each chapter.
Such a story is, by its very nature, fractured, and by the end of the book
Presley's father is no less tormented than he was at Day One. Yet Presley has
found stability in her father's story, and her willingness to share it—and her
own revelations—will be appreciated by readers who deal with any form of
wartime PTSD.”
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