Out of the Whirlwind: PTSD and the Archetype of Job: The Journey of a Traumatized Combat Nurse to Meet the Divine Within

Out of the Whirlwind is the story of a relationship between two strong and caring women – Mary, a former combat nurse, unable to bear the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and her Jungian analyst, Dr. Donna Cozort. Twenty-six years after her service in the Philippines, Mary found herself re-living all the horror, despair, and hopelessness of those wartime experiences. Dr. Cozort knew that Mary’s only choice was to find her way through the darkness back to life and meaning, but all of Mary’s energy had been diverted to keeping one particular memory out of awareness: a brutal betrayal at the hands of the men in her unit, whose pain she’d been avoiding for half her life. Dr. Cozort tells Mary’s story as she experienced it in the analysis – piecing together the fragments of Mary’s history, struggling to contain Mary’s terrors and hopes, and gradually recognizing, by way of dreams, reactions and intuition, that Mary’s psychological state might yield to its amplified reflection in the Bible’s story of Job. The book is invaluable for its insight into PTSD, but it is also a personal, moving, and spiritually discerning account of the therapeutic process as it unfolds in time.