To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.
— Milan Kundera
I dreamed about my dog, Lexi, this morning, as she was pressed against my back, sleeping alongside me. In the dream, I was holding her. We were in a park. She saw an older woman in poor health and began wagging her tail. I carried Lexi over to the woman. She angled her head downward and pressed the top of her muzzle against the woman’s cheek.
The woman began to cry. Lexi intrinsically understood what the woman was feeling. She was there for the woman in a way humans hadn’t been. Tears streamed down the woman’s face and landed on Lexi’s wispy facial hairs.
Others from the park gathered around. In silence, they entered the space Lexi was creating for the woman—a space of loving without words, of existing fully and selflessly with someone in need. A kind of joy emerged, not unbridled happiness, but the deeper joy that suffering makes possible.
I heard a “thump, thump, thump,” as rhythmic as a healthy heartbeat. It was Lexi, not in the dream but beside me in bed. Each morning when she wakes up, her tail starts moving before the rest of her body does. The “thump, thump, thump” was her signature wag. Good morning, Lexi, I responded, as I do each day. Those three words invariably set the rest of her body in motion. She wriggles up to my face, plies me with kisses, then curls up in the space between my shoulder and head while I tickle her tummy and tell her how much I love her.
I had other dreams last night—recurring nightmares whose subjects and plots are so similar they’ve worn ruts in my mind. A house with missing walls, no locks on the doors if there are doors at all. Strangers inside with me. Men, mostly. Sometimes complicit women. More of them coming. More and more, so many they resemble debris-filled floodwaters. Me, half-naked, running. A bare mattress in a basement. No way out.
I only remember the nightmares as I sit down to write this. The dream of Lexi is what got me through the night. The reality of Lexi is what gets me through each day. Lexi and her wagging tail. Lexi curled up beside my head, her soft, disheveled fur tickling my face. Lexi and the space she creates for deep joy within deep suffering. Lexi, the healer. Lexi, my healer.
Today, Lexi and I will sit at the base of the sandstone slope that rises, unreal and dreamlike, behind my home—its strata twisted by profound geological events during a time scale humans can barely fathom. It will be a glorious afternoon. We will do nothing. We will feel peace.
If you meet me when I’m with my dog, Lexi, chances are you’re going to hear her story. The story of how she lived during the first nine months of her life. The story of the woman who bravely stepped in when nobody else would and carried Lexi and her littermate out of a deplorable situation while both she and the dogs shook with fear.
The story of her frail, failing body. Her lack of food, water and shelter. The way she was locked in an outdoor pen with other breeds—some much larger than her and all of them puppies. Lexi was deemed unsellable, so she and her littermate were forgotten, left to fend for themselves when they didn’t even have the freedom to roam in search of shelter and sustenance. Lexi and her littermates were left to die. Some of them did. Around them, dogs barked and wailed. They slept on ground soaked with urine and excrement. The business of selling went on.
Lexi was born into the life of backyard breeding, a practice that’s ubiquitous in the United States. Like many states, the one in which Lexi was bred — by a person who saw dogs as a source of quick cash—provides insufficient legal protection to companion animals. What Lexi went through is not unique or unusual. It’s built into the business model for inhumane breeders whose cramped pens and suffocating buildings litter the country from coast to coast. Slow death and immeasurable suffering are a feature of these businesses, not a bug.
When I try to tell Lexi’s story, trainers almost invariably interrupt me early on to say something like this:
Dogs are resilient. If you hold onto that story, your dog won’t be able to move past it. You need to think about your dog’s future, not what they went through.
Agreed. But I’m not “holding onto” Lexi’s past. If anyone is aware of her resilience, it’s me. I see evidence of it daily, hourly, and minute by minute. What I’m doing is this: Raising awareness wherever I can about the horrific abuse and neglect that occurs in backyard breeding operations and puppy mills. I’m educating those in my community about dog abuse and neglect, as well as the effects of irresponsible breeding and pet overpopulation. Most people don’t know about any of those issues, especially not in sunny Southern Utah, where the scent of yesteryear still permeates the air and, on the surface, everything appears to be good and right and noble, always. Here, the unthinkable isn’t just unthinkable. It’s literally not thought.
Here, the unthinkable isn’t just unthinkable. It’s literally not thought.
Teaching the public through education and outreach programs is essential to getting the message out about dogs like Lexi, but so is giving those stories a face. Lexi is that face. While someone is marveling at how sweet and wonderful Lexi is, I can tell them a story they would never have imagined while all their senses are engaged. The listener can feel Lexi’s fur, gaze into her beautiful eyes, and smell that signature Cheetos odor wafting from her scraggly paws. The listener gets a serotonin boost while learning what Lexi and other dogs have to endure. Engaging the heart and mind together makes the teachable moment that much more powerful.
This is immersive education and storytelling at its finest. The subject is right there. She’s not a statistic or an abstraction. I’m able to make inroads with folks who might otherwise drift into local pet shops that source puppies from unethical breeders when they decide it’s time to add a dog to their family. Those stores’ pretty plexiglass display cases won’t hint at where the puppies came from. Their owners and employees won’t tell the truth. Instead, they’ll spin some yarn that has no veracity.
Lexi has to tell the true story. And because she can’t speak, I have to tell her story for her and with her. So I’ll continue talking about her trauma, as well her resilience and recovery. It doesn’t mean I’m living in the past or locking her into a figurative pen. Quite the opposite. Our stories can free us. They can also free listeners from ignorance, misunderstanding, and a lack of awareness. Lexi’s story is designed to ensure there’s no next Lexi. Mills must stop churning. Backyard breeding operations must close. Neither will do so willingly. Their market—folks like the ones I share Lexi’s story with—needs to dry up. Without demand, there will be no supply.
I’m concerned that some trainers are myopically focused on the client and dog they’re working with. They fail to see the bigger picture. They speak before they listen. How can they not understand the importance of telling stories like Lexi’s? Is it because they work with clients who have purebred dogs? Do they feel pressure from breeders in the community? Do they just not like hearing unpleasant stories? These trainers don’t recognize the implications of discouraging adopters from sharing their dogs’ stories, especially stories of trauma. I wish they’d reconsider shutting folks like me down.
Lexi is part of my family now. That means her story is my story. We walk through this world together, each of us with our own histories of trauma, each on our own healing path. Together, we’ll tell our stories in our own ways as long as we walk this earth.
She tells me her name. It’s a faux portmanteau of candle and mandolin. She uses her digital SLR to show me a bufflehead, a common goldeneye, and a scaup. We don’t know one another, but we are the only two people standing on top of Clinton Dam which, at eight hundred seventy-five feet, towers over Clinton Lake. We are here to watch waterfowl. That’s as good a formula for a fast acquaintanceship as any. Bird lovers talk to one another. We’re an endogenous group with overlapping interests that include conservation, education, outdoorsmanship, and a good-hearted love of birds (with a bit of competition thrown into the mix). I’ve seen folks pull up beside one another in popular birding areas to share information on what birds are present and where they are located. “Seen anything interesting” is a common refrain. That’s exactly what the woman on the dam said to me before introducing herself.
It’s supposed to be in the forties, but it isn’t. At this height, the wind cuts right through my layers. It might as well be in the low teens. I don’t feel like a warm-blooded creature. This is how the stones on the side of the dam must feel, losing all their heat to the frigid air and thereby becoming the essence of frigidity. I jump up and down to stay warm. It’s a futile endeavor. My body heat flows into the surrounding air.
Lake Clinton was built under the Flood Control Act of 1962 by damming the Wakarusa River. Funds were allocated the year I was born, just one state to the south, where we’d had a recreational reservoir since 1944. My family adored that bloated watering hole, whose creation necessitated the flooding of four towns. Artifacts from those engorged ghost towns still sit at the bottom of the lake, including marble tombstones that emerged a few years ago during a drought. The creation of Lake Clinton required destruction as well. Ten communities were wiped out with the lake’s development, as well as rich histories, such as underground railroad sites. The Wakarusa River Valley Heritage Museum now operates out of an old milk shed that was once part of Bloomington, one of the towns washed away when the lake was filled. The historic house the shed belonged to was razed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1981 after agreeing to renovate it.
It’s only my third trip here. I made the most recent one yesterday with my partner. Somehow, we managed to miss the turnout on the dam, which is one of the lake’s best spots for watching birds. When I got home, I realized our mistake and decided to come back out on my own. Birding is different alone. There’s something both calming and unsettling about looking for birds without a partner. There’s a kind of intimacy in finding a bird and sharing that experience with the person you love. It’s nice to run into other bird lovers, in part because they are so enthusiastic and in part because it takes the edge off the loneliness that can accompany solo birding. But it’s not the same as being out with my partner. I have more time to think, for one thing, which is both good and bad, depending on the thought.
Off to the right, the woman and I see two American white pelicans. To the left, a great blue heron flies in and lands on the rocky shore. The heron was here yesterday, too. The woman and I talk about how surprising it is to see a heron in such cold weather. My worry is evident in my voice, which cracks from more than the cold. I’m concerned that our unusually warm weather has affected migration timing and that many birds, not just this heron, are now in danger. In a matter of days, the temperature has plunged from the forties and fifties to the single digits, with subzero temperatures on the way. The woman and I talk about how cold we are before drifting back to our respective cars and cranking the heat. She drives away. I am on my own now, again.
I make my way up and over the lake to an area called Bloomington West. It takes longer than I expect. “Alone, alone, alone.” The word pecks at the deadwood in my head. I realize this is the first time I’ve done anything on my own since I experienced a period of great trauma in 2015. After that year, I retreated into what was safe and comfortable—into myself, mostly, and away from other people. I didn’t know a pair of binoculars would send me back out into the world—alone, alone—no less. This open-ended time is terrifying on some levels but also healing. I felt like the earth is putting me back together bone by bone, like a someone preparing a bird skeleton for display at a local nature center.
On the road, a man approaches from behind, fast. I’m going the speed limit, but he wants me to drive faster. Now I am not alone, and I want alone to return. Alone suddenly feels like an empty nest, safe and solitudinous. I worry about being out here at the lake and meandering through the rural areas that surround it. How easy it would be for someone to mess with a woman, with me. I feel old traumas speaking through my body, marks left by the men who have harmed me. Some experts call what I am experiencing the sequelae of trauma. Others call it post-traumatic stress disorder. The language I use is different. My trauma is subjective, not objective. It is visceral, not clinical. Psychologists don’t capture my experience any better than the authors of the DSM. I think about the eyes of the Cooper’s hawk who hunts behind my yard. They are the color of Baltic amber. I imagine my body is made of amber that, over time, has grown around what it has encountered, each occlusion an infraction—something forced, something taken, something threatened, something denied. The body is still there but so is what the body has been through, what it remembers. I have hardened around these memories.
I turn on a street with a funny name: E 251st Diagonal Road. The man is still behind me. I turn again, onto a road that will take me to the shore. The man keeps going straight. “Alone,” I exhale, as if the word were a mantra. I pass a newly tilled field and scare up countless meadowlarks and European starlings. They skim the field’s teased surface. I continue all the way to the lake, past a sign that reads “Road ends in water.” Perfect. A road to no-road feels existential in this moment. At the water’s edge, there’s another sign. This one says parking is not allowed at any time. I see nobody, anywhere. There aren’t even boats on the parts of the lake that haven’t frozen over. I park the car and step onto a wooden loading dock. Its yellow poles are as bright as a red-shouldered hawk’s legs and feet. The rest of the scenery is hazy, as if someone is holding a sheet of onion skin paper between me and the world. At first, I hear nothing. Then, there is noise everywhere—around me, beneath me, near, far. All at once, it sounds like singing and cracking and heavenly voices mixed with ghostly nightmare cries. My heart feels like a heron slipping on a frozen marsh until I place the sounds. It’s the water freezing, the everywhere sound of solidification. Imaging one thousand people bending saws and one hundred sticks cracking all at once. This is what the Sirens must have sounded like. Enchanted to the point of being driven mad, those poor sailors never stood a chance.
Now that I understand what I am hearing, the terror turns to strange beauty. This unsettling and unexpected improvisation has reduced my lexicon to a single word: “Wow.” I say it over and over. I look up from the ice to take in this abandoned corner of the freezing lake and see a tree full of bald eagles. I say wow again. And again. One eagle flies away. Another flies in. I see one in another tree. I see one on the ice. Wow. Part of me wishes my partner was here. Part of me wishes the woman I’d met on the dam was here. I know she would love this. But those parts are easily subverted. In truth, I want this experience all to myself, and I have it all to myself. The eagles. The lake. The haunting ice. And me.
I drive by Bloomington East, past the closed Wakarusa River Valley Heritage Museum, before heading out the way I came in. I stop the car in front of the field where I saw the meadowlarks and schlep into the freshly turned soil, aware that I am trespassing. I watch groups of starlings and meadowlarks skim the surface of the land, first left, then right. Through the binoculars, the birds don’t look real. The starlings are on one plane and the meadowlarks on another, like two paintings on separate sheets of glass with a space between them. I feel like I’m looking at an image in a View-Master. Not 3D, not really. Not the world the way the human eye and mind see and understand it. The binoculars create a beautiful distortion that turns the world into a piece of modern art.
I turn to walk back to the road. I think I see a party limo, but there’s a casket in the back. It’s a white hearse with a dancing neon license plate cover. A trail of cars follows. Ordinary cars. Nothing festive about them. They are the kinds of cars people in rural areas drive, ones that sit high off the ground, get around in all types of terrain and weather, and are always dirty. The occupants of the vehicles look sad and also a little irritated about passing a stranger standing where she has no business standing. Heavy with impatience and shame, I wait in the space that separates the life in the field from the death snaking beside it. The procession passes. I get in my car.
My road does not end in water, not today. I drive back the way I came. Hawks perch in the trees and on power lines along the highway. They give way to rock pigeons, then starlings. I arrive home in time to see a white-breasted nuthatch and a Carolina wren in the yard. It gets darker. Only the northern cardinals remain. Then they leave. Darker still. I see a mourning dove on the edge of the birdbath. Then nothing.
Leaves from our red oak appliqué the lawn. The fall-blooming plants have lost their flowers, save for two azaleas. Butterflies and moths have been visiting the azaleas since the butterfly bushes started dying back. Above, I see woodpeckers from time to time. They dance up and down the trunks of our sweet gums. I’ve seen a slate-colored junco on two occasions. Both times, he was sneaking over the fence to take a dip in one of our birdbaths.
We have three birdbaths. Before we moved to this house, I never paid attention to birds, at least not close attention. The birdbaths came with the home, a gift of sorts from the previous owner. The birds who visit our yard regularly were also a gift. Shortly after moving here, I decided it was time to do something about my long-held desire to identify the birds I saw. I got my wish when I was given a set of bird flashcards and a pair of binoculars. The View-Master effect of the binoculars made the whole world pop to life. I couldn’t believe such wonder existed right outside my door. I’ve spent countless hours not only watching birds but also examining trees, the sky, squirrels, the texture of all manner of surfaces, the shrubs at the back of the property that lean into each other like old friends, and so on.
One of my favorite birds is the junco. I remember them from when we lived here years ago, before we moved away (and subsequently moved back). They frequented the yard at our first house. I remember that time fondly. My trauma was about half what it is now, though those earlier traumas were closer to me, more deeply imprinted, less smoothed by time, effort and consideration. Now, the most recent traumas are the jagged ones. They jar me from sleep at night and intrude on my waking hours.
I’ve been fighting for a long time, for myself and for others. For the most part, I feel unheard and unseen. I am frustrated by the lack of literacy around trauma, oppression, discrimination, and other issues that profoundly affect people’s health and well-being. I am frustrated that neurotypicality is imposed on all levels and that social constructs are mistaken for truths.
The birds help. Immensely. They don’t give me answers, and that’s the whole point of paying attention to them. They allow me to stay on a little island called here and now, unaffected by what’s happened in my past and unburdened by the extremely difficult work of being heard above the din of prevailing beliefs and values.
In these small slices of time, there is nothing wrong, nothing at all. The world is wings and air, and I am part of it.
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.
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.
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.
Dana Henry Martin 