Out of the Silence

Trapped in his living room between his gun-toting father and his butcher-knife-wielding mother, eight year-old Howard Lovely stood in horror as his father pulled the trigger. Amazingly, no one died. But something happened inside of Howard that would take more than thirty years to begin to reverse. Howard's horror caused a major disruption in the young boy's brain processing that led to what is labeled in the DSM-IV-TR as post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental health condition faced by approximately 5.2 million Americans each year. Howard and others like him suffer from a series of painful and far-reaching psychological, social, and physical effects as a result of having witnessed or experienced violence. From the moment of this trauma, Howard seemed to walk through life upside down. A neighborhood kid yelling to another would make his body feel under attack. The beep of a car horn would hop him up on adrenaline. The sound of a dog barking would send his heartbeat racing into full PTSD mode. Howard figured that if he could just get away from the screaming and hitting at home, everything would start to be okay. But when he enlisted in the air force, Howard's body and mind took off again, racing down an everlasting rollercoaster of PTSD attacks. Howard would suffer through three hospitalizations in psych wards, fourteen out of twenty years in a jobless state, and countless doctor and therapy visits. In the end, he took a gamble on a treatment he had read about: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, also known as EMDR. That gamble gave him a renewed opportunity at life. This is his unforgettable story into the war raging inside his head and finally back to peace. Out of the Silence takes readers inside the complicated mind of a victim of PTSD and how each can reclaim his or her life.