What is Creator’s perspective on “combat stress reaction” or “battle fatigue?” So much of GetWisdom has been dedicated to healing historic trauma the deep subconscious reacts to, as this is understood to be the primary culprit behind MOST of our negative karmic issues and even the rise of evil itself in the galaxy. Yet trauma doesn’t have to be deep and can be right in your face, such as experienced by the soldiers Patton slapped (assuming their distress was quite real, and they were not faking it). Fleeing combat by any means certainly aligns with the karmic and divine imperative to protect oneself, but at the cost of abandoning their duty and comrades, not to mention setting an abysmal example of how to comport oneself in the face of danger. What is Creator’s perspective on this dilemma?

This example you are using, of strength versus weakness, must be taken into the context of all that was at stake for combatants in World War II, given their responsibility and duty to perform as representatives of many others who depended on them for their own fate, ultimately. We have described how the great generals you named enjoyed the inner wherewithal of great courage, as a soul attribute, which enabled them to be quite fearless much of the time. The combat soldiers who break under the stress of battle are not making a cynical self-serving choice to be selfish so as to not take risks and dodge their duty to seek safety and abandon their posts, they reach a breaking point of overwhelming stress that compels them to run for their lives, literally, in fleeing to safety in whatever way they can regardless of what might be the consequences. In a very real sense, they are reacting to a force that is a mirror image of courage, representing instead great fear, and that is debilitating in the extreme in proportion to the magnitude on display. So, in a sense, General Patton was standing strong, by virtue of his inner courage, and that combat soldier he slapped, who was sent to the hospital after collapsing, was standing down, each individual responding to the strength of the inner wherewithal in the face of their feelings and all of the other personal imperatives that make up the human drive to live and survive at all costs. So this episode, rather than representing an example of human failure in contrast to the strength and resolve of General Patton as a great military commander, is merely illustrating the folly of expecting any two individuals to act the same way and have the same capability under extremes of personal danger and perceived risk. Life being what it is, all actions have consequences. So someone who crumbles under pressure will have to live with the self-judgment it might trigger as well as the harsh judgment perhaps of others seeing them as weak and perhaps cowardly and self-serving. That reality speaks to the genuine dilemma that people are limited by their inner makeup and wherewithal, just as individuals vary greatly in their physical strength and capabilities—they cannot simply decide to be stronger, more agile, react more quickly, and, in a way, more adept. So this dilemma raised by the demands of the physical realm is quite real and the karma from trauma, as people experience their potential weaknesses and shortcomings compared to others, will likely be quite painful and may well resonate over a series of lifetimes. This creates a tremendous healing need, and this has been a failure of human culture, that people have great ignorance and a lack of guidance in how to manage stressful circumstances and their responses. Perceived failure, whether realistic and warranted or not, can be a crushing blow that haunts a person over multiple lifetimes and, in fact, that soldier who was slapped had such a karmic history, a series of tragic deaths at the hands of others in violent conflicts, and that set him up to be a victim of his own inner wherewithal that grew over time from life to life as a liability.