Reading time: 5 Minutes
MWi Hack
- Put the date in your phone. Not the anniversary itself, which you will not forget. Put a reminder three days before it and another one a week after it. The first is so the week does not arrive without warning. The second is so somebody checks on the person after everyone else has stopped. If the date belongs to someone you know rather than to you, put theirs in instead
MWi Summary
- The VA’s National Center for PTSD documents anniversary reactions: the date of a traumatic event raising distress, sometimes years later. It names September 11 as an example.
- The reaction is not always obvious from outside. VA lists difficulty connecting with friends and family, and avoidance of anything tied to the event, which reads as wanting to be left alone and usually is not.
- A person may not connect their own distress to the date. VA notes that cues can seem to come out of the blue, at work or at home, with no awareness of the link.
- The most common thing people say to themselves is the question VA quotes directly: why am I still bothered by this. Twenty-five years feels like too long to still be having a hard week.
- VA states most people feel better within a week or two after an anniversary. The reaction outlasts the coverage, which stops the next day.
- VA calls planning for it coping ahead. The practical version is a date on a calendar and one person told in advance.
The One That Comes With a Date
Most difficulty does not announce itself. It arrives on no particular schedule and is recognized late, if at all.
Anniversary reactions are the exception. The VA’s National Center for PTSD documents them plainly: the date of a traumatic event can bring up distress years afterward, and the reaction tends to repeat the feelings and physical responses of the original event. September 11 is the example VA leads with, because a date that became the name of the event is a reminder nobody has to go looking for.
For this community the dates stack up. September 11. Memorial Day. The day somebody did not come back, which appears in no news cycle and on no calendar but one. The reaction does not require a diagnosis, and it does not require the event to have happened to you directly.
What makes it different from almost everything else is that it is predictable. That is an advantage, and close to nobody uses it.
What It Looks Like From Outside
Not what people expect, which is part of the problem.
VA lists difficulty connecting with friends and family among the common reactions, alongside avoidance of anything tied to the event. The example VA gives is a combat Veteran staying home on Memorial Day rather than going to the parade. From the outside that reads as a person who wants to be left alone. It is usually a person who cannot face the version of company on offer.
The other reactions are ordinary enough to be missed. Trouble sleeping. Short fuse. Jumpiness. Fatigue and physical pain. Sadness that arrives without an argument attached to it.
And the link is not always obvious to the person having it. VA notes that cues can seem to come out of the blue, at work or at home, and that someone may not be aware their distress is connected to the anniversary at all. Which means the useful thing an outsider can offer is sometimes just the date itself.
Why Nobody Mentions It
VA names the thought directly, and it is worth quoting because most people think it is only theirs: why am I still bothered by this.
Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough that people conclude they have used up whatever standing they had to bring it up, and that saying anything now would be indulgent. So they run the week alone and let it pass.
There is a second version that starts earlier. VA describes anticipatory distress, the dread that builds in the days before a date because a person already knows what is coming and expects to struggle. That part is often worse than the day, and it is entirely invisible, because nothing has happened yet.
The Week After
Here is the useful number. VA states that most people feel better within a week or two after the anniversary of a traumatic event.
Read that the other way and it says the reaction outlasts the attention paid to it. On the day itself, everything is about the day. Every organization posts, every network runs the footage, and anyone struggling is surrounded by acknowledgment whether they want it or not.
Then it stops. The coverage ends the following morning and the calendar moves on, and the person is still inside the window VA describes. The support and the reaction are on different schedules, and the gap between them is where people go quiet without anyone noticing they have.
That gap is the whole opportunity. It is the one week of the year where the useful thing to do is completely predictable in advance.
Coping Ahead
VA’s term for planning around a known date is coping ahead. It is not complicated.
If the date is yours: decide in advance what the day looks like rather than letting it arrive. VA suggests activities that carry meaning, and also simply having something else to do. Cut media exposure if the anniversary is a public one, since coverage intensifies the reaction. And tell one person, in advance, what you need. VA is direct about that last one, describing telling others what you need to feel supported as valuable in its own right.
If the date belongs to somebody else: the contact that matters is not on the day. On the day they will hear from everyone. Reach out the following week, when nobody else does, and do not make it a conversation about the anniversary unless they take it there. Ordinary contact is the point. A person who has spent a week believing they have no right to be affected is not looking for a discussion. They are looking for evidence that somebody thought of them when there was no longer a reason to.
Resource
PTSD Coach (mobile.va.gov/app/ptsd-coach). A free app built by the VA’s National Center for PTSD together with the Department of Defense’s National Center for Telehealth and Technology. It covers what trauma reactions are, tools for screening and tracking symptoms, and exercises for handling them in the moment.
