Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Once, years ago, I phoned my father in a state when I was awaiting nerve-wracking test results. He reasoned with me, pointing out possible benign explanations for my symptoms and counselled me to be patient, not to jump to dire conclusions. I was not consoled and he grew exasperated. His voice rose as he demanded to know why I was the way I was, why I always assumed the worst. In reply, I surprised myself by making, for the first time, a direct connection between my traumatised past and my anxious present. I told him that I never assumed everything would be all right, that I was always braced for the worst and on guard, the better to be ready for it when it came. I told him what it felt like never feeling safe. I told him how, in the wake of violence, a child hopes madly that it will not happen again and when it does, time after time, they learn to expect the shock, the startling tear in the fabric of ‘normal’. I told him the worst felt to me surer, more trustworthy, more reliable and more likely than any other possibility. My father listened in stunned silence and his voice, when he spoke, was shaken. It stayed that way for weeks.

  It must have weighed on his mind because a couple of months later he emailed asking why I had never spoken of the violence. If only you’d told me, he said. I tried to explain the cone of silence that descends on chronic violence and abuse. If my father had asked the right questions, if anyone had, I probably would have told, but it’s too much to expect a child carrying the weight of her own and her mother’s pain and shame to confide in those by whom she feels abandoned. Even after many years of therapy, publicly breaking the silence is uncomfortable. I grapple with feelings of disloyalty to my mother’s memory, with the fear of being viewed a whinger. But my desire to reach other traumatised people is stronger. I want to speak for those who grew up with family violence or dysfunction and don’t find a way out of the maze of substance addiction, those who are diminished and die in trauma’s long shadow, those who never find the words. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Nobel peace laureate and author of almost sixty books, including Night, a memoir about the murder of his family and his survival in a Nazi concentration camp as a teenager, writes: ‘For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living.’

  Despite the catalogue of woes, trauma is not all bad news. Its psychological effects do have an upside. Survivors often have a remarkable empathetic capacity and many work in the helping professions. Some days I think I’d trade my freakish antennae and super-sensitivity for a non-traumatised childhood and peace of mind in a heartbeat, but we don’t get to rewrite the past, only our interpretations of it. When a series of debilitating panic attacks took me back to therapy in my forties, I focused for the first time on my anxiety and panic disorder and its roots in trauma. I was told that recovery from chronic trauma is possible, but it’s a slow and arduous process, frustratingly nonlinear and vulnerable to relapse, and it resists the neatly tied-up-with-a-bow endpoint. At the heart of a panic attack is an utterly overwhelmed child, saying: ‘I can’t cope. Help!’ Recovery means facing the fact that no one is coming. One must learn to soothe oneself. Even well into recovery, the chronic trauma survivor may face setbacks due to high stress levels and inadequate time for the activities that help (yoga, meditation, friendship, etc.) and fresh trauma can set off a relapse.

  Herman describes three stages of recovery: establishing safety and support; remembrance, mourning, reconstructing and telling the trauma story; and reconnection with ordinary life. While I’ve successfully negotiated each of these stages I cannot claim to be free from the negative effects of my history. I’ve turned many corners, but sometimes I feel like I’m circling within a spiral. My life is transformed. Richer, deeper, better in many ways than I imagined possible, but I am continually brought undone. I still, for example, experience occasional panic attacks, and there are phobias I’ve not yet overcome or mustered sufficient desire to challenge. Avoidance is a drug. Maybe I’m selling myself short. Maybe I’m exhausted after decades of expending energy and effort. Maybe I’ve matured and relaxed my perfectionistic impulses. I’ve reached some kind of acceptance, some kind of inhabiting who I am.

  The night my hysterical neighbour was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed by a team of policemen in the hallway outside my door, my ex-husband did what most people would do: he backed off and watched from a distance, ready to help if called on. As for me, the scene activated some ingrained neural pathway and I entered the fray at the speed of light, just like I had back in the day. There I was in an instant, trying to placate my irrational and frantic mother, begging her to be reasonable and stop ‘making it worse’, imploring her all-powerful assailant mismanaging her overreaction to back off and let her go. When my neighbour was dragged off to St Vincent’s psychiatric unit for an assessment, I called three times to plead her case against committal. And when she was released and taken to the station to be charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, we were outside at two o’clock in the morning, in the cold, waiting for her. When she emerged, she looked straight at me and said, ‘I’m broken.’ She stopped under a lamppost and lit a cigarette with shaking hands before walking off into the night.

  I worried nervously about her the next day. Ancient neurons were sparking and I found it hard to separate my neighbour from my mother and myself. When she knocked on the door and apologised, hiding her face in disgraced tears, I told her I too had panic attacks and that I understood. I suggested she get a letter from a psychiatrist explaining that her behaviour was the result of the fight switch being activated in the fight-or-flight response of a severe anxiety attack, as it might help her defence. I lent her a book called Power over Panic by Bronwyn Fox. She said she wanted to find a therapist and I mentioned gingerly that the majority of people with panic disorder have experienced trauma or profound neglect, and that if this was the case she should look for a trauma therapist. She disclosed that she had grown up with domestic violence. Me too, I said.

  I don’t know what became of her. I do remember her parents came to see us, and asked us to write a letter for her court hearing, which we did. The mother, all pinched features and wiry body, sat leaning forwards and bending over backwards. The father sat stolid, manspreading, tightly coiled and hyper-masculine. My heart ached for their daughter, but I couldn’t offer her friendship. We were worlds apart, she didn’t seem ready to face down her trauma and wouldn’t likely have accepted it, and we lost contact when I moved out after my ex-husband and I separated. I hope she got ready and found good company along the way. In the test of endurance that is the post–chronically traumatised life, friendship is both the gold and the canary in the mine. It has been, all along, my saving grace.

  In 1977, on a windy summer day, my childhood best friend, Emma, and I walked into a milk bar on Sydney’s Broadway and, as we often did, struck up a conversation with a complete stranger about Sherbet, the Australian pop phenomenon du jour, and star act of an outdoor concert held that day across the road at Victoria Park. The stranger turned out to be Mike Meade, host of Flashez, an ABC TV afternoon music show. Captivated by our fervour, he asked if he could interview us. In the park, before the camera, poised between childhood and adolescence, we poured our hearts out. This slice of film is now a time-capsule testimony for a generation of Sherbet worshippers, an eternal reminder of the crazed and vivacious, bold and unspeakably vulnerable thirteen-year-old girls we were. Baby-faced virginal groupies, we both wore our dark hair long and parted in the middle. I’m wearing a white cotton dress and I have a spattering of pimples on my forehead, an early crop of what would become a distressing teenage propensity towards acne breakouts. In honour of Sherbet’s guitarist, I have Harvey written up the length of my arm and I’m holding a stuffed bear I’ve named after him, in confusion between amour and childish homage.

  Harvey James was my one true love back when Emma and I happened upon Mike Meade. When Harvey died of lung cancer, in Melbourne in 2011, aged just fifty-eight, the internet was momentarily aw
ash with Sherbet: I saw photos I had mooned over when they covered my bedroom wall, photos that once went everywhere I went, images imprinted deep in the still-reverberating pubescent region of my psyche. I phoned Emma to see if she’d heard the news. Though Harvey was the object of my fanatical affections, it was my devotion to Emma that got me through the troubling years following my parents’ divorce.

  Emma and I met when we were six, after my mother and I left Aunty Nance’s and moved into the house across from Emma’s in Annandale. It was the early 1970s and we lived opposite each other on a quiet, wide street in a laid-back urban neighbourhood, made more interesting by the mysterious ‘Abbey’ around the corner, a fifty-room gothic mansion rumoured to be haunted. Emma and I bonded swiftly and ardently. When I was with her it felt like I had a compass that I lacked alone. Our friendship was characterised by a mutual commitment to fun and outrageous pranks. We packed our mothers’ bras with tissues, stuffed small pillows under our clothes and wandered around talking up the trials of our pretend-pregnancies.

  We stole flowers from gardens with plans to start a guerrilla florist business. We made up unflattering ditties about our nemesis, Stephen ‘Dick’ Stark, who lived down the road, a rude, bespectacled bullyboy who tortured animals. We choreographed elaborate routines to popular songs of the day and performed them for our families and schoolmates. We planned detailed escapades on family outings, undertaking all manner of orchestrated and spontaneous adventures.

  We shared beds during countless sleepovers and traded ‘goosies’ – back ticklings used as a private currency. I might, say, negotiate being allowed to borrow her blue floral maxidress in exchange for a hundred goosies, which I would deliver in full on the next sleepover (you had to count out loud as you were doing it to ensure you reached the quota – skiving was not permitted). We were the daughters of divorced parents and neurotic, self-absorbed mothers, and we took refuge in each other, but there was one significant difference: Emma was close to, and clearly loved by, her seafaring navy-officer birth father and her gentle sailing-obsessed stepfather, while I mourned the absence and apparent disinterest of my father without knowing it and suffered my mother’s childish, whiskey-addled boyfriend, Stuart, whom I held in undisguised contempt (he was as needy and reckless as Al was later rageful and dangerous). Emma was both my escape and my succour. When we were grounded, as punishment for some dastardly transgression (such as the theft of flowers from surrounding gardens), life felt sunless and unbearable, and I watched the front of her house desperately, longingly, for signs of Emma, living for the day I could be with her again.

  What does it mean to ‘survive’ chronic and/or extreme trauma? It means one goes on living, against the odds. There are those who do this alone, as islands, singular in their survival, but I could not have been one of them. Were it not for friendship, for the company of similarly afflicted others, I would not have had the will to carry on. I would not have known how. Friendship was, for me, a lifeline from an early age. My brother came and went, disappearing into teenaged surfiedom on the northern beaches across the bridge. I more or less grew up, after a certain age, as an only child, and my need for the companionship of peers drove me to form ardent alliances. I once wrote a poem called ‘Circle’, in which I tried to get to the bottom of connectedness (an ambition begging to be humbled).

  Friendship was refuge from a home in which a balding man fought me for air. Conflicts between my mother and Stuart could be explosive, but they were not as violent and fearful as those to come in the Al years. Pasty, unfit and flabby, Stuart was physically inept, but that didn’t stop him indulging his infantile overreactions in distraught displays, upending chessboards if my mother was winning and exhibiting a pitiful jealousy of anyone or anything that demanded my mother’s attention, including me. Years later, when I was in my teens, I bumped into him in a pub in Balmain and we got soused in the beer garden and he tried to fondle me. Later still, in my mid-twenties, I saw him at an AA meeting and this time, newly sober, I suffered the ninety minutes in an uncomfortable state of nameless, churning emotion, greeting him with a subdued hello when it ended.

  Sometimes when there was friction my mother called in the cavalry: my grandparents, Glady (short for Gladys) and Johnny (my grandmother’s second husband and the man most present throughout my childhood). Johnny was not my mother’s father, but he loved us and we loved him – at least I know I did, and with a mighty trust I lent to few others. A gentle man, an immigrant who looked like an Asian Elvis, Johnny had been a boxer in his youth. One night, during a particularly nasty fight, they arrived and Johnny surprised us all by punching an already legless Stuart, blow by blow under the street lights, all the way down Annandale Street while I stood in my nightie at the gate, watching and silently cheering him on. It felt like the protection I craved, like someone was on our side, righting a wrong, doing something to help.

  When the relationship deteriorated to the point where my mother asked Stuart to leave, he pleaded to be allowed to say goodbye to me, came into my bedroom while I lay in bed, put his hand down my pants and fingered me. I don’t know how my mother found out – I vaguely remember an adult conversation in which she said I’d told her right after it happened, but one of her closest friends, whom I think of as an aunt and with whom I’m still in touch, says my mother caught him in the act. In any event, my mother knew about it very soon after it happened, and it was the beginning of a saga that took months to play out. She was predictably upset and my ‘aunt’ says it was the turning point, the death knell for the relationship, but here’s the thing: she didn’t walk right away. In the immediate aftermath my mother took him back, and I count this as one of her most damaging betrayals. I cannot imagine a process in which she could even partially reconcile herself to this deranged act, and yet I understand all too well how readily a traumatised mind and wounded being can rationalise the unacceptable. It was, as child sexual assault goes, relatively harmless. He was no doubt drunk and would use that as a defence, and he was clearly not thinking straight, but even as a child I knew some sacred relational seal had been broken. I was devastated when my mother not only let him back into our lives, but also made me move in with him in between the sale of our old house and the purchase of the flat in Glebe. It took decades to forgive her. Despite knowing what he was made of, and to my crestfallen bitterness, she uprooted us to the dank sandstone house Stuart owned in alien Waverley. Losing easy access to Emma was a catastrophe. My loneliness surrounded me and seemed to echo in the damp isolation of Stuart’s lair.

  I started at a school where I didn’t fit in and where the charmless teacher took an immediate dislike to me. Miserable, I was sent to a child psychiatrist. It was at least in part an attempt to help me deal with the abuse, but after several sessions the doctor apparently declared that there was nothing wrong with me other than the fact that I hated Stuart (which I could have told my mother for free), and that was the end of that. I missed Annandale, and remembered my days at Annandale North Public School adoringly, often crying myself to sleep and upon waking, begging not to go to school. But even knowing Emma existed, that I had a Best Friend out there, afforded some comfort.

  It’s a guess, since I have no clear recall of the timeline, but I suspect the night we were expelled from his house might have been the end that stuck. A fight erupted and built to a crescendo in which Stuart gathered up armfuls of our belongings in a drunken frenzy and turfed them onto the street before booting us out after them. Ordinarily, we’d call my grandparents, but they worked nights and it wasn’t always possible to reach them, or even to make a phone call. So we sat on the street with clothes and sundry items strewn around us until a gang of bikers came to our rescue. They asked my mother if she wanted them to sort Stuart out and I was disappointed when she said no.

  In Glebe, life began all over again: I was at a new school I liked with a wonderful teacher. My happiness grew daily, but my mother, single and without her first drug of choice, was deeply
depressed. I was about nine when I took it upon myself to look for a suitable partner for her, going so far as to perform the old asking-for-a-cup-of-sugar trick on an unwitting upstairs neighbour. I felt responsible for my mother’s well-being in a way no child should, and, like the kid who brings booze to the alcoholic parent, I was in a co-dependent relationship with my mother’s addiction. I needed her to be okay, so I had to make her okay. I was also frustrated and bored by her depressive state. I disliked her dispirited, downcast mood around the apartment. Just when I was beginning to give up hope, I befriended Stacey and the mutual matchmaking began.

  Emma’s family had also left Annandale, moving further west, and we had few opportunities to meet. Our friendship was forced to fallow until I was twelve going on thirteen, right on that cusp of childhood and adolescence. In a photo my father took of me in my paternal grandmother’s Seaforth sunroom, which overlooked her glorious garden, I am that mythical creature: the girl-child about to bloom into womanhood.

  Fast becoming a wilful force to be reckoned with, I finally commanded enough impatient autonomy to pursue my wishes and started travelling by train to Emma’s on weekends. We resumed regular contact as if the years between had never intervened.

  Coming back to Emma was like a paradoxical homecoming to escape. Home to a shared sympathy that did not require understanding of our respective histories, home to fun and lightness and adventure, home to relief from what experts in the field refer to as ‘cumulative childhood stress’. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, conducted by Vincent J. Felitti et al., sought to understand the impact in terms of disease, both physical and mental, and concluded that the higher the score of cumulative childhood stresses, the greater the risk of substance abuse, depression, suicide attempts, heart disease and a host of other negative outcomes. The researchers ‘found a strong graded relationship between the breadth of exposure to abuse or household dysfunction during childhood and multiple risk factors for several of the leading causes of death in adults’. It doesn’t take an expert to see that chronic trauma presents challenges to establishing and maintaining healthy friendships, and that children who grow up in abusive environments are likely to find it difficult to trust others, may either have trouble forming bonds or form highly dependent attachments (as I did with Emma), and are prone to having trouble regulating emotions.