A Case Study of Characters and Trauma: The Winchesters

(This post contains heavy spoilers for the show Supernatural especially through season 5)

I have recently finished reading John Winchester's Journal by Alex Irvine which is a type of prequel to the TV show Supernatural. John Winchester is a character which fans are often divided on. On one hand he was clearly not "parent of the year" on the other it is clear that he loves his children deeply and would do anything to protect them. As I read his Journal I found that many of John's paradoxes seem to stem from his inability to truly process the death of Mary Winchester. 

When John loses his wife, he falls back on what he knows best, being a soldier. The Supernatural universe which killed Mary becomes The Enemy. And everyday life becomes a battle. His mission is to get revenge for Mary. For him family always comes first in the same way a military squad becomes a "Band of brothers". He expects his son's to follow his orders because, in the middle of a battle, it is life and death. Winning this battle against the Supernatural becomes all consuming in his life and the lives of his children.  

John expects that Dean, who was 4 when Mary died, to be responsible for his baby brother Sam. Dean is to guard Sam with his life. This is a lot to put on a young child's head and Dean feel this responsibility very deeply. Sam follows a different path and John struggles to understand. Sam who was 6 months when Mary died, handles the trauma by dreaming of a normal life. Sam resents the Constant moving, Constant training, Constant fighting. I think some of this resentment comes from Sam seeing his father putting the mission to avenge Mary ahead of anything else, including his children. And Sam is correct in this veiw, as John himself writes 

I can't understand him, and he doesn't try to understand me. Typical father-son trouble, but it feels worse because neither one of us can talk about what happened to his mother. He wants to be in one place, live a normal life. The older he gets, the more he wants it. But the older he gets, the more I'm going to need him to help on the hunt. He's got to understand that. We will finish this quest, and he's going to be a part of it p 120-121

As someone who has experienced trauma, and likely has some form of PTSD, John struggles in providing a stable lifestyle for his children. And this is hard on the few other Hunters who call them friends like Bobby. Bobby sees Sam and Dean as his boys. Bobby also understands why John is obsessed. because all hunters have a similar story, but he also sees that Sam and Dean need something more too. Bobby becomes a second father which is something Sam and Dean needed, but still struggles to explain that their father loves them despite not knowing how to show it. 

After John is killed, Sam and Dean continue to struggle with how to respond to the traumas they face everyday in their work as Hunters. Both deal with the paradox of the call towards "Saving People, Hunting Things, The Family Business" and the call towards a normal life. Depending on the season the strength of these calls changes. But one constant is this struggle, because they know that they can never have both. You can't fight monsters and have a normal family with 2.5 kids and a picket fence. 

Sam and Dean discover the only thing they can cling to is each other. And while 11 seasons in they still struggle to talk to each other about what they are feeling or experiencing (Since these were not skills John taught them), they do find their own ways to tell each other that they will stand by each other until the very end. Nothing is able to keep them apart for long. Something that Angels and Demons, and Heaven and Hell and Purgatory, and Death himself have all had to learn.

John turns out to be human. Reading his journal I realized that while he coping mechanism were not healthy he did find way to cope after a fashion. Despite raising his children as soldiers, they grew up to be amazing individuals in their own right. John made plenty of mistakes and never learned to work through his trauma but he still loved his children. And in the end Sam and Dean have to find their own ways to process the traumas in their lives. And like any journey in life there are times the path is smooth and times the path dead ends, and times the path disappears completely.  

What characters have you seen process trauma well? What characters have you seen struggle to do so?