Since 2010 when I originally wrote this piece sharing my personal journey, our life has taken a completely different course. Because of this piece and all the comments and interactions, I realized where my strengths are with writing for the first time. Sharing my personal experience was so profound that I decided to keep doing everything I had done the same way in the future.

I wrote a completely different book in July of 2010. The new direction while at first was still geared toward helping people work from home, the topic of writing was not. I wrote a 29 page book sharing my experience of living with my husband who had been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which led to turning it into a fully-published 320 page book. Showing you a bit of the story is probably easiest so you can see how this turn of events played out.

Excerpt from "The War at Home: One Family's Fight Against PTSD" by Shawn J. Gourley, pg 172.

Reading over the letter, I started to wonder if I couldn’t share my story about living with PTSD as a way of helping other spouses understand the situation the same way my stories about Xbox machine repair were helping people learn about that. I wasn’t thinking of making money off people’s pain. In my heart, I just wanted to help them get informed. More than that, I thought my situation with Justin and my writing ability put me in a position where I could really help people know what could actually happen if PTSD goes untreated so they could get help quicker. I never wanted anyone else to go through the hell I had. I also thought it would be another way to get my name out there as a work-from-home expert because many spouses living with people who have PTSD are forced to work-from-home, just like I had been. As much as I wanted to help them, I was also hoping to keep money coming into our house so that we could stay afloat. It was a fine line to walk between making money off PTSD and trying to keep my other job going, so I decided I would write and give away a free book about my PTSD experiences to make absolutely certain that I wasn’t crossing that line. Giving the book away as a digital download was the only way I knew to provide it free to the masses without spending a lot of extra money to print copies to give away. And besides that, a download would be instant, and I wouldn’t have the same hassles with shipping stuff out as I did with the Xbox machines that I repaired. I took Justin’s PTSD stressor letter and my letter and combined them into one to make up the contents of the free book. In July 2010 I started making a Facebook Fan page and named it Military with PTSD™. I really didn’t know what to expect when I started the page. I thought maybe I’d find more women like me who were tired of fighting with their vets and tired of fighting the VA to get help. But I suspected that there would be a lot of anger, so I thought I had better set things up right to take care of it. I laid out some very specific ground rules for this page. Firstly and most importantly, this was a place to give away my free book. Secondly, I wanted to help spouses prepare for when their members of the armed forces came home and give them an understanding of what could really happen, so there would be no selling or solicitations of any kind on the page. Thirdly, the page would be open so spouses could talk and get support from one another. Lastly, as rule for myself, I wasn’t going to hide the side of me who was an Internet marketer, just to make sure people didn’t think I was trying to sneak my way into selling them something.

I wrote the free book and started giving it out in October of 2010. Although I was hoping to help spouses work from home, my intentions changed when I realized that my free mini-book had such an impact on people when they read it. They asked me to please turn it into a full book and add my husband's side of the story. I knew then I had found my purpose, and it wasn't teaching people how to work from home, but rather using my personal experience to help other families. So we did what was asked while still keeping the writing style the exact same for both my husband's side and mine. Our book "The War At Home: One Family's Fight Against PTSD" was published in September 2011. Since that time, we have also founded the Indiana non profit Military with PTSD in 2012 and became a 501c3 in July 2014 with over 90,000 members on our Facebook page. This whole journey has taught me more than anything how a personal story can keep us from feeling alone. Most of the work I do for Military with PTSD is about sharing my personal story.