Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  My mother’s lifelong dream of being a working actor came to the fore during her time with Al. In her forties, with one child living independently and the other nearing adolescence, she was finally free to pursue her goal; to take classes, sign up with an agent, and take extra jobs and parts in local theatre productions. Together we conjured up the notion that I too had acting talent and she called on an old family friend to take photos of us – individually and together – that might be useful in landing us gigs. A few years back the wife of that photographer contacted me on Facebook. She had come across the contact sheet from that session and asked if I would like her to send it. When it arrived I stared at the small square black and white images, going from one to the next, fascinated by our performances of femininity. In the top corner photo my mother is lovely, arms crossed, smiling gently and awash with light beaming through a nearby window. In another my mother appears to be deranged, eyes bulging, shoulders hitched high and hands on hips. I don’t remember the photos being taken so I have no context for this, but I imagine she is ‘acting’ mad. I note that it seems to be pre–boob job. In the image beneath we stand together before a white wall. She looks to camera, unsmiling, arms crossed again. My eyes are cast down and off to the side; I have my finger in my mouth. I am spellbound by this image in particular. It seems to capture us both in our respective and related traumas. We stand apart and there’s a symbolic tear in the wall behind us, between us. My mother is drawn, more brittle than beautiful. There’s something about her direct gaze. She resembles a trapped animal, her eyes ghosted by pain. Her mouth is open slightly, as if she wants to speak. I seem lost, spaced out, sad. I’m old enough to have conscious thoughts about my fraught home life, but I never speak of it. I don’t know how to.

  The younger a child is, the less easily they articulate trauma, but it is a mistake to equate this with a lack of, or a reduction in, impact. Herman reports that among twenty children with documented histories of early trauma studied by psychiatrist Lenore Terr, none of the children could verbally describe traumatic events that took place before the age of two-and-a-half. Even so, these experiences were indelibly encoded, if not in ‘indexical’ memory, as Ernst van Alphen calls it, in some less traceable form of memory that encompasses bodily and affective imprints. Eighteen of the twenty children showed evidence of traumatic memory in their behaviour. They exhibited specific fears related to the traumatic events, and they were able to re-enact these events in their play with extraordinary accuracy. But convincing as such studies are, the law, relational expectations and familial harmony often depend on coherent indexical memory.

  Apart from being disorienting, perplexing and problematic in legal contexts, patchy and contested traumatic memory can cause more familial problems down the track. My brother has gone through stages of feeling the need to help me understand, to set me straight, to fill me in on details of aspects of our shared history I was too young to have been aware of. During these periods he has sent emails explaining my past to me, certain that what he sees as the facts in his possession are essential to my process and progress. When it comes to events I was old enough to remember, though, there remain unresolvable discrepancies between our perceptions of what took place. In one of his emails he spoke of being witness to the violence between my mother and Al, though I had no recollection of his presence. I sent Stacey a message asking if she remembered him staying with us or being there for much of the fighting (we had connected on Facebook through our old school page some years back). I told her that I did remember the rare visit from my brother, and maybe the odd overnight stay, but that when the fights came back to me, all I got was two little girls stuck in the middle. She said she only remembered him visiting occasionally, and couldn’t recall him sleeping over. ‘I remember the same as you,’ she added, ‘two little girls. We have survived and are doing okay.’

  Herman describes the difference between people who experience a one-off traumatic event and those subjected to repeated and inescapable trauma: ‘People in captivity become adept practitioners of the arts of altered consciousness. Through the practice of dissociation, voluntary thought suppression, minimisation, and sometimes outright denial, they learn to alter an unbearable reality.’ The adult who experiences a one-off trauma from the basis of an already stable personality suffers differently from someone whose selfhood has formed in the chronic presence of trauma. Terr says that people subjected to prolonged trauma develop ‘an insidious, progressive form of post-traumatic stress disorder that invades and erodes the personality’. At the same time, as Silvan Tomkins would have it, chronic trauma paradoxically generates a script of punishing affects that shape its expression throughout a life. Chronic trauma survivors do not fit the classic description of ‘simple’ post-traumatic stress disorder. Their symptomology cannot simply be understood in terms of nightmares or flashbacks.

  How do you describe not just dreaming, but becoming the nightmare, the flashback, cognitively stunned and in thrall to overwhelming panic? Herman has campaigned (so far unsuccessfully) for the term ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder’ (CPTSD) to be included in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), arguing that it more accurately describes the complicated picture with which chronic trauma survivors often present. Chronic trauma is, literally, unacceptable. Even now, after all these years, an image will flash up – me jumping onto Al’s back and clawing at his giant shoulders to pull him off my mother, say – and I tell myself I must be mistaken, this cannot have happened. These visions cannot possibly belong to me and my life. And while trauma is trauma and, as Herman says, ‘the severity of traumatic events cannot be measured on any single dimension’, certain ‘identifiable experiences’ increase the probability of harm, including ‘being taken by surprise, trapped, or exposed to the point of exhaustion’. Each of these is typical for the child reared amid family violence. Days that started out as exciting excursions, whose sunniness seemed sure to continue, would, in a splitting second, cloud over before breaking in a publicly humiliating thunderstorm.

  An echo of Tomkins’ statement that shame ‘strikes deepest into the heart of man’ surrounds me, and I remember the way these public blow-ups struck shame deep into the heart of my child-body. In these moments, every other family seems normal. Other children seem to deserve more, be more. The shame and fear, unleashed, flies around, sticking to everyone in its midst, but most of all to those most vulnerable and most porous: children, non-human animals and those already severely traumatised. There’s a saying that warns against comparing one’s own ‘insides’ with the ‘outsides’ of others, but for children, whose brains have not yet developed the capacity for reasoned, insightful self-reflection, this is gibberish. The surfaces matter a great deal. The family at the next table who seem to be happy and carefree irrefutably are, and are the better for it, and a rupture there, at the surface, at the table of your family, before the judging eyes of others, is nothing less than mortifying.

  The most common time for fights to erupt was late at night after I’d gone to bed. I would lie awake stilling myself so that my breath was almost inaudible, the better to monitor the sounds from outside my door for any sign of discord. Once started, the fights went on for hours. Adrenaline kept me from feeling tired, but I passed countless sleepless school nights tracking intensity and, if it got bad enough, intervening in an attempt to referee. No one is more trapped than a child who cannot survive without the adults they depend on. When those adults are also their prime threat, they are trapped in a double bind. Tenderness and terror. Need and helplessness. No moment was exempt from the potential for that sudden sour turn. In some ways it might have been easier if the conflict had been constant, the abuse daily. The contrasts were extreme and the unpredictability crazy-making: the highs were the highest I’d known – our home was wonderful when the adults were happy and I had never felt safer than when our blended home was harmonious – but the lows were intolerable, crushing, the hysteria of high dra
ma followed by a collective emotional hangover that lasted days. At some point, this state of caution slipped into the past and I’d dare to relax into pleasure and security again, only to be jolted out of it, sooner or later, by the all-too-familiar signs of a fight.

  Children in violent families are strapped into the seat of an endless rollercoaster ride: when you sense a big dip coming, the feeling is much the same as that stage when you’ve been on a ride too long but can’t get off. Everyone is familiar with the cliché of the woman with the bruised face softening at the sight of a repentant abuser. Without the benefit of a fully developed brain and life experience, children are particularly susceptible to the magical thinking that the cycle of family abuse demands. My mother didn’t fit the mousy-victim stereotype. She was an attractive, outgoing, modern working woman who owned her own apartment and was not financially reliant on Al. She was smart and politically aware, and she could be very assertive. Yet she stayed in a relationship in which control, possessiveness and intimidation were routine, vulnerable time after time to the sweet words of remorse and promises.

  If at first I too believed these words, I soon grew familiar with the devastation of fairy-tale faith giving way to bitter disappointment and despair. In the shadows of this devastation, a child develops certain beliefs in an attempt to make sense of cyclical trauma. Waites explains: ‘Trauma is not merely experienced but interpreted … A child’s perception of what happened is frequently quite accurate, and vivid veridical memories often persist long after a terrible event, but understanding why is harder.’ Irrational interpretations can themselves distort developmental processes and complicate recovery, says Herman, and I’ve uncovered a number of the core beliefs that crystallised in my formative years, including Don’t Hope For The Best Because The Worst Will Always Happen; Don’t Trust Happiness Because The Rug Will Always Be Pulled Out From Under You When You Least Expect It; and, most detrimentally, a belief that is so deeply embedded as to almost evade consciousness: The World Is Not Safe And You Will Be Annihilated Any Minute Now. This is the belief most resistant to re-framing, the belief that even now on a bad day stops me taking walks where and when I want to, that has me scanning figures (calculating gender, size, affective aura = assessment of risk) from five hundred feet away as if my life depended on it, that stops me getting on a plane to take up my friend’s tempting offer of staying for free in a farmhouse in south-west France, that makes me want to avoid tunnels, that sparks so deep in my cells as to arrange my muscles into painful knots so set that even deep massage only touches the top layers. These are the thought patterns that trigger the mood disorders and syndromes so endemic among chronic trauma survivors, and they inform a dazzling array of symptoms and behaviours, most of which have eluded correct diagnosis for centuries.

  It’s commonly noted, perhaps most famously by Oprah, that abuse changes who you are. It paradoxically erodes and shapes you. It changes who you might have been to who you become in its aftermath. Neuroscientists now confirm that this is exactly what happens to a developing mind exposed to abuse and trauma. Louis Cozolino, professor of psychology at Pepperdine University in Malibu and author of The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, describes how the systems of the brain link up to create experience: ‘When we reach a certain level of traumatic experience our brain does a number of things that don’t enhance our ability to integrate experience. And that really is what dissociation is, it’s a cutting off, it’s a disconnection of different neural networks.’ In other words, trauma causes a profound split between the language-producing conscious part of the brain and the non-verbal, more primitive regions. This is the reason trauma theorists consider trauma unrepresentable, unspeakable in the conventional sense.

  Even when the trauma story is known and can be told, in therapy for example, a disconnect remains between this linguistic capacity and the hardwired traumatic writing of the brain. In a ‘war zone’, change takes place at the structural/neuronal level as an adaptation to relentless stress. When the ‘war’ is over, the brain doesn’t shift out of its now-programmed, full-tilt limbic response – it gets stuck there, like a vinyl record with the needle caught in a groove, firing up even at minimal stimulation – real, metaphoric and metonymic. Therapy aims to heal this split between thoughts, feelings and words by encouraging speech connected to the traumatic event, using various techniques for activating cortical areas that allow a person to reintegrate neural networks dissociated by trauma.

  My body is at the ready for flight. I can’t switch my nervous system off. It scans and calculates tirelessly, antennae out for threats. I avoid going out on Friday and Saturday nights because the energy ‘triggers’ me. I experience the revved-up speeding down suburban streets, the big bodies spilling out of doorways, the loud lubrications, as threatening and unsettling. What others consider ‘fun’ I might well find menacing. I feel the micro-aggressions as macro. The body remembers.

  In a report titled The Neuroscience of Traumatic Memory, Bessel van der Kolk and Ruth Buczynski describe how the thalamus malfunctions in the overwhelmed brain, which results in traumatised people often remembering images, sights, sounds and physical sensations without context, without a coherent ‘story’ of the traumatic event. So it is that certain sensations or sensory stimuli can trigger a traumatic reaction. Apparently, the brain forms maps of territories marked dangerous and safe. The brain of an abused child can become wired to believe, ‘I’m a person to whom terrible things happen, and I’d better be on the alert for who’s going to hurt me now.’ This can’t be fixed by talking about the event in the past, which is not in the past at all, but in the present, in the very sensations of the now. ‘The past,’ they say, ‘is only relevant in as far as it stirs up current sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts. The story about the past is just a story that people tell to explain how bad the trauma was, or why they have certain behaviors.’ All the talking, all the therapy, all the writing, all the putting the pieces of the puzzle together don’t quell that indefatigable fear that I’m a person to whom terrible things happen, but they have helped lessen the stranglehold of that fear. They’ve given me resources to draw on in dealing with it, and have enabled me to meet myself with compassion more often in those moments in which I disappoint and frustrate myself. I don’t see myself as cured. It’s not black and white. I don’t graduate from grief; it comes in waves and layers and varying intensities. It laces my days, never too far away, keeping my heart soft and pulsing.

  Trauma gets lodged in the tissues. The breath stops, catches, flows shallow, mimicking trauma’s deathliness. I remind myself to breathe, guide the breath down into the belly, remind my breath that it lives, that I live, that I deserve to live, to claim the life in my body. I remember the body in yoga; remember the breath, stretch through pain to release, calming the lizard brain. These zones of reconnection and sacrosanct relief recharge me, help soothe the fractious fight-or-flight switch that is always tripping on, the shimmering not-quite-here thoughts-of-danger that can escalate in a heartbeat to sounding alarm, the stabs of fear. Sometimes, in meditation, there is a moment that opens up into an ebbing oneness that, like the sea, can’t be broken.

  Herman cites three symptomological categories of CPTSD: hyper-arousal, intrusion and constriction. Hyper-arousal manifests as irritability and restlessness, a quickening to anger, impulsive and risk-taking behaviours, hyper-vigilance, sleep disturbances, and psychosomatic complaints. Intrusion includes the flashbacks and nightmares most typically associated with war veterans and PTSD. And constriction, which flies under the radar more than the others, entails various avoidance strategies – shutting down or out, surrender and psychic retreat, fantasy, numbing, trances and dissociation – in which the traumatic experience, and any experience thereafter, may ‘lose its quality of ordinary reality’. This usually happens to me in the most mundane of circumstances – at dinner, in a crowded shopping centre or under the glare of merciless fluorescent lights.

  I recall a surre
al sense of detachment during fights. They felt like film, not quite of this world. In its most extreme form, this detachment presents as dissociative disorder. Most people who dissociate do so in terms of amnesia for certain memories, absent-mindedness and a lack of clarity around certain events or their childhood in general. As a teenager and young adult, I experienced almost complete amnesia regarding the violence and abuse during my childhood. When a drug counsellor in a detox once asked me about my early life, I told him I’d had a ‘happy childhood’. I wasn’t lying – I believed it; I couldn’t remember.

  There were good times. When I was growing up, my world was peopled by characters, eccentrics and artists. There was colour and laughter and affection. I was one of the fortunate ones. For all the madness, I was wanted and well cared for in many respects, but the amnesiac erasure of the dark side left me with the belief that I’d been raised by bohemians who were above and beyond ordinary accountability, and who, in any event, had nothing to account for. Consequently, while I carried the burden of transgenerational trauma more visibly than anyone else in my immediate family, I had no idea why I was so screwed up. Had I understood my history earlier, I might not have felt so ashamed, so singular in my failure to live well, so alone.

  My hyper-arousal symptoms included ‘psychosomatic’ asthma attacks during our time with Al. They stopped as soon as he left and have never returned. Traumatised people are also prone to ‘real’ illness and impaired immune function as a result of ongoing inescapable stress. Waites cites several studies in which the experience of trauma ‘has been found to be associated with increased susceptibility to infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders, and cancer’. In September 2014 I was diagnosed with endometrial (uterine) cancer and had a radical hysterectomy six days later. A subsequent test result suggested a condition called Lynch syndrome, which puts carriers of a defective gene at high risk of various cancers, most especially colon and endometrial. I was referred to a cancer genetics clinic for further screening and a specialist test that would give a more definitive, if not conclusive, result.