Trauma

The Loneliness of Recovery

I used to think to be not alone meant / never having to walk through the high wheat / or struggle in the water.

— Allison Seay

I am standing in the high wheat. Field with Sheafs, by August Haake (1911–1914), oil on cardboard. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

When I was a teenager, my mother’s best friend came over one night after a long absence from the weekly happy hour my mother hosted. When she arrived, the friend was serious, even somber. She stayed just long enough to tell my mother and their mutual friends that she wasn’t coming back to the group because she had quit drinking.

Couldn’t you just come and not drink, someone asked, flummoxed by the surprise announcement.

No, she said. And I can’t be around any of you again, not while you’re still drinking.

She explained that being around people who drank would jeopardize her recovery. She couldn’t be in that physical or psychological space anymore. My mother didn’t understand, or maybe she understood but didn’t accept her friend’s decision. This was, after all, the woman who had been there through everything with my mom. They’d known each other for more than thirty years. This woman even picked out something for my mother to wear to my father’s funeral. I remember her bringing a selection of outfits home for my mother to try on.

Nothing black, my mother had insisted. I hate it when widows wear black at funerals.

Her friend complied. She fanned out half a dozen wool and satin pieces in beryl blue, emerald green, and ruby red—the rich colors of a painted landscape. My mother sat slumped on the edge of her bed, barely present.

Get up and try these on, her friend coaxed.

Her concern for my mother was evident. It was one of those defining moments in a friendship. Through death, they had become even closer—friends for life, or at least that’s what everyone thought at the time.

After her announcement, my mother’s friend rose and walked purposefully through our paneled den, the one with the mirrored wet bar my father built before his death. She reached the thick cedar door and let herself out.

Empty Space

There are many differences between the alcohol recovery model and the mental health recovery movement. Still, situating myself within the recovery movement feels similar to leaving everyone and everything I’ve known, the way my mother’s best friend had to all those years ago. For one thing, there isn’t a recovery-oriented support group in my area. I don’t feel comfortable at local support groups that follow the disease model, suppress or dismiss research that challenges that model, treat the DSM as authoritative, teach people that medications are the best and often only option for managing their assigned illness, accept funding from pharmaceutical companies, and act as mouthpieces for those companies.

I’ve tried to take part in those groups—to create a space for myself and my view there—and I’ve been met with everything from dismissiveness to outright disdain. For me, they are not places where healing can occur. Rather, they are culdesacs that lead to feeling, and learning to be, what Lewis Mehl-Madrona describes as “forever ill.” In Coyote Wisdom, he writes:

On the down side [sic], support groups for particular illnesses sometimes encourage stories that keep people sick and support them in seeing themselves as ill. People who absorb these stories can come to define themselves as forever ill. A healing story needs to challenge their membership in the community of sufferers.

In my experience, label-specific support groups don’t tell healing stories or encourage peers to create those types of stories for themselves. Instead, I’ve heard group leaders refer to their own mental health labels as “awful,” “terrible” and “horrible.” I’ve seen peers internalize that language and mindset. This does an incredible disservice to the community and is, in my opinion, contemptible. I won’t set foot in those groups anymore because of the culture of self-loathing they cultivate.

Recently, I ran into someone from a group I used to attend. Though it was wonderful to see him, I wasn’t sure how to pick up where we left off more than a year ago. My DSM diagnosis has changed since I attended that group, but that information isn’t important because the DSM isn’t an accurate or helpful classification system. Whatever label I do or don’t have is just that: a label. My thyroid disease has also been addressed, but explaining how that affects my well-being is taxing for even the most attentive listener. So a silence opened in the conversation, like a crevasse in brittle ice. I stood on one side, he on the other. I care about him. I also care about myself and need to do what’s best for me, which includes walking purposefully on my own path, the one that leads to healing. Now I understand how space forms between people, like it did between my mother and her best friend.

Hello, Out There?

There are like-minded people in my area, and I’ve had a difficult time connecting with them. Often, when I reach out, I don’t get a response. I know survivors experience frustration, exhaustion, burnout, and a host of other issues related to trying to have their voices heard while also caring for themselves. Nobody in the recovery movement owes me anything, and I don’t want to take time or energy away from their important work. At the same time, it’s hard to go it alone when I know there are others in town who feel the same way as me. I like to imagine us coming together in friendship and shared purpose. (That’s my internal idealist talking. I’m trying to find my internal realist, but so far she’s eluded capture.)

I’ve had difficulty with recovery-oriented online support groups as well. Members seem to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with one another, suppressing individual voices, and creating caustic environments in other ways. It’s exhausting to take part in those groups. I often come out feeling worse than when I went in. Online groups also tend to share a great deal of misinformation about mental health, most of which goes unchecked. There are perspectives and opinions, certainly, and those should be respected. But sharing inaccurate information doesn’t help anyone.

Whether in person or online, it probably doesn’t help that, in addition to being an idealist, I’m sensitive, introverted, and have a low threshold for interpersonal strife—either experienced or witnessed. Still, I’m here. I want to speak, write, and act in accordance with what I value, which is a model that promotes well-being over ill-being, individual approaches over generalized protocols, and healing over harm.

I’m over here in the high wheat, in the water. I will stay here even if nobody joins me.


Aside: Reaching Across the Crevasse

One way the mental health recovery movement differs from the alcohol recovery model is that there’s really no room for leaving anyone behind. That silence I felt when talking with my friend recently? I decided to try to connect with him to the best of my ability. He’s my people. Everyone with lived experience is my people, and I am their people. I can’t forget that. While I do need to distance myself from the disease model and the “therapeutic” frameworks that fall out of it, I don’t need to distance myself from anyone who’s open to where I am coming from, even if they remain on the other side of the crevasse.

In part, I told my friend that I am looking at well-being as opposed to ill-being these days, and at a mental health model that supports everyone (regardless of DSM label or lack thereof) having the tools and supports to live meaningful lives. I added that I believe we can all heal from trauma, adversity, and distress—which comes in many forms and touches most of our lives in one way or another. Finally, I said that I don’t think the medical system (physical or mental) goes far enough in not just treating illness and ill-being but in showing us ways that we can thrive and experience well-being.

I guess that’s my new elevator pitch, though it’s a little long. I’ll work on it.

A Secret Order

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

— Carl Jung

This morning, my chihuahua threw up on me in bed. I was curled up in the fetal position, and she was behind me with her chest against my back. You could say she was the big spoon and I was the little spoon, as preposterous as that might sound, given that I am approximately eighteen times her size. But there it is: big spoon = chihuahua, little spoon = human.

Understandably, being woken in this manner led me to believe I might not be in for the best of days. As I took care of my dog, got myself cleaned up, and cobbled together all the linens that needed washing, I felt defeated before I’d even brushed my teeth. Then my centralized pain set in, along with intestinal distress because I dared to eat out yesterday afternoon. As if that weren’t enough, I felt like I was being strangled. Yesterday, my new thyroid surgeon examined the scar on my neck from the thyroidectomy that my old thyroid surgeon performed last fall. He needed to assess how much scar tissue was present. Turns out, there’s a significant amount of scarring, and manipulating the area has made it extremely tight and painful today.

I needed to get it together, and fast. My first session with a holistic therapist was scheduled for noon. This meeting was important to me. I didn’t want to arrive at the therapist’s office sweaty, whiffling, and redolent of dog vomit. I needed to be lucid, solid, maybe even likable. (The last one is always a longshot for me, but I hold out hope with every new interaction.)

I made it to the session with my pestilent body in tow. A sack of pain I was. The therapist put me at ease by pointing out her Carl Jung action figure and saying, Not everyone has one of those.

They don’t, I thought. But they damn well should.

She also had a stuffed Yoda on her desk. He was wearing spectacles. I should probably show her my bright orange, 3D-printed Yoda head at our next meeting. I don’t have any Jung tchotchke to share, but I do feel Jung at heart, so at least I have a pun lined up for next week’s session.

The therapist knew things were serious when she began charting my immediate family, and I was in tears by the time she asked me what my father’s name was. I would have totally lost it if she’d asked my mother’s name. (It was Merry, which is heartbreaking considering how much trauma she was born into and lived through. Given her life circumstances, my mother’s name was a cruel, impossible demand—a mirthful adjective that would never find its occasion. What were my grandparents hoping for, beyond hope, when they fitted her with that albatross?) In short, I wasn’t able to mask my physical or emotional pain, and that made me feel as vulnerable as a fledgling swallow leaving the nest for the first time.

The therapist asked how I was feeling. I told her I was a burning tumbleweed careening down a hill, setting the countryside on fire.

She seemed to understand.

I asked her if she thinks there’s more merit to the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress than other DSM diagnoses. She said she doesn’t give a hanging chad about diagnosis. She only cares about hearing and seeing the person in front of her.

You are not a diagnosis. You are a human being, she said. What I’m hearing and seeing is you.

I tried not to cry because I don’t want Therapy Dana to be someone who is weepy throughout an entire session. But I’m not sure I’m in charge of who Therapy Dana is or isn’t, let alone what she does and doesn’t do.

I chose the Jung quote above because it makes me think about the DSM and its litany of disorders. The DSM is a dead end that never leads back to order. How do you make your way out of that book once you’re in it? My therapist says you have to stop looking at the disorder and start looking at what will help you heal.

I don’t always know where to cast my gaze, but I’m looking.

Trauma as Mineralized Body

If you cannot find it in your own body, where will you go in search of it?

— The Upanishads

My freeze response this morning was kind of like this, but without all the great scenery and gentle animals. A Fairy Tale, by Arthur Wardle, oil on canvas. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

This morning, I felt like a length of fossilized wood, my body having turned to stone. I was lying in my bed, white sheets a blanket of fresh snow glinting near my mineral-laden bark. Every time I imagined getting up, my torso and limbs tightened. I was stuck. I wasn’t able to move for more than an hour.

This happens sometimes. It’s one of my responses to trauma. Most people have heard of fight and flight, two physiological reactions to threats and perceived threats. There are two other, related responses: freeze and fawn. Many people who’ve been traumatized have some combination of these four responses. I’ve experienced all four, but my primary responses are flight and freeze.

Of the two, I like flight more. Much more. At least with flight, I’m in motion. I feel like I’m getting away from a threatening situation, my body moving, machine-like, under its own direction. Freeze is worse because I have all the emotions associated with flight, yet I have to experience them wherever I happen to be when the freeze response starts. Inside, I might be saying, “Just move. You’ll feel better if do. Start with a muscle, any muscle.” Yet I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t even think properly because my limbic brain has sand bagged my neocortex, which can only watch on, enfeebled.

You wouldn’t have known what you were seeing if you had walked in on me this morning. You would have seen a woman in seeming repose staring at a ceiling fan, its faux-wood blades smearing with soothing regularity.

Aside from the discomfort of the freeze response, I hate freezing because it’s triggering. The first time I froze was when I was thirteen years old and my father’s best friend began molesting me. I also froze in 2009 when I was sexually assaulted. Powerlessness, shame and despair are associated with the freeze response. It’s no surprise that people who freeze when being molested, raped, and sexually assaulted have higher rates of post-traumatic stress than those who don’t. There’s more self-blame associated with freezing than with the other responses to trauma.

I had physical symptoms this morning, too. A migraine. A tinnitus flare-up. Burning mouth syndrome. These issues, along with my freeze response, were my body’s way of dealing with distress I experienced yesterday. Along with three other psychiatric survivors, I was invited to share my account of abuse within the mental health system with a local healthcare organization. As I listened to the other women’s stories, I felt like my heart was being fed into a meat grinder, stuffed into a casing, and sewn back inside my chest. Those are the strongest, bravest, most intelligent people I’ve had the pleasure of sitting alongside in a long time. The day took a toll not just because I shared my story, but because we shared our stories. Nobody should endure what we and so many others have endured. Nobody should have to live with the trauma that led us to seek care or the additional trauma that seeking care can lead to. Nobody should have to face the very real risk of being retraumatized every time we tell our stories in the hope that healthcare might improve, that others might understand us, and that we might be able to speak and write our way back to life.

Though I still feel crystalline, I am moving, albeit slowly. I’m writing slowly, too, with my fossilized mind.

Everything I need to know is in my body and always has been. The body is a great teacher, and I am trying to learn from what it is telling me rather than vilifying it. The more I can see why I am freezing, as opposed to resisting the response, the more I am able to see what my body wants me to pay attention to. Today, I am paying attention.

Throwing Roses into the Abyss

Throw roses into the abyss and say: “Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The Roses of Heliogabalus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888), oil on canvas. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

I am alive, despite having experienced trauma for years. You could say trauma is my monster, a hydra that’s reared various heads over five decades, from infancy into middle age. Sometimes all the heads appear at once, like a giant air balloon tied to another, identical balloon—and another and another—a train of memories and flashbacks as real as the window I’m looking through now at the world beyond. But there’s never glass between me and the trauma, not a single pane. I meet it with no shield and no weapons.

Nietzsche says we can’t live as the vanquished. We have to live as the victorious. To do this, we must show our thanks to the monster for not knowing how to devour us. We must throw roses into the abyss. For him, the monster is what lies within us. For me, the monster is both internal and external—and never exclusively one or the other. A thing happens. As a sentient being, I respond. Now the “thing” is within me, kneaded into my response, often long after it has raised its tail and returned to its bottomless lake. This works in reverse, too. As a sentient being, I can’t perceive anything that happens without being informed by my lived experience. The external is never simply external, and the internal is never simply internal. Within is without and without is always necessarily within.

Trauma starts outside us, but it twines its way through each of our two hundred six bones, ninety-thousand-mile nervous system, and more than six hundred forty skeletal, visceral and cardiac muscles. The sequelae of trauma are significant and can include disruptions to nearly every system in the body, behavioral and cognitive changes, high rates of retraumatization, changes in our core beliefs and values, difficulty with living a “normal” life, and much more.

So the monster is not just internal. It is also external. And the two are perpetually engaged in a simple but exquisite water dance. For me, throwing roses at the abyss performs three functions. First, it’s a way to honor the parts of me that have worked together to survive. Second, it’s a way to begin forgiving the monster that is trauma. And third, it’s a way to bring greater presence and beauty to my past, present and future—even if trauma continues to be there, hissing in the margins.

I am alive, and this site is where I throw roses into the abyss. Let them fill the chasm.

The First Wound, a Found Essay in Verse

The First Wound

The first wound was in the right hand
…………………..and occurred at the patrol car as confirmed
by skin tissue found on the car.
…………………………………..It was the only close wound.

The Body

The body weight is 289 pounds and the body length is 77 inches.
The state of preservation is good in this unembalmed body.
Rigor mortis is well developed.

The body is heavier than ideal weight base upon height //.
Lividity is difficult to access due to natural skin pigmentation.
There is no peripheral edema present.

Personal hygiene is good.

No unusual odor is detected as the body is examined.
There is no abnormal skin pigmentation present.
There is no external lymphadenopathy present //

The pupil of the left eye is round, regular, equal and dilated.
The scleral and conjunctival surfaces of the left eye are unremarkable.
The right eye cannot be accessed due to an acute traumatic injury (gunshot wound).

Gunshot Wounds

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the vertex of the scalp.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the central forehead.
There is a gunshot exit wound of the right jaw.

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper right chest.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the lateral right chest.
There is a gunshot entrance wound of the upper ventral right arm.

There is a gunshot exit wound of the upper dorsal right arm.

There is a gunshot entrance wound of the dorsal right forearm.
There is a gunshot exit wound of the medial ventral right forearm.
There is a tangential // gunshot wound of the right bicep.

There is a tangential // gunshot wound near the ventral surface of the right thumb.
There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyebrow //.
There is a gunshot related defect present near the right eyelid //.

The Heart

The surface of the heart is smooth,
………………………….glistening and transparent.

Tissue Fragment

Sections of the tissue fragment from
the “exterior surface of the police officer’s

motor vehicle” are consistent with a fragment
of skin overlying soft // tissue.

There are features of desiccation/drying
artifact present within the soft tissue.

There is a granular layer present
within the upper layer of stratified

squamous epithelium.
Focally, lightly pigmented keratinocytes

are present within the basal layer
of the stratified squamous epithelium.

The Hair

The hair is black.
This represents the apparent natural color.
The hair is worn short to medium length.
There is a goatee present on the face.
The body hair is of normal male distribution.

He Came Around

he came around
…………………..he came around
………………………………………with his arm extended
…………………………..fist made
……..and went like that
………………………….straight at my face with his …
………………………………………….a full swing with his left hand

Mace

I know how mace affects me so if I used that
in that close proximity I was gonna be disabled per se.
And I didn’t know if it was even gonna work on him
if I would be able to get a clear shot or anything else.

Um, then like I was thinking like picturing my belt
going around it. I don’t carry a taser so that option
was gone and even if I had one with a cartridge
on there, it probably wouldn’t have hit him anywhere.

He Said

He said, “You’re too much of a fuckin’ pussy
………………………..to shoot me” and grabbed my gun.

Then

Then I took my left arm and I pinned it against
my back seat and pushed the gun forward
like this
…………………..took my left hand, placed it against his
and my hand on the side of my firearm
and pushed forward both of my arms.

Somewhat Lined Up

When it got there I saw
that it was somewhat
lined up with his silhouette
and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.
Pulled it again,
nothing happened.

Um I believe his fingers
were over in between from
the hammer and the slide
preventing it from firing.

Blood

The first thing I remember seeing is glass flyin’
and blood all over my right hand on the back side
of my hand.

……………..Um, he looked like he was shocked
initially but, and he paused for a second and then
he came back into my vehicle and attempted
to hit me multiple times

………………………….He had, after I had shot
and the glass came up, he took like a half step back
and then realized he was okay still I’m assuming.
He came back towards my vehicle and ducked in
again his whole bod …

………………………….whole top half of his body
came in and tried to hit me again.

……………………………………..Um …

Again

I tried to fire again, just a click.
Nothing happened.

…………………….After the click,
I racked it and as I racked it,
it just came up and shot again.

Dust

I was still in this position blocking myself
and just shooting to where he was ’cause
he was still there.

……………………Um, when I turned and looked,
I realized I had missed I saw, a, like dust
in the background and he was running …

A Grunting Noise

When he stopped, he turned, looked at me,
made like a grunting noise and had the most
intense aggressive face I’ve ever seen on a person.

Still Charging

Still charging hands still in his waistband,
…………………..hadn’t slowed down. I fired another set of shots.

…………Same thing, still running at me hadn’t slowed down,
hands still in his waistband.

He Went Down

He went down his hand was still
………………………….under his, his right hand was still
……………under his body looked like it was still
……………………………….in his waistband. I never touched him.

Swabs

Swabs from Michael Brown’s t-shirt / Swabs from Michael Brown’s shorts / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swabs from the palm of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swabs from the back of Michael Brown’s right hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s left hand / Swab from the fingernail scrapings/clippings of Michael Brown’s right hand / Piece of apparent tissue or hardened nasal mucus from the driver front exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from the driver rear passenger exterior door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swab from roadway in front of 2943 Canfield / Swabs from RBS on the upper left thigh of [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants / Swabs from top exterior left front door of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from exterior left front door mirror of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from interior left front door handle of Ferguson [Police Department] vehicle 108 / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s “SIG P229” / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform shirt—left side and collar / Swabs from [Police Officer] Wilson’s uniform pants—left side / Buccal swab reference sample from [Police Officer] Wilson / Bloodstain card reference sample from Michael Brown

The Deceased Hands

The deceased hands
were bagged with paper bags
to save any trace evidence

—

The text above was taken directly from the documents pertaining to the grand jury investigation of Michael Brown’s shooting. Omitted words are indicated with a double slash (//). Omissions do not alter the context of the information provided. Read the grand jury documents here.

May everyone involved in this tragedy find healing. May we all find our way out of this, of this and so much more.

I Want

I’ve woken up feeling comfortable, relaxed even, which leaves me not knowing how to go about writing. I like to work against something when I write, and often what I work against is my own feelings of discomfort, physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. My state of comfort will pass, of that I am sure. But for now, I feel untethered—not quite sure how to write what I want to write, so instead I will focus on what I want to write.

I want to write about holograms. I want to write about time, space, the notion of self.

I want to write about authorship, the need to author. To own. To get credit. To take credit.

I want to write about poets being so obsessed over having “publishable” work. When did publishable become our standard for writing?

I want to write about women who are obsessed with acting like and being seen as girls. When did womanhood go out of fashion? When did we decide we wanted to trade whatever level of empowerment we have as women and go back to having much of our lives scripted for, dictated to us, as girls? It’s not all baby-doll dresses and piccolo voices and hopscotch on the asphalt playground. When did we forget that?

Do we really want to feel our first abuses all over again? Do we really want to be dismissed? Do we really want to unlearn our bodies? Have we forgotten what it took for us to survive, and do we not want to own, get credit, take credit for what we’ve managed to grow into, even as forces worked against us all along the way?

I want to write about my strange dream, where a room in my house was filled with plants. I could see spores rising from every leaf, wafting toward me. Some were threads, others particulate, the majority large and ethereal with skins thin as oolemmas and insides like jellyfish. I tried to grab the large ones, but my hands cupped nothing. I batted at them with my arms. The heat my movements generated made the spores move faster and more unpredictably. I want to write about how it felt to take those spores into my lungs.

I want to write palindromes but can’t seem to find anything worth saying as a palindrome.

I want to write about how thick the body can become with wanting.