by Lori Shenher
Little had changed with the VPD-recommended psychologists in the ten years since I’d first sought treatment. None of the people on their very short list had formal training in trauma, which astounded me given the nature of police work. I searched online for someone specifically trained in trauma and located an office I could easily access so that I wouldn’t quit prematurely, as I’d done with other therapists since 2002. I found Dr. Joanne MacKinnon, called her up, and began my journey.
We began working together weekly to slowly untangle the last twelve years of my life. I explained that I’d tried neurofeedback, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), art therapy, meditation, yoga, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and a multitude of other treatments with varying degrees of mild success, but I continued to feel broken. I’d never stuck with anything for long, other than yoga. I told her I’d done EMDR with Margo Weston in 2002, but her number was no longer in service, and I had no energy to track her down. She had helped me, and I thought I should do more EMDR. I also returned briefly to my neurofeedback therapist, the wonderfully caring and generous Barb Macnaughton, and found relief from some of my agitation through that and the cranial-sacral massage she also practiced.
Dr. MacKinnon and I began my treatment while I continued working as an intelligence officer with the VPD, analyzing and assessing threats in the public domain of the City of Vancouver. She helped me manage my ongoing frustration and anxiety as the final months of the Missing Commission of Inquiry degenerated into farce and spectacle, complete with internal accusations of sexual harassment in the commission’s own office, cries of conspiracy from the lawyers for the victims’ families and Downtown Eastside interests, resignations, and the provincial government’s choking off of hearing time and public funds to properly conduct the inquiry. Using EMDR, she helped me to loosen the grip these old and newly inflicted traumas held on my body and mind. In those months, Dr. MacKinnon kept me from slipping deeper into the pit. It was no mean feat.
Each appointment stirred up old skeletons, not buried, merely discarded in the ditches along the road of my consciousness. For the rest of the day after each appointment, I felt crankier and more agitated and was short with my kids and partner. It seemed like I was getting nowhere, but I felt a need to keep going, to have some faith in the process. Dr. MacKinnon assured me this was common with EMDR treatment and told me that some people were so stirred up after a session that they were advised not to drive. I trusted her; there was nowhere else to turn, and I couldn’t remain the way I was.
With her support, I submitted a new claim to the renamed WorkSafeBC in the summer of 2012, hoping my case would be accepted under the new provincial legislation recognizing operational stress injuries such as PTSD in the workplace. My claim was once again denied, in the space of a few weeks. No one from WorkSafeBC interviewed or questioned me. This time, I sought union assistance to submit an appeal.
In May 2012, I advised the VPD Human Resources Section I would no longer be competing for promotion, despite my favorable chances. I copied the email to Deputy Chief Constable Doug LePard; a sergeant in HR responsible for the competition; my inspector; and my supervisor, Sergeant Mike Purdy. Only Mike responded or talked to me about how I was doing and helped me through that year before I finally booked off, because he was my boss and that was his job.
In early 2013, my physical body began failing me further. Digestive problems, aching muscles, and severe allergies had plagued me since 1999, but I’d written them off to normal stress and tried not to worry. Worry was the one thing I could count on, however. I worried incessantly about everything from my own physical health and that of my kids and partner to the world at large. I began to follow politics obsessively. I carried hand sanitizer everywhere, terrified I would contract bird or swine flu and bring it home to my family. I lugged our one-year-old king-sized IKEA mattress back to the store and left it there on the floor, convinced it was causing my pain and nightmares each night, leaving the staff there shaking their heads at the crazy person. I started having visual migraines and eye infections.
I began to avoid driving alone, because whenever I did, I became enraged at everyday traffic and careless drivers. I could keep it in check with my family on board, and I knew enough not to put myself in danger by confronting other drivers when I drove alone, but I railed, hollered, and seethed in the driver’s seat and carried the anger with me for hours. I’d cycled to work for most of my career, but I found myself terrified of being hit by vehicles or crashing my bike, and my commute became more and more unbearable. I wrote nasty emails to colleagues who parked in my assigned parking stall. I ranted at office social functions when I found the conversation ridiculous or lacking in appropriateness or sensitivity—I, who used to enjoy a good dirty joke as much as anyone, began to hate and judge everyone and everything.
On January 10, 2013, a WorkSafeBC review officer drafted an eight-page decision on my appeal, varying the earlier 2012 decision that did not allow my claim of PTSD brought on by my participation in the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. A couple of days later, I came home from work and found the decision in my mail. I opened it and read, throat choked, eyes welling with tears, which prompted my partner to ask, “Did they deny it?”
“No,” I croaked. “They accepted it.”
I read the review officer’s critique of what I’ll politely call the “lacking” investigation she found WorkSafeBC to have done into my original claim. She dismissed my union representative’s request that my claim be reopened and reinvestigated; instead, she accepted the claim outright based on the information provided. She got it. She accepted Dr. MacKinnon’s diagnosis of PTSD.
I felt like a grossly overfilled balloon someone had finally mercifully popped. I immediately booked off from work, even after learning that WorkSafeBC benefits would not be available to me until a forty-day appeal period passed. It made me think of Lent and my Catholic upbringing. I felt quite certain the VPD and WorkSafeBC wouldn’t appeal the decision, and I didn’t care if either of them did.
The next day I slept in and took in a matinee at my local movie theater, where Zero Dark Thirty was playing. The film is loosely based on the true story of a CIA agent’s attempts to locate Osama bin Laden and have him brought to justice. I enjoyed the film but was left obsessing about what the story might have looked like had no one listened to the agent’s theories or provided her the resource support to catch bin Laden. What if she had merely languished in her knowledge of where he was and agonized that no one helped her make a plan or go out to catch him?
I stayed off work for three weeks before succumbing to various pressures—many of my own creation—to return. When I had first booked off, I acted with no plan other than to try to feel better, and although I felt more rested, I remained highly anxious and agitated and was drawn back into my routine of workaholism. Dr. MacKinnon said she would support whatever I decided, but I know she feared that returning to work would not be helpful to me. The work itself was fine, but I hid in my office as I had for eleven years, interacting with others as little as possible. Each morning, I awoke to my 5:00 AM alarm depressed and exhausted from my nightmares. It felt as though I had a ten-ton anvil strapped to my waist. I panicked at the change in myself from the highly anxious, hyper-productive workaholic to someone drowning in depression. I shared this with no one and tried to act as though everything was normal.
Over the spring of 2013, I continued to spiral downhill mentally and physically. I felt agitated, trapped, and hopeless about my future. In April, a friend of mine who was a sergeant in the VPD contacted me to talk about a PTSD treatment program one of her employees had taken and benefited from greatly. I was open to anything. She connected me with her employee, and we met for a coffee and talked about our experiences. At one point, I nervously said to him, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I really need something like that.”
He smiled and laughed, not unkindly. “I said the same thing. Trust me. You need it.”
I knew he was right. I did need it. I needed something.
28
Doing the Hard Work
• • •
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
JAMES BALDWIN
THE VETERANS TRANSITION Program (VTP) is a ten-day residential PTSD treatment program developed by Dr. Marv Westwood of the University of British Columbia (UBC) Psychology Department. It’s split into two four-day weekends and one two-day weekend, and no drinking or drugs are allowed. The program is based on creating a sense of safety and trust in the group, which allows participants to take part in a therapeutic enactment of a past trauma they feel is keeping them emotionally stuck.
The therapeutic enactments are well planned in consultation with the participant and the clinicians. Most group members are given a role to play in each other’s enactments, including someone who acts as the double for the person whose enactment it is so that they never have to “stand” in their traumatic event the way they did in the past. They watch their double go through the incident and often will step in and say things they may not have been able to say in the actual moment. They are frequently asked what they are feeling physically and where in their bodies they feel it. This is designed to guide the trauma out of the body and allow the mind to reprocess it, effectively leading the person to become “unstuck.”
It’s an incredibly powerful and cathartic tool designed to take the experience through both the mind and the body to process it effectively. It gives the person a different perspective and a voice, which they may not have had during the traumatic event. I am in no way an expert on group therapy or therapeutic enactments, but participating in my own therapeutic enactment and witnessing and taking part in those of others has been and continues to be a very large part of my recovery. The clinicians like to use a logjam analogy, guiding participants to loosen that one log, which will often loosen the rest to start the flow of mental health again. It certainly achieved that for me.
At the end of May 2013, I found myself sitting in the cafeteria of a Roman Catholic retreat center eating breakfast with several men with military and first responder backgrounds, waiting for our VTP to begin. We chatted easily, but our nervousness wasn’t far from the surface. We all knew why we were there, and this was far more terrifying than arresting bad people, driving an ambulance, or deploying to a war zone. Our enemies were within us, and we all later confessed we’d been more scared to be there than of anything else we’d faced in our lives. We worked in a group therapy setting, guided by two psychologists and two paraprofessional graduates of the program. We started telling our stories.
Respecting the confidentiality of the program and its participants is of paramount importance to the success of any group therapy. We came from diverse backgrounds, and our traumas were varied, ranging from experiencing terrible sights and smells, suffering traumatic events at early developmental stages, and lacking support from our institutions and communities domestically or upon return home from combat missions. Often, we suffered from a combination of experiences, but all were horrifying on one level or another.
Drs. Matt Graham and Mike Dadson, two UBC PhD graduates with vast experience in leading group therapy and treating trauma, led us through an introduction to the program. Assisting them were two paraprofessionals, both Canadian Armed Forces leaders, both due to retire on medical release for PTSD, and themselves graduates of the VTP. Immediately, I felt we were in safe hands. I may as well give this all I have, because I’ve tried everything else. Later, as I came to know the other participants, I learned we all felt the same way: each of us was desperate for a last chance at recovery.
It’s difficult to describe the changes I saw in the men I worked alongside in the VTP and felt in myself over the ten days of the program and the following year. I watched the light return to eyes that on the first day or two had been glassy, distant, and devoid of feeling. It was as though our bodies had been freed—even if only temporarily at first—from the ghosts haunting them. We’ve gone our separate ways, but I know I could call any one of them and they’d be there for me in a heartbeat, and we do keep in casual contact.
We all placed our trust in the clinicians and each other and shared our deepest terrors and experiences, trusting that this was a safe place to do so. The energy in our circle was palpable; at one point, I asked Matt Graham if it was unusual to feel this so tangibly, and he told me that it was what they strive for, but our group was extraordinary. The care the clinicians took to create that circle and foster that trust seemed effortless, but I knew it was born of a great deal of skill and planning on their part. I am truly indebted to all the men in my group and especially to Matt and Mike.
After the first four-day VTP weekend, I knew I couldn’t go back to work. Sharing some of my experiences and attempts at coping with the others, I understood that I’d pushed myself far beyond a healthy place. Did I believe I could learn to manage my PTSD? Absolutely. However, I also learned that suffering with it for more than ten years meant my case bore many elements of complex PTSD, and I would need to take better care with myself and practice self-care to a much greater degree than I had to that point.
When I completed my VTP, I was only the second female among more than two hundred men to take part. Women were not excluded, but the VTP had been tested and developed using men, and women weren’t aware of the program or didn’t express interest in it. I am thrilled to say I was able to complete my first paraprofessional VTP assignment on the pilot all-female VTP in the spring of 2014, and I hope to work with men’s and women’s groups in this capacity in the future. The skill and compassion of the clinicians is impressive, and the results they achieve are miraculous. To work alongside them to help people who are suffering is truly a privilege for me.
In October 2013, the VTP held a medal ceremony, and Senator Roméo Dallaire—a retired Canadian Forces general who suffered from PTSD as a result of his peacekeeping work during the Rwandan genocide in the early ’90s—presented medals to program graduates. More than two hundred men and two women had completed the VTP by then, and the program had not lost a single one to suicide. Many of the graduates did not attend; it is hard to stage an event and bring together people who still suffer from varying degrees of social anxiety or agoraphobia, but many, including me, managed to make it to the UBC Armoury for the event.
I felt good. I dressed in business clothes—which I hadn’t done in more than a year—and drove to UBC in a thick, chilly fog, determined to get my medal and see “my guys” with whom I’d completed the program. Lt. Col. (Ret) Chris Linford, one of the paraprofessionals on my program, as well as Dr. Mike Dadson, Dr. Matt Graham, and Stan*, another participant from our group, were there, and it was fantastic to catch up during the cocktail portion of the evening.
That was another test for me. In the past, I would invariably drink far too much at “work” (VPD) functions, and after I stopped drinking, in December 2006, I avoided such functions and socializing with police people. The only exception was the annual Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) contact party every January. My relationships with CSIS people were by far the most satisfying and enjoyable of my career, and with them I felt minimal temptation to drink and was able to manage socializing at their parties.
As I mingled at the VTP medal ceremony, I saw Senator Dallaire across the room. I’d brought my well-thumbed copy of his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, hoping he would sign it. I had devoured the book back in 2003, sensing that we shared the similarly faith-shattering experience of doing our jobs and reporting our shocking findings, only to have them ignored or minimized by the people to whom we reported. I knew our situations were much different, but they shared enough common elements that I felt a kinship with the senator. I made my way over to him in a moment when he was alone.
“Senator, I’m Lori Shenher,” I sai
d, extending my hand. I felt a flush of embarrassment, recalling that I’d emailed him years back in frustration with my own PTSD and isolation, asking if he had any advice or treatment information that might help me. His assistant had kindly replied with some suggestions of potential resources, but I knew they saw me for what I was back then: an unstable, desperate, suffering person emailing a stranger as though I knew him.
“Ah, yes, how are you?” He shook my hand and looked me squarely in the eye. I felt fairly sure he wouldn’t know of or remember me. We made some chitchat about his busy travel schedule and Vancouver weather. Eventually, I held up my book.
“I’d be honored if you’d sign this for me,” I said. “I read it during a particularly tough time, and your experiences really resonated with me. I’m planning on writing my own book.” He nodded, listening intently. He took the book from me and began looking for a place to sign. I’d known that he continued to suffer greatly from his PTSD and that he was an ardent supporter of the VTP, despite not having participated himself.
“You should try the VTP, Senator,” I ventured, immediately regretting my suggestion and hoping it didn’t seem intrusive. Suggesting that someone undergo a ten-day residential group therapy program is probably best saved for good friends and family interventions, but I wished that something would help his suffering. He looked up, still holding my book.
“Well, you know, Chris has been after me to try it, but it’s very hard for me to find the time.” He passed me my book.
“Thank you,” I said. “I hope you didn’t find my suggestion impertinent.” I remembered I was speaking to a Canadian senator and retired general. Respect for rank was a habit that didn’t die easily.