When you think back to your first heartbreak, it is striking how vividly those feelings can return. Even after years have passed, some painful events can feel as though they happened only yesterday, collapsing time and distance in an instant.

That was true for AJ (not his real name). According to The Guardian:

The faces of the two young Afghan policemen would never leave him [AJ]. They had both been shot while defending their position and bled to death in the back of a trailer as AJ and a medic tried to staunch their wounds. They could not have been more than 17 years old.

AJ is a former Royal Marine who served in Afghanistan. Just as the faces of the two young policemen never seemed to leave him, many service personnel return home carrying memories that continue to haunt them. As The Guardian observed, many of them are “damaged not by a traumatic event, but by the shock of returning from war.” They came home but could not find the home they left behind,

The Psychological Cost of Returning Home From War

Many ex-servicemen and women return from war with insomnia, anxiety, intrusive memories, hallucinations, a severe sense of isolation, and guilt about what they did, didn’t do, or could have done.

AJ now lives in Exeter, England, but part of him still feels as though he had never left Afghanistan. As The Guardian reported:

He was assigned a role as an instructor, but as he lectured classes on preparing orders for battle, he would suddenly find himself back on the tower in Robinson, braced for a fresh barrage of mortar rounds. He only realised he had trailed off in mid-sentence when his audience began to murmur.

Although he was teaching soldiers in the UK, his mind unexpectedly transported him back to Afghanistan. Only the murmurs of his concerned students brought him back to the present.

Episodes like this illustrate how someone can unconsciously re-experience traumatic events despite standing in front of a classroom. This is what I call cognitive immobility. Cognitive immobility can affect anyone who has lived through a traumatic, or even affectionate, experience associated with a particular place, relationship, or life experience.

Cognitive immobility can result in someone having a sense of stressful psychological entrapment in which they consciously or unconsciously returns to the past, mentally recreating experiences tied to places they once lived in or visited.

For AJ and many veterans in the United States and the United Kingdom, returning home was supposed to mark the beginning of a more peaceful life, except it often felt like they had never left the battlefield. They experienced what I describe as mental immobilisation in the past, one of the defining features of cognitive immobility. However, not everyone who has been to war will experience cognitive immobility, even though many ex-soldiers may develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

According to Charan Ranganath, emotionally charged experiences can leave lasting marks on our memory because they carry information that may help us recognise danger, adapt to similar situations, and survive and flourish. Such experiences may come from bereavement, divorce, retirement, imprisonment, military service, or a painful disappointment or event when some have to leave a homeland, family, loved ones, or a cherished relationship because of circumstances beyond their control.

When the War Comes Home

A 2013 BBC documentary reported that, in 2012, more than 50 UK soldiers died by suicide. This figure is higher than the number of British soldiers killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan that year. The picture is similarly troubling in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ 2025 report, 6,398 veterans died by suicide in 2023.

For many ex-soldiers, leaving the battlefield does not mean leaving the war behind. Some continue to relive combat long after returning home, which can result in severe loneliness alongside persistent emotional pain and mental health issues, while also feeling that those around them cannot fully understand the psychological burden they carry.

The UK military has introduced a range of evidence-based treatments for trauma, including trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR). According to the Guardian report, AJ underwent EMDR as part of his treatment.

Yet one of the challenges is that these approaches do not always provide answers for everyone. Some ex-soldiers continue to struggle despite receiving appropriate treatment, suggesting that PTSD may not fully explain their experiences. This is where cognitive immobility may offer an additional perspective. As I have argued elsewhere, “PTSD may be one pathway into cognitive immobility.”

If we want to better understand how experiences in war zones can continue to affect veterans after they return home, we may need to look beyond PTSD alone and consider whether some of them remain cognitively anchored to the places and experiences they left behind. Doing so may help us better understand “how the past continues to organise a person’s present, shaping how they think, feel, behave, and understand who they are.”

An ex-soldier may experience nightmares, and other symptoms associated with PTSD while able to build a meaningful life after returning from the war zone. Another may experience similar symptoms but also remain mentally and emotionally anchored to the war zone itself. In that case, the defining feature is not only the traumatic memories but an enduring cognitive attachment to the past.

Recognising this difference may help us distinguish between those who are haunted by memories of war but live in the present cognitively and those whose minds have never really left the battlefield, even after they receive effective treatment for PTSD.

Healing Means Accepting the Past and Living in the Present

Just like AJ, who struggled with re-experiencing past events in the present, many of us also go through life without realising that our past experiences continue to shape our thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and relationships today.

AJ eventually found ways to begin healing. So can anyone who feels unable to let go of painful experiences from the past. Healing begins when we recognise that although the past cannot be changed, it does not have to dictate how we continue to live.