"She's leaving home, after living alone, for so many years"

PTSD Patrol

Kathie Costos

March 24, 2021

Does your adult child believe they are living alone, even though they live with you? Sometimes the loneliest place to be, is with people you love. This is to the parents of survivors, especially young veterans. They will not say much about where they were or what they did, but they say even less about what came back with them. Their souls have a huge scar.

You may notice the changes in their actions and attitudes. You may notice they are not the same. What you don't notice is they are not just "getting over it" on their own. It is up to you to be able to understand what the changes mean and if they need help instead of time to heal from it.

If not, then they may end up feeling as if they are living alone with a house full of people around them. Sharing a dwelling is not the same as sharing lives.

There are so many causes of trauma but the key doctors look for are the two words most often spoken afterwards. "Suddenly changed" give doctors a clue as to what the person can be suffering with. PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, can be misdiagnosed as many other mental health issues, but this one is only caused by surviving traumatic events.

While news reports cause people to be emotionally invested in the stories, survivors of those same events can be hit especially hard by them. I get really emotional when I read about domestic abuse and stalking. I also get emotional reading about veterans committing suicide. It is as if the events that hit my life has happened all over again.

When the police officer's knee was on George Floyd's neck, most people got angry but for some young black men, it stuck in their minds. It caused traumatic reactions the next time they encounter police offices. When police officers read reports of other officers being shot, the next time they encounter someone with a weapon, it can cause a traumatic response that lingers.

No matter what caused PTSD in them, whenever it happens to someone else, it hits them hard and they will remember when it happened to them more stronger than during most days. If they are in therapy, they need to talk to their therapist. If they are not, then try to get them to at least open up to you.

Most of the time, people will not talk about any of this out of fear of being judged. The thing is, they fear what they do not understand. If they understood PTSD is only something survivors experience, then they would know there is nothing to be ashamed of.

Don't let them think they are living alone and cannot talk to you about what is harming them.

Today the featured video is "She's Leaving Home" by the Beatles.

Melanie Coe, the teenage runaway who inspired the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home," looks back on her surreal moment as a 'Sgt. Pepper' muse. (Read article from Rolling Stone below)

Remember it is your life...get in and drive it!

#BreakTheSilence and #TakeBackYourLife from #PTSD

She's leaving home

The Beatles;

Wednesday morning at five o'clock

As the day begins

Silently closing her bedroom door

Leaving the note that she hoped would say more

She goes down the stairs to the kitchen

Clutching her handkerchief

Quietly turning the backdoor key

Stepping outside, she is free

She, ... (we gave her most of our lives)

Is leaving (sacrified most of our lives)

Home (we gave her everything money could buy)

Father snores as his wife gets into her dressing gown

Picks up the letter that's lying there

Standing alone at the top of the stairs

She breaks down and cries to her husband

Daddy, our baby's gone.

Why would she treat us so thoughtlessly?

How could she do this to me?

She (we never thought of ourselves)

Is leaving (never a thought for ourselves)

Home (we struggled hard all our lives to get by)

She's leaving home, after living alone, for so many years

Friday morning, at nine o'clock

She is far away

Waiting to keep the appointment she made

Greeting a man from the Motortrade

She (what did we do that was wrong)

Is Having (we didn't know it was wrong)

Fun (fun is the one thing that money can't buy)

Something inside, that was always denied,

For so many years,

She's leaving home

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Lennon John Winston / Mccartney Paul James 

Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ at 50: Meet the Runaway Who Inspired ‘She’s Leaving Home’
Melanie Coe looks back on her teenage days as an unlikely Lennon/McCartney muse
The Rolling Stone
By JORDAN RUNTAGH
MAY 23, 2017

The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone named as the best album of all time, turns 50 on June 1st. In honor of the anniversary, and coinciding with a new deluxe reissue of Sgt. Pepper, we present a series of in-depth pieces – one for each of the album’s tracks, excluding the brief “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reprise on Side Two – that explore the background of this revolutionary and beloved record. Today’s installment focuses on Melanie Coe, the real-life teen runaway who inspired “She’s Leaving Home.”

“A-Level Girl Dumps Car And Vanishes,” screamed a headline in the February 27th, 1967, issue of London’s Daily Mail. A pretty blonde 17-year-old named Melanie Coe stared out from the adjacent photograph, taken not long before she went missing from her family’s home in Stamford Hill, England. The report portrayed her as a “the schoolgirl who seemed to have everything,” including her own Austin 1100 car and a “wardrobe full of clothes,” both of which were left behind. “I cannot imagine why she should run away,” her father told reporters. “She has everything here … even her fur coat.”

Unable to express herself at home, Coe made a desperate lunge at freedom. One afternoon, while both her parents were out, she left a note and slipped out the door. Decades later, Coe remains stunned by the prescience of the Beatles’ lyrics. “The most interesting thing in the song is what the father said, ‘We gave her everything, everything money could buy.’ And in the newspaper article, my father actually says almost those words. He doesn’t understand why I would have left home when they bought me or gave me everything. Which is true; they had bought me a car and they always bought me expensive clothes and things like that. But as we know, that doesn’t mean that you get on well with your parents, or even love them, just because they buy you material things.”
read the rest here