Edward Tick, PhD, is an archetypal psychotherapist, educator, poet, author, and international pilgrimage guide and activist, who has been working to heal the wounds from violent trauma in veterans, families, societies, and our world for over forty years. He is also a co-teacher of Pacifica Extension and International Studies’ upcoming certificate, “A Depth Psychological Approach to Moral Injury and PTSD in Veterans: Restoration and the Returning Warrior,” February 20, 2025 – July 31, 2025. I’m delighted to speak with Ed about his work and the certificate in Part I of a two-part interview.
Angela Borda: Your work is described as “concerned with restoring the soul and spirit to our wounded warriors and modern world.” Pacifica actually formed in response to the need for therapeutic counseling for people returning from the Vietnam War, so it’s close to the institution’s heart as a mission. Can you share with us what led you to this as a calling? Was it a particular experience or war or cultural moment?
Ed Tick: All of the above. As Pacifica was founded in part in response to the Vietnam War, so was my calling. I turned 18 in 1969. Beginning in high school and until its end, I protested that war. In college I was applying for conscientious objector and decided the only way I might serve would be as a medic. I got a high lottery number and did not have to serve. I felt safe but also uninitiated—nothing asked, nothing given.
I finished my MA in 1975, the year the war ended. As a young psychotherapist I immediately began working with Vietnam War veterans in rural New York State, when almost no one was, there was little literature, PTSD was not a diagnosis until 1980, and the work was considered dangerous. I realized then that this was a calling I could follow, an initiation into the warrior world and the development of that archetype in the life of my soul—I could serve as a home front medic, a “doc” for the invisible wounds. Through 45 years of this work, including worldwide research and service, I became imaginally initiated into the military and veteran worlds—our versions of the warrior world—and have served there ever since. Like Pacifica, I was an early and rare bridge between the civilian and veteran worlds.
Angela: Your book Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War will be part of the reading for the certificate. Looking at the title, my first question is, “What happens to the soul in combat and how does depth psychology offer tools to help those returning from war?”
Ed: Early in my career, one combat veteran vividly recited his experience during the horrific siege of Khe Sanh, declaring, “My soul fled.” The name for the wound we call PTSD in Lakota, Sioux, is nagi napayapi, meanings “the spirits left.” The Bible calls this wound “an evil spirit sent by the Lord.” World traditions teach warrior spirituality and warn of soul wounding in warfare.
Our contemporary mainstream interpretation is that trauma results from “broken brain” and can be restored or repaired by combinations of pharmaceuticals, cognitive therapies, and retraining techniques, etc. These may eradicate or reduce symptomatology. But war trauma is inherently and primarily a soul and social wound and must be addressed on that level. I translate PTSD as Post-traumatic Soul Distress and PT Social Disorder.
The soul is the center of our being, the actor in our internal lives. Everything emanates from the soul and everything about the soul is impacted, distorted, wounded by exposure to war and extreme violence. Not only are our brains and nervous systems altered—the primary focus of contemporary treatments—but also our hearts, identities, moral systems, ability to be intimate and sexual, our sense of belonging, connection to others, the nation, nature, the cosmos, our faith, purpose. These are matters of soul and all are seriously impacted and need to be restored. “The spirits left” reminds us that we are reservoirs of vital energy and spirit that become distorted and drained during experiences of violence and moral wrongdoing. Socrates was a veteran. He taught that the soul is that which determines good and evil, grows when doing good and is harmed by doing wrong. Some practitioners hold that PTSD is what happens to the brain, but Moral injury—the judgements of our souls—are in the center of the holistic wound.
Depth psychology is the branch of psychology that tends the soul. It is concerned with the inner life, with the health and shape and stories of our archetypal lives. It affirms that we all live mythic lives and must embrace and shape our lives as unfolding epics. Military people have lived this, veterans carry it. They are warriors, and warrior is a foundational archetype that has been energized and mobilized in their psyches by their service as in few of us. Thus, archetypal and depth psychology used rightly and informed by the warrior ways can be well-suited to guide our veterans on their psycho-spiritual homeward journeys.
Angela: A member of my extended family was a paratrooper in the Vietnam War. He was a person of tremendous integrity and strength, and a man deeply traumatized by the things he’d seen and been asked to do there. For decades after he returned to civilian life, he was still living in the midst of the war, but in a family and town that held no understanding for what he’d gone through. In your work with veterans, is this kind of experience common, and how do you begin to work with this kind of trauma?
Ed: Tragically the experience of your relative is very common in our society. There is a severe and serious rift between the veteran and civilian populations. It has gotten worse since the Vietnam War because now only a minority of people serve, and the nation has transitioned to viewing the military as a “profession of arms” rather than a democratic institution in which all might serve. Civilians do not commonly know, understand, or have compassion and patience for the sufferings and special needs of veterans. The result is that vets often feel alienated, abandoned, left out of public awareness or concern, given inadequate services and negative judgments. The result is that homecoming itself is a major source of trauma. It can be even more severe than combat because the foe was supposed to fight but our country is supposed to welcome, support, heal.
This touches on why I call PTSD Post-traumatic Social Disorder. It is our society and its mainstream pressures, prejudices, and inadequate response to vets that are at issue. Whenever a society uses most of its resources for making war rather than healing it, it is in disorder. To heal our veterans and bring them home, ironically but truthfully, we need massive amounts of public education about military service and war to transform our country into a welcome and healing home for our warriors.
Further, anyone working with veterans needs to achieve their own profound immersion, education, and experience into warriorhood, its history, traditions, demands, difficulties, challenges, blessings. Warriors are different and need educated and initiated helpers for the homecoming journey.
Angela: I thought back to my family friend when I read about the healing journeys you lead to Viet Nam, and what a difference that might’ve made for him. Please tell us about this work and what kind of results it has for the people who undertake the journey with you, and for the people of Viet Nam.
Ed: I began leading healing and reconciliation journeys back to Viet Nam in 2000 and have led 19 journeys so far. I only stopped this annual practice due to the pandemic. By now I have led about 300 Americans, half vets, many their relations or survivors, back. These journeys are indeed profoundly healing for both Americans and Vietnamese people.
It is hard to believe from the standpoint of Western psychology, but there is almost no wartime PTSD in Viet Nam. That society has preventive and protective factors built into it—Buddhism, Confucianism, ancestor worship, animism, a 3,000 history of resisting larger, more powerful invaders, and more—that mitigate against the breakdown. The Vietnamese are joyous and grateful to meet Americans, say to our veterans (these are quotes from their vets), “We are brothers and sisters who survived the same hell,” and “We must become the lips and tongues of the same mouth telling the world the same stories.” My goddaughter Ngoc says, “Please keep bringing your veterans here so I can heal them with my love.” A survivor of the My Lai massacre said, “If you wish to help me heal, please let me meet and forgive your veterans.” All this testifies to the depth of Buddhist humanism and compassion they carry and that meeting American vets and civilians completes and finally spiritually ends the war in their souls. One vet there said, “The war was over on April 30, 1975, and we were your friends on May 1. What took you so long to realize it?”
Our veterans achieve more healing returning to Viet Nam for 2 or 3 weeks than they have achieved in all the decades since the war’s end. They see that Viet Nam is green and growing and thriving again, so their fear of destroying it vanishes. They replace the old war imagery with this new. They are forgiven, embraced, loved by the very people they harmed. They often meet with their exact counterparts in combat and embrace as brothers and sisters. We do extensive philanthropic work; we have built two elementary schools, support Agent Orange centers and victims, have built half a dozen Compassion Houses for the neediest. We meet with Buddhist priests to pray and learn how Buddhist philosophy and practices heal. In these and many other ways, our veterans heal upon returning. I have written another book, Coming Home In Viet Nam, that presents all this in the poetry I have been writing as I travel through Viet Nam with our vets and theirs for 20 years.
Angela: That is deeply touching. Thank you so much for your work.
Part II of this interview to follow shortly. “A Depth Psychological Approach to Moral Injury and PTSD in Veterans: Restoration and the Returning Warrior” will take place February 20, 2025 – July 31, 2025, and is now open for registration on our website.
Edward Tick, PhD, (www.edwardtick.com) is an archetypal psychotherapist, educator, poet, author, and international pilgrimage guide and activist. He is recognized as a “thought leader” on healing the invisible wounds of war. He has been working to heal these wounds from violent trauma in veterans, families, societies, and our world for over forty years. Ed is the author of five books of nonfiction, including the groundbreaking War and the Soul, and Warrior’s Return, now translated and used in both Ukraine and Russia, as well as three books of poetry and more than 200 articles. He is an editor of the international journal Close Encounters In War. He was chosen by the Pentagon as subject matter expert to train our U. S Military on healing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Moral Injury. As well as active imagination, archetypal engagement, and the arts, he uses pilgrimage and cultural immersion for holistic healing and has been leading annual healing journeys to both Viet Nam and to Greece since 1995. Since the beginning of the Ukraine War, he has counseled, trained, and supported military and civilian war trauma healers in both Ukraine and Russia. He is a specialist in archetypal psychotherapy and uses the humanities, literature, and worldwide indigenous practices for modern healing. All his work is concerned with restoring the soul and spirit to our wounded warriors and modern world.
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.