As I watch events unfold around me; as I watch children insisting on their lives, I wonder… are we splitting as a species? From the destructive, ravaging side of sapiens to a more aware, advanced homo illustratum? Are we in the throes of this cladogenesis? Are we amid speciation growing pains? Were the sixties actually the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius?”
With every fiber of my being, I certainly hope so.
What I’m seeing now, with #MeToo, Times Up, Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives—is survivors uniting through the shared experience of trauma. We know that trauma has specific effects on neural pathways, and that these play out in emotional injuries and physical illnesses. We know that trauma changes a living thing permanently. We know that trauma is handed from one generation to the next through conditioning, which in turn may affect our DNA. The science is out on that one, or rather—it is a parade of blindfolded travelers encountering Ganesha.
Our belief in our ability to “know” far exceeds the reality of our knowledge.
We are still a species that will kill one another over rocks. Anyone vaguely cognizant of our ravenous, profligate nature and its impact can see there’s a code flaw. As with conceptual, self-healing artificial intelligence, perhaps the dawning awareness is our frontal cortex trying to overtake the lizard brain before it gets us all killed. I wonder if, within my lifetime, there will be a rapid shift. Will we see ourselves becoming illustratum—a species that will reverse-engineer us back to the paradise earth once was?
With every fiber of my being, I certainly hope so.
The social movements we see now are the clarion call of enlightenment—the raised voice of suffering saying, “no more.” We have pilloried one another, ourselves, our earth and everything in it long enough. Saber-tooth tigers are no longer trying to chase us down and eat us. It would be good to stop behaving as if they are. This fear-based desperation drives toxic aggression. Toxic aggression drives racism, sexism, bullying, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, greed and violence of every sort—from the raised finger in traffic to the flooding of Glen Canyon to the caustic mentality behind nuclear destruction.
Those associations may seem like a stretch because violence is so utterly ingrained into so many things that we do that it requires deliberate attention. A willingness to investigate our own behaviors and the courage to face what we find rather than seek the ongoing comfort of delusion and drunken consumption. E.g., years ago, we discovered our use of plastics was creating a massive pestilent cesspool between the West Coast and Hawaii. We react by spending half a paycheck on plastic packaging at Costco and Trader Joe’s, because the larger reality of the impact has not yet touched us directly.
Am I equating incest, for example, with buying plastic-wrapped tubes of plastic? To a degree, yes. Both are a perpetration. Both cause trauma. Both come from a place in the human ego resistant to taking responsibility for the outcome. Each is an artifice of toxic aggression.
There may or may not still be time to change before the Garbage Patch reaches our front steps. The human ego does not awaken easily and is now subject to greater distraction than ever before. The one phenomenon known to rapidly expand awareness beyond ego is trauma. Waking up to a stinking, decaying landscape of refuse would be traumatic to most reasonable people, and I am of a mind that most people are reasonable.
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Monday, March 19, 2018
Shortfalls of Therapy
It’s not easy to find the right therapist. A good therapist isn’t necessarily the right therapist.
My current therapist is a survivor. The difference in our discussions versus those I’ve had with non-survivor therapists is that she understands what I am experiencing directly rather than indirectly through observation. We have a camaraderie through doors ripped opened by #MeToo.
There are a lot of good therapists, but there are also a lot of highly educated, minimally informed individuals in the mental health fields who are not outright predators, but simply incompetent. Mental health is not plastic surgery, where incompetence is hard to hide. Mental health is vastly larger to comprehend and far, far more complex to treat.
A therapist should be sufficiently versed in neuroscience and trauma to be able to identify the difference between someone born with the wiring of depression, obsession, phobias, etc. and someone with acquired mental illness. I hesitate to even use the term “mental illness” here because our understanding of it is primitive. We are one generation away from Stephen Hawking being institutionalized.
Describing the spectrum of mental and emotional responses that come with childhood sexual abuse as an “illness” is incorrect. It is an injury. The sooner it is properly treated, the sooner it begins to heal. When someone breaks a leg, we put it in a cast so it will heal straight. We don’t just leave it to mend itself at a bent and twisted angle that will torment the injured person with lifelong pain and physical limitation. But we do this with our own mental health in large part because of our history of weaponizing shame.
We are just starting to discuss the human experience of depression in the proper, if elementary, clinical terms. My father was ashamed of his depression and tried to hide it and cope with it on his own and on his family for most of his life. Something broke his emotional well-being and was never encouraged to properly mend because depression means your mind is weak, he once told me. Though not a Scientologist, he was influenced by the dogma. It was only after precipitous weight loss and unrelenting darkness in his 70s was he finally persuaded to speak to a physician about depression.
He was prescribed Prozac and sent to speak with a therapist via satellite video—I suppose for lack of options, since my folks lived so remotely. But whomever thought a World War II veteran from farm country would describe his darkest secrets to a screen was woefully ignorant of human psychology. My father had more satellite TV options than accessible mental-health treatment options.
I first took myself to a psychiatrist when I was 16. I drove 50 miles one way to see him. I told him I was in a self-destructive spiral (that I hadn’t yet connected to childhood incest) trying to save myself. He told me to meditate. I paid him cash in waitress tips and drove the 50 miles back into the darkness. I was out of his league.
That was 41 years ago. I’ve watched the mental health community trying to sort itself for four decades. One thing we’ve learned, thanks in large part to military veterans, is that camaraderie can achieve what no therapist or drug can ever do. It can make us feel understood and not alone, and that’s imperative, because there are not enough therapists to treat the growing throngs of survivors—of sexual abuse, of human trafficking, school shootings and traumas to numerous to imagine.
We need each other. Trauma survivors are one.
My current therapist is a survivor. The difference in our discussions versus those I’ve had with non-survivor therapists is that she understands what I am experiencing directly rather than indirectly through observation. We have a camaraderie through doors ripped opened by #MeToo.
There are a lot of good therapists, but there are also a lot of highly educated, minimally informed individuals in the mental health fields who are not outright predators, but simply incompetent. Mental health is not plastic surgery, where incompetence is hard to hide. Mental health is vastly larger to comprehend and far, far more complex to treat.
A therapist should be sufficiently versed in neuroscience and trauma to be able to identify the difference between someone born with the wiring of depression, obsession, phobias, etc. and someone with acquired mental illness. I hesitate to even use the term “mental illness” here because our understanding of it is primitive. We are one generation away from Stephen Hawking being institutionalized.
Describing the spectrum of mental and emotional responses that come with childhood sexual abuse as an “illness” is incorrect. It is an injury. The sooner it is properly treated, the sooner it begins to heal. When someone breaks a leg, we put it in a cast so it will heal straight. We don’t just leave it to mend itself at a bent and twisted angle that will torment the injured person with lifelong pain and physical limitation. But we do this with our own mental health in large part because of our history of weaponizing shame.
We are just starting to discuss the human experience of depression in the proper, if elementary, clinical terms. My father was ashamed of his depression and tried to hide it and cope with it on his own and on his family for most of his life. Something broke his emotional well-being and was never encouraged to properly mend because depression means your mind is weak, he once told me. Though not a Scientologist, he was influenced by the dogma. It was only after precipitous weight loss and unrelenting darkness in his 70s was he finally persuaded to speak to a physician about depression.
He was prescribed Prozac and sent to speak with a therapist via satellite video—I suppose for lack of options, since my folks lived so remotely. But whomever thought a World War II veteran from farm country would describe his darkest secrets to a screen was woefully ignorant of human psychology. My father had more satellite TV options than accessible mental-health treatment options.
I first took myself to a psychiatrist when I was 16. I drove 50 miles one way to see him. I told him I was in a self-destructive spiral (that I hadn’t yet connected to childhood incest) trying to save myself. He told me to meditate. I paid him cash in waitress tips and drove the 50 miles back into the darkness. I was out of his league.
That was 41 years ago. I’ve watched the mental health community trying to sort itself for four decades. One thing we’ve learned, thanks in large part to military veterans, is that camaraderie can achieve what no therapist or drug can ever do. It can make us feel understood and not alone, and that’s imperative, because there are not enough therapists to treat the growing throngs of survivors—of sexual abuse, of human trafficking, school shootings and traumas to numerous to imagine.
We need each other. Trauma survivors are one.
Thursday, March 15, 2018
Invisible Family Dynamics
I am a strange-looking person. I can appear either regal or ozark incested, depending on the moment. I have the sharp profile of the Roman patricians on ancient coins, probably by way of the highlands, given the blue eyes and dark hair going gray.
My hair is a lot of work. It’s fine and breaks easily, so it doesn’t grow thick and long. I have often suspected that the endocrine onslaught of childhood sexual abuse affected it, as well as my early Franken-growth—days when I’d wake up and the ground was an inch farther away. I was a cartoon child with freakishly long legs, big feet, scraggly hair and budding breasts, standing on a homemade diving board over an irrigation canal at the age of nine, in an old Polaroid I managed to digitize long ago when I lived in New York.
I’m so glad I did. I’m not sure I would know she existed had I not. By then, I had been sexually abused by my brother and his friends for several years. It wasn’t constant, but more like guerrilla warfare. They were my only playmates. There were no little girls in my neighborhood—at least none that came anywhere near our house for long. Maybe everyone knew and did nothing, because that’s what you did.
Sexual abuse and its life-long mental torture slithers from generation to generation toxically masquerading as the sanctity of family. Rural, Midwestern people do not get involved. We do not talk about it. Virtually no one is capable. The best I, myself, can do, is write this random and vaguely anonymous blog.
My hair wants to be left alone. It was chopped off shortly after the picture on the diving board. My dad was not a barber. I was soon outfitted in a quilted PTO jacket. My parents had clearly seen in the old Polaroid that I was a girl. It caused them to panic from a place they’d never acknowledged with words, but with depression-fueled anger from my dad and terrified paralysis from my mother, who’d been abdominally eviscerated by inept country surgeons by that time.
My mother’s surgeries occurred before and after my brother and I were adopted. It started with a tubal pregnancy. The corn-country surgeons—many from World War I and mostly ignorant of the female body—took everything. Total hysterectomy. Put her on estrogen. She’s then a farm wife in a primogeniture family who can’t have kids, and there’s no such thing as therapy or survivor blogs. She and my adoptive father have zero guidance, compassion or commiseration in dealing with their guilt, shame and grief—their trauma—which naturally transferred to the next generation.
The complications from that initial surgical savagery required three more surgeries and culminated in her brief death on an operating table when my brother and I were around three and five years old.
Mom feared she would lose us. Only she and a few close relatives knew my father had a drug problem. I would later hear from their siblings that he was hooked on “narcotics,” which most likely was morphine. He’d been hospitalized for several weeks shortly after I was adopted. He told me once that he’d had gangrenous legs from spraying 2-4-D on waist-high weeds in the unused horse corral. I later heard phlebitis, which is associated with needle use. Whatever it was, some of his behavior—and the things that came out of his mouth—could only be explained by opioid addiction, the “epidemic” we all think is so new. Only talking about it is new.
My hair is a lot of work. It’s fine and breaks easily, so it doesn’t grow thick and long. I have often suspected that the endocrine onslaught of childhood sexual abuse affected it, as well as my early Franken-growth—days when I’d wake up and the ground was an inch farther away. I was a cartoon child with freakishly long legs, big feet, scraggly hair and budding breasts, standing on a homemade diving board over an irrigation canal at the age of nine, in an old Polaroid I managed to digitize long ago when I lived in New York.
I’m so glad I did. I’m not sure I would know she existed had I not. By then, I had been sexually abused by my brother and his friends for several years. It wasn’t constant, but more like guerrilla warfare. They were my only playmates. There were no little girls in my neighborhood—at least none that came anywhere near our house for long. Maybe everyone knew and did nothing, because that’s what you did.
Sexual abuse and its life-long mental torture slithers from generation to generation toxically masquerading as the sanctity of family. Rural, Midwestern people do not get involved. We do not talk about it. Virtually no one is capable. The best I, myself, can do, is write this random and vaguely anonymous blog.
My hair wants to be left alone. It was chopped off shortly after the picture on the diving board. My dad was not a barber. I was soon outfitted in a quilted PTO jacket. My parents had clearly seen in the old Polaroid that I was a girl. It caused them to panic from a place they’d never acknowledged with words, but with depression-fueled anger from my dad and terrified paralysis from my mother, who’d been abdominally eviscerated by inept country surgeons by that time.
My mother’s surgeries occurred before and after my brother and I were adopted. It started with a tubal pregnancy. The corn-country surgeons—many from World War I and mostly ignorant of the female body—took everything. Total hysterectomy. Put her on estrogen. She’s then a farm wife in a primogeniture family who can’t have kids, and there’s no such thing as therapy or survivor blogs. She and my adoptive father have zero guidance, compassion or commiseration in dealing with their guilt, shame and grief—their trauma—which naturally transferred to the next generation.
The complications from that initial surgical savagery required three more surgeries and culminated in her brief death on an operating table when my brother and I were around three and five years old.
Mom feared she would lose us. Only she and a few close relatives knew my father had a drug problem. I would later hear from their siblings that he was hooked on “narcotics,” which most likely was morphine. He’d been hospitalized for several weeks shortly after I was adopted. He told me once that he’d had gangrenous legs from spraying 2-4-D on waist-high weeds in the unused horse corral. I later heard phlebitis, which is associated with needle use. Whatever it was, some of his behavior—and the things that came out of his mouth—could only be explained by opioid addiction, the “epidemic” we all think is so new. Only talking about it is new.
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