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I went from being twelve years old to being an adult in about a day.

Steve Sullivan, Son of a Veteran with PTSD, talks about what it's like to live with someone who has PTSD.

Transcript

Having my father kind of in and out of my life,

sort of disappearing one day, back another,

it was very confusing.

Any sense of stability or security kind of evaporated,

which I think had a lot to do with how old I was at the time.

And it just, you know, went from --

I often say I went from being 12 years old

to being an adult in about a day.

And that's a lot, I guess, for someone that age.

I don't think, at that age, when my father

started going through all this, I'm not really sure.

I don't think I had any plan of what I should be doing

or what it was that would help the situation,

which probably only added to it because I was

always on edge, always sort of nervous that,

say the wrong thing, see the wrong thing, do the wrong thing,

he might be out the door again or something might just,

might affect him and I would have no --

you know, at 12 or 13, you really don't have any idea

what a trigger is, what, you know, what,

OK, there's going to be a loud noise here.

You don't have any idea.

So at the time, it's really not much to go on.

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