Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Debating whether or not to undergo the test, I phoned my brother, who has sired five sons, to discuss it with him and let him know the outcome might have implications for him and my nephews. He determined from the outset that he would not take the test himself even if it showed I had the defective gene, nor would he raise it with his sons. ‘We’re traumatised people,’ he said plainly. ‘It’s going to come out one way or another. I’ll take my chances and deal with it if it comes to pass.’ I ended up testing negative for the unfortunate gene, but the idea of trauma being somatically expressed as physical illness is a compelling one. As Matt Haig writes in The Guardian, ‘You can’t draw a line between a body and a mind any more than you can draw a line between oceans.’ Beyond the established associations between trauma and certain mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, and the physical toll of trauma-related addictions, it’s impossible to measure the extent of lived, embodied sufferings or the collective economic cost of chronic trauma.

  But for all trauma’s symptomological expressions, its silences and absences can be just as lethal, and its more covert operations are hard to pin down. Even though I still struggle with an ingrained sense of unsafety from living with violence, that type of florid dysfunction in my family has been, in some ways, easier to come to terms with than other, less overt violations. Like neglect. Like the daily familial and cultural abandonments that send the message: you are lesser, you don’t matter, you don’t exist.

  Even (or maybe especially) in an amnesiac person, CPTSD can manifest as eating disorders, self-cutting, and substance and process addictions including workaholism, compulsive sexual behaviour, anxiety and/or panic disorder, phobias, obsessive–compulsive behaviour, perfectionism and over-achieving. Exhibiting lots of symptoms is no guarantee of diagnosis, though. Survivors suffer first from the condition, and second from a lack of understanding of it. As Herman notes, ‘Because post-traumatic systems are so persistent and so wide-ranging, they may be mistaken for enduring characteristics of the victim’s personality. This is a costly error, for the person with unrecognized post-traumatic stress disorder is condemned to a diminished life, tormented by memory and bounded by helplessness and fear.’

  People often lose patience with survivors and counsel them to ‘let go’ of their anger or fear, failing to realise that survivors are not experiencing a ‘normal’ order of emotion. Rather, Herman explains, the survivor is ‘continually buffeted by terror and rage. These emotions are qualitatively different from ordinary fear and anger. They are outside the range of ordinary emotional experience, and they overwhelm the ordinary capacity to bear feelings.’ Though it’s broadly believed that people are generally more attuned to emotional complexity and more aware of mental health issues now than in previous decades and centuries, there are few places in the technologised, corporatised contemporary age equipped to recognise and accommodate complicated and problematic beings like these, and yet we are everywhere, even if we don’t all wear our trauma on our sleeves.

  Perfectionism commonly masks traumatic shame among those with CPTSD. Domestic violence has an undeniable effect on a child’s self-esteem. In order to preserve faith in their caregivers, children often reject the obvious conclusion that something is wrong with unbalanced or abusing adults. Instead, the child assumes responsibility – and a belief in ‘innate badness’ or ‘wrongness’ is born. In an attempt to ‘construct some system of meaning that justifies it’, Herman continues, the child ‘seizes upon this explanation early and clings to it tenaciously, for it enables her to preserve a sense of meaning, hope, and power’. My sense of culpability was heightened by my regret at having brought my mother and Al together. Poor self-esteem can manifest as anti-social behaviour or it can be masked by an abused child’s ‘persistent attempts to be good’.

  I was not an outstanding student at school, but I did excel at ballet. During the Al years, I threw myself into dancing with unprecedented zeal. I went to classes after school and all day Saturdays. I pushed myself to the limit in one class after another – classical, jazz ballet, acrobatics – and it wasn’t long before I was chosen to be part of the Keane Kids, an elite group of students who performed professionally on television and in shopping-centre showcases during school holidays. I embodied the showbiz ethic ‘the show must go on’. By early adolescence, however, I had given up both dancing and trying to be good. I took up running (metaphorically speaking), fast and hard. The stereotypes are entrenched. I was considered a problem when I cut loose with drink and drugs and men, but the frenzied dancing was admired. Success means you’ve licked it, at least until the early-age coronary, or the collapse of an intimate partnership, or the discovery that your kid is hooked on ice.

  Interestingly, the most notable and visible backlash to trauma-related stereotyping comes from men who object to men being cast as perpetrators of violence. A younger generation of vocal feminist commentators like Clementine Ford and Amy Gray are regularly flamed and trolled by the ‘not all men’ brigade, mostly men’s rights activists or sour lefty-lightweights keen to distance themselves from the dirty deeds of the patriarchy. I know women aren’t the only victims of violence, and men aren’t always the perpetrators, and even when they are it’s not always as clear-cut as many would like to think. My mother often provoked Al and at times it seemed she thrived on the chaos. To my child’s mind my mother was ‘asking for it’. I could never understand why, just when Al seemed to be settling down, she would slam doors, throw objects and revive the drama. Now myself a woman older than my mother was during the years she lived with domestic violence, I understand that people are complex, and that Al and my mother were driven by feelings more powerful than reason – triggers not only stronger than their regard for each other, but stronger too than their love for their children. My mother was physically tiny. She was fierce at times, but beyond occasionally taking aim with a handy objet d’art she was no physical threat to any man. He, on the other hand, was a beef-caked hulk, a man of muscle and fury, yet the cowardly mismatch gave him no pause in a heated moment.

  Having spent a great deal of time in recent years reading and writing about trauma, with a focus on the ways it is transmitted across generations and written about, I have little doubt that trauma – along with attitudes born of aeons of religiously sanctioned patriarchy – had a bearing on Al becoming the man he was. The question of accountability is a vexing one for those of us who view transgenerational trauma as undeniable, not only within our own families but across culture at large. But however driven by polluted passion, whatever the dark traumatic secrets of his own past might have been, I hold Al responsible for not taking whatever steps were necessary to prevent his passing his trauma on and to protect his partner and the children in his care. Not all men. Not all men act out violence, but most raised as boys inherit the entitlements or imagined entitlements that inform it. And many engage in the micro-denials that enable it. Not all men are dangerous and not all men require so little of themselves in the face of it if they are. #alllivesmatter; #notallmen; #ffssake: focus.

  A worldwide movement of feminist collectives have been ‘counting dead women’ since 2012. Karen Ingala Smith began the first count in the United Kingdom. This project, Femicide Census: Profiles of Women Killed by Men, features vignettes that tell the story, as much as is known, about each woman who died as a result of a man’s violence. Head shots of the murdered women appear in a grid-like visual memorial. They are all ages, from all cultural backgrounds, smiling, captured in happier moments unseeing their brutal ends. ‘I want us to stop seeing the killings of women by men as isolated incidents, to put them together and to see the connections and patterns,’ says Smith. ‘The murders of some women barely cause a ripple, some don’t make it into the national media.’ And even when they do, the slippery language of journalese, which usually fails to ground the event in social and political terms, rarely does them justice and rarely acknowledges aeons of patriarchy as the setup. Gabriele Schwab gets
to the heart of the whitewashed matter when she says, ‘The collective or communal silencing of violent histories leads to the transgenerational transmission of trauma and the specter of an involuntary repetition of cycles of violence.’

  When people talk about family violence they often speak of ‘women and children’, as if they were equal in their capacity to confront their circumstances. I understand enough about transgenerational trauma to know my mother had no choice in having been wounded and that she was compelled to act out her woundedness the way she did, but I do hold her accountable for failing to seek help, though it must be said ‘help’ was not as readily available then as it is now and, even when sought, not all sources of help are up to the task. However economically, emotionally or otherwise trapped an adult may be by their abuser, whatever fears they hold for safety, they have power, options and abilities that a child does not. Perhaps this is what remains of my rage towards my mother, the part of me that says, ‘I don’t care how much he broke you down; you were the mother and you should have protected me.’

  According to Herman, the psychological control of the victim is not completed until they are forced to violate their own moral principles and betray their basic human attachments. The moment Al succeeded in forcing my mother to betray me is burned in my being. He made no secret of the fact that he beat his own daughter, probably from a very young age. He believed whipping Stacey with a belt was an acceptable form of parental control. My mother had never hit me nor allowed anyone else to do so, but there came a day when Al decided that Stacey and I should both be punished for some childish wrongdoing with ‘the strap’.

  Stacey could take the beatings, in the sense of not being surprised by them, and she rarely cried, but I went into shock: I cowered and pleaded with my mother not to let him hit me. As the strap came down on the flesh of my buttocks and thighs, blow after blow, I screamed in anguish. She sat on the sofa and watched, her face twisted into a grimace of pain and guilt. I could see in her eyes that she knew she was violating us both, and my howling as she looked on is my ‘indelible image’ of her betrayal of us both to this day. We later lost many years to estrangement when my belated ire made it impossible for me to be in the same room as her and be civil, and we reconciled only shortly before her death.

  Watching a parent suffer and die is hard: you’re gripped by a confusion of love and grief and guilt. A sickly woman for much of her life, my mother took ill suddenly in a new and mysterious way and was sent to hospital for tests. I was living interstate and after a prophetic dream in which she died I rushed back to Sydney. Two days later I was holding her hand in intensive care. I was demented with fatigue and sorrow the night she died. I hadn’t slept and had barely eaten for days. My partner had come to join me, and when I finally drifted off I dreamed she was holding me, comforting me. In the eulogy I penned in those first days after her death I wrote: ‘In reflecting on and celebrating her life, I think she would want us to acknowledge the enormous physical and emotional pain she experienced at times.’ She was not always honest when I needed her to be – such is the cunning of denial, the convoluted mental manoeuvres of rationalisation, justification, minimisation, and their working to twist reality inside out, shaping it to hallucinations of convenience and preference – but at least she had a welcome capacity for it, which aided my process of facing our history. I wonder, sometimes, how she would feel about this book. I think she would find it painful and understand what Schwab speaks of when she says: ‘Writing from within the core of trauma is a constant struggle between the colonizing power of words and the revolt of what is being rejected, silenced. Trauma kills the pulsing of desire, the embodied self. Trauma attacks and sometimes kills language. In order for trauma to heal, body and self must be reborn and words must be disentangled from the dead bodies they are trying to hide.’

  My already troubled relationship with my father and my friendship with Stacey were also collateral damage. In my child’s mind, I reasoned that if my father loved me, he would have known and done something about the violence with Al. I longed for his protection all through my childhood and never felt it. As for my relationship with Stacey, it was shattered. Not only were we no longer sisters; we weren’t even on speaking terms. Stacey mimicked her father’s abuse of my mother by writing ‘slut’ and other slurs on our belongings. I sought to protect my mother and hardened against Al and Stacey.

  A deep rift formed between Stacey and me. As the situation declined I sided with my mother, Stacey with her father. Stacey slept through the fights; I rushed out of our bedroom fearing for my mother’s life. Stacey had lived with violence all her life and accepted it as normal, having known no other reality, but to me it felt life-threatening every time. I had lost my friend and I had no one with whom to share the terror. This is the kind of mind-fuckery that happens in an abusive, oppressive situation; even allies and those who share injustices can turn on each other like rats in a cage. When it’s not safe to challenge or be angry with perpetrators, or when those people seem all-powerful, untouchable or unreachable, it’s tempting to take it out on someone safer. This plays out in homes and boardrooms and factory floors: people pitted against the patriarchy turning against each other while the abuse of power continues unchecked.

  Not long after I found my mother sleeping on the sofa with a knife under her pillow, it ended – not with a bang but with the whimper of my exhausted ultimatum. I gave my mother a choice: him or me. She took out an apprehended violence order and Al and Stacey left. I felt responsible for bringing Al into our lives, and I had a distorted sense of my power to influence events, as if she wouldn’t have ended up in yet another questionable relationship with a different troubled man had she been left to her own devices. The false sense of empowerment I exhibited in taking off for London when most girls my age were studying for exams and playing team sports had its roots in moments like these, moments in which I imagined myself both the creator of worlds, a little God, and the bearer of them, the one on whose shoulders they must be carried.

  I thought Al’s exit and the reign of peace that set in as I geared up to start high school was the end of the story, but it was just the beginning of my life as a traumatised teenager. I started smoking, drinking and experimenting with drugs at thirteen, and by fifteen I was drinking heavily and consuming drugs recklessly. I overate and was depressive as a teenager. As a young adult I had a volatile relationship that featured occasional violence, followed by others that kept my stress levels sky-high. I was a poly-addict: I’d take anything that would get me high and preferably oblivious, in any combination, but I had my favourites. I liked barbiturates and benzodiazepines and drank alcoholically as a baseline, started mainlining speed at twenty, and then when that burned me out, leaving me in a state of underweight paranoia, I turned to heroin. I was never tough and I was never cool. I was self-obsessed, chaotic and sloppy.

  Sometimes, traumatised people are suicidal. I remember waking up from yet another heroin overdose and realising with a quiet clarity that I was toying with suicide, which brought with it a sense of eerie comfort. But when I continued to survive overdose after overdose, I decided it was time to find a better way to live. Being on the planet in a non-self-destructive way was not something I knew how to do, and quitting mood-altering substances was only the first of a series of necessary major changes. In those early years ‘clean and sober’, I lived on mania, coffee, cigarettes and sexualised highs. After the shock of adjusting to sobriety subsided, the trauma surfaced in new ways, mostly in painful sexual relationships and pronounced anxiety, which Herman describes as a ‘major symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder’.

  I was afraid of many things, including the night and physical attack, and I arranged my world so that these fears were rarely confronted. In other words, I became a deft practitioner of what’s known in the mental health sector as ‘avoidance strategies’. Over the years, I developed new phobias: I was afraid of storms and became claustrophobic and agoraphobic. A
t one stage, I developed an obsessive fear of illness and drug reactions, proving Herman’s assertion that chronically traumatised people often ‘perceive their bodies as having turned against them’. The more I cleaned up my life, the more self-destructive habits I addressed, the more anxious I became. I grew more controlling in response, both in my relationships and in my environment, where I developed OCD tendencies. Unmedicated, my brain was maladapted to ‘peace time’.

  Most of my friends considered me acceptably neurotic, but my lovers and partners struggled to accommodate my relentless array of phobias, internal dislocations and demands. Everyone who ever loved me has suffered by association. My friends could not have failed to notice my extreme self-absorption, although few had the insight to discern its roots in CPTSD. Being mistaken for plain self-centred is one of many misunderstandings. Even if survivors finally see the connection between their past and present symptoms, it doesn’t guarantee that others will extend the compassion they crave. If we ignore our past, no one knows and we inadvertently alienate those around us. If we discuss it, we risk being seen as malingerers, as people who live in the past – which is, in a sense, exactly what we do, if not consciously or by choice. ‘Traumatised people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of religion and community.’ This passage from Herman’s book might sound melodramatic, but it perfectly describes the non-trusting chronically traumatised psyche.