I was writing the original version of this entry last night, when the whole neighborhood lost power until the morning, and whatever I had written ended up "gone with the wind." In a way, it might be nice to just leave it at that because it means less exposure, but whatever...I'll make another attempt at saying the same thing. Here goes:
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It was interesting how Claude Anshin Thomas talked about how "Everyone has their own Vietnam," "Their own experience of violence, calamity or trauma."
This summer I noticed that Janis Ian is on tour. A young contemporary of Billy Joel, back in the day, one of her big hits was "At Seventeen," which she will no doubt be trotting out on this tour. The song is basically a lament, in the person of a high school student, about how only the popular girls get the guys, and how miserable it is to be outside the popular group. Ahhh, teenage angst. We all remember it so well, because everyone alive has felt some.
But contrary to Janis Ian's wistful reflections on the hot cheerleaders getting the hot football players and vice versa, and how "painful" that was for her to be left out of the loop, the reality is, many of us "at 17" were dealing with things much more significant than that. Seventeen is the age that many of the guys were who went to Vietnam for the first time, and saw their worlds turn upside down with what they saw, did and experienced -- things it's safe to say they were completely unprepared for. 17 is also the age that many of the young men and women were when they made the fateful decision to sign up for the armed forces, and ended up in Iraq or Afghanistan or, a few years back, in the Persian Gulf. Their childhood came to an end very suddenly, and perhaps they couldn't relate any more, well, to the friends they left behind, who didn't have nearly the same things on their plates; who in fact had much simpler lives.
I have one memory of being around 17 that stays with me to this day. My mom was dying of cancer the whole time I was in high school, but it advanced and escalated in intensity, as cancer has a way of doing, as I got closer to graduating. The cancer had started as breast cancer, metastasized into her spine, and caused all the usual horrific problems that come about when it's diagnosed too late in the cycles to be saved. My mom tried to still be a good mom and try not to have us focus too much on "the elephant in the room," that was she was actively dying, every day, and that the end would come shortly. She still tried to be a mom, and go to the store and cook dinner, when she could, but she was so darn sick, and just so frail and helpless by then, that it was a tremendous effort, and really painful to watch. But I also understood that it was part of what she needed to do: almost keeping the illusion alive that she was still coping with her mom role, because somehow to stop doing that would have meant we could all realize the huge disaster we were in: we're about to lose our mom, and there WILL be no replacement, not now, not anytime in the future.
Well, anyway, the memory that I have is not that significant except for what I thought about at the time. In this guise of "she's trying to seem like things are semi-okay," we went out to the grocery story together one night when it was already dark. She went in, probably very slowly and feebly, by herself to pick up a few things, and I used that opportunity to stay outside in the car, and just think. I remember looking up at the moon, from inside the empty car, staring out at a very dark night, and realizing that although the night seemed perfectly ordinary: black night, white moon, mom in store doing a little shopping, it was anything but ordinary: in fact, I could tell by how sick she was that there really weren't going to be many more times she could even go to the store, and this in fact might be the last. I sort of paused mentally to take that in, and realize how the sky and the moon and the ordinary sameness of the even ing would "keep" going on like that, but very soon, my mom would not, who I really dearly loved, as much as she sometimes vexed me. And the next thought that crossed my mind was my personal Vietnam:
I started to sob, thinking about how I was going to have to live the whole rest of my life without my mom, and then I quickly pulled up short, realizing: oh, man, if I start getting in touch with how I REALLY feel about this -- completely devastated, bereft, alone -- you fill in the blanks, they're all appropriate -- I will basically start crying, and NEVER be able to stop. And then what will I do?
So I caught myself at the beginning of whatever the harshest, deepest, raw-est cry could have -- the cry that Oprah and others refer to as "an ugly cry" (and then some) -- and just shoved the whole experience -- or the potential for getting in touch with that much emotion -- about as far down and out of the way as I could -- and I bet by the time my mom came back to the car, I was "all better." Maybe I even thought I was doing it for her sake; I certainly thought I was doing it for mine.
But as you can imagine, the pain from that experience didn't get any less because I refused to really cry from that gut-wrenching a level, and when my mom did die, a few months later, and literally for years afterwards, I was still in a suspended state of grief, where something terrible and yet completely vital to deal with, ran just below the surface, like a terrible, powerful undertow, running through the quicksand of my actual life.
It's fair to say that this experience gave me some "life-based empathy" for people who deal with things far beyond their ability to endure at such a young age: in many ways, I bet our emotional lives just STOP when we encounter heavy-duty psychological losses like those. But at the same time, I have nothing but respect for people who can, even at a later point, begin to crack the gigantic ice floe of their emotions into manageable pieces again, and look at each one in turn, and see if it's really the demon or the disaster they've made it out to be. So many things that haunt us for years are not just the acts themselves, but the interpretations we've placed on them. Not just "what" happened, but "how" we interpret what that actually meant: what was the message to us, encoded in the circumstance.
Speaking of Oprah, there's a revelation she had years later after seesawing so heavily in public on the otherwise very private issue of her weight. What she eventually realized, having noticeably gone to extremes over the years, was that the core issue to her was that she had a hard time handling disappointment, and rather than "sitting with" those feelings when they happened, as they inevitably do, she instead "turned to" other things (in her case, food) that would take the edge off, distract her, and provide some level of comfort. Because we're all human beings, we too can understand what Oprah was going through; and we understand as well her eventual realization that she was short-circuiting her own healing by doing so. The desire to avoid pain, while a completely understandable desire, also sometimes gets in the way of actually becoming free from it. What you hear when you read what Claude Anshin Thomas and others say is, although they initially turned to drug, sex and alcohol (workaholism also counts) as a way to "manage" and blunt the acutely, horrifically painful memories of war; ultimately it became necessary to confront what the actual memories were, in order to finally break free.
While this blog takes a lot of twists and turns from time to time, as it and its author come into maturity ;-), the reality is, there are some key main themes that get returned to again and again. The "point" of the whole thing is "catharsis" -- which really means, "breaking through." Or more to our purposes, "breaking through" without "breaking into a million pieces." That's what I wanted for myself; that's what I want for you. And I want you, and us, to consider absolutely anything practical that holds out any hope for changing what's affected us so drastically. It's almost certain that there is "no silver bullet," no single solution that appears in "one size fits all" to take all the pain away. Whatever it is, will surely involve work -- breakthroughs, while responsive to a good bit of luck, also take profound and sometimes even prolonged effort." But it's also true that as less Western types are fond of saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." If you're even reading this blog, you're wanting more than the ordinary "solutions" to a life-changing problem, PTSD. You're at least curious to learn about what it would take to really heal, from the inside out.
What I've seen over the last few months, and ideally you have as well, is that contrary to their being "one method" that might help relieve the pain of combat trauma, and work through the agony of it, there are actually "quite a few" approaches that might offer some hope and help. Systematically, you can look into each of those methods in turn, and evaluate whether it has benefit to you. You can be inspired by those like Claude Anshin Thomas who were willing to strip life back to the essentials, and see what it would take to get free: not an easy task, but a crucial one. You can appreciate the healthy "nerve" that it takes others, like Pat, to process what they're going through in writing, in an attempt to "explain themselves" to their families (maybe) but certainly in the process, to themselves. And you can avail yourself of all the latest thinking, even from unconventional corners (our specialty ;-) about what various non-mainstream forms of treatment might hold out in the way of help.
There's nothing wrong with the mainstream treatments, provided they work. But if they tend to numb out the patient, and not help him or her move forward far enough in integrating the experience of combat trauma into their lives -- in fact, just putting off that inevitability -- then they too should be challenged for falling short of a solution that may actually still just be a dream. Human beings are so different from one another, and PTSD is no level playing field. Not everyone exposed to combat trauma develops it; not everyone who does, develops it in the same way, or can heal from it, even slightly, in the same way. That's why it's worth considering "all" the alternatives, and not so eventually finding the "toolkit" that you can use to help overcome yours. Can it ever be fully overcome? In some ways that's a less important question than, are there things you can do today to help you achieve some victory and a semblance of peace, comfort or relief in yours. With 475 blog posts behind us, and who knows how many to come, that would be the entire point of this blog.
"To your health..." and to some semblance of integration with the life you left behind, because it is also part of who you are today. Not an anti-self, a different self, which also needs to be integrated back into who you really are. You saw the elephant; most did not. But the elephant doesn't need to be the single defining moment of your life. It's an inextricable part of who you are, but the whole of you is so much greater than that. Work to help it find its rightful place in your life: not by rejecting it -- it was still your experience -- but by finding a way to integrate it into the full, complete, total, adult you. With all possible best wishes for doing so, the expression of which at this moment is this continually updated blog.
