My Journey Through Trauma to Recovery: A Tale By a Survivor of Torture, Abuse, Apocalyptic Violence and More in Childhood

The author of this piece wishes to remain anonymous
The work is dedicated to Shannon

 

Today is a strange day for me to be chronicling my thoughts and feelings to survivors and those who work with them. Just a little over a year ago, I was an inpatient in an amazing treatment program for trauma and dissociative disorders. There I met an amazing woman, Shannon. I’d known her briefly during my stay there, a mere two weeks, but she changed my life completely. I called her the day after I got out. She had been afraid- afraid that I would forget her. I tried to tell her that of all the things she was- forgettable was not one of them.

In trauma group, before one leaves the hospital, one does a closure: it’s a review of the time spent, and the future that awaits. One of the questions we were to answer was, “What was your greatest surprise?”

I said, “As for my greatest surprise, you, Shannon, were my greatest surprise.”

I promised her that I was going to send her some things when I got out and I hadn’t planned to call her until I had done this. But, the day after I got out, I called her. When she answered the phone I said, “I know you were afraid I might forget you. So I just had to call, because the idea of proving you wrong just made me so happy.” She laughed and we talked for a little while.

I got a call two days later from a representative from the hospital asking that I call. I feared the worst. My friends tried to calm me down. I couldn’t figure out any good reason they would be calling. I called later that day. My fears were confirmed: Shannon was dead. The subsequent days of my life were too crazy and complex to go into here, but suffice it to say, that I found myself inpatient again, in a different unit of the hospital. I didn’t want to be stuck there on my birthday, just a few days away. I managed to get out in record time.

The next morning, at about 2 or 3 am, I was trying to look up information about Shannon, because though we had gotten quite close in the brief time we knew other, even holding hands at times, I didn’t know her last name. I searched Google. Finally, I got a hit: an obituary in the town where she grew up. The news item said there was a funeral service later that morning. I was amazed. I assumed it would be impossible to get a ticket, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway, and a few hours later I was on a plane to another state. I got in, took a taxi from the airport, and arrived just as the memorial service was starting. I remember my intense emotions at the memorial service, which was beautiful, and so evocative of Shannon- beautiful, frail, intelligent, troubled. I didn’t introduce myself to anyone, and left soon after it was over.

I remember the overwhelming feelings and flood of memories at the service: anger, grief, pain, despair. Why, I thought, was this precious being dangled in front of me, only to be taken away from this world? But then I remembered: she was an angel- that’s how I thought of her, and I’ve only met a few angels in my life. But that’s it right? Some angels are just here for a short time, and then go to be with their angel friends up in heaven.

Shannon had talked about moving out to California where I was, when we were in the hospital, having fantasies about me driving her from her home town. I didn’t say anything, because I wanted her to focus on her recovery.

It’s now exactly one year ago–hard to believe.

Shortly after I got out of the hospital last year, and after Shannon’s death I wrote a letter to one of the other greatest loves of my life, to another other angel, excepted below.

July, 2010

I’m filled with seemingly inconsolable sorrow, or seemingly inconsolable grief. For so many things, for persons found and lost, for friends gone crazy, for the bureaucratic wheels of injustice grinding down with patients, persons, in the way of it all, including me; Neruda says the night is shattered that you are not with me; and I feel the same way about those I felt so close to, now so far away, not with me.

I’m hanging on to this mast, of the ship that is sailing from and on the sea. I don’t know where it’s going. I’m crying as I write this, with tears that now punctuate my days, oftentimes out of the blue, abruptly. In between the craziness of the last month, my mind has been on fire with ideas, poetry and love, now almost buried in my sorrow. I thought I’d write because the last thing I have left is my love of words and people.

I don’t know if I ever told you before but in the last two or three years I have experimented with writing novellas- something I may continue doing. I’ve been spending some time reading and writing poetry, including on the inside. I’m looking for one of my books, buried in some pile somewhere on Bob Dylan, I think called Chimes of Freedom, or something like that. I’ve also been looking up Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Vision of Sin, along with a new book I’ve bought on Joni Mitchell’s music. I’ve been listening to her album Blue and Court & Spark.

I wrote two poems after Shannon’s death, set into print below, but initially written on two sides of a sheet of paper, with some pastel markers, which I still have.

The Perfect Storm

Hurricane’s falling,
Winters morn,
Total disaster befallen:
A perfect storm.

I wrote this one for Shannon, when I was stuck in the other unit of the hospital, after she died.

Love came,
But now it’s gone,
Your heart shone,
Your love lives on.

It’s hard to believe when you meet someone like an angel (well, you must know, being an angel and all). But I guess all angels aren’t meant to stick around, they’ve got angel things to do. Harder to believe that you meet someone and then they are gone. She burst into my life and just as quickly was gone.

The combination of the work of dealing with the trauma, meeting and losing Shannon, and then the fiasco thereafter- well, I guess any one would take its toll. The triple conjuncture must be some cosmic test of my faith, of my resilience, of my stamina, my ability to surmount all odds, against all odds.

I’ve felt many emotions this last month, some of which I’m ashamed of, including hatred for God, which I felt intensely at the funeral. I was so upset. Why dangle this soul in front of me only to take her away? And then, before that, after the craziness at the hospital, and then being stuck in another section, getting out on my birthday, and then going to Shannon’s funeral the next day- I thought, divine intervention?

I can’t really make sense of it all.

I hope it’s ok if I tell you a little bit of the story. I read all of Jorge Luis Borges Selected Poems (2000) on the inside: genius lights from every page- amazing. When Shannon talked to me about us cooling [our handholding and other small intimacies, innocent though they were], what with the understandable concern of the nurses, despite it being pretty tame stuff, right before I was about to go, she got worried that I was going to forget about her; despite being unforgettable. So I read her a poem, of Borges, p. 39, one of the greatest poems I am aware of in any language, which rivals even Neruda:

Anticipation of Love

Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day,
Nor the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,
Nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence,
Will be so mysterious a gift,
As the sight of your sleep, enfolded
In the vigil of my arms.
Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep,
Quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,
You will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own.
Cast up into silence
I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being
And see you for the first time, perhaps,
As God must see you—
The fiction of time destroyed,
Free from love, from me.

I was trying to tell Shannon, in my own way, through Borges, that whatever feelings she had for me, I just wanted her to focus on her recovery, on getting well, on reclaiming her life. She had initiated the hand holding and small intimacies, and I went along (I was happy to do so, to allow her to feel that safety and warmth), though I was concerned that she not get too close, because I felt the most important thing for her was to work through the challenges she faced.

I’m sure I felt safe to her (and the prospect she seemed to be starting to fantasize about- of escaping with me, of me rescuing her), I’m sure seemed attractive. When she told me about the nurses concerns, she was afraid that it might tip my decision to go, and she was right in part. But exactly because of this, I left the next day in part because I was afraid that if she became too focused on me, it would distract her from the hard work of recovery facing her.

Perhaps, for my own self, in retrospect, I left too early. But I felt a love for her and for her well-being and those feelings made it feel right to go at that time. I spoke with here just a few days later, the day before her death. I told her that I stayed up all night trying to forget her (a joke) with no success- but mostly I told her that I called because the thought of proving her wrong (about me forgetting about her) made me feel so happy. Inside, I had written some poems, inspired by her and given them to her along with a book. So she had the words that bound us together, with our love of books, to remember me by.

Another dear friend of mine called me soon thereafter to tell me of her former lover now trying to win her back, despite having gone back to his wife, and the fact that this friend of mine is now married. The man is moving locally, so my friend was a bit freaked out and asked me what I thought.

I started out by saying, as a caveat (and exaggerating for effect), that I’ve made every mistake one can make in relationships, pushed everybody I loved away from me, destroyed all that was good and fine in my life, so whatever I was about to say should be taken with a grain of salt, especially in the face of my feelings of judgment. But in the end, I said that I thought he was the opposite of someone who loved her, because true love, if it is really true, and whether platonic or romantic, first and foremost should concern oneself with the well-being (and ethical consideration) of the other, and not one’s own self and desires. Strangely enough, that’s exactly why I left the Trauma unit that day, in part: I mean not to exaggerate it because at the time it was just one thing in a mix of considerations I had. But, I definitely did think, as I tried to express with the poem from Borges, that it was best if my friend were freed from me. Even if I had stayed, we would only have had two days left.

Shannon had talked about coming out West, and making a new start. She had talked about me coming and driving her out from the state in which she was living (though I said nothing when she mentioned this and had no intention of doing it, just as I had no intention of getting romantically involved with her, at least for years, given her need to focus on her recovery, and despite the connection that had already begun between us). But I didn’t say anything against it, especially because given her situation she did need to get far away from her family.

I told her the story of me and the spoon. Did I tell you that story? When I bought cereal a few months ago, I refused to buy silverware because I was only willing to buy one spoon. Shannon asked, “Well, when I come over won’t you need another spoon?” Which was so sweet… She was funny, and so bright, with so much to live for, despite her repeated attempts to end it all, including just before she got in. She was the first person I even talked to in the Trauma unit after I left. What are the chances, multiplied by infinity? Borges is the most mathematical writer I’ve ever read; perhaps that was part of the plan.

I hope it’s ok. I don’t know if it’s appropriate or not- me sharing this story, but I still feel closest to you of anyone in this world, in a world in which I’m struggling to stay connected with those I love.

Torture, Trauma And Recovery: What To Say?

I always think back to the lyrics of hip-hop artist Tupac/2Pac Shakur, “If you see God first, tell him shit got worse.” What I’m referring to here, is something that few people seem to know, and the experts themselves don’t seem to understand; which is that for survivors of severe child abuse and torture (I’m speaking specifically about those whose abuse/torture occurred as children – but it may be more generally applicable) things spiral downward as time marches forward. Judith Herman (1992) stated it eloquently in her brilliant Trauma and Recovery:

As the survivor struggles with the tasks of adult life, the legacy of her childhood becomes increasingly burdensome. Eventually, often in the third or fourth decade of life, the defensive structure may begin to break down. Often the precipitant is a change in the equilibrium of close relationships: The failure of a marriage, the illness or death of a parent. The facade can hold no longer, and the underlying fragmentation becomes manifest. When and if a breakdown occurs, it can take symptomatic forms that mimic virtually every form of psychiatric disorder. Survivors fear that they are going insane or will have to die (p. 114).

I remember the day I found Judith Herman’s book, comparing those in small concentration camps in the home with those large concentration camps that have periodically inhabited our world. I remember her discussing, through quotations from the survivors she worked with, almost all of whom said that it was the totally instability, marked by periodic outbursts of apocalyptic violence that was the worst of all. For the first time in my life, I felt that somebody had finally understood me, had brought for the first time a little light to my word. The testimony of survivors about the centrality of instability – and requisite lack of ability to trust – is in conformity with what leading experts in the field, notably Colin Ross, have mentioned. It can be misleading to focus on this or that event- it’s the overall environment of abuse that is the key.

Ross points out another key feature though, that’s mentioned in passing by Herman, which always perplexed me, the attempt by the child to preserve the attachment to the perpetrator. Ross notes that children, biologically – and as my late friend and colleague, the noted psychologist Margret Brenman-Gibson used to say, biosociopsychologically – have to attach. I had to attach. In relatively non-abusive families, as Ross notes, one has the usual neuroses, the ambiguity and back and forth with the parents helping to allow for growing independence and autonomy within the general framework of secure attachment. But in abusive families, like mine, this is all different. The child has to attach to the perpetrator, who is oftentimes the only person the child believes who can protect them from harm. In order to keep this attachment secure, children, who have the sense that the world revolves around them anyway, have to assume that they are bad and that the perpetrator(s) are good, thus giving them the possibility of control and hope in the world, the alternatives being too awful to contemplate. I certainly thought this, and my torturer and relatives told me so again and again. To survive under such conditions, the child develops ingenious mechanisms to cope, as did I, but as the child grows up, these abilities, finely attuned for the crazy, abusive environment, become less functional and more dysfunctional, and eventually stop working all together. At the same time, core negative beliefs that the child had and which s/he carried into adulthood (“I am bad”, “I am stupid”, “I have to die”) resurface with a vengeance, especially in the face of professional challenges and major life changes. Having been the lifemast, these ways of coping increasingly become the equivalent of a sinking ship and in response to this, the survivor – and this was definitely true of me – just tries to hold on tighter and tighter.

All of this happened to me. Successful, with a prominent job as a tenure-track professor at a relatively prestigious university, I broke down. Because, for me, being evaluated meant being attacked. And thus I just wanted to get it over with. I was sure, secretly, that as I had believed since childhood, that I was stupid and therefore had to die. None of my nominal accomplishments meant anything. Instead, whatever I didn’t know how to do was the secret evidence – whose revelations I was sure was only a matter of time – that I was stupid.

When I was a teen, after running away and being on the streets for years, when I finally started going to community college, I remember consciously thinking, “If only I’m not stupid, then maybe I don’t have to die.” But when things were breaking down, none of the three degrees I had meant anything. This is another part of my dilemma- the survivor’s dilemma. In order to cope with the horrific abuse, I never celebrated my accomplishments. After all, if one holds onto success, one can be shot down; better to just allow it to get you by until your next hurdle. For me, it was liking keeping the ball up in the air. As long as I was achieving more and more, the ball was still up in the air. But now that I had reached a certain level and was going to be evaluated, things worsened. In the face of this, not surprisingly in retrospect but totally out the blue at the time, or so it seemed, I ended up having the worst symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – and I now realize, almost six years later, Dissociative Identity Disorder – that I’d ever had in my life: 24/7, symptoms of hyperarousal, intrusive thoughts and more, that eventually led to the worst depression I ever had in my life and to increasingly worse suicidal ideation. I thought about killing myself all the time.

I liken it to buying congealed pure CPTSD- like 100% pure heroin or something. I attended many intensive outpatient cognitive therapy programs – some for four to six hours a day – and was put on medication, almost for the first time in my life. But things just got worse and worse. The cognitive programs may have helped me in the long run but at the time, I continued to decompensate. It’s like that Stone, Paper, Scissors game- here, trauma trumped cognition every time.

Because the resurgent CPTSD and DID was so intense, I had to stop working – though I didn’t make this decision myself. My suicidality resulted in folks putting me in the hospital. Eventually, with the help of a specialized trauma program, and after 6 months of being almost continually hospitalized and one year of disability, I started getting better. Fleetingly, haltingly, but progressively better, which is not to say it was a linear process at all.

In the years before I went into the hospital as the trauma came back, I thought my life was over. I was sure of it. It was just a matter of time before I would be rejected and humiliated by the world. I was going to beat the world to it, as I couldn’t bear it. In order to survive, I would have to learn nothing less than a whole new way of being.

For years, I had what Judith Herman calls a survivor’s mission: I was an anti-war and human rights activist, most recently writing on behalf of torture survivors and victims and working with groups like the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC), and Survivors of Torture, International. The latter was prompted by the fact that right after I returned from my year medical disability leave, John Yoo, the writer of the infamous torture memos, visited my campus, leading to my jump into the foray with friends and colleagues in my area, but not as someone who was open about what happened to me. How ironic that this person visited at this time, right as I was emerging from hospitalization for my own trauma treatment as a torture survivor. I always knew that my work on theses was a sublimated way of dealing with what happened to me, because of my inability to deal with what took place in my childhood, but it all came home, long before I got involved in my current work against torture. And I’m still grappling with the challenges of it all coming home. One particularly important source of support for me during these years was the person and work of Sister Dianna Ortiz, whose memoir and work with TASSC was a powerful inspiration to me. She helped me to see that I could survive.

I came to realize – only in the last year really – with the guidance of my therapist, that I had DID: my mind had created distinct personalities – a small boy part of me that experienced the abuse and looked at the world from this vantage point, a long series of attacks punctuated by brief periods in between – and an older functional part of me that had helped me survive, which was also the workaholic part.

I did lots of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, through intensive outpatient programs. But what was most significant is that I had a community of supporters, and therapists who understood me and sympathized with me as a survivor. It has been like being given another life; a whole other life. I still have ups and down, periodic meltdowns, where my little one comes out and I get suicidal and have to go inpatient. But I’m safe now, because I have a commitment to live, no matter what.

What was so ironic for me and took me a long time to understand – and I still struggle with it – is that the more successful I became the more my symptoms were triggered. Had I understood how normal this was- well, who knows how it might have helped? Perhaps, in some small way, relating my story, however briefly, might help one of you. So for you, my fellow survivors, here’s a tale from one of you. You can make it through. It is possible, but only if we stick together, and that means honoring our little parts too, and understanding that the process of recovery can take a lifetime. But in the meantime, commitment to recovery and life can allow one to live one’s life, as I have, happier and more fulfilled, than ever before.

 
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