Today’s show is going to be a very vulnerable one for me, but I am doing it purely for myself in my process of healing with the hopes that it may help other people who are struggling in similar ways. I will not delve deeply into the specifics of what happened to me since the parties to my own Shakespearean tragedy are very much still alive, apart from my mother, who I have talked about in previous shows. So I must tread carefully to avoid any unforeseen legal issues. I also do not wish to tell anyone else’s story, so my brother will be left out of this entirely, though he also experienced many of the same traumas growing up.
I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in 2015 after finding myself too overwhelmed by the fear to deal with it in college. After dozens and dozens of therapy and psychiatry appointments, I was handed a prescription for five milligrams of Lexapro and just that bit of medication changed my life. There was finally a quietness to the inside of my head that had been incessantly buzzing with worries since who knows when. A glimmer of control appeared. I felt like I could manage to walk on the tightrope again without falling off. I asked the psychiatrist, “Is this what ‘normal people’ feel like?” She smiled, and I vowed to try to fix myself since, apparently, I had not come out from my youth unscathed.
So when did all this start? I can still remember leaning over in bed as early as middle school, a trash can serving as a makeshift puke bucket at the bedside, shaking with nauseous fear until I fell asleep. This occurred anywhere from once a month to every few months a year. My self-soothing technique and then getting lost in the school system’s copious mounds of homework and extracurricular activities kept me able to keep everything inside until I graduated and went off to college.
I grew up with trauma for about a third of my thirty-year life at this point—from about seven to seventeen. My childhood and adolescent brain were still wiring and firing together at a fast pace while being jostled about by the unexpected tragedies that life threw at them. In the most sterile terms, my trauma timeline goes something like this: Pretty much right after my mother beat breast cancer, at seven, my parents divorced and split custody, then my mother died of a second, rarer form of endometrial cancer when I was at eleven, and finally from about eleven until seventeen, the court system, in a rare move, forced a visitation schedule between my father and my mother’s family, who had plenty of their own mental problems. My trauma mostly stems from the constant ripping back and forth between people who were supposed to love me and want what was best for me. But I felt unheard, like a prisoner in a communist country with no will of my own due to my age. My mother’s family created a boogeyman in their minds and believed they were saving me from abuse; instead, they used parental alienation, a form of emotional abuse, thereby becoming the abusers themselves. One day, I hope they reflect on this fact and realize the true damage they did by trying to separate me from the only parent I had left once my mother died.
Up until this year, I was still in denial that I even suffered from something like PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I thought I had successfully put all the trauma in a tightly wrapped box under the floorboards of my brain. This was simply a thinking problem I needed to solve, according to Aaron Beck’s book, like an irrational fear of spiders. My mother had anxiety and my father depression, so perhaps it was all genetic, which is why only Lexapro saved me from the abyss. I would be on that stuff forever. Besides, how bad could this anxiety thing be if I never self-medicated with alcohol or drugs? I was never a wounded veteran or physically abused. I had no reason to feel like a victim. Right? But my latest therapist took a look at me, astonished, saying, “You were just a child, with a brain that was developing and still wiring itself, and trauma is still trauma.” The effects of trauma certainly feel the same, it’s just a matter of the degree.
I went back to therapy when I discovered that I was pregnant. I had heard of the case of Andrea Yates and the extreme postpartum psychosis she experienced. I was afraid because now that I was living a life of “normalcy” with a husband, a house, and a steady career, I could see the distinct moments when my anxiety demons emerged. Over the years, I started off with fears about choking and appendicitis and tornadoes and alligators. Those fears morphed into ones about grades, school, presentations, vacations, and outings, like to restaurants and things of that sort. The physical symptoms were getting stuck in my own train of thought and spiraling down right into a panic attack. Bathrooms were my best friend. My heart palpated out of my chest with the sense of impending doom right around the corner, irritation toward everyone, my stomach tied itself into knots, and I could never rest. Relaxation or vacations were foreign to me now. Entering college only unleashed more panic attacks, stronger ones, and ones where I felt something was deeply wrong with my body. As the panic attacks subsided, I tried getting off the medication only to be greeted by nights of vomiting myself to sleep, shaking to the point my teeth could be heard chattering from across the room, and no longer being able to eat. So back on the medication I went and more therapy. This time I wanted a “scientist” to help me, not a parrot. I sought out CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and while I got rid of some flashbacks, it did not stop the anxiety from transforming yet again. Nowadays, it’s been the unwanted intrusive thoughts keeping the fear very much alive. My brain is sick, and I knew that now more than ever, with a child on the way, I needed more help.
They should really have posters out there that rather than saying, “This is your brain on drugs,” they say, “This is your brain on trauma” because it does change you whether you like it or not.
Now I should say, if you, dear audience member, are worried about me, please don’t be since it is only in my happiest stage of life that I have been able to take a step back and really look at my upbringing with clarity. It is at this apex of happiness in my life of stability and wellness that I am finally strong enough to make the change in the final puzzle piece to my recovery—to acknowledge that my body keeps the score.
And with that, a previous therapist had recommended me this book to read: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. I wanted to share with the public every nugget that I got out of it in the hopes that others may benefit too. This book described so well how I have felt as a person who grew up swamped in a decade of trauma.
For the longest time, I was holding onto the trauma as a way to protect the memory of my mother in many ways. Of course, the happy memories with her were of a distant past that was not as vivid as the more recent traumatic ones. It is the reason that I am addicted to trauma and subsequently have this toxic love affair with anxiety. I felt so close to her when those flashbacks came in of her being sick and struggling, and my anxiety made me feel closer to her as she also struggled with the same mental illness. “Trauma is not stored as a narrative with an orderly beginning, middle, and end. […] flashbacks that contain fragments of the experience, isolated images, sounds, and body sensations that initially have no context other than fear and panic.” In Kolk’s book, he describes how he always came away in “awe at the dedication to survival that enabled my patients to endure their abuse and then to endure the dark nights of the soul that inevitably occur on the road to recovery.”
Though I felt like my trauma was not as extreme as a Vietnam vet’s and that’s why for the longest time, it was so hard for me to fix because my symptoms could, at times, be subtle but still uncomfortable or alarming when I got triggered. The book says that “trauma affects the imagination” and “also our very capacity to think” while I “stay stuck in the fear [I] know.” It actually becomes the most comfortable place for me to be, simply due to its familiarity. My anxiety or stress hormones from trauma continue not to reach the normal baseline. This brings me back to having read first Aaron Beck’s major work on anxiety, called Anxiety Disorders and Phobias: A Cognitive Perspective, which told me this was a “thinking problem” but, gee, that didn’t help at all! I do agree, however, with his idea that the anxiety built up as a survival mechanism to the trauma. I could be a high-functioning student with anxiety. But the book, ultimately, made me feel like I was irrational or unable to think. Led by my father in the household, I was taught to take on the soldier or male mentality of sucking it up and if I succumbed, then that’s a sign of weakness. I could not “let them win” by drowning in my own sorrows. So I denied letting other people in, especially therapists, since I considered them simply noisy and unhelpful for the longest time. I believed that the less I cried about it, the longer that time went by, the more I had conquered my past. But there was trauma and before I could “not let it get the best of me,” I had to be able to understand exactly what happened to me first; only then could I start to grieve and finally accept it. “People cannot put traumatic events behind until they are able to acknowledge what has happened and start to recognize the invisible demons they’re struggling with.”
After college, I developed an interest in true crime, like so many of the women in today’s society. In a strange way, feeling the anxiety well up inside of me while watching these threatening shows made me feel oddly relieved, like an addict or a compulsion I had to repeat. Again, I believe that I was trapped in a cycle where small talk was useless noise and the “real world” was full of tragedy and agony. I felt safer talking about the most frightening things over commenting on the weather. The language that I had been speaking for most of my life thus far was one of trauma—hearing true crime shows felt like they were actually speaking to me and not all these other dull, practical commentators. Hearing about murders and kidnappings and robberies felt like just another day internally for me. It was soothing to hear of others experiencing as much horror as I was. It took even more therapy while pregnant to finally see through the chaos. For “Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable.”
“All trauma is preverbal.” This quote reveals just how difficult it is to heal from trauma when you can barely express it, especially when you are in it. That’s why I feel like so many creative people who go into the arts are the types that are still learning to express their trauma in various ways: through theater, or poetry, or painting, or music, or dancing. It is a form of “sensory integration,” where you can explore “your internal map and the hidden rules that you have been living by” without completely understanding it all yourself. I used ballet and then guitar for a long time to try to at least release some air from that tightened valve—but not too much, never too much, which is why “The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their life.” I could not and still cannot handle any spontaneous trips to places or variations in my daily routines. For I have felt too much chaos on the inside that all I want externally is peace and quiet and stability. But my voice has been the most direct and poignant in the literary fiction that I write, my novels. I find that literary fiction has always served as an outlet for people who have gone through so much, felt it all, and stayed brutally honest throughout their explanation of vital aspects of the human experience. It is also the only reason that I feel compelled to put myself out on the internet in such a vulnerable way because it is a continuation of my art, a continuation of being honest so that others can feel they are not alone in the dark. I will never fake any aspect of myself for this reason.
I think childhood trauma that lasts for an extended period of time is much more difficult to heal, fix, or try to eradicate than a person who has one bad experience, like a car crash, in their adult life. Those very specific phobias, such as a newfound fear of driving after an accident, have seen higher successful treatment rates than the ones where a brain has been maladapted for survival to fit its environment over years of abuse. My dorsal vagal complex, in charge of the emotional stimulus like nausea, has gone through this process repeatedly of going from an enforced visitation to fight or flight (also known as hyperarousal) to collapse (or hypoarousal). I discovered that “experience shapes the brain.” And while many people “In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive,” I remember telling myself in high school that I’d rather suffer with anxiety than not feel anything at all, which I thought, at the time, would be good for my art. “However, traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.” By “going into a panic—they develop a fear of fear itself.” While “Suppressing our inner cries for help does not stop our stress hormones from mobilizing the body.” It is known that “Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”
To me, the only thing that allowed me to survive all the trauma was to have “A Secure Base, wherein our mother may put us on her belly or breast for delicious skin-to-skin contact,” since “Our attachment bonds are our greatest protection against threat.” I know I am lucky enough to have had a secure attachment to my mother and through breastfeeding with her for two years while my dad made sure to cuddle and sing me to sleep all the time. It was all the illness and divorce and back and forth afterwards that caused a lot of trauma to my ability to attach socially with other people outside of my inner circle. In Kolk’s book, he quotes from Pierre Janet, a psychologist, who wrote, “Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.” Much like the parental love that protects Harry Potter in J.K. Rowling’s series, I felt wrapped in that love and self-esteem concerning myself enough to move forward with a tough face on. “Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage—a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.” That is why divorce and subsequent separation from either parent can be so detrimental. “For example, children who are separated from their parents after a traumatic event are likely to suffer serious negative long-term side effects. Studies conducted during World War II in England showed that children who lived in London during the Blitz and were sent away to the countryside for protection against German bombing fared much worse than children who remained with their parents and endured nights in bomb shelters and frightening images of destroyed buildings and dead people.” I would have chosen to stay by my mother’s side as she was sick and then dying. I would have chosen to stay with my father when I was developing into a woman and figuring my way out in the world. A child’s parents are perfection in their eyes—no matter how much they may make mistakes. They are biologically connected devotees to their creators—mother and father. Children simply do not thrive as well without them.
Even though I cannot remember much of my growing up since I actively tried to forget about most of it, I still kept becoming unknowingly attracted to other people using this language of trauma. Many, many people fall into this cycle of falling in love with their own demons. It feels safe and like the other person really understands you, but it never turns into a very healthy relationship. It took me a few tries before I found a healthy one—one that allowed me to clearly see how odd I was compared to other adults my age.
I had to learn that “Children have no choice but to organize themselves to survive within the families they have […] Instead they focus their energy on not thinking about what has happened and not feeling the residues of terror and panic in their bodies. […] They don’t talk; they act and deal with their feelings by being enraged, shut down, compliant, or defiant.” And I was an expert at shutting down or feeling some dissociation where I’d listen to my internal dialogue and usually cause myself to panic when I was younger. Sadly, I “continue to behave as if [I] were still in danger.” It is from “The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma [that] are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.” Therefore, “The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind—of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed.”
As I discovered in college, sitting in my philosophy classes with other students, they all were driven by this question of “why?” Many of them probably started questioning after also experiencing some type of trauma in their childhoods. I know I certainly did, like why did my parents have to divorce; why did my mother have to die; why did my mom’s family dislike my father so much? All these questions pushed me to seek out answers with an obsessive attitude. Studying classic literature in middle and high school started the ball rolling, guiding me through various perspectives on human lives. But I grew hungrier with each new book. My father gave me Atlas Shrugged as a gift and said he really loved it, and so my fifteenth summer, on one of my enforced visitations, I sat and absorbed every word of Ayn Rand. I will never forget calling him frantically out of breath saying that this book changed my life, as he chuckled on the other side of the phone—how I wish he was in the room with me at the time so I could hug him so!
I continued my high school career with a clearer mind. Life made much more sense to me now than the foggy trappings of my Protestant upbringing. I felt a hope that I could make my life better for myself. Since I was almost an adult, which I had longed to be since childhood. I was so tired of being tossed around like a rag doll. I longed for the days when I could dictate my own schedule and work to achieve my own dreams without worrying about anyone else.
But like most young Objectivists, I was unable to grasp one of Rand’s many challenging concepts: the mind-body dichotomy. In Atlas Shrugged, during Galt’s famous speech, he says, “They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.” In terms of my anxiety, I initially saw it as a chemical error in my brain, perhaps solely a thinking problem. I made my anxiety clinical. Again, if you don’t cry and box the trauma up, then you have defeated your enemies. There was no lasting trauma for me, no PTSD. After all, as a rational Objectivist, I gave very little credence to my subjective emotions. Oh, how many of us have seen Objectivists like this? But let me let you in, dear Objectivist listeners, you cannot heal from trauma and, therefore, be happier on earth, unless you physically train your body, through things like yoga and deep breathing, to prove to your body that you are not in constant danger. That is exactly the mistake I was making for years after I left behind the trauma. I only paid attention to my mind and not my body. But they are both intertwined! You cannot have one without the other.
No matter how much we try to box up the trauma, it will come out one way or another, usually when we become our most vulnerable. The anxiety symptoms will escape and throw you down, and the depression will keep you paralyzed for days. And then most people self-medicate. They seek out alcohol, drugs, promiscuous sex to forget that they exist in a pain that seems to drop from out of nowhere. I urge more people to go seek help through a combination of medication and therapy. I have now learned that the medication was treating my brain while the therapy was truly helping my body heal—the nature and the nurture part—the genetics and the environmental scars I was wearing. Those pesky unwanted intrusive thoughts are still hanging on because my body does not know that it can come out of survival mode and breathe a sigh of relief.
I love that in many ways my anxiety kept me away from self-medicating while I was growing up and that Ayn Rand gave me the hope and courage to find my way out of this mess into my own light. Kolk’s book made me understand that trauma changes a person no matter how they deal with it. I will always be who I am and so I cannot erase the trauma I experienced, but I can learn to live with it and acknowledge the frightening thoughts as simply remnants of an ancient past that I am no longer living. Usually, when they come up, I find it helpful to think, “Oh, that’s just the trauma talking” and move on with my day. I also have to remind myself that thoughts are not thinking, and morality does not exist where thoughts do. I am not those intrusive thoughts.
In the book, Kolk also suggests various options to cope with trauma, such as self-awareness, mindfulness meditation, yoga, Pilates, theater or roleplaying out the traumatic scenarios, building strong relationships, therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), hypnosis, Model Mugging Self Defense training, Internal Family Systems, Feldenkrais Method, self-leadership, rewiring the brain through neurofeedback like with alpha-theta training.
I have personally tried talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) (however, “In contrast to its effectiveness for irrational fears such as spiders, CBT has not done so well for traumatized individuals, particularly those with histories of childhood abuse”), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) (although, the issue I have with this method is that while I have a few vivid memories, most of my trauma was felt in the absence of my mom or in between those forced visitations (attachment problems), which may be another reason that EMDR didn’t seem to help me with association and integration), and medication. In terms of self-expression, music and ballet has helped me with controlling my breathing and my body. For instance, I have never panicked in a ballet class. After meeting my husband, who is in the National Guard, he follows a strict workout regime every morning, Monday through Saturday. This inspired me to finally start getting on my personal workout routine completed every Monday through Friday. Since becoming pregnant, I have done plenty of prenatal yoga, Pilates, and mediation, which have truly allowed me to breathe easier daily, all of which have allowed me to inhabit my body again in the way of self-care.
“Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling […] their own physical sensations that now are the enemy.” This is why you must fight back through movement. Take exercise seriously as one way to really take back control over your life. “Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless […] avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits.” And “This is why trauma that has occurred within relationships is generally more difficult to treat than trauma resulting from traffic accidents or natural disasters.” “However, the most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked.” So your healing can simply start with hugging the one you love. The key is that “Sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing” equate to “the pleasure of completed action.” And “The best way to overcome ingrained patterns of submission is to restore a physical capacity to engage and defend.” Since “Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past; it is just as much a problem of not being fully alive in the present.” The idea is “not desensitization but integration.” “However, drugs cannot ‘cure’ trauma; they can only dampen the expressions of a disturbed physiology.” “While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.” Again, this is what my books do for me because continuing to remain silent is the equivalent of death itself. “Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.” Although, “Yet another pitfall of language is the illusion that our thinking can easily be corrected if it ‘doesn’t make sense.’”
For flashbacks specifically, “It’s best to treat those thoughts as cognitive flashbacks—you don’t argue with them any more than you would argue with someone who keeps having visual flashbacks of a terrible accident. They are residues of traumatic incidents: thoughts they were thinking when, or shortly after, the traumas occurred that are reactivated under stressful conditions.” It is “the psychical trauma—or more precisely the memory of the trauma—acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that still is at work” like a splinter in the finger. Because “trauma interferes with the proper functioning of brain areas that manage and interpret experience.” “These powerful feelings are generated deep inside the brain and cannot be eliminated by reason or understanding.”
Instead of engaging in self-numbing activities like exercise or work, I am trying to learn how to step away, even if for a brief time, in order to relax during each and every day. “As long as we manage to stay calm, we can choose how we want to respond. Individuals with poorly regulated modulated autonomic nervous systems are easily thrown off balance, both mentally and physically.” So it is the goal to improve your heart rate variability (HRV). “One of the clearest lessons from contemporary neuroscience is that our sense of ourselves is anchored in a vital connection with our bodies.” But the “Trauma makes you feel as if you are stuck forever in a helpless state of horror. In yoga you learn that sensations rise to a peak and then fall.” And while “Pushing away intense feelings can be highly adaptive in the short run. […] The problems come later.” So we have to work at “reconfiguring a brain/mind system that was constructed to cope with the worst. Just as we need to revisit the parts of ourselves that developed the defensive habits that helped us to survive.”
Kolk explains that creating structures using things like “psychomotor therapy” can fill in the holes that trauma has created. Another new technique is neurofeedback, which “simply stabilizes the brain and increases resiliency, allowing us to develop more choices in how to respond.” It also “changes brain connectivity patterns; the mind follows by creating new patterns of engagement.” This can lead to improvements in focus, which before remained unfocused because our “brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment.” Like “when people hear a statement that mirrors their inner state, the right amygdala momentarily lights up, as if to underline the accuracy of the reflection.” So “we can create new emotional scenarios intense and real enough to defuse and counter some of those old ones.” Whereas “Often there is excessive activity in the right temporal lobe, the fear center of the brain, combined with too much frontal slow-wave activity. This means that their hyperaroused emotional brains dominate their mental life.”
The hope at the end of the book is that “We are on the verge of becoming a trauma-conscious society.” Since “Trauma constantly confronts us with our fragility and with man’s inhumanity to man but also with our extraordinary resilience.” I needed this book to show me that I did not escape my traumatic upbringing in childhood unscathed. Just because I held my emotions inside did not mean that I was just fine. My genetics and environment forced me into using anxiety as a survival mechanism, which in many ways both saved me while it fed upon me, especially once the traumatic situations had come to an end. It took me another decade of my life in fear to start understanding the full scope of my trauma.
I hope to end the cycle of emotional abuse, silence surrounding mental illnesses and trauma, and the destructive nature of enforced visitations brought on by the divorce and subsequent eruption of the nuclear family. I want my children to feel securely attached to me and my husband. I want to give them a forever home with a solid set of friends they can grow up with into adulthood. I desire nothing more than to worship each child individually and to always hear their voices, take them seriously, and do what they believe will make them happy. I sincerely wish to give them the firm foundation of love that I was grateful to have had before the storm came and to avoid such senseless storms for them in their futures.
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Links: https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748; https://www.amazon.com/Anxiety-Disorders-Phobias-Cognitive-Perspective/dp/046500587X; https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Therapy-Emotional-Disorders-Aaron/dp/0452009286; https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Unwanted-Intrusive-Thoughts-Frightening/dp/1626254346; https://calusarecovery.com/blog/f41-1-diagnosis-a-comprehensive-guide/; https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/; https://beckinstitute.org/about/dr-aaron-t-beck/; https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Centennial-AYN-RAND/dp/B0027M0HV6/ref=pd_lpo_sccl_2/143-1155917-6053026?pd_rd_w=CVlwr&content-id=amzn1.sym.4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_p=4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_r=8R1G0Q3YJ6X1E280D1P0&pd_rd_wg=SlV45&pd_rd_r=e4afa001-e2db-4811-8790-756fad892f06&pd_rd_i=B0027M0HV6&psc=1; https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/media/this-is-your-brain-on-drugs-tweaked-for-todays-parents.html
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Views Expressed Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies, or opinions of American Wordsmith, LLC. Please also know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand’s philosophy visit: aynrand.org.