Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  By now we were nineteen and running in circles. We careered to a crash one afternoon in the office of a Byron Bay doctor, who promptly admitted us both to detox at the local hospital. We lay side by side in a four-bed ward doped up on Hemineurine, a sedative and hypnotic used for treating alcohol withdrawals. I discharged myself after several days, staggering up Jonson Street under the glaring sun to the old pub opposite the beach, where I began to feel peculiar, not quite right. I went back to the hospital, but the nurses refused to re-admit me: I’d been marked as a troublemaker. They phoned a local rehab for addicts known as The Buttery, on account of its location on the site of an old butter factory. I found myself sitting opposite a friendly twosome who talked about the joys of ‘getting clean’. I had no idea what they were saying, but I agreed to go with them. I thought it might be a relaxing holiday, time out from the furious movement, somewhere to gather my thoughts, to see what they might be when they weren’t pickled by ethanol. The next afternoon I had a seizure by the banks of a river during an outing.

  I spent several months at The Buttery, where I sobered up, ate too much, went back to writing depressive poems, and edited a collection of poetry written by residents, Polyunsaturated Poems, which had the significant benefit of getting me out of drains duty when my turn came up on the roster. I’m not sure how much I absorbed, how seriously I took what they tried to teach me about addiction, or whether I understood anything of my own predicament. I do know I left with the best of intentions, and that I tried to practise what they preached upon my return to Sydney, but soon The Buttery and its ways receded into the past. A new chapter began.

  It was 1983 and I was closing in on twenty when I started writing poems with fervour, my typewriter set up on a makeshift desk next to my bed. I’d had two poems published while at The Buttery, and I was starting to think of myself as a poet. The turning point came when I met a mouthy redhead named Louise through a stranger with whom I’d hitched a ride back to Sydney after visiting Maggie in the Blue Mountains. (Maggie, by then, had had a flaxen-haired child to Jeremy and had finally come out as a lesbian.) The stranger had stopped off at Louise’s pad to buy Buddha sticks before driving me home. Louise and I struck up an instant friendship and I started spending time at her basement flat and accompanying her to gigs. Show by show, she introduced me to her friends, and the night I met The Idol, lionised by local punters as the striking singer of a legendary and defunct band, I wound up sitting on his lap in an over-packed car. I liked his self-effacing manner and piercing blue eyes, his intelligence and sinewy gait. Our paths continued to cross, and a few weeks later I kissed him on tipsy impulse next to the poker machines on the first floor of the Trade Union Club. It was on.

  I fell crazy in love. I came alive to myself, to my body, to desire. I learned how to listen through my lover, twelve years my senior. Music became a form of worship. My world opened into ever-unfolding new worlds. References multiplied and exploded into other references. Now, at last, I understood what sex meant, what music was, who I could be. At first I went with it, but soon the ghosts of my trauma came out swinging, shadowboxing me into a corner that would take decades to emerge from.

  For most of my life I waited (the past in the present) for my father to show up and convince me he loved me. Like Godot, the longed-for father of my childhood fantasies never did come, and like Estragon and Vladimir I passed my days in an absurd tragi-black-comedy where nothing really happened but the marking of timeless time. Countless characters took that stage for a moment, for days, for months or for years, and I looked to each to save the day.

  My father slices banana onto his cereal at breakfast. He is far away and frightening. I do not know who this stranger is and why he sometimes appears in my house. I do not feel I belong to him and yet he is of great importance to me. I am confused. He is here before me, my father, and I know he is ‘my father’ but he does not seem to be my father. I don’t have a father.

  My mother folds laundry in my parents’ bedroom. My father bends down and makes a swing of his arms between his legs. I sit on them and he rocks me back and forth. He throws me down on the bed and rubs his whiskers on my cheeks, tickling me. I giggle. He blows raspberries on my bare belly and I laugh, exploding with delight. I have a father. I feel special and loved. I am the happiest girl in the world.

  This story, the story of my father and me, of me and my hallucinated fathers, is an enigma, subject to interpretation. My memory is defective, untrustworthy. Time stops.

  I was five when he left, when I realised I no longer had a father. I didn’t know why he disappeared and I thought about it all the time. I didn’t even know how to think about it but I did. Shame: at school the other children had fathers. I didn’t know what I’d done to no longer have the father I had never been sure of having, or why my family wasn’t the kind of family I saw all around me. Divorce was not unheard of, but in 1960s suburban Australia it wasn’t common.

  The Idol (three years?) surprised me. A vague supplication. I became a believer. We lived in the night, vampiric. He saw in me a poet and that was his greatest gift to me. I loved him broken-winged, unhinged. How well I knew his flailing flight, his two strong hands, his holy hell and half-blind eyes.

  And if he doesn’t come? Our troubles didn’t arise because (or not only because) I was immature and ill equipped for that order of intimacy. It was as if The Idol keyed his way into the deepest strata of my being, and in doing so inadvertently released the traumatic demons entrapped there. But as is inevitably the case with origin-myth analogies, we’re left scratching our heads as to what that really means.

  According to Ruth Buczynski, a trauma researcher at the US-based National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, it means (ironic spoiler alert) that significantly traumatised people are more triggered by getting up close than less traumatised people. Studies, Buczynski claims, confirm links between ‘childhood emotional maltreatment’ and PTSD that highlight a tendency towards self-criticism as interfering with the ability to have harmonious and satisfying intimate relationships. Two hundred and eighty-two comments from members of the public follow this short article, one hundred and sixty-seven heart pourings of pain: ‘I had really low self-esteem, thought I would die if anyone touched me’ / ‘Relationships With Women Had All Failed’ / ‘I have a broken relationship with 2 of my children, and have not seen 5 of my grandchildren for years’ / ‘Sometimes I feel she actually wants to sabotage our relationship’ / ‘When you are abused as a child, you learn to trust no one’ / ‘My step-Dad … tortured and raped me almost daily … and I still can’t seem to find a man who doesn’t act exactly like my step-Dad.’

  Between the ages of five and eight I have no memory, no memories at all, of my father. For a long time after the divorce it feels as if he is dead, or on another planet. At Christmas he does not come or call. On birthdays there is no word. I do not have a father. I look at other girls who have fathers and I think they are prettier, cleverer, better than me in ways I don’t see. I look at other girls who have fathers that love them and I ache with longing to be loved like that.

  I think now about this period, this time in which my father seems to have disappeared, and wonder if his imagined absence comes down to the strange patchiness of childhood memories or if it’s a sign of traumatic amnesia, for there is evidence to the contrary. My brother insists we saw him regularly, but when my father and I recently tried to piece it together with the aid of our mutually dodgy memories he confirmed that there would have been long periods in which we saw little of each other and times when we didn’t see each other at all while he was travelling overseas or living in Gosford and Queensland. In any event, I have no recollections of spending time with him until several years later, when I was around nine, and he would come on Sundays (I don’t recall ever spending whole weekends with him). Not every Sunday, but some Sundays, occasional Sundays (again my memory is hazy here – it seems as if I could count the visi
ts on my fingers, but I suspect there were more than that).

  When he did show up on Sundays, every few months (or was it weeks?), I was torn between dread and anticipation. I lived for those torturous visits, counting the days to when I would have a father and hoping that this time he’d be the father I wanted, the father I saw other girls having, the father for whom I would be the Most Important Thing.

  He comes to visit. I wear my favourite outfit and wonder where we’ll go. He arrives, chats to my mother from the armchair, and then settles down to read. I am bored and bereft.

  He comes to visit. He takes me across the bridge to a big house. There are no children. The grown-ups talk and their conversation is white noise. I do not exist. Classical music plays in the background. I sit in a beanbag. I like the beanbag, but there’s nothing to do. I listen to my father talk and understand nothing of what he says. People seem to like him, look up to him. I’m not sure why, but I like it. Maybe it means he’s special. Maybe it means I’m special.

  Sometimes I felt proud of him without knowing why, or as if I would be proud if he were my father, if I had a father. There were moments when I thought he was proud of me too, especially about the dancing, so I danced harder, lulling myself to sleep with visions of dancing on a grand stage, the star, with my family, if I had a family, in the audience, applauding, and the sound of that applause was the sound of being good enough.

  He comes to visit, and sometimes he surprises me with fun, or rather I have accidental fun when I’m with him. This happens when he takes me to places where there are other children to play with and adults who fuss over and entertain me.

  He takes me to lunch at exotic restaurants. I don’t want to go. He never asks where I want to go, what I want to do, what I’d like to eat. He wants me to try food I don’t like the look of. I don’t want to. He is disappointed I am like this. He insists. I eat unenthusiastically. I don’t like the food. He makes me try something else. I hate it and I want to go home. He goes quiet.

  Years later, when I was in my forties, we had a candid conversation, during which my father admitted he didn’t like me as a child. There were differences of opinion between him and my mother and grandparents, differences regarding diet, discipline and other aspects of child-rearing. He disliked the effects of my mother’s indulgences and my grandparents’ spoiling. He felt sidelined, cut out, disrespected. He thought I preferred my mother and grandparents (I did). He gave up. He let them have me. And he disapproved of the person I became under their influence.

  It’s common sense that the absence of approval and the withholding of affirmation will negatively affect a child and likely cause problems later in life, but can it qualify as traumatic, given trauma’s association with shock and extreme events? This lack of admiration was not a blunt-force trauma to the psyche. Most of the time it was a diffusive, amorphous, permeating injury rather than a jarring or violent one, though there were moments I felt it acutely, moments when a critical word or a timely silence or a loveless look would pierce my being to its core and make its pointy, permanent mark.

  My father wasn’t intentionally mean. He wasn’t mean at all. He tried, in his way, to be caring, to reach me, but he never quite met me where I was. His own historical wounds and conditioning gave rise to a subtle form of neglect, part frequent physical absence and part constant emotional disconnect. It’s unfair to expect caregivers to meet the emotional needs of their charges day in and day out without faltering. Even the very best unavoidably fail sometimes to meet the needs of those in their care, so where and how do we draw the line as to what constitutes neglect?

  In Running on Empty, Dr Jonice Webb describes emotional neglect as an ‘invisible force’ defined by a parent’s failure to respond enough to a child’s emotional needs. Webb views this type of neglect as the opposite of the overt mistreatment commonly associated with child abuse, in that maltreatment is characterised by parental acts, whereas emotional neglect involves an absence of affective connection. This unmemorable failure to ‘notice, attend to, and respond appropriately to a child’s feelings’, this act of omission, becomes ‘the white space in the family picture’, the ‘background rather than the foreground’ of loss, a holding pattern of trauma around needs and wants that one may not even be conscious of having had. So while in the foreground I experienced my mother’s chaotic relationships with violent and alcoholic men as disconcerting at best and annihilating at worst, in the background my father’s emotional neglect erased me.

  My father’s rejection was compounded when he remarried and his new wife gave birth to a baby daughter. I figured he’d traded us in for superior models. My sister and I have since swapped notes and it seems she shared many of my experiences of his fathering as a child, but at the time it looked to me as if she got the father I had always wanted. I tried to understand why he seemed to love her and not me. I wanted a sister but not like that. I imagined she was better than me in ways I couldn’t see. He more or less disappeared out of my life again when they moved interstate.

  The English Ex-junkie (two-and-a-half years): sweet and numb and chronically late. Is anybody home? Back and forth and around and about we went until I looked at him and saw the place where my father was not. There’s the wound!

  I was in my early years of sobriety when I took up with The English Ex-junkie, whom I’d met (it does not get any more clichéd or doomed than this) in detox. It was my first attempt at forming and maintaining a relationship without the aid of substances and though it was, overall, more ‘functional’ than previous relationships by virtue of not being blacked out or drug-fucked, it hurt. I was slowly coming to the realisation that I was attracted to ‘emotionally unavailable men’, as the old standard goes. It was the first time in my life I had experienced the pain of this pattern without self-medicating and I found myself spiralling into states of emotional turmoil, sometimes even without an identifiable trigger. I came across a word for this whirlpool: abandonment. One of my best therapists once said that an adult cannot be abandoned, only left, because an adult is not subject to the same dependence-for-survival as a child, and is at a far more sophisticated stage of development with which to deal with a separation or a relational rupture, even a traumatic one. Only children can be abandoned, but people who experience significant enough levels of caregiver abandonment as children are often and more readily triggered into a traumatic re-experiencing of earlier, formative abandonment in the context of a present-day circumstance (the past in the present). I learned that I was highly susceptible to these ‘abandonment triggers’ and came to realise that once sufficiently bonded to another I lived in perpetual fear of it, and in hyper-vigilant reaction to any hint of it. Yet the knowledge that I didn’t need to fear it because it had already happened, way back when I was a kid, was little consolation because I continued to re-create it, or hallucinate it (the past in the present) in visions so real I lost touch with any other reality. I fell for emotionally undependable men and then became excessively dependent in a paradox that wedged me firmly between the proverbial rock and hard place.

  I first came across the teachings of John Bradshaw when my coupling with The English Ex-junkie was in its death throes. Bradshaw, who died aged eighty-two in 2016, had been, like me, a teenaged problem drinker. After fleeing the monastery where he spent his young adulthood, he became an author, therapist, public lecturer and self-confessed ‘compulsive intellectual’. His ‘Where Are You Father?’ talk came as a revelation at the time, helping me connect the dots between my childhood experiences with men and my adult experiences with men. Unlike many of the self-help formulations of the day, Bradshaw didn’t figure the family as an isolated unit in an otherwise apparently well-functioning society; he called patriarchy to account.

  Bradshaw’s central thesis is that aeons of traumatising patriarchy has resulted in generationally cyclical conditionings and trauma-bound woundings across the gender spectrum (my inclusive adaptation of his rather more tradit
ional and binary view of gender). Generation after generation of men, pitted against one another in war and business, inherit the patterning of an outdated patriarchal masculinity that ‘hides behind prestige, money, and power’, prohibits affective encounter, expression and vulnerability, and cripples the very capacities needed for intimate relationship and healthy familial bonding.

  There were critics who, cynical of any text and figure associated with the genre of self-help, baulked at his impassioned evangelistic Texan drawl (Bradshaw had spent time in a seminary, which was why preaching had a marked bearing on his masterful oration). Many declared him a charlatan, erroneously assuming he was cut of the same cloth as Tony Robbins on account of his stage presence and ability to draw a crowd. Even The Simpsons took the piss out of him in a classic episode called ‘Bart’s Inner Child’. I understood these reactions, but nevertheless I found solace and sense in Bradshaw, and to this day he stands above the pack in my mind. Unlike Robbins, Bradshaw never promised anyone a trauma-free rose garden. He didn’t charge exorbitant prices for his workshops or greet pre-hyped audiences with hyper-masculinist gestures, and he freely admitted that his do-good public works came with regular ego-strokes. He was an intellectually sophisticated and compassionate cultural critic and trauma worker who addressed us as equals in a mutual struggle for harmony and happiness. ‘In many ways I failed my son and stepdaughter as a father, even though I was a family therapist and a dedicated father,’ Bradshaw said frankly in an interview with Sherry Von Ohlsen. ‘I had grown up fatherless. My father was an alcoholic who abandoned the family. I didn’t have a father model. I wasn’t there emotionally for my son a lot because I didn’t know what my emotions were.’

  Slowly, over time and in light of myriad influences, I began to identify the effects of my father’s absence and rejection on both my childhood and floundering relationships as an adult. I realised my father’s abandonment and neglect helped create the conditions for the overtly traumatising experiences of growing up with my mother’s alcoholic and violent post-divorce partners – not just, or even, in his initial leaving, but in his failure to engage with me enough to earn my trust and know what was taking place in my home life, and in his failure to intervene on my behalf. I gained some understanding of the way men – and more specifically my father, brother, grandfathers, partners and lovers – had been set up to be socially shamed out of vulnerability and empathy. It dawned on me that trauma isn’t always splashy or overt: that it can be inscribed by lack as much as by action, and instilled by what is not done as much as by what is done. Neglect – including emotional neglect – thus becomes an under-the-radar form of trauma that often eludes detection. And I came to see how traumatic formative relational experience establishes destructive patterns – ‘scripts’, Tomkins called them – for adult relationships, which are further traumatising, or at least re-traumatising in that they trigger CPTSD-bound reactions, feelings and behaviours. Patriarchy and the ‘father wound’: it all made sense.