FINDING SANCTUARY WITHIN
A Journey from Trauma to Transcendence
We all have trauma. We all need to heal.
For those who suffer from trauma and have lost their connection with their deepest self,
there is a way home.
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Introduction
I am a survivor. I survived a home invasion, having my life threatened with a gun to the back of my head, and sexual assaults. I survived childhood psychological abuse, neglect, and isolation. I survived adult traumas. I’m a survivor who wants to help other survivors.
I am an integrative holistic coach—one with a unique perspective on the psychology and physiology of trauma, a perspective brought about through professional training and extensive research, but, most of all, through personal experience.
I am a musician—a singer, instrumentalist, and producer of multimedia musical productions. Music is the greatest healer of all; it is the reason I am alive—literally and figuratively.
I am a writer—both non-fiction and creative. Writing helps me make sense of the world, of my struggles, of my questions. It allows me to offer healing practices, clarifying insights, and helpful information to others. It allows me to make life more gratifying and fulfilling for others—at least that is my hope. It allows me to reach people around the world whom I might never have the chance to meet. I always write now with the intention of healing, educating, and enlivening—for others who might be suffering or who might be helping others who suffer.
Most of all, I am a creative artist and therefore someone who must find a way to create, no matter how difficult the life circumstances. The creative impulse will not let me withdraw—even when I would like to withdraw. It moves me to create, to participate in a less than perfect life with a less than perfect mind and body in a world that often—no, usually—does not accept what I do or who I am. I am committed to supporting others who come from this particular circumstance. My life is dedicated to creativity and allowing it to flourish in all of us. Virtually everything I do comes from this commitment.
The synthesis of these five personae gives me a unique perspective on healing from trauma and the tools to make a difference in that domain.
I wrote this book because trauma is something that many people in the world need to heal from—and the need will continue to grow as trauma continues to explode globally. I want to offer my insight into the resolution or transcending of trauma in the hope that it will benefit at least some who suffer.
Trauma is the issue of our time. It is sure to be the root of many serious challenges, both psychological and physical, that many people in the world face now and will face in the coming decades. Sexual violation, child and spousal abuse, war, persecution, fascism, authoritarianism, torture, cruelty, environmental changes, natural disasters, and more result in a traumatized society. At this time, there’s still not much available in the way of help or healing for those who have suffered or are suffering from trauma.
I wrote this book because I wanted to let people know what healing really is and what creates it, particularly with regard to trauma. I wanted to help them avoid wasting time and money, to prevent them from being harmed, and to help them get what they’re truly looking for. I believe that it’s crucial for people to understand the nature of healing at this point in time, and to recognize its quality. I see that a lot of harm is caused in the name of “healing,” particularly with regard to trauma, partly because there is a lack of understanding about its nature, and partly because many people and organizations are more concerned with the financial benefits of providing a quick, often bogus substitute for healing than the actual manifestation of it.
The reason for that is two-fold: survivors of trauma are often not validated in their suffering by those who could (and should) support them—whether that’s due to others’ lack of understanding of the condition or a lack of empathy is sometimes unclear—and there is not an understanding by those in the helping professions of the nature of trauma that would support effective resources being made available to trauma survivors.
There’s also a need—a requirement, really—for acceptance and non-judgment of those who experience post-traumatic symptoms, something that’s often difficult for those who haven’t experienced such trauma themselves or who have unacknowledged or unconscious trauma themselves, a common condition.
There is growing evidence that many psychological maladies long attributed either to “neuroses” or “chemical imbalances” are instead caused by trauma and its after-effects. Rather than assuming that someone who experiences mental health issues (which I prefer to call “life issues”) has something inherently “wrong” with them, and giving them a pill for the rest of their life which will (possibly, if they’re lucky) suppress their symptoms—along with their life force and personality—and give them sometimes permanent side effects, it might be possible to assist that person by helping them discover an underlying trauma that precipitated the mental distress and resolve it. In other words, it’s quite possible that some conditions we’ve been calling “mental illness,” “psychological disorder” or “chemical imbalance” are simply long-term or delayed reactions to trauma. That would not be good for the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies and their stockholders, which means that there’s a lot of opposition to researching this line of thinking or speaking about it. Some would prefer that trauma sufferers have to take a pill the rest of their lives than actually heal from it.
I’m also writing this book because, while I am encouraged that “post-traumatic stress” is now part of our language and that many people are now familiar with some of its symptoms, few people fully understand what causes the symptoms and, most importantly, how the syndrome can be ameliorated effectively. Most of the literature on trauma that I’ve read leaves me with the feeling that the so‑called treatments that have been tried and are currently suggested are pure guesswork on the part of the clinicians, and that many of them actually make the sufferers feel worse and create new trauma on top of the existing trauma for them.
Fortunately, there is a way to heal from trauma. Those in the business of selling will not be able to profit much from it. It also doesn’t fit the framework of the traditional mental health paradigm of diagnosing and drugging, so the information might not be disseminated or accepted widely just yet. But it is important to speak about it now, when so many are suffering.
I obviously have a different perspective about these things, and with good reason. Not only have I fully lived with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress–that is, trauma—but I have a background in psychology and counseling, together with a life-long study of consciousness, the mind-body connection, and healing. In addition, I have the benefit of having experienced the healing power of creativity and the arts, as well as certain more “esoteric” types of healing, such as consciousness work and breathwork, and the work of those who have researched and practiced those things. The perspective and the approach I arrived at to alleviate trauma comes both from my own experience and from using it successfully with others. As with many things in life, you don’t need to spend a million dollars to do a study to see if it works; you simply have to try it and see if it works for you.
In this book, I offer what I know about what works: what helps with the symptoms, what helps with understanding, and what ultimately heals or transcends trauma and post-traumatic symptoms.
But first, let me tell you my story.
Chapter 1
My body felt strangely electrified, as if I were plugged into a light socket. I simply couldn’t doze off, buzzing with electricity, in spite of the late hour. I turned over and squinted at the clock, just able to read the numbers with the help of the night light: 1:45 a.m. I had to get up for work at 7:00 a.m. I turned over again, faced the wall, closed my eyes, and willed myself to go to sleep. Instead, the odd, electric sensation increased.
A man’s voice came out of the darkness. Startled, disbelieving, I turned over to see a dark figure standing just inside my bedroom door holding something up to his face. In massive confusion, I processed that a man was in my room.
A glint from the shiny metal of a gun reflected the light of my night light. “Take the pillowcase off the pillow and put it over your head,” said the man’s voice. Still in disbelief, I discovered I couldn’t move. “Do it now!” he barked. In massive shock, hands shaking, mind racing, adrenaline rushing, I took the pillowcase off the pillow. “Put it over your head!” said the voice.
I willed myself to put the pillowcase over my head, but I simply could not make my hands do it; they didn’t seem to be within my control any more. The thought of not being able to see terrified me as much as the gun pointing at me. Giving up my vision would deprive me of my strongest defense, my primary sensory information. I couldn’t do it, even with the gun pointed at me.
“Do what he says,” said a loud, clear voice in my head suddenly, “or he will kill you!” This “voice,” a part of me, and yet not me, would be with me throughout this event. I still could not make myself put the pillowcase over my head.
“Turn over on your stomach,” he said, gesturing with the gun. I forced myself to turn over on the bed. I was afraid he was going to shoot me in the back. He came over to the bed where I lay and jerked the pillowcase out of my hand and roughly yanked it over my head. I was in total darkness. The abyss. Terror.
Then he climbed on top of me.
I thought, strangely, lying face down on my own bed with a pillowcase over my head, unable to see, feeling the weight of an unknown man on top of me, knowing that my life was in grave danger, of the fact that I did not have health insurance at the moment. It raced through my mind that a friend without insurance who had been injured had ended up in a local state-funded hospital. I had visited her there; it was a truly horrible place, not a place I would ever want to be, a place to be avoided at all costs. My mind immediately switched from “staying alive” to “avoiding being injured” as the focus of my actions. This turned out to be a blessing, as it resulted in a slightly more goal-oriented focus instead of abject terror and mere survival.
With the man planted on top of me, I felt the cold metal of the gun next to my left thigh where he had put it. “The gun’s next to my leg. It might go off,” I whispered, momentarily forcing myself to overcome terror in order to speak. He stopped for an instant, moved the gun slightly, then continued moving.
I felt him enter me from behind. I willed myself to think of something else and disconnect from my lower body so that I would not resist and be torn. Then, more movement by the man on top of me. “Why aren’t you moving!” he barked. “Move!” I tried my best to move so that he would not kill me, but my body simply would not obey. No longer mine, it seemed completely separate from me, lying there unmoving, no matter how much I willed it to move in order to save my life. Why would it not do what I asked it? I simply could not communicate with it. Hours went by, or so it seemed. He never seemed to satisfy himself. No conclusion was reached. Finally, he stopped moving.
Words began to come out of my mouth, seemingly without my permission, words that horrified me. “You’re nice. Do you live around here? Oh. I guess you can’t say.” I felt sick hearing those words come out of my mouth, horrified at myself for communicating with this evil person, this malevolent being. But somehow “the Voice” that had been guiding me knew instantly and instinctively that engaging this man, making him see me as a person rather than an object, treating him as if he were human, somehow normalizing the situation, pretending that what was happening wasn’t really happening, that I was just fine with him, was the only way I was going to get to live that night. He had to see me as a person. He had to see that I saw him as a person.
I felt him hesitate. He didn’t answer, but slowed his movement. Then more rape. But with less aggression. Then stillness. As more words came from my mouth, without my consent, I sensed him relaxing. There was a knowing in me that speaking to him was something I had to do, that it would reduce his power somehow. It was only later that I realized that that is probably what saved my life.
Then, suddenly, he stopped. Abruptly I felt the hard coldness of the gun at the back of my head. I knew with absolute certainty that he was about to pull the trigger, blow my head off, and kill me.
There’s a funny thing that happens when your life is in imminent danger, and that is that the sixth sense—intuition or whatever you choose to call it—becomes greatly heightened. I knew and felt his moods and intentions instantly as if they were my own.
And then words began coming out of my mouth again, repeating themselves endlessly while I watched them helplessly. “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me,” I intoned. “Shut up! He’ll kill you if you don’t shut up!” the Voice told me. But I seemed to have no control over my own speech. I could not stop the words from tumbling out, words which were being spoken, yet they did not come from me.
Just as I knew with all certainty that he was about to pull the trigger, everything in my mind’s eye turned a brilliant, all-encompassing blue, brighter than anything I had ever seen or imagined. Inside my closed eyes, with vision blocked by the pillowcase, I saw blue everywhere, nothing but blue. I prayed. I did not believe in a traditional god, but I knew prayer. “Please,” the Voice pleaded loudly, urgently, silently. “Please. I didn’t get to be a singer yet. Please don’t let him kill me. Please.” With every bit of will and intention I had, I pushed this plea out into the blueness, the electrifying energy, the universe, to anything that could hear me. There was no separation between me and the universe. Me, the blueness, prayer, the universe.
Now I felt cold tingling. That was the moment of greatest fear, the absolute knowing that my life was about to end. An instant later, somehow I was beyond the fear, beyond myself. I felt an incredible, all-encompassing energy come into the room, one which I truly do not have words to describe. I felt him soften. Slowly, he took the gun away from the back of my head, and I knew that he could not, would not, pull the trigger.
After silence and stillness for what seemed like a very long time, he climbed off of me and stood up. “What’re you gonna do when I leave?” he demanded. “Nothing,” I whispered. “You’re gonna call the police, aren’t you?” “No.” “Yes, you are! You’re gonna call the police!” “No, no, I won’t,” I repeated shakily. “Who’re you gonna call?” Sensing that I might possibly survive this night if only I gave the right answer, and that he clearly was not going to believe that I was not going to call someone, “I might call a friend,” I whispered. “Who’re you going to call!” “I’m going to call a friend.” That seemed to satisfy him.
“When I leave,” he growled, “do not get up for thirty minutes. And do not call the police! Do you understand?! If you do, I will know, and I will come back and kill you. Do you understand?” “Yes,” I whispered. “I’ll know,” he repeated. “Thirty minutes. Or you’ll lose your life. You’ll lose your life,” he repeated.
“Where’s your money?!” “In my purse on the dresser.” I heard him fumbling with what I assumed was my bag. Then he left my room, or so it seemed to me, still blind with only my hearing and my sixth sense to tell me what was happening.
I waited, still in darkness with the pillowcase over my head. I waited some more. I heard footsteps farther away, maybe in the living room. Then a heavy thud. “He’s killed Athena,” I thought. My heart sank. My beloved black cat Athena liked to perch on top of the old-fashioned upright piano in the living room. The thud I heard sounded as though she had fallen off the piano and didn’t land on her feet. The thought that I had lost Athena, whom I loved with all my heart, was unbearable. But I could not allow myself to feel the sadness or horror. I had to avoid injury. That was all that mattered; instinct gave it the highest priority. I shoved the thoughts and feelings aside instantly and focused hard.
After what might have been five minutes—time was all out of kilter and seemed to stretch endlessly into eternity—I tentatively reached up and slowly pulled the pillowcase off of my head. I listened, kept perfectly still. No more footsteps.
I slowly turned over and looked around. Everything was blurry in the softly lit room. Somehow I couldn’t see. Suddenly I remembered that I needed my glasses. I saw them on the nightstand, wondered if I could reach out for them without alerting him. I slowly reached for them, grabbed them noiselessly, put them on. Waited. After what seemed like an eternity, I slowly sat up, trying to be silent. More waiting. My heart was pounding, adrenaline still coursing, body vibrating. I half expected that the man would come back into the room and kill me any second. Was he gone?
Then I heard a noise, seemingly from the kitchen. It hit me like a ton of bricks: he had stayed to see if I would get up. My heart sank.
More footsteps. After forever waiting, hoping he was gone, not being certain, I swung my legs out of bed and tried to stand up, but quickly found that I could not; my legs would not support me. Sinking to the floor, I crawled out of the bedroom, slowly, afraid with each baby step I crawled that the noise that would alert him. The telephone was in the living room. My goal was to reach the living room without being shot, which meant without being heard. Was he still in the house? I listened intently. I heard nothing, but couldn’t be sure. I hadn’t heard a door close. He could still be in the kitchen, which was next to the living room on the other side of a swinging door, right by the telephone. And if he saw me up before the thirty minutes was up, he would surely kill me.
I crawled silently on all fours, unable to stand, all the way to the living room, heart pounding out of my chest. Waited. Listened. No sound. I crawled to the far side of the living room and reached up to the telephone on the table. With hands shaking so badly I could barely grasp the phone, I dialed 911. I whispered rapidly into the phone, “A man broke into my house. He might still be here. If he finds me on the phone, he’ll kill me.” With every second, the abject terror of being discovered increased. “Stay on the line,” the operator said. “I can’t! If he finds me on the phone, he’ll kill me,” I whispered. “He’ll kill me.” I expected him to come through the swinging door any second. “Please stay on the line. I’m dispatching someone now.” After what seemed like hours, I did not dare to, simply could not, stay on the line any longer. I hung up.
Now the phone was ringing! So loudly! No! I let it ring, terrified that he would come through the swinging door. Finally, I picked up the phone. “He’ll kill me if he finds me on the phone!” I whispered. “Stay on the line. Help is coming. Stay on the line.” I willed myself to keep the phone in my hand, although every instinct told me to hang up.
Now there was banging on the front door, which opened directly into the living room, where I was crouched on the floor. Terrified that he would suddenly appear through the swinging door from the kitchen, I crawled to the front door, reached up to the handle, opened the door a crack, not knowing who was on the other side, not knowing if I was opening the door to the rapist. The police pushed in. Merely glancing at me on the floor, they quickly moved past me. Lights came on. A police officer asked me questions I could not comprehend. Many people were moving very quickly through my home, covering the surfaces with fingerprint powder, ignoring me.
A man not in uniform told me to get some clothes to bring with me, but not to change yet. I staggered to the bedroom, holding on to the wall, and grabbed jeans and a tee shirt. The man steered me towards his car. “I’m going to take you to the hospital,” he said. “After you see a doctor, you can change into your clothes. Then we’ll take you to a room and ask you some questions. You won’t have to come to the police station.” He seemed so kind in comparison with the police officers who had first entered my home; they had been cold and dispassionate, especially the female officer. It was strange riding in an unknown man’s car in my nightgown.
Chapter 2
Riding to the hospital in the car of the plainclothes detective felt surreal. When I reached the door they put me in a wheelchair. An orderly came toward me. The detective quietly spoke a few words to him, after which the orderly looked at me with disdain. “Oh, one of those,” he said audibly with disgust. His comment made me feel so awful, as though my existence was somehow offensive, that I was repulsive because I’d been raped. That moment is etched in my memory. Our words to someone on their worst day can affect them deeply and remain in their memory for years—something to remember.
After being wheeled into a brightly-lit examining room, a doctor came in to do a rape kit and examine me for damage and evidence. The minor tearing would heal on its own, he told me. “Thank you for coming in so early,” I said to the doctor, feeling bad that this doctor had been waked up at four o’clock in the morning to examine me. “No problem,” he said. “If it were my wife, I would want someone to be there for her.” He was kind to me.
When the exam was finished, a nurse came in and told me to put on the clothes I had brought with me, and to give her the clothes I’d been wearing so that they could be put into Evidence. I felt as though I were moving through molasses. Everything seemed so slow, like a video in slow motion. And something was wrong with my vision. Everything looked hazy and out of focus. I later learned that these were signs of shock.
After I dressed, the detective appeared and asked me to follow him. We entered a small private room that had been set up in the hospital specifically for police interviews of rape survivors, one where the light was soft. (I remember this, because my eyes were extremely sensitive to the bright lights in the hospital during the exam, a sensitivity that continued for the next day or so.) Another detective was waiting in the interview room with him.
The two of them asked me questions. “Did you see his face?” “No, he held something up over his face until he put the pillowcase over my head. He was a black man, maybe 5’10” or so, and not heavy.” “What kind of gun was it?” “I don’t know anything about guns,” I said, “but it was big and silver.” “It was silver?” The detectives looked at each other meaningfully. I had no idea what that meant. “You said it was a big gun?” “Well, it looked big to me,” I said. Then, softly, a bit uncomfortable, “He didn’t come,” I said. “He didn’t ejaculate?” they asked me. “No. I was hoping he would finish,” I said, embarrassed. “But he never did.” The detectives seemed surprised, looked at each other, made notes, seemed to find that important. “He’s done this before,” I added. “You think he’s done it before?” “Yes, he knew exactly what he was doing. It wasn’t his first time.” I explained that he never hesitated, seemed always to know the next step. Finally, they told me that that was all, and the detective who had brought me in took me back to his car.
I learned later that this way of examining a rape survivor and following up immediately with an interview by the police on the hospital premises was a new program that had been instituted by the Baton Rouge Police Department in the previous year. Prior to that, rape victims were taken directly to the police station after their hospital exam, forcing them to sit in a loud, chaotic, brightly lit, frightening room full of criminals. I can’t imagine anything more horrible for someone who has just been traumatized and was likely experiencing the first of the PTSD symptoms that would soon be an ingrained part of their lives. It would have been a nightmare for me. I was and am grateful that this program had been instituted before this happened to me. I hope there are similar programs around the country.
Although I have no memory of the ride back from the hospital, I do know that the kind detective dropped me off at my house. After walking through the front door, looking around, it was as though I were looking through a thick layer of gauze that surrounded me, seeing just a hazy outline of everything, with pale colors filling in the scene. The gauze was soft, protective. I would soon learn that these are some of the initial signs of PTSD, a feeling of being slightly removed from “reality” and experiencing an altered visual sense. I also learned that this is actually a softening of the senses, nature’s kind way of assuring that too much sensory input does not penetrate to a shattered nervous system which has already been overloaded with input; this is the body-mind’s built-in protection. In order to allow the parasympathetic nervous system to help the nervous system regain balance, it needs to limit further sensory input. This reflects the innate self-healing intelligence of our body and mind.
Immediately upon entering my house, my body began trembling violently, my heart pounding, the adrenaline pumping, the fear all-encompassing, as though the event were happening again in that moment. My mind experienced confusion because my body’s reaction didn’t match my perception of reality.
When the shaking lessened a bit, I called the law office where I worked as assistant to the managing partner, told them I had just gotten out of the hospital and wouldn’t be in until noon, offering no further explanation. I hung up, stood there, trying to figure out what to do next. I heard a creaking noise and jumped, terrified. He’s coming back! my body seemed to say, once more shaking, heart pounding, brain racing. After my breathing slowed a bit, I walked slowly to the bedroom, as if I were in a trance. There was fingerprint powder all over my furniture and possessions, a further violation.
My cats, thankfully, were all right. I went to the kitchen to get them food. On entering, I saw that the intruder had left a carton of yogurt that he’d gotten out of my refrigerator in the middle of my floor, as though he wanted to remind me that he had been there.
I was so tired. I wanted to lie down. I lay down on the bed and was terrified. How was I ever going to sleep in this bed again? But I had to get some sleep, or some rest at least, so I could go to work. I focused on relaxing.
It occurred to me then that I was in exactly the middle of my menstrual cycle. If I had wanted to get pregnant, that would have been the night to try. I couldn’t think what to do. Then I remembered a doctor I had seen a while back that I had liked. I called him and told him what had happened. He said that he would call in a prescription for the morning-after pill (I had not even known that one existed!), and that I must take an antibiotic to prevent disease since I had had unprotected sex with someone I didn’t know. Like me, he was averse to the unnecessary use of antibiotics, but he said that in this case, it would be much less harmful to treat me for the effects of antibiotics taken briefly than it would to treat me for syphilis or gonorrhea that I might have contracted as a result of the rape, as those would require large amounts of antibiotics for a lengthy period of time. He would include a prescription for probiotics to offset the effects of the antibiotics.
I knew I had to sleep so that I could go to work; it was 8:00 a.m. and I had not yet been to sleep. I lay down in the bed where I had just been raped and tried again to sleep. The floor creaked—it was an old house full of creaks and groans—and I jerked; the heart-pounding panic started all over again. And again. And again. Sleep was simply not going to happen. I forced myself to lie there for over an hour, knowing that I had to sleep, could not go all night without sleep and go to work. Every time I started to doze off, I jerked all over, my heart pumping wildly and painfully, as though it would literally jump out of my chest, and woke me up.
I later learned that this is called “exaggerated startle reflex,” a common symptom of post-traumatic stress, one which, in my case, would plague me the rest of my life. With every creak of the old house the terror started again. Finally, I gave up and got up. I hated having him “on me,” but, having been up all night and fading from total exhaustion and sleep deprivation, I simply didn’t have the energy to shower, just could not do anything, so pulled on some clothes and left for work, stopping along the way at a drugstore to pick up my prescriptions. That was the first time I had walked into a public place alone since the event, and I felt extremely vulnerable, as though I didn’t have my “skin” on, that I was too open to the world. I later learned that this was another symptom of PTSD, that of not having boundaries, of feeling exposed. I got out as fast as possible and drove to the law firm where I worked.
I parked at the law firm where I worked, entered through the back door, trudged up the stairs to my office, walked into the office next to mine and handed my boss the detective’s card with the case number on it so that he would know that I had a legitimate reason for not showing up until noon. “What happened?” he asked, glancing at the card. “A man broke into my house, raped me, stayed a long time,” I replied, emotionless. “I had to go to the hospital. I’m sorry.” I went back to my office, began to work. Although exhausted, having missed an entire night of sleep, I felt relieved to be around people in a familiar place. At least I was safe there.
A few hours later, since the firm’s file clerk was absent that day, I had to go across the street to deliver some papers to the court. The back of the courthouse and its parking lot were directly across the street, a wide boulevard, from the law firm. I delivered the papers to the Clerk’s office, then began walking back across the large, almost-empty parking lot when a slender Black man appeared, walking towards me.
Wait, what was happening to me?! The event seemed to be happening all over again, in the present, only inside of me. My mind and body reacted exactly as if the man were raping me again, exactly as if the gun were at the back of my head. I had no control over this. The emotional terror returned, the shaking started, the heart pounded, adrenaline coursed, mind raced, confusion ensued. I felt disembodied, watching my body’s reaction, frozen to the spot. So began my first flashback.
Fortunately, I had done some training with a large group awareness training (LGAT) a few years previously that helped me recognize that I was not the reaction I was having, so I was able to be the observer to my reaction to some degree. I really cannot imagine how frightening this experience would be for someone who did not have that understanding. Not only is the experience itself frightening, but when it occurs, the mind itself is temporarily out of your control, and that could make a person believe they’re going crazy—or make someone else believe that they’re crazy.
This is why giving those who seek help for trauma, or who have recently had a traumatic experience, good information about what they might expect, about what would be “normal” for a trauma survivor, is enormously important. I had also studied the mind in depth prior to the event—psychology and the mind-body connection were a major interest of mine from an early age—so I knew fairly soon after the flashback began that this experience was not “me” but something my mind was doing. “I” stayed rather apart from the chaotic breakdown, observing it. I had no control, was unable to respond to the environment reasonably, and yet “I” stood apart from the reaction. When I was able to move again, I somehow got myself across the parking lot, across the street, and into the office. I stumbled into the kitchen on the ground floor, still shaking heavily. After the shaking subsided a bit, I went upstairs to my office. Back to work.
Later on I had to go downstairs and pull a file. As I bent down, an enormous pain in my belly made me cry out. I realized in an instant that this pain resulted from the internal bruising from the rape. That made me sad; it felt like a further violation, as though he had left a remnant of what he did, that he was still in me. I ran to sit down in the kitchen and began sobbing without meaning to. I am not a crier; I had not cried in front of anyone more than twice in my whole adult life, so this was mortifying to me. I waited for the crying to subside, then trudged back upstairs to my office. Once again, I felt safe. The work helped me get through the minutes. Finally, it was time to go home.
But I knew I couldn’t return home to my house again; I had known that was impossible from the moment I had crossed the threshold after returning from the hospital and began to shake. I would never be able to sleep there or spend the night alone there again. I couldn’t stand inside the house without the trembling starting and the flashbacks coming. I no longer had a home.
Chapter 3
By the day after the event, I knew that my life was never going to be the same. Virtually everything in my life changed that night.
Everything I knew as safety was gone. Once my home had been breached, I knew that locks on the door were not enough to keep danger out. I no longer had a space in which to live and sleep that felt—and was—safe from intruders, a space to withdraw and heal.
My body was a different place in which to live. It no longer felt—what I could feel of it—like my own. Once my body had been breached, I no longer felt safe anywhere, least of all within myself.
My mind seemed to be no longer under my control, and odd thoughts, feelings, and sensations happened to my mind and body out of the blue.
But I could not allow myself to indulge in emotion or overwhelm because there was simply too much to do.
Once I was settled in at my job the next day, the first thing I had to do—in addition to my legal work—was to find a place to sleep. At first I couldn’t think of anyone at all that I could call; I didn’t have any close friends or family there. Then I remembered an acquaintance from a while back; I called, explained briefly what had happened and asked if I could sleep on her floor that night. Just for the night, she said. And so I had my first night’s accommodation.
While I tried to sleep on her living room floor that night, I kept hearing noises and having small flashbacks and extreme startle reflex so that I couldn’t sleep at all. Just as I would almost fall asleep, I would jerk, wake myself, and feel panic. When that happens all night long, it results in profound sleep deprivation, something that was soon to become familiar.
Since it became obvious quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep in the strange living room alone, I went to the woman’s bedroom, knocked gently, and asked her if I could sleep on her floor there. No, she said, so I went back to the living room. I didn’t sleep more than two hours that night. Then back to work. I had had probably less than three hours’ sleep in two days.
And now I had another problem. The hormones and antibiotics I was taking to hopefully prevent pregnancy and infection were making me extremely nauseous. It was hard to get myself to eat, having lost my appetite from the trauma in addition to being queasy, and I knew that it was important in keeping my focus to eat well. I started sipping ginger ale and cola to stave off the nausea and managed to keep a bit of food down, but the nausea persisted as long as I was on the medications. I was angry that I had to take the damn drugs, causing further damage to myself, because of what the attacker had done to me.
Oddly, that’s the only time I felt anger toward my attacker then, at least directly. I felt a million emotions, but that wasn’t one of them. The rage came later, and indirectly.
I still had to find a place to sleep that night. I had participated as a volunteer in the network of a large group awareness training (LGAT) I had done. I called someone I remembered from the network and told them briefly what had happened and asked if they knew of anywhere I could stay for a night or two. They offered me a name, and so I found my next night’s accommodation in the home of a couple who belonged to the network. It was weird staying in a stranger’s home, but I felt immense gratitude and relief.
The next day I put out word in that same network that I needed a place to stay until I moved, probably for the next six weeks. That’s because I had planned to move from Baton Rouge to New York City in September; it was then only July. A woman from the network whom I had never met called me and said that she had an artist’s studio behind her house, and that I could stay there for a short while until I moved. I collected my two cats, a sleeping bag and a few clothes, and moved in to my new … floor.
The small second-floor studio had no hot water, so unbelievably icy showers greeted me every morning. There was no carpet, so my two cats and I slept in a sleeping bag on the hardwood floor with no cushion underneath.
The studio was upstairs above a garage, and the only way to get to the entrance was up a narrow flight of outdoor stairs. And that was also the only way to get out of the studio, as well, so if someone came up and knocked the door down—the rapist, for example—there was no way for me to escape. This was my unwelcome fantasy, that the rapist would come back. It really did happen sometimes, my voice teacher’s accompanist had told me. In fact, she knew someone it had happened to. It was not unheard of for a rapist to come back to the same place and the same person and commit the same crime again. And he had told me that he would come back and kill me if I got up too soon or called the police, both of which I had done. So with every noise, I was terrified that he had returned, and I had no way out. I lived in a constant state of terror at the studio every night.
The repeated flashbacks and extreme startle reflex were physically exhausting. My adrenals were becoming worn out. It was hard to put one foot in front of the other, or even to stand up at times. I still had to prepare for a preliminary trip to New York, where I had planned to move in September, while working at the law firm every day, and to keep practicing and taking voice lessons so that I could be ready to audition when I got to New York, since my purpose for moving to New York was to further my opera career. But I was ready to leave Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where I had lived for eight years, for New York, and each daily step took me closer.
As an opera singer just shy of thirty, which was pretty much the limit for beginning a serious career, I knew I had to be in New York to make my singing career happen. I had always wanted to live life at the highest level, to create and achieve the greatest goals I could, to become the highest expression of human potential that I could be. That sounds a bit pretentious to me, writing it now, but simply to exist without purpose and without fulfilling my potential was not tolerable to me. (It still isn’t.) So I was accustomed to pushing myself, to persevering no matter what the challenges, and that drive came in handy in managing to function with an unfortunately altered nervous system and a completely exhausted body and mind.
I returned to my house briefly to assess how long it was going to take me to box up my belongings. I still shook when I entered the house and jumped every time a floorboard creaked, so I finished what I had to do quickly and went outside. I believed that the woman who lived across the street might be living alone, so I went across the street and knocked on her door. I did not want anyone to go through what I had gone through, so I wanted to warn her to be careful and keep her windows secure. (My attacker had broken a window to get in to my rented house, something he wouldn’t have been able to do as easily if the screens had been secure.) When she answered the door, I told the woman succinctly that a man had broken into my house and raped me. I encouraged her to check her windows and locks. Then she told me that what had happened to me had happened to another woman in the neighborhood, one who was older than I was, and that the assailant had blown her head off. I had not told this woman that my attacker had held a gun to the back of my head or even that he had had a gun. I knew in that instant that I was extremely lucky to be alive. That put the event in a different perspective for me: I had not just survived a home invasion and rape, but a murder attempt.
The “event,” as I came to call it, had happened on July 6. Since I could no longer live in my home—just entering the house caused immediate flashbacks and was physically overwhelming—and since I did not want to stay in the artist studio any longer than necessary (grateful though I was for the free place to stay), I decided to move to New York earlier than I had planned, in August the following month instead of at the beginning of September. At least I would feel safe from the rapist there, since there was no way he could find me in New York—or so I believed. I gave notice at the office and made arrangements to make a brief visit to Manhattan to find a job, see about housing, and learn the New York City transportation system.
I was beyond burnt out, but I really had no choice but to keep going. I had to make a living, and I had to move to New York. Thankfully, I had my commitment to my opera career to hang on to. Commitment was everything to me; it was my god. If I had paid any attention to all of the things that had happened and were happening to me, and all of the things that had to be done in such a short time with a mind and body that were almost non-functional, I would have collapsed in a heap. Instead, I focused on my commitment to move to New York and be an opera singer, and got myself ready to move.
I made the preliminary trip to New York, found a law firm job and, armed with a subway map, mastered the transportation system and city navigation in a day or so. Housing was another issue. Rent was extraordinarily high and apartments were not plentiful at that time. I would have to find a place to live after I moved instead of before. I returned to Baton Rouge to prepare for the move.
By this time, it was obvious to me that my period was late. If I had wanted to become pregnant, I could not have chosen a better time to try than the day of the event, which was right in the middle of my cycle, so I knew that pregnancy was a real possibility, even though I had taken the morning-after pill (which in 1986 was simply strong estrogen pills). Would I have yet another problem to handle?
Chapter 4
By now it had been seven weeks since the home invasion. My period was late. As the days went by, I came to feel a life in me; I knew instinctively that I was pregnant. Strangely, that feeling comforted me.
But what would I do if I were pregnant? So many women have to ask themselves that question, and because of this experience, I know first-hand how difficult it is to answer it. Multiple factors play a role in the decision, and emotions are involved, as well.
I had always supported a woman’s right to choose and assumed that if I ever had an unwanted pregnancy, I would end it. Simple, right? But now that it was happening to me, the answer seemed less clearcut and certainly a lot less easy.
My head knew that the only logical solution—and by far the most compassionate solution for both the fetus, assuming there was one, and me—was to end the pregnancy. First, assuming I gave it up for adoption, given that a bi-racial child would not be adopted in Louisiana where I currently lived (my rapist was black), and possibly not in New York, the child would have no expectation of a happy or decent life if it grew up in an orphanage, or even if it were adopted, since neither race would accept them, especially in Louisiana. (Remember, this was 1986.)
Second, if I chose to give birth to the resulting child and keep it, I would be looking at someone who probably looked like and reminded me of the rapist every single day, and that could not help but influence my attitude toward the child. I would not want to inflict that on a child, since I knew personally how negatively that would affect its self-perception and self-worth.
Third, what about my future? What kind of future could I possibly have with an infant and no job? I certainly couldn’t be a singer (an expensive and time-consuming undertaking). I would have no future at all, never fulfilling my potential.
And since I would be unable to work at the end of, and after, pregnancy (how could I work if I had to care for an infant?), and so would have no money whatsoever to support myself and a child prior to and after delivery, it simply would not be intelligent or compassionate or even feasible to have a child at that time.
My heart felt differently. I felt love for the life I felt in me. But as the days went by, while I waited for a doctor’s appointment (home pregnancy tests were not available back then), and it seemed more than likely that I was pregnant, I made my decision, really the only viable decision: to abort if I were pregnant. This made me sad, but I knew it was absolutely the right thing to do, so I felt no ethical conflict. I was fortunate that the laws were in my favor, and abortion was available to me if I needed it.
Only a few days later, my period came. It was unusually heavy and incredibly painful and I’m certain that I miscarried. I’ll never know for sure, of course, but I do know that I have a different perspective on making the decision about a problematic pregnancy, and I have very definite ideas about the rights of rape survivors to make that decision as a result. It truly is, and must be, no one’s business but theirs. No one should be forced to bear a rapist’s child, a child that she does not want or is not economically able to support. She should never have to look at a small being who looks like the person who raped her and reminds her of that traumatic event daily for the rest of her life, which also makes it certain that she cannot look at that child with love or without aversion because she sees the rapist in them, so that the child grows up damaged and adds one more damaged, angry person to our society. That would be extremely cruel to the mother and to the child. Only an ogre would inflict this on another human.
So I was grateful that that problem had resolved. Meanwhile, I had to deal with my belongings. I couldn’t take much to New York, given that I didn’t have a home yet, so I needed to pack up everything but essentials and store it. The problem now was that I couldn’t be in my house alone; the post-traumatic symptoms and flashbacks began the minute I entered the house so I was not physically able to stay inside. I was fortunate that a kind man from the LGAT network I had participated in who barely knew me offered to help. I boxed up all of my possessions except the most crucial, then we stuffed them into my car and drove them to the storage rental, where we unloaded them and locked them up.
I had kept out the things I would need in order to function for the first month or so after the move, when I wouldn’t yet have an apartment. I boxed up a microwave (for frozen dinners since eating out every day was far too expensive), my cats’ litter box and food bowls, and a few more essentials. I filled my two suitcases with clothing and other necessities. I got two airline-approved kennels for my cats. All I had to do was throw my sleeping bag in a box and put the cats in their carriers and I was ready to go.
I still had to answer the question of where I would stay after I moved. I asked an old friend from high school who lived with her husband in Queens if I could pay them a visit when I arrived. It turned out that they were about to leave for Europe but would still be in town for just a few days after I moved and they offered to let me stay with them for that short time. After that, who knew? At least I—and my two cats, Athena and Jasmine—would finally be in New York.
A couple of days later, I left Baton Rouge forever.
I flew to New York and took a cab to my friend’s home in Queens with my microwave, two suitcases, and two howling cats. My tiny blue-point Siamese Jasmine and my huge black street cat Athena had not enjoyed traveling in baggage, but I was given no other option, as only one pet carrier was allowed on board, and I was not allowed to put them in the same carrier. Athena, with icicles hanging from her whiskers, came out of the plane looking frozen and livid. Once we got in the cab, Athena and Jasmine let loose, loudly vocalizing their displeasure, screaming their lungs out in the cab. The cab driver kept looking back at us in the rearview mirror with a wide-eyed look that might have been concern. We made it to my friend’s home in Queens, where the cats and I stayed in their living room for a couple of days. At last, we were on solid ground in New York City, with everything that had happened behind us and a new future in front of us.
My friends left for Europe a few days later. I had to find new quarters quickly.
Regretfully, I had to board the cats for the first time ever (devasting to both me and the cats) while I searched for a place to stay. A singer acquaintance in Baton Rouge who was living in New York had once told me that I could stay at her apartment in Queens if need be, so I gave her a ring. My friend was out of town, but another singer, unknown to me, who was staying there picked up and said I could stay at the apartment, and I headed over to her Astoria apartment that afternoon.
It turned out to be a rather wild first night, as the singer apparently had some not insignificant psychological issues. Suddenly at midnight she urged me, screaming incomprehensibly, to leave. Get out! she screamed, over and over. I blearily called a singer who was staying at the Greystone Hotel in Manhattan, someone my voice teacher knew but whom I had never met, explained briefly (while the woman continued screaming in the background), and the singer and her roommate agreed to let me sleep on their floor in their hotel room for the night (I am still in awe of their generosity and trustingness). I got dressed, packed my things, located a cab (not easy in Queens at that hour!), and arrived at the Greystone Hotel at one in the morning. I introduced myself to the two women who were allowing me to share their room and threw a blanket onto the floor as my bed of the evening. I slept fitfully and sporadically on the floor for several hours before preparing to go to my first day on the new job.
On my way to work the next morning, I stopped at the hotel’s front desk and asked for a room of my own in the Greystone, but the clerk insisted that they had no rooms available. I used my best persuasive powers and got myself a room anyway. (I didn’t really know that she was holding out, but my reality simply would not allow there not to be a room.) After work that day, I took the train out to Queens, retrieved the cats from the boarding facility, and sneaked them into my room. Jasmine and Athena seemed happy to have a new home all to themselves and so was I, even if it was a hotel room. I actually enjoyed staying at the quirky but comfortable Greystone and would have continued to stay there if the fee had been a little more reasonable. I hunkered down for the next six weeks while I searched for an apartment.
Finding an affordable apartment in Manhattan was, to say the least, a challenge. But renting a room in the hotel was expensive, and I couldn’t keep it up for long; I was running out of money. I spent all my free time when not at the office job (which was exhausting) searching ads for apartments and making calls (this was in pre-internet days), but continued to come up empty. Finally, in desperation, I contacted a roommate service and found a young woman in Sunnyside, Queens, who was looking for someone to share her apartment. The “room” that was to be mine was actually the living room, and I would be sleeping on the couch. She had to go through the living room to get to the kitchen, bathroom, and front door, so I had no privacy at all. It was all I could find that was remotely affordable, and I desperately wanted the search to be over. And she would allow my two cats to join me! I said yes. Now, for the first time since the attack on July 6, I technically had a home, even if it was a couch.
I continued to have flashbacks, all the while getting used to life in New York and learning a stressful new job at a midtown law firm. Of particular difficulty was riding the subway. Any time a man sat down next to me, instantly rage came, along with physical symptoms related to the attack (heart pounding, sweating, desire to flee) and occasionally a full-blown flashback. This reaction was initially to a man who happened to appear near me or to sit down next to me who looked at all similar to the one who had attacked me, but the reaction soon generalized to all men, something I later learned was not uncommon in those with post-traumatic stress.
Prior to the event, I had always found it easier to relate to men than to women, and my best friends had always been men. Now half the population felt dangerous and anger-provoking. I felt extremely sad about this loss.
Athena and Jasmine never fully settled into their new life in the Queens apartment with the roommate; they missed having their own space. So did I. But I was finding my way in my new life, taking the 7 train to the B train to my job in midtown Manhattan and back every day, grateful at least to have a regular roof over my head while I began to pursue my opera career.
After less than six months in the shared apartment in Queens, the roommate told me she was giving up the apartment and I had to move. (I suspect she was actually tired of the cats. Or me.) When I mentioned this to a musician at the law firm where I was working he asked me if I would like to sublet his studio apartment in Inwood, at the north tip of Manhattan, as he was moving temporarily to Boulder. I said yes! Absolutely yes. So Athena and Jasmine and I hit the road again and moved across the river to Manhattan, which is where I had always intended to end up.
After a time, the musician decided not to return to New York and gave me the lease to the studio. The apartment was mine! Finally, I had a place of my own. Not a home, exactly, not yet, but my own space. The cats and I settled in and began to build a new life in Manhattan.
I had lived through a major traumatic event. I had survived. I had moved to the city where I’d always wanted to live. I had a job and an apartment. I was finally ready to pursue my dream.
Chapter 5
You might be wondering how a single traumatic experience—dramatic though the home invasion was—can lead to a cataclysmic change in an individual’s life.
To answer that question, I want to take a short detour and return to the early part of my life. Because the life experiences I had prior to the home invasion and rape greatly influenced what happened to me after the event.
In my case, the extreme PTSD symptoms I came to suffer—flashbacks, exaggerated startle reflex, continuously jerking awake when sleeping resulting in severe sleep deprivation, hypervigilance, and more—came about because I had had an unusual number of traumatic experiences, both chronic and acute, earlier in my life.
Experiencing prior traumatic experiences often makes an individual more prone to developing PTSD after an acute trauma, partly because trauma has a cumulative effect. Experiencing early traumas prior to maturity, before the part of the mind that makes intellectual decisions has matured, makes that even more likely. And that is made all the more probable when no support or solutions are made available to the individual, leaving them to make sense of the aftermath and deal with its consequences alone, or when their trauma is denied or unnoticed. All of those things were true for me.
Any of the acute traumas I suffered would be sufficiently traumatic to cause post-traumatic symptoms, but together with a lifetime of chronic childhood traumas, my nervous system was primed to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Chronic trauma of any kind can cripple children, and the adults they grow up to be, if it is not recognized, acknowledged, and supported. If that trauma is denied or minimized, that is an additional trauma. But if people who experience childhood or adolescent trauma have the proper support early on, they can escape relatively intact, or at least with good coping skills.
Since I did not have that support, I later spent many years and thousands of dollars attempting to find healing for myself. I did find some relief from the PTSD symptoms eventually—and I’ll share with you what I found about resolving PTSD symptoms later in this book—but I regret the decades of my potential that were unnecessarily lost.
We really have to find a way of providing support for children and adolescents who are in traumatic situations. There must be somewhere for them to turn to find comfort and support when they need those things in order to thrive and survive in the future. It is my intention for my story to shed light on the effect of chronic trauma in the hope that it might lead to better safeguards for children in our country.
Children under eighteen are highly vulnerable. If they have problems at home or school, unless there are extended family, close friends, or teachers who are supportive, they have no one to turn to, and that alone can be traumatic for a child since they do not yet have the resources to care for themselves. Trauma that receives no support, validation, or treatment is certain to blossom, and the longer it goes untreated, the more entrenched it becomes.
In other words, untreated and un-validated trauma can lead to life-long physical and psychological problems, often severe ones. The list of potential outcomes is long; it includes substance abuse, addiction, physical disorders, anxiety, depression, prolonged grief, suicide, poor relationships, unfulfilled potential, violent behavior, and even psychosis. It also makes them more vulnerable to the influence of gangs and cults.
It might seem easy to judge someone who has a significant post-traumatic response to an event that seems relatively innocuous (and people often do judge, unfortunately). But when you realize that you don’t know what that person might have experienced in the past that could contribute to their current condition, it becomes easier to accept that their response is understandable or “legitimate.” In fact, any response to trauma is legitimate. To doubt that is ignorance and can be harmful to those who have been traumatized.
In addition to an individual’s past experiences, innate traits such as resilience and sensitivity affect their response, as well, so that we can never tell how someone might respond to a particular trauma or to repeated trauma.
I’ve chosen to share some of my childhood experiences here, especially the chronic ones, because I believe that the traumas young people experience aren’t always recognized as being traumatic. Sometimes the traumas are hidden or don’t seem unusual at first glance. Seeing these experiences in someone else often makes it easier to recognize them clearly as traumas. My experiences might also give you a sense of how the consequences of the repeated traumatic events in my own life built to create the perfect storm for major PTSD later on.
The chronic trauma of my early life left me with chronic PTSD symptoms throughout childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. I of course didn’t realize as a child or teenager that I was suffering from the effects of chronic trauma, in the same way you might not be aware that you need glasses until after you get them; only after you can see clearly do you realize how cloudy your vision has been. Until I began to search for a way out of the severe post-traumatic symptoms that plagued me after the home invasion, I didn’t realize that I had experienced chronic trauma and post-traumatic symptoms long before that event. Once I did, I had the opportunity to recover. It was a long road.
* * * * *
Prior to the home invasion, I had lived a life filled with trauma. The difference in that early trauma and the trauma of the home invasion at almost age thirty was that the home invasion was something everyone agreed was a bad thing. That event was the first time in my life that I had received any validation of the fact that something bad had happened to me. All of the trauma I experienced in childhood and adolescence had been un-validated; in fact, most of it was secret.
I grew up in an unusually challenging environment. There was psychological abuse as well as isolation, together with chronic physical pain and loss. There was no one who saw that I was drowning emotionally, no one to reach out a helping hand. There was no human with whom I could talk about difficulties, no one in whom I could confide. Those things alone set me up for having a symptoms in later life of low self-esteem, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, addiction, and major challenges in reaching my potential, as they tend to do in many or most children who experience these things.
There is a difference in chronic and acute trauma in terms of duration, but the effects are remarkably the same. Both can lead to PTSD. The one thing that can make a difference is that acute traumas are usually acknowledged by others as traumatic, while chronic trauma is often more insidious or hidden, making it harder to acknowledge, treat, or recover from. Childhood trauma is often chronic.
While my early life was a rocky road, I believe there is value in my experience in that it could help someone else or potentially change the view of some with regard to society’s role in protecting children who are experiencing trauma and what our country needs to do to ensure that future generations are strong and able to fulfill their potential.
And now, a bit of my story.
Chapter 6
Childhood was something I avoided thinking about for most of my adult life. The pain of living through it and also of remembering it later was excruciating. It’s only now that I can look backward and see the threads of the stories and patterns and how I ended up where I am at this late stage. If only I had seen these sooner so that I could have overcome them! But we can only be where we are at this moment in time. The past exists only in our memories, showing up in fragments which reveal partial truths and which can be tricky to navigate. The future is what we’re creating with our thoughts and actions now, so it’s wise to create a good now.
One of the reasons I’m writing this memoir is that I hope that my story encourages someone else to look back as though from above and see the stories of their lives objectively, see the currents or patterns running throughout, with no emotion clouding their vision. If we can learn from the past, we’re not doomed to repeat it in the present, or to pass it on to offspring who repeat it in the future. We can also choose our future more clearly and effectively.
I’m also sharing this story because I believe that seeing our past more objectively can shed light on the traumas we might have suffered that affect us still, traumas we might not have seen as traumas, since no one called them that, and so did not give them the weight they deserved or the importance they held in navigating our lives, past and future.
There’s so much I realize only now that I don’t know about my family. I wish I could ask my maternal grandmother about the story of her life before she married my grandfather. I don’t even know how they met. And what happened to her around the age of twelve that caused her to change so drastically, to be “different” and have “emotional problems” from that time forward, according to her sisters? That seems important, because her difficulties surely played a large role in my mother becoming the person she did.
I wish I had learned more about the painful but inspiring story of my maternal grandfather, the oldest of eleven children born to an alcoholic father who didn’t support them, and how he became something of a Horatio Algier story. His authoritarian approach to parenting likely contributed to some of my mother’s personality traits, although he was also a sensitive and kind soul at times. I don’t know how I couldn’t have thought to ask them about those things.
I wish I could have learned more about my paternal grandmother, who died six months before I was born, from her relatives while they were still on this earth. I wish I could ask my paternal grandfather what being a jazz musician in Texas and New Orleans in the 1920s was like, and what it was like to report major league baseball by Morse Code and to report as a journalist on FDR’s whistle-stop campaign. My grandfather was a unique creative individual and I wish I knew more about him. I somehow believe that if I knew more about his parents I could understand better how my father’s personality came to be.
I wish I could ask my mother what it was like to discover in high school that she was pregnant, what it was like to have to tell her fundamentalist Christian parents about that, to marry hastily in a civil ceremony, not to wear a beautiful white dress and have the wedding every girl dreamed of back in the 1950s, to give birth to a child she didn’t want, to have to sit out the remainder of that high school year away from her friends, to go back to school for her final year with a baby at home that was being cared for by her mother, and tended to by her when she wasn’t doing homework.
What was it like to relocate constantly with no one around her but her husband and a child she couldn’t relate to? I know at least part of the story, of why she had no self-esteem and was psychologically unstable, but I wish I had asked her more about that. Although I’m certain that if I had, she would have blasted anger at me because I had had the nerve to ask. And now I remember why I didn’t ask her those things.
I wish I knew what it was like for my father, at age seventeen, finding out just days after his mom died from cancer, that he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, that he was going to have to get married before finishing high school and live with his girlfriend’s parents, and that his future was not going to be what he had planned. What did he envision his life was going to be before all that happened?
Why did I not ask them all about their stories? Perhaps because my family on both sides were very tight-lipped. No one talked about themselves or their past or their feelings. Especially not feelings. I guess I continued that pattern. Until I didn’t!
Also, it’s hard to see those close to us, particularly our family, objectively, as human beings who have stories and pasts, rather than simply as our family members who play a certain role in our lives.
I wish I knew more of my own story. That’s something I think will become clearer once I have access to some pictures of me and the extended family, during and prior to my childhood. Those pictures have been withheld from me to date, stored in what manner of preservation I shudder to think, in an attic in the Midwest that I pray will not be destroyed by a tornado before I finally inherit them. Once I have those photographs, I believe I’ll have the full picture and will feel more complete with my life story.
* * * * *
I must warn you that due to my intention to safeguard the living by not divulging too much, my upcoming story might be a bit short on detail. Forgive me for being succinct in that regard, but it is not my desire to cause harm to anyone. It is in fact my desire to prevent harm from occurring to others in the present or the future, through unacknowledged or unsupported chronic trauma, which is why I’m telling my story, however briefly. And although the details might add color to the story, I don’t believe they’re essential to understanding what happened through the lens of this exploration.
The acute traumatic events of childhood that happen to us are usually (though not always) easily remembered and acknowledged. It’s when trauma is chronic that it becomes like the background music to our childhood so that we have trouble putting our finger on exactly what happened to us that caused us to feel damaged, or just to have trouble functioning in life.
* * * * *
I was born in a small town in the Midwest to two teenagers with significant psychological issues who were not ready to be parents, or even adults, and for whom my appearance on the scene was the impetus for a major, unwanted change in their lives, namely a hasty, ill-timed marriage before either had graduated from high school. That would be challenging enough for the unwanted child born into that situation. There was more.
Apparently (at least, so say early photos) I arrived in the world with a smiling, cheerful personality. By the time I was six years old, pictures show me as a sad, unsmiling, withdrawn child. It was downhill from there.
At home there was verbal abuse, shaming, much substance abuse, and bullying. I don’t recall ever being given a single word of encouragement. Instead, there was continuous denigration and any accomplishment was ignored or minimized. My parents did not like me and showed it.
My mother, forever short on empathy, told me pointedly when I was a precocious six-year-old that she had wanted a girl with black hair and brown eyes; she looked down at my small blonde, green-eyed self with pursed lips, shook her head, and walked off. My father bullied me at every opportunity and repeatedly snarled at me, “You can’t do anything right.” Once as a teenager, in a spurt of unusual defiance, I said quietly, “Yes, I can.” “Name one thing you’ve ever done right,” he countered. I was silent. I couldn’t think of anything.
I had no siblings (my mother would have liked to have more children, but my father would not agree), and there was no extended family at all due to continuous moving from one town to another. I don’t remember having a single friend until I was in the tenth grade.
At home, I was not allowed to speak up for myself—without anger being blasted at me or worse. Eventually the reprimand was built in; I stifled myself at the same time I tried to speak or write, resulting in the silence of blocked speech. I was only able to speak when a specific question was asked of me, unable to initiate conversation, or to say what I needed and very much wanted to express.
As a result of these things, my self-esteem never developed. Neither did my social skills.