Praise for After 9/11
“Hovitz shows us, for the first time, what it was like for families in New York City who suddenly had to live like other war refugees, with no idea where their loved ones were or when the next attack might come. After 9/11 is a moving and remarkable testament to a time that changed our country, told beautifully by a young woman who never gave up hope that she could reclaim her life, no matter how grim things looked.”
—Sean Elder, Newsweek
“Helaina Hovitz has written that rare kind of book that combines a poetic sensitivity to detail, the stark emotion of memory, and a searing glimpse of the human spirit as it suffers, struggles and learns to heal. In her story are the seeds of hope for anyone who has survived trauma and seeks to truly live again.”
—Michele Rosenthal, Heal Your PTSD: Dynamic Strategies That Work
“Helaina Hovitz’s first book is a brave, honest, and fast-paced personal account of the ways in which one day can change the course of our lives forever. Her story is an example of how trauma and addiction become part of a life, not someone’s entire life, and how we can take the wheel and change that course if we are willing to work for it. By combining her own personal experience with interviews and journalistic research, Hovitz shows us, every step of the way, what it is like to finally move towards the light after so many years of darkness.”
—Maia Szalavitz, bestselling author and journalist for TIME
Copyright © 2016 by Helaina Hovitz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Carrel Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas
Cover photo credits: Skyline - iStockphoto; Author photo - Carlos Luna; childhood photo - Author’s collection
Print ISBN: 978-1-63144-062-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63144-063-2
Printed in the United States of America
Author’s Note:
To protect the identity and privacy of the people in this book, I have used their first names or last initials only, and, in some cases, changed names. The few exceptions to this rule are those who have given consent to the use of their full names.
While PTSD and other mental health conditions can become a big part of someone’s life, these things do not make up an entire life. They do not define a person, and they cannot account for all of the choices we make. Therefore, all I can do, and what I have done honestly, is show you how just one day can change someone’s experience of the world around them forever, and how that looks in the context of a life as it goes on.
Dedication
To anyone who lost a piece of their heart or a part of themselves on September 11th.
This is the greatest gift God can give you:
To understand what happened in your life.
To have it explained.
It is the peace you have been searching for.
—Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Acknowledgments
Thank you …
To the team at Skyhorse Publishing, who banded together to make this book possible.
To Michael Lewis, my editor, who believed in my story enough to give me the one “yes” I needed and help me bring this baby home.
To Joelle Delbourgo, my agent and advocate, who took the time to tell me what worked and what needed work, and who patiently answered all of my questions as a first-time author. You truly saved the day.
To Abby Sher, who helped me bring Grandma Lucy to life again.
To Amye Rosenberg, who told me to keep going and going until I found an agent who cared and a publisher who “had balls.”
To Kyle Pope, who told me I could do better and then helped me do it.
To Mark Statman, who agreed to work with me on the beginnings of this project as an independent study back in college, even though it was not, in fact, a collection of poetry or book of Spanish translations.
To Rakhel Shapiro, who helped me find the last missing puzzle piece that put me back together again.
To all of the women in the program who helped me navigate the world “one day at a time.”
To Lindsay Champion, who, despite my instructions to “tear it apart,” gave me constructive feedback in the delicate way only a very dear friend would.
To Farrell Kramer, who always gives it to me straight and who took the time to assure me that, despite the surprising lack of sex scenes, I really had something here.
To Donna Campione, who helped me get on a plane to Disney World and who, to this day, continues to provide long-term support to children struggling with trauma.
To Dr. Arielle Goldklang, who held me to a higher standard and led me to my new beginning.
To Dr. Jennifer Hartstein, whose guidance and support over many years has consistently helped shape me into the person I’ve always wanted to be.
To all of the family members who have cheered me on: Aunt Fran, Aunt Libby, Uncle John, and the rest of the clan that always keeps the invitations coming.
To my parents, for loving me when I was at my most unlovable and for never giving up as we tried and tried again to find the answers that would help me become the daughter I was meant to be.
To Lee, for never letting me give up on my dreams, for being my best friend, my biggest fan, and everything that you are. I feel so lucky each day that I get to share my life with you.
Finally, to my grandmother, who showered me with unconditional love right through to the end, love that I felt even when there were no longer any words. You were the sunshine that warmed my heart through the darkest of my days, and you will always be the love of my life.
Contents
Foreword by Jasmin Lee Cori
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
PART TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
PART THREE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PART FOUR
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
Afterword by Patricia Harte Bratt
About the Author
Foreword
Life through the Lens of Trauma
September 11th, 2001, was one of America’s most visible shared experiences of trauma. Although the whole country was traumatized—most of it vicarious trauma—those in Lower Manhattan were most directly affected, as thousands were sent running for their lives.
There were hundreds of children living and going to school near the World Trade Center on that day, many of whom were caught in the chaos that you saw on television (or perhaps you’ve Googled the footage, or seen it at the 9/11 Memorial Museum). A handful of children were caught directly underneath the Towers from start to finish as the tur
moil unraveled, and that chaos continued to live on inside of them for years.
One of the further damaging factors of this large-scale trauma was that it did not have a definitive ending. There was the uncertainty of who would be found alive, whether or not more attacks were coming, and when people who were displaced would be able to return to their homes. For Helaina, the physical aftermath went on for months, between the toxic particles lingering outside her front door, the presence of the army and police, and the lack of transportation and access to food, medicine, and phones in her neighborhood. Ground Zero was just blocks away—there was no escaping it.
Orange Alerts and anthrax scares further perpetuated the state of emergency. The presumed sense of safety that makes normal life possible was wiped out as quickly as the towers fell. Why did this happen? What will happen next?
Understanding Trauma
Trauma, by nature, is terrifying and completely overwhelming. To be technical for a moment, trauma refers to the impact of a traumatic stressor on a person, although we often use it to refer to those horrifying events. We are rendered helpless at such times, and the most common imprints are feelings of being trapped and helpless. (Those who have a more active response generally fare better than those who can do the least.)
The most common misconception people have about trauma is that it is simply a one-time event to “get over.” Yet for those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it’s not over. It’s not over in the nervous system, not over in the body, not absent from dreams or daily interactions. In PTSD, the trauma is stuck inside, staining every part of our lives.
With PTSD, over both short and extended periods of time—years later, even—we experience panic attacks, a pervasive feeling of impending doom, a fear that we are going to die or that we will do something crazy or uncontrolled. Our dreams are stalked by ghosts of the horrifying event, which intrude into waking memories as well, sometimes taking us over completely, as in flashbacks.
Our nervous systems continue to respond to cues similar to those that occurred in the trauma in ways similar to how we originally responded. These reminders are called “triggers,” and our out-of-proportion response is often called “reactivity.”
We can all be reactive at times, but people who suffer from trauma-related disorders become reactive a lot of the time. Not because they’re choosing to be dramatic, but because something is hitting a raw nerve, and they’re already permanently wound up, exhausted, or depressed. We react in a “bigger” way than the situation calls for, whether it is with more fear, more insecurity, more anger, more mistrust, more of any emotion. We do this even in response to the most ordinary elements of our lives, like work, school, relationships, or our morning commute.
Disturbing thoughts and images may intrude into consciousness from out of nowhere, startling us with their negative content. It may be an image of hurting an animal, or the thought of someone we love being hurt. We could have trouble focusing or concentrating, become highly distractible, lack good judgment, become disorganized, and have poor impulse control. Many trauma survivors feel confusion, self-doubt, and shame about the inability to pick up and carry on.
The lingering effects of trauma also wreak havoc on our relationships. There’s emotional volatility, a desperate need for safety (paired often with an inability to register safety), the fear of being hurt again, the rupture of the trust that allows us to go through our lives in a normal sort of way. Symptoms escalate, continuing a life of chaos and desperate attempts to find something—or someone—to hold onto, and ways to escape what is too intense and terrifying to live with.
With PTSD, we struggle with simple things others take for granted—a good night’s sleep, seeing common images in the media, attending a sports event in a large crowd. Our hyperarousal keeps us on the defensive, ever alert for danger.
Even when life may be going well, we often don’t notice the positive. We only notice how hurt and victimized we feel as our minds create crises from situations which would be innocent enough were it not for our filter. The body sensations we experience are no longer warnings of truly impending danger but are like reruns of past events captured on film.
Unresolved trauma is like a creature with many heads, each tormenting us. Although PTSD is thought of as the classic trauma disorder, it seldom appears alone. It often co-occurs with depression, anxiety disorders, addiction, eating disorders, various types of dissociation, and rigidities. People we might consider “control freaks” are often trauma survivors desperately trying to create safety for themselves and escape the helplessness they carry inside.
Trauma survivors are also hard hit on the health front. They suffer physical diseases that commonly accompany unresolved trauma, like irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, chronic migraines or headaches, chronic lower back pain, high blood pressure, and fibromyalgia.
What is perhaps most disturbing is that some people live with trauma for decades before they ever come to understand what they’ve been living with and where it all began. Helaina did not know any of this until her ninth therapist explained it to her eight years later!
To Helaina’s tremendous credit, as soon as she learned about trauma, she began reading everything she could find, interviewing experts in the field, and reaching out to her former classmates to find out if any of them had experienced the same horrible things. It was during that time that she first reached out to me.
Why Do Some Suffer More?
As if there isn’t enough baggage with trauma, people often feel shame or self-blame when they see others recover more quickly from the same traumatic stressor. It is important to remember that many factors shape our response to traumatic events—factors that both precede such events and follow them.
Age is one of these factors. I would argue that Helaina and her classmates, who were just heading into adolescence, were less resilient than adults who had more stability and coping under their belts, and more vulnerable than children too young to fully cognize what had happened. Adolescents are just starting to understand the world around them. For Helaina and her friends that world was deeply shattered by the terrorist attacks, a sudden calamity that was more than they could take in and integrate, especially with the fight-or-flight response being activated frequently in the aftermath.
Then of course there are individual differences. Some children have stronger psychological foundations than others, related to factors like how secure their attachment is to their parents, what kind of physiology they come in with, how much stress their tender nervous systems have already been under, and how strong their sense of self and safety are.
How needs are responded to after such an event also plays an important part. If fears are met with understanding, grounded reassurance, and feelings are normalized, that helps mediate the damage.
As 9/11 also demonstrated, in moments of fear, we reach out for those we love. Resolving trauma may not always require formal therapy if there is sufficient support from one’s community, but, too often, family, friends, and even well-meaning professionals do not know how to provide that support. Further complicating it for the kids near Ground Zero, their whole community was in a collective haze.
The Cost on Young Lives
Trauma is everywhere. Studies show that half of all American children have experienced severe life trauma, and that eight million adults live with PTSD during any given year. That number likely continues to go up as we see an uptick in climate-related disasters, school shootings, and acts of terrorism. Add these to the standard staple of traumatic events like sexual and physical abuse, medical trauma, and sudden loss, and we see a severely traumatized nation.
Many of these traumatized young ones may not seek help at all, or even talk about their troubles with another person. Or, like Helaina, they may try and try to get better, only to find that nothing “works.” Their brain will not give them any relief. For these reasons, and many more, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people ages fifteen to twenty-four in
the United States.
The account you are about to read is not entirely the direct consequence of 9/11. (Life is never so simple.) Some of what Helaina lived with could be categorized as normal teenage angst—surely, as teenagers, many of us rebelled, or had sex with people we shouldn’t have, or got drunk one time too many.
For Helaina, these normal adolescent challenges were filtered by a brain that had been chemically reconfigured to respond to the world in a way that made almost everything in her life seem dangerous and sad. She experienced her most formative years through a lens of fear and panic, from her first love to her final midterm exam, and the slow, painful loss of the one person who meant everything to her.
There Is Hope
Fortunately, After 9/11: One Girl’s Journey through Darkness to a New Beginning ends on a very hopeful note. Helaina’s relentless dedication to healing paid off. After years of stumbling through the wreckage of her own psyche and a string of therapists and medications that, for the most part, fell far short and failed to identify the role of trauma in her suffering, she found the help she needed. Through tremendous effort, she was able to pull herself out of that rubble and become the young woman she always hoped she could be.
Helaina was able to find relief, happiness, and peace of mind, becoming strong enough to hold herself together even when the world around her crumbles, which the world will do for all of us from time to time.
Please know: A new beginning is always possible. There is healing after trauma.
It’s just that we have to work hard for it. Harder than we’ve ever worked before.
Only then do we find the light.
—Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, psychotherapist and author of Healing From Trauma: A Survivor’s Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
“The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” said Chicken Little.
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