Used to be, we didn’t say the word trauma. Instantly, if we told, we might feel judged or excluded, or, worse yet, cast out of our family and social organizations. A pariah who could never be reabsorbed into the culture. In other words, a form of death. So, we choked down our truth and tried to get on down the road, while shackled to horrific memories.
That stance shifted about fifteen years ago when we began revealing all in social media, tagging what we’d gone through as trauma. Meanwhile, therapy shifted. I recall my therapist telling me, “What fires together, wires together.” Suddenly, my responses began to make sense. Oh, it’s nature, not some inner failing.
When we had no agency over what we experienced – over rape, incest, war, terrorism, abandonment, beatings, and domestic violence – our brains would instantly throw us into a place to keep us safe. That might be fight or flight. There’s also freeze, which looks like the animal playing dead so a predator won’t kill it. A version of that is flop, meaning the body goes completely limp. And there’s fawning, which I didn’t even realize until
recently was a trauma response. Fawning – or friend — looks like placating the abusers so that they don’t harm us.
“What fires together, wires together.”
According to the newest definitions of this ancient word, most of us suffer some degree of trauma. Depending on the study, that means easily more than 70-percent of us.
Without being flippant, it’s part of being human. It’s not pretty though. And we can heal. We often float through life not realizing that some of our behaviors are the result of unhealed trauma. We can live better lives. I am living proof. Some of this trauma stems from the attachments we form early in our lives. Biologically, we must form attachments for the purpose of survival. Our brains alter and reshape our lives to keep our minds and bodies alive.
I know the moment my life shifted from creative delight to shutting down to stay alive. I didn’t know then that that was trauma. I did know, from early on, that I was different. My Stradivarius-playing grandfather passed away on Christmas Day when I was a few
days away from turning three-and-a-half. About that same time, my true dad vanished from my life, replaced by a man who would later adopt me as his daughter.
Losing the two most important men in my life – in my eyes, the only men – rewrote my life. I felt too full of fear to connect deeply with anyone. Would they be taken away, too, was the sense I had from that time.My nightmares began soon after we moved into a new home far away from our New York City apartment where my grandfather’s music had embraced the century-old walls. These bad dreams were signs of trauma I experienced within the walls of this new
home. Even more so when the nightmares looked like great black bears chasing me. I recall dream author Gayle Delaney looking at me in horror when I asked her the meaning of those nightmare bears. She told me those nightmares signified the terror that I must have experienced. Yes. I had trouble with trust, another sign of trauma. That led me to books and reading. I could trust the words on the page. I could trust books. My 92-year-old mother recently told me that I carried my books around with me like they were armor.
Books shielded me from the lies I heard all around me.
I withdrew into my books, lifting my head only when necessary, perhaps to wash the laundry and hang the clothes on the line for my family of five, perhaps to raise my hand in class so the teacher wouldn’t feel left out when no one else raised their hand.
Otherwise, I stayed silent, holding it all inside a cloud of depression.
Depression is another sign of trauma, along with anger, unresponsiveness, anxiety,
emotional outbursts and panic attacks. I felt safer when I stayed silent, so as to not draw attention of the new father. He found me anyway, often in the middle of the night.
My mind created safe pathways to navigate through life. Be silent. Pretend you are invisible. Go away in your mind – which evolved into Dissociative Identity Disorder, more commonly known as split personality.
That creative urge to survive also lived in poems I wrote, the drawings I made with my box of 64 Crayola crayons, and the dance classes in which I shyly moved. I disappeared myself, another form of DID.
When books led me to journalism, again in my search for Truth, I unknowingly employed that DID. I could split and be hyper-focused on the people in the stories I covered. No wonder I was drawn to covering other peoples’ stories and to possible pathways to fix what is wrong in the world. I couldn’t change what had happened to me, but I was set on a path of somehow finding love again. At one of my radio stations, I had a boss, for whom I worked more than a decade. One day he told me, “You are the most resilient person I know.”
That resiliency is one possible path out of trauma.
I bonded with books and that delivered a life I never could have imagined.
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