Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  It’s a fearsome business, this tryst with the works of bygone philosophers (someone is bound to point out my mistakes – in my mind it’s a man, white and tenured). There’s a reason I’m taking that risk.

  In Ethics, Spinoza claims that the more the body is rendered capable of affecting others and of being affected, the more the mind can perceive. The formulation continues. The capacity to consciously experience affect (emotion and the senses) leads to perception, which leads to reason or understanding (he uses both words alternately). For Spinoza, the most valuable form of self-esteem, perhaps the only true form, comes about through a reflective ‘power of understanding’. I can claim to have achieved something of this power of understanding, but as for a tidy dénouement, there is none; neither my story nor my trauma has yet concluded.

  The trials of traumata survived and surmounted is the tried and true formula for many Hollywood movies, but in the real world the film keeps rolling past the happy ending and I continue to show up in all my flawed, neurotic glory. I no longer seek to purge the most stubborn seeds of my trauma, but to live as peacefully and as compassionately with them as possible. Discussing how he came to be an expert in traumatic stress in an interview, Bessel van der Kolk recounts the moment in which a Vietnam vet led him to the realisation that working with trauma was not as straightforward as issuing a ‘cure’. ‘People become living testimonials for things that no longer exist,’ he says. Trauma is not a blight to be lasered over; it involves a ‘loyalty to the dead, to what was’. If I changed (and I have), if I became more of who I always was (and I have), if I have surpassed survival to live (and I have to some degree), this is how it happened. In the rooms of therapists, in the community halls of support groups, feeling it, on the phone to friends, in the arms of lovers, practising yoga, writing, doing shit jobs, feeling it; in the heat of the moment, in the sensation of a smell, during a long walk, at the cinema, reading, singing, patting a cat, feeling it, looking at a painting, feeling it, listening to music, making music, feeling it, bearing body-splitting, mind-twisting pain, casting doubt, writing, love, feeling it. This is how I weather patriarchy and heal from its traumatic effects (as best as I can, given that I continue to live inside the wound that is our culture) – one day at a time, one person at a time, one action at a time, one point of connection at a time.

  I toss through the night, hot with dream-memories. Wake up with a start, a cry carrying forth.

  Spinoza envisions ethical and what Joan Wynn Reeves calls ‘insightful action’ as the aptitude to override affects resulting from external causes (which may be experienced as positive or negative – in the case of trauma, they are usually heartbreaking or violating) through a process of scrutinising the misunderstandings they generate and discernment from within the grips of the resulting misery. Though not always sufficient to change damaging circumstances over which one has no or little control, this process has the potential to bring relief from suffering and an increase of power (beingness). In his view, this capacity to insightful action is innate to human beings, as an expression of vitality, of life force. It therefore necessarily has positive or joyful resonances. It is ethical because such a development not only benefits the individual, it also benefits others and contributes to the common good. This in turn informs action and self-overcoming. When affect resulting from external stimuli is traumatic and overwhelming, like that generated from toxic patriarchy, an individual or community manifests what Spinoza called ‘the passions’ or ‘bondage’. This is affect run riot, detached from perception, discernment and understanding. This is toxic masculinity and absent fathers and raging stepfathers and neglectful, abusive mothers. This is war and suicide statistics. This is terrorism and jails. This is trolling and cyber-bullying. This is sexism and depression and the glue of our social structures that keeps inherited bigotries in place. This is where we find ourselves. This is where I found myself at the age of twenty-four, thirty years ago, as I walked up the path of a halfway house for women with histories of addiction.

  I look out the window to see the arms of gum trees shaking fists of leaves in the wind. I’m unsettled by the association between Nietzsche and the Third Reich and the appearance of anti-Semitism and sexism in those passages of his writings where, in biting and fervent cultural critique, he rails against the constructions and constrictions of Judaism and gender-conditioned femininity in such a way as to seemingly disparage Jews and women. I worry that perhaps I’ve been too eager to buy into blaming his sister, too keen to castigate her for polluting and misrepresenting his ideas, too quick to absolve him. I think about Nietzsche breaking down, as it is said, on a Turin street at the sight of a brutally whipped horse, about his decline, the once monumental mind desolately isolated, decaying slowly, beyond words, beyond philosophy, depleted of its will to power.

  For those of us not yet beyond reach, there’s good, if tempered, news: thanks to our brain’s capacity for change, recovery is possible (though not guaranteed as an absolute). Miki Perkins’ profile of Dr Bruce Perry in The Sydney Morning Herald reveals his life-changing work as a psychiatrist and leading expert on the long-term effects of trauma in children. His research on the way trauma in childhood changes the biology of the brain confirms that ‘prolonged stress can literally shrink the brain and alter its functioning’. The neurological baseline of the stress response becomes elevated and stays that way. Some parts of the brain stop functioning. The more threatened such a person feels, the more primitive their reactions and behaviours become, the more ‘scared and scary’. Conversely, though, that also suggests that the less threatened a traumatised person perceives themselves to be, the safer they feel, the less scared and scary they’ll become. It’s something worth remembering as ideological warfare rages and a host of socio-political tensions tear communities around the world apart.

  Brain plasticity means that even the most severely traumatised people can, under the right conditions, re-wire at least some neural pathways malformed by chronic stress, and thus find some reprieve. Neuroscientist Bessel van der Kolk postulates three key differences between the functioning of individuals with post-traumatised brains and those with relatively healthy brains. First, people with PTSD have enhanced threat perception, which means they tend to see danger (the past in the present) where less traumatised people see a manageable challenge. This is not controllable at the level of conscious cognition because it stems from the fear-driven primitive part of the brain, wired to protect physical safety (Bradshaw referred to this as the ‘lizard brain’). Second, the brain’s filtering system, which helps to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant data, gets messed up. Consequently, a PTSD-affected person is prone to focusing on details that less traumatised people ignore, and may find it difficult to fully engage in everyday situations (the past in the present). Finally, the self-sensing system is numbed, most likely due to a defensive response activated by terror during the traumatic experience. This numbing can be further heightened by drugs or alcohol, and van der Kolk links this effect most directly with the post-traumatic impulse to self-medicate and the addictive tendencies so common to people with C/PTSD. But this solution, this salve, exacts a toll, compounding trauma’s deathliness by repressing positive feelings along with the negative ones, and diminishing the capacity to love and empathise (and the ability to undertake the insightful understanding/action Spinoza espouses).

  This is what I can tell you. I no longer self-destruct. I know myself well. I often like myself, but not always. My experience of chronic trauma is commonplace to people born and socialised as female and to people born to addiction-affected families. It’s not growing up in a ghetto surrounded by gang warfare. It’s not a child crying under siege in Aleppo. It’s not wasting away in the indefinite detention of a refugee camp, or being held hostage in a basement for years, forced into sexual slavery by a sadist. I live and write from a foundation of relative lifelong comfort. There were many needs and wants my family did meet, care unremembered, u
nmentioned in this book. I’ve made peace with family members alive and dead and I love them unreservedly today. I enjoy gains hard-won by feminist foremothers and those forefathers who also fought for my rights. I am the beneficiary of relentless goodness: caring teachers, patient nurses, helpful cabbies, and the kindnesses big and small of innumerable people whose names I may not recall or perhaps never knew. I contribute. I know love.

  There are still bone-deep cracks and bruised vulnerabilities and injurious trauma-bound habits. Of van der Kolk’s three areas of damage to the post-traumatised brain, I’ve made the most progress on the second and third. I remain most affected by the first, my lizard brain at the ready, forked tongue flicking. My preoccupation with physical safety has proved resilient in the face of various kinds of therapy. I have an array of daily micro-madnesses, obsessive-compulsions, anxious overreactions and hypersensitivities, and a self-protective need to limit my time out and about in the world.

  If you go walking among the ghost gums in the wildfire winds of spring, beware. Fire, as they say, starts with a spark.

  This is what I ask myself: can you dedicate your life to changing what is in your power to change, what needs to be changed? Can you love life despite the ugliness, the unfairness, the injustice? Can you meet traumata in tenderness? There are moments of grace, good days, in which I can answer yes, emphatically, whole-heartedly, but most of the time I still struggle towards those elegant hours. Could I bring myself to ask these questions of the family in the refugee camp, the family under siege in Aleppo, or the parent whose child has been killed in the crossfire of warring drug lords? These are questions I ask, philosophies I entertain, as one who has endured a privileged kind of traumata, a childhood of well-resourced neglect in the context of white, western womanhood.

  In his concept of ‘the eternal return’, which relates to the will to power, Nietzsche puts to us a puzzle.

  What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?

  He poses an impossible, trickster question: ‘how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?’

  You’re thinking about how to respond.

  Nietzsche was mad, of course, by the time he died, and perhaps much earlier than that, for he served as a medical orderly in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War and returned profoundly traumatised. His thoughts and ideas are, like many productive and provocative thoughts and ideas, open to dispute (and compromised in the hands of the dreadful Elisabeth), but I will always love him for throwing himself on the beaten horse against the whip of the patriarchy.

  The winds have died down and evening falls again, with its dome of popping stars. A halo of cloud circles the moon as it drifts across the night sky. I stand looking up, exhaling mist into the still air.

  I think of that girl, the one who wandered round the playground in a daze, the one who got into the car of strangers on the trail of Sherbet, who flew to London on her own, who fled the seedy Bondi hotel room naked, who rode the highways in a puce-pink EK station wagon, who fell in love and spiralled down into drug-culture crisis, and I marvel that she survived.

  In the early 1990s, when I had not long turned thirty, there was a time when this girl often knocked at my door, keeping me up at night, unruly, unreasonable. When her demands for attention wore me down and I could no longer ignore her, I wrote her a love letter in the form of a poem.

  To the girl

  You turned one summer

  into a car too fast,

  an empty house, a gang of

  lost children looking for home.

  You turned,

  golden-skinned, and

  sent your smile out like a servant

  to gather wood for fires that

  did not warm you.

  From blaze to blaze

  they did not know you,

  covered in ash, and

  melting them

  your flame was hidden.

  You turned then

  into one who speaks

  too much and too loud of

  all but what needs to be said.

  You,

  small-bellied, lately fleshed, suddenly seen,

  ran away from the castle of dead kings and queens

  and leaving behind their costumes and jewels

  you became a beggar, as orphans often do.

  You turned one winter

  into rain that never stopped.

  Cold-limbed and tired you sat still.

  It was lonely time full of days

  and ticking clocks.

  Music slipped down stairs

  or laughter in the hall

  but your room was quiet

  as a funeral.

  You waited and guessed for what.

  Girl, you are my girl

  I will not bury you.

  All that you guessed was not it

  and you waited too long for me,

  like a burning bridge between

  there and here

  in a tired

  old war.

  In a photo taken by my father, I’m standing on a grassy knoll, aged four, maybe five. I don’t recognise the place and my father can’t remember. I’m standing on a grassy knoll on First Nation country, on country stolen from people who once roamed those rocks and that sand.

  I’m standing on a grassy knoll. It’s a windy, cloudy day. I’m looking out across the living sea. Most of my story is not yet written, and I have no knowledge of what is to come. There’s some part of me that will be untouched by it, or rather that will remain untainted. There’s some part of us that continues being, continues becoming, like the wind and the sea and the clouds, no matter what madness, what brutality, what traumata surrounds us. It has no name. It can’t be caged, there where breath meets love. Can you feel it?

  Acknowledgements

  This book would likely not exist were it not for Julianne Schultz and Griffith Review. Julianne first encouraged me to write memoir and has championed my writing since I first published in Griffith Review 4: Making Perfect Bodies. And it was Julianne’s prompting to write a book-length memoir that led to my undertaking Traumata. I am profoundly grateful for her support over the years. Varuna, the National Writers’ House, is a treasure and was a vital resource during the writing of the book. Winning a Varuna residency in the Griffith Review Contributors Circle competition in 2016 enabled me to start this book. Soon after, I submitted the first three chapters in application for a Varuna Residential Fellowship and was awarded the Dr Eric Dark Flagship Fellowship for non-fiction 2017, which granted me another three weeks’ retreat. This allowed me to complete the first draft. I thank the Dark family, Varuna staff, and the peer panel who honoured and assisted this work by selecting it for the Flagship Fellowship.

  As a first reader, Sylvia Johnson has been a great friend to me and to this book. I thank her warmly for her generosity in giving of her time and talent, for lending her sharp eye and ear to these pages, and for her astute suggestions. I am also indebted to other readers and supporters: Deb Shaw, Kate Cole-Adams, Tanya Vavilova, Lex Hirst and Carol Major. I have been heartened by the way my agent, Jane Novak, and my publisher, Alexandra Payne, embraced this book, and
I am grateful for their guidance. I warmly thank Ian See for his deft and attentive edit, and salute all at UQP who helped get Traumata to print and beyond.

  I heart my family for accompanying me through the wild ride of life, and for what I hope will be their understanding. There can be few things as confronting for a family as to find they have a memoirist in their midst. I hope too for the understanding of others who might have recognised themselves in these pages. I appreciate they will have their own version of shared experiences and I’m aware my telling mine may cause some discomfort. I have changed some names to protect identities in an effort to minimise that. Gregory Atkinson supplied many breakfasts, lunches, dinners and cups of tea as I worked on this book in time I barely had to spare. I will not forget his crucial practical support, or his steadfast faith in me and in this work.

  Finally, I want to acknowledge the many women who, in different capacities, have buoyed me and educated me over the past three decades of mindful wrangling with both trauma and patriarchy. I dedicate this book to them, to all those wranglers who came before us, and to those who will follow.