I did what people so often do – I thought in terms of a hierarchy of suffering, concluding that I had no right to be as affected as I was, given the closest I came to danger was being on a bus travelling south towards the towers at the time of the attacks, before watching them fall in plumes of black smoke while standing in the shadow of the Empire State Building. I was waiting for my husband, who was making his way to me, along with the throngs of others fleeing downtown, so that we could get on a packed bus heading back uptown. Between the bus stop and our apartment building, we stopped to buy supplies at the near-empty store, which resembled a scene from one of those Armageddon films. We reached the sanctuary of our apartment, huddling in shock to watch the live coverage as the city shut down, bridges and tunnels closed, and fighter jets circled the sky overhead. I did what people so often do – I forgot to factor in the power of formative experience (the past in the present) and the difference between PTSD and CPTSD. As Judith Herman states:
repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.
It felt as if I had been thrown back into this realm of immature psychological defences, as if at some level the healing or maturation or reasoned understanding I had achieved – patchy and incomplete at best – had been erased by the spectacular reminder on 9/11 of just how violent men can be, and just how unsafe our supposedly civilised society can be, despite the veneer of decency.
By the time my husband and I celebrated our first anniversary the damage was done; the fault lines had been exposed. There was a gulf between us that seemingly could not be traversed. Having grown up in a stable environment with no familial experience of violence, he found my reaction excessive, and hard as he tried he could not understand the tenacity of my distress and extra-heightened anxieties, which remained so for several years after that dark September. ‘Most people,’ continues Herman, ‘have no knowledge or understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh.’ I don’t blame my ex-husband for judging me, for being frustrated and falling short of meeting my endless neurosis with ample compassion. I judged myself just as harshly and felt equally frustrated by my seeming inability to snap out of the liminal tension between the traumatised past and the re-traumatising present, though I was also aware I was trapped inside it. I became increasingly lonely and isolated.
It’s hard to know how the marriage might have panned out without that terrible day and its ongoing reverberations, but thinking back over my history with men I see an undeniable pattern of bonding followed by struggles around intimacy. Pia Mellody’s figuring of love addiction offers some insights into understanding how the fundamental need for intimacy becomes deformed by early traumatic losses, re-emerging in adult life as an obsessive attempt to bridge a traumatic gap in relationship. In some ways, I successfully shut down that behaviour in my marriage to The New Yorker, but only by suppressing my need for intimacy. He was a rock in terms of commitment and stability, and attentive in his way, but despite being caring and sensitive he was, at some crucial level, also as emotionally impenetrable as a rock. I settled for the level of intimacy he was capable of and content with, but it meant sacrificing that desire for shared vulnerability, for emotional access, and it turned out that was a bigger sacrifice than I bargained for. I grew restless in a Madame Bovary kind of way, becoming persistently dissatisfied, depressive, and flirtatious with other men. It was a relatively tranquil relationship, but I felt a dogged irritation that increasingly erupted into angry outbursts, and most of the time I felt guilty for not being as happy as I thought I should be now that I enjoyed high-quality living, a partner everybody liked, and a share in a mortgage on a three-bedroom warehouse apartment in Surry Hills. We became more and more alienated from each other and I became more and more alienated from myself, and, as this twofold alienation gathered speed, the CPTSD symptoms that had flared up in the wake of 9/11 snowballed into frequent panic attacks. I became reliant on my husband for reassurance; in response, he behaved like an indulgent, resentfully repressed carer, measured impatience and impervious in the face of my inner turmoil. I was a mess of contradictions: child-like and leaning on him one minute, raging at him the next.
Among the many possible variables of a relationship, two dominant, negative models are often assigned to the committed het relationship: the domineering, controlling, possibly violent man to the submissive, oppressed little woman; and the angry, controlling woman to the sensitive, passive (and often passive–aggressive) man. If my relationships have tended towards one of these stereotypes it would be the second. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve witnessed a woman spoken of as a ‘bitch’ or a ‘ballbuster’, or how often I’ve heard a woman maligned for daring to be unsatisfied with the proffered passive alternative to traditional patriarchal machismo. Often politically left-leaning, this alternative man comes as a welcome relief from more toxic modes of masculinity, for he allows a woman independence and agency. She gets to express strength, and to define terms, but because the passive man is confused, ashamed of his kind, and suffering painful emotions from generations of patriarchal woundings, he represses his own strength and desire, lacks initiative, stays too safe, and lives on the surface. She wants more. He is baffled.
‘A man works all his life to get it right, to be the strong, invulnerable warrior, and then someone says you’ve got it all wrong,’ Bradshaw said in his interview with Sherry Von Ohlsen. He was speaking for the men of his generation, those who grew up trained to adopt patriarchal roles in the nuclear-het family only to have them upended by twentieth-century feminism. ‘We men have been raised by women, and so our feelings about ourselves stem in large part from them. Women who have unresolved male issues affect how a male grows up to think about himself.’ (But what woman can not have ‘unresolved male issues’ in a patriarchal society?) bell hooks reminds us that feminists began to use the word ‘patriarchy’ in place of ‘sexism’ and ‘male chauvinism’ as a conscious effort to highlight the ways in which patriarchy negatively affects everybody. She criticises ‘antimale activists’ for making men ‘the enemy’ instead of inviting them into a partnership in learning how to understand, and change, the deeply embedded and traumatically rooted attitudes and practices that perpetuate the cycle, generation in, generation out. When hooks says in Feminist Theory, ‘Separatist ideology encourages women to ignore the negative impact of sexism on male personhood. It stresses polarization between the sexes’, she’s just warming up: ‘Patriarchy promotes insanity,’ she writes in The Will To Change. ‘It is at the root of the psychological ills troubling men in our nation.’ She also states: ‘Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life.’
Until the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates is collectively acknowledged and formally stunted, toxic or neutered masculinities will continue to proliferate. There are exceptions and we need men who have forged, or are forging, new masculinities and capacities. Women, feminists, need to work with them, to acknowledge them. There’s a difference between being expected to ‘hand out cookies’ every time a man isn’t an arse and due recognition and regard.
When The New Yorker and I took our tattered marriage to counselling, it slowly dawned on us that we didn’t seem to have a future. I wanted more (though I couldn’t be sure if this wasn’t a sign of my tendency to be discontented). There is no more,
he said, this is it, this is all I am, all I got. Friends were shocked to hear me talk of leaving. It made no sense. And then one night in my early forties, as we made our way towards that conclusion, I was woken by a dream.
The Son of the Holocaust Survivor (Act II: twenty months) had grown paler and weary. The sand-sea eyes searched my face as if they’d found home. Why don’t we hang ourselves? It was not a question of trust. Nor forgiveness. Apparitions – made flesh what were we? Alive? We dwelled in parallel dimensions, him married with child in the outer suburbs, me married, childless, urban.
I initiated a separation and my husband put up no fight. The Son of the Holocaust Survivor tried leaving his rotting marriage. He spoke of her, how she clung on, playing the child-pawn, one grim move after another. He flailed in limbo and then conceded defeat. He couldn’t leave the boy like his mother had left him.
It was a question of faith. We lay in the darkened bedroom of my apartment, where I was living alone for the first time in years. I told him I would not see him again and I asked how I would go on without him. ‘Think of me as dead,’ he said, ‘because I will be.’ Then, and for the last time, he went home to the suburbs and his miserable wife. Astride a grave and a difficult birth.
It was then, in the following weeks, that I started to stop waiting for my father (the past in the present). There were nights when the upstairs neighbours would start. Nights when, no longer waiting, alone in the darkened room, I would hear them and plead telepathically: please, not tonight. Lying there, willing my neighbours to stop, I’d remember the way The Son of the Holocaust Survivor sometimes opened me up so much I’d cry when I came. Think of me as dead, he’d said. Then it would be over and quiet. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they come.
I cried for months after I turned him away, could barely manage routine daily tasks. I knew it was not just about the end of the affair and my marriage, but about the traumatic grief around the men of my childhood, and most especially my father, as it finally surfaced. It had made its way to light before, but I’d always managed to outrun it, to introduce yet another man into the space it demanded. This time it would not be stopped, and I had lost steam in trying to stop it. I had what my grandmother would have called a nervous breakdown. I think of it more as an exposé, a rite of passage, a trial by fire. The floodgates broke and there was no stemming the gushing flow.
I am standing in the centre of my apartment so assailed by pain I want to die (I should not exist). I don’t know what to do, where to go, and can’t think straight to gather my things and get out the door. I don’t know what to do so I stand there, staring ahead. Without thought, without intention, I cross the room and watch as my hand reaches for the phone. By the time my father answers I am sobbing uncontrollably. He says hello and I hear myself speak, the words coming out all on their own, breaking soft through the snot and the tears and the hard-to-breathe breath: why didn’t you love me when I was a child? Oh my darling girl, he says.
I have a father.
We talked. I told him about the waiting and the men. He told me what went on behind the scenes, the marital theatrics and the back-story I’d never known, his errors of judgement, his regrets. I didn’t think I’d be missed, he said. We counted the cost. For the first time I understood his life as a younger man, the other side of his failure to father in the way I needed, and I felt relief and I felt forgiving, but I couldn’t stop weeping. I spent a week in a psychiatric hospital. After I returned home, for the next two years, in the eternal time of passing nights in the darkened room while listening to my neighbours fuck, I was alone.
There have been many men. I have a father and I have never loved him more than I do now. It is not for nothing I lived through this long day. Sometimes I am the happiest girl in the world. Think of me as living.
But when I reflect on the men I shared my life with, between my sexual awakening with The Idol at twenty and the gruelling grieving of my mid-forties, I’m still not sure how much of what passed between us was desire, love or addiction.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that the demise of my relationship with The Idol, my first ardour, my first true fuck, was what finally brought me undone.
I’d already weathered a speed bender during the course of our relationship, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, mainlining till I saw glimpses of speed psychosis and reached a paranoid, whimpering end, by which point heroin had become my go-to crutch. I didn’t think myself a proper junkie, supposing I wasn’t as bad as some of the people I ran with. I was a lowly poly-addict, not tough or street or armoured like the hardcore junkies, but more unruly than the lightweights and more blatantly self-destructive than your average dedicated ‘alchy’, for I thought nothing of consuming lethal chemical cocktails, the kind that left a friend’s twentysomething sister with brain damage so severe she’s spent the past few decades being cared for in a nursing home. I didn’t think myself a proper junkie, insisting I had class, that there were things I wouldn’t do for a fix (in rehab they called these ‘yets’). Is there any way to avoid cliché? This is not about my numbing. It’s about the big numbing: patriarchy, with its endemic traumata.
How Childhood Trauma Creates Life-long Adult Addicts (The Fix)
The US-based organisation Addiction Campuses, a Christian network of comprehensive addiction treatment services, set out to determine which kind of traumatic experience would most likely lead to a substance addiction. An Addiction Campuses blog post by Brittany Meadows rhetorically poses an extended question: do particular traumatic experiences have links with particular substances? I say rhetorical, because they go on to conclude, without citing actual studies, that the obvious answer is that ‘any type of trauma can be just as damaging as the next’. Trauma affects individuals differently: you and I might experience the same event with one of us emerging traumatised and the other relatively unscathed; according to the piece, ‘the crucial factor isn’t what the event was, but how the person perceived and was able [or not able] to cope with it’. We don’t usually get to choose our formative traumas, but most addicts have a ‘drug of choice’. Even those not socially tagged as addicts tend to lean on something: those extra glasses of wine at the end of a hard day, that shopping binge when you’re feeling blue, the work jag that leaves you depleted and alienated from the family. What’s your poison?
We don’t usually get to choose our formative traumas, but they’re what sticks most. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson quotes psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: ‘Babies do not remember being held well – what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough.’ That is to say that the met need does not wound, and even if you don’t ‘remember’ a traumatic experience, even if you suffer from traumatic amnesia, it has wounded and has been registered in implicit memory. For Nelson, Winnicott’s observation is an incitement, an invitation to the maternal goal to leave her child no memory, by which she means no traumatic memory (whether that memory be conscious or remain buried even in the midst of its raising hell).
Having qualified their position, the Addiction Campuses’ ‘addiction professionals’ go on to list some of the traumatic experiences most commonly associated with addiction: sexual assault, emotional and/or physical child abuse, ‘complicated’ grief (which is when the normal grieving process following the loss of a loved one has pathological characteristics), violent crime or accidents, and natural disasters, almost all of which are symptoms, either directly or indirectly, of the traumata of patriarchy (from the inside out). Even natural disasters, once described as ‘acts of God’, are, in the epoch of the ‘Anthropocene’, potentially and increasingly associated with the works of industrialised, globalised and capitalist ‘mankind’.
Thoughout my extended binge of chemical excess, I spent my days indulging pop culture obsessions and playacting the role of a coquette across several coteries.
The Idol has left me, but I can’t let go and I get to him the only way
I still can: sex. We’re hanging by this thread. Thankfully, he has bad boundaries and things drag on for months. Eventually, he meets someone else and that last filament is severed. I go mad (I mean madder), wracked by a blood-deep grief I’d rather die than feel. My flat is a glorified bedsit on Liverpool Street. I’ve toyed with the Czech down the hall and an army of others in an effort to get over The Idol as I spin out of control. Now I take a new lover.
My new partner in crime and inamorata is a leggy beauty with a killer smile. Ona is of Chinese-English-Irish descent, and she has, by happy coincidence, moved into the hovel-room next door, as we’d already met – back when she was the girlfriend of my friend Ben, who was deliriously in love with her. We pass time hanging in my flat, or drinking Lambrusco on the roof, looking down on the city streets. We sit around like a couple of witches, cooking up in our makeshift cauldron: dessert spoon resting on the laminex table, the delicate pouring of a small pool of water from a nearby glass, the tapping of a tiny mound of powder from the creases of an alfoil square, the dab of cotton-like matter torn from the filter of a cigarette, the lighting of a match held under the raised silver spoon, the belt tourniquet, the needle sucking up the cloudy water, the rising vein, the droplet of blood on the pale inside of my arm, the steel sliding out, the melting down and closing eyes, the unyielding back of the vinyl chair against my spine, the surrender to the welcome tranquillity of a warm nod, the stopping of time, the dissolving of fear and memory, the unreserved relaxation, the finally feeling safe. Our days are devoted to getting on and rampaging around the city with a chain of jokers who have one foot in the grave.
Addiction tribute #1: Uncle Hugh. I remember your cravats and pipe and biting wit, and the way you never ate. Just the whiskey and milk and waking with the shakes. I didn’t make your funeral (it’s a long story and not one I think you’d understand). I hope you know I cared. I’m still writing after all these years, as you can see.
Traumata Page 24