Book Review

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk

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This remains one of my favorite books for trauma recovery. I read it right after CPTSD: Surviving to Thriving, so close that they seemed like one big book. I finally had a chance to re-read it almost a year later. Those wait times at the public library are intense, but I guess I’m glad so many people are reading this kind of book, especially during COVID. This book currently lives in my top 5 list for therapy books, and I highly recommend reading them together like I did, as they are very complementary. This post is very long because this book is very full of important ideas. I hope you stick with it.

Bessel van der Kolk is a very accomplished and experienced psychiatrist and researcher in the area of trauma. He started working with Vietnam veterans in the 1970s (before PTSD was a known diagnosis) and has been instrumental in hundred of studies and research projects to better understand the impact of both single traumatic events and long term traumatic exposure. His work with war veterans led him to understand how childhood trauma was both similar and different from combat trauma, and he has been vital to the understanding of CPTSD. He is an expert the experts defer to. “The Body” was published in 2014, so it’s fairly up to date as far as technology and research techniques described.

This post is so much longer than other book reviews because the book itself covers so much. It tells the history of understanding and treatment of trauma. It explains the scientific studies used to advance that understanding and treatment. It addresses the social, political, and economic barriers to the study, understanding, and treatment. It shares case studies of individuals suffering from and recovering from trauma. It shares statistics of the staggering number of people who have been traumatized in one way or another in life. It addresses the critical link between “mind, brain, and body” in how trauma affects us and how we heal from it. And it looks into a range of treatment options, explaining how and why they work, or don’t. Yet somehow, Van der Kolk does all of this in a casual and personal narrative style that carries the reader through his life’s work in a compelling and interesting way.

Just My Highlights

There’s no way for me to even try to summarize everything that Van der Kolk talks about here. I won’t do it justice. I stress again how worthwhile a read this is for everyone. Understanding trauma and the historical, social, and political context of cycles of abuse is the only way we will ever make changes. There some standout points that I want to zero in on for my review, and some opinions I’m squeezing in because this might be my last therapy book review post.

The Historical Cycle of Trauma and Suppression

Hysteria and Sexual Abuse

In the mid-late 1800’s some ‘scientists’ named Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet were studying hysteria. Although a lot of the people diagnosed with hysteria were women, there were also cases of “hysterical blindness”, “hysterical paralysis”, memory loss, and a host of strange behaviors that occurred in people across the gender/age spectrum. At first, Charcot was looking for a physical cause, but when he was unable to find one, he turned to hypnosis, and came to the conclusion that all these problems were being caused by the repressed memory of traumatic events.

Freud came along and got really into finding out what those traumatic events were and got deep into talk therapy, actually listening to his clients (not something doctors had done before). He determined that the young women suffering in this way were all suffering as a result of sexual abuse at the hands of an older male relative. He thought he had a great breakthrough, until he realized that it would mean that a huge number of the well respected men in Vienna would be guilty of raping their daughters and nieces, including his own father. He thought that maybe the promiscuous FRENCH could be doing that, but he just couldn’t countenance that his own Viennese men could be doing the same. He backpedaled and changed his theory, placing the blame on the girls as “seducers” of their fathers and uncles.

World War I & Shell Shock

Then a few short years later, as WW1 came around, and there were British soldiers having weird symptoms after battle. The term “shell shock” was coined and some scant treatment began. However, as the tide of the war shifted against the British, the top brass decided that “shell shock” was just a coward’s excuse. That “real men” don’t break down from a little light war trauma, and they banned the use of the word in any documents. Some soldiers were arrested, imprisoned and even executed because they had trauma that no one in charge wanted to believe in.

There were plenty of doctors pleading to be allowed to study and treat it, but the gag order was politically expedient to win the war. Another generation was blamed for exhibiting symptoms of trauma that those in power had caused. In America, the WW1 vets had it a little better for a brief moment. They were temporarily greeted as heroes and awarded combat bonuses, the money to be given as a delayed payout. When the depression hit, the veterans rallied in DC to ask for their bonuses so they could afford housing and food. The police and army were sent in to scatter them and burn their camps. Congress voted to never give the vets their money, and they were left to fend for themselves as a new crop of young men were lined up for the slaughter of the next big war.

World War II, Vietnam & PTSD

WW2 of course went through just about the same thing. Suddenly “shell shock” was rediscovered to be real. It was even treated for a hot minute before being dismissed again when the reality of the extreme damage being done to a generation of people in the name of war turned out to be too big a price tag for the law-makers at home. Generals and politicians would much rather believe that men and women are faking it, or fragile, or damaged in some way that the leadership cannot be held accountable for. It wasn’t until the Vietnam veterans came back that we finally started to see a break the cycle of discover and repress. PTSD is now a well recognized condition, but the battle isn’t over. It’s currently recognized almost exclusively for combat veterans, with some exceptions for civilians in war, major catastrophes like the 9-11 building collapses, or devastating natural disasters.

Van der Kolk and his associates, however, found that trauma comes far more frequently and affects far more people than this commonly accepted understanding of PTSD can encompass. In addition, the results of ongoing or repeated trauma, of childhood trauma, or of sexual trauma may have many similarities to PTSD as described in the DSM, but it’s not 100% the same and more importantly, the treatments are not equally effective. These discoveries led doctors like Van der Kolk to advocate for a new diagnoses in the DSM:  Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS) aka Complex-PTSD, or CPTSD for short.

The DSM is BROKEN

What is the DSM? Some of you may know it well, others may be totally confused. DSM stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and it’s the big book of Mental Health. Doctors and insurance companies use the DSM for diagnosis and treatment, but in America anyway, more importantly MONEY. Insurance will not cover a diagnosis or treatment that is not listed in the DSM. This gets tangled up very quickly, because when health and money meet in a room, health loses every time. I can’t even scratch the surface of everything that is wrong with the American DSM model, but in regards to PTSD and CPTSD the main problem is that they are NOT the same.

Multiple studies have shown over and over that they are not the same, and that treatments for one do not work for the other (or may work, but less effectively). As a result of this, people who are suffering from prolonged traumatic exposure get diagnosed with: ADD, ADHD, GAD/anxiety, depression, bipolar, BPD/borderline personality, anorexia, bulimia, OCD, alcoholism, drug addiction, and a bunch of other acronyms because the doctor is trying to address their symptoms in a way that fits the DSM. The best case scenario is that they do this because they know the insurance won’t pay for it if it doesn’t match the book. The worst case is that they simply do not believe any diagnosis not in the book is real.

DSM 5 Defines Trauma

I did some extra reading about the DSM, since van der Kolk only mentions the failed attempt to get CPTSD into the DSM 4 in 1994, and we are currently on DSM 5. I wanted to know if any progress was made. The answer is unfortunately, not really… They did expand the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and added a “children under 6” category, but it’s still not going to cover most people in the CPTSD range.

What is considered “trauma” by the DSM is extremely limited : “The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence”. It fails to reflect any of the studies of long term exposure to many other types of trauma, such as the ACE study, nor has any relation coercive control style abuse.

I discovered another diagnostic manual called the ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases) has added a separate category for CPTSD. The bad news is that it is very limited in scope. It still focuses on exclusively horrific traumatic circumstances where escape is unlikely, like torture, genocide, slavery, etc. “Prolonged domestic violence” is there, but not well defined. There remains no reference to the coercive control or psychological control that prohibits escape, nor of issues like systemic racism or medical trauma. In addition, it requires flashbacks (intrusive memories & images) as a symptom, which are common in PTSD, but according to most experts, not in CPTSD where emotional flashbacks (which lack a visual component) are more common.

Treating a Symptom Instead of a Cause

Without the ability to get a correct diagnosis for the underlying cause, many CPTSD sufferers are limited to receiving treatment only for their symptoms, so while these people may experience relief of symptoms while under treatment, their suffering resumes as soon as that treatment stops. Not only is this a massive healthcare disservice, but it’s contributing to a huge waste of money. Traumatized individuals are unable to function in a healthy way, and often need government resources for chronic health issues, job loss, and criminal behavior. (if you need more proof of this, read the book)

Additionally, some of what are seen as “problems” might really be “solutions” within the context of trauma. An alcoholic is not merely physically addicted to alcohol; their drinking is a self prescribed treatment to forget some pain they are unprepared to deal with or in some cases even acknowledge. The same can be true for any addiction including gambling, drugs, sex or food. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté is an excellent exploration into the traumatic roots of addiction including socially prized addictions like overworking.

Obesity is another great example of why we can’t just treat symptoms. It is a major health epidemic in modern America, but if people are overeating as a trauma response, a defense mechanism, or to self-sooth, then no diet/exercise program will ever be successful until the core wound is healed. Van der Kolk explains that many obese patients also have a history of sexual molestation, assault, or abuse. Others may have been bullied or beaten up when they were small, and may feel strong and powerful by being larger than anyone else in the room. They feel safe from future assault or abuse because of the extra weight.

Of course, most people suffering this are not consciously aware of this in the mind. They do not think “fat will protect me” as they have another scoop of ice cream. They just feel better when they eat, so they eat. When they go to a doctor for help, it should not only be about diet, exercise, or surgery, but should include a look for deeper mental health causes that lie at the root of addiction issues. The problem with that is, as long as the DSM and major health organizations refuse to recognize that systemic social problems and resultant trauma are causing all these health problems, patients will continue to be misdiagnosed, mistreated, and inevitably blamed and shamed when their incorrect treatment fails.

The Cycle Isn’t Broken

My takeaway from all of this, the history and the DSM, and stories in the book of how van der Kolk and his associates were thwarted from doing research or having that research recognized, is that we have not escaped the cycle of notice and repress. We are still as a society unwilling to recognize that parents, caretakers, leaders and other people who are supposed to love and protect us are the deep root cause of untold amounts of pain and suffering. Crime, violence, illness, and death are all linked to childhood and domestic trauma, yet we can’t even properly diagnose or treat it. We’re looking for ways to blame the victims, a faulty gene or just a lack of moral fiber, but heavens forfend we look hard at ourselves and see the damage that our blindness is causing.

So many of the books I’ve read on this journey talk about the fact that trauma is caused by what the brain perceives as a threat, not what is objectively a threat or agreed upon by society to be a threat. Limiting PTSD and CPTSD diagnoses and treatment to people who have experienced “bad enough” trauma by someone else’s standards is part of the denial and suppression cycle. Of COURSE genocide and sexual slavery are undeniably horrible. OF COURSE the people who experience that are traumatized. What Van der Kolk and many others are trying to show us is that trauma is neither rare nor limited to such obvious horrific sources — that in reality, trauma is widespread and pervasive in the world, and that it comes from places we don’t want to see.

Although the scientific and ethical advances of the last 40 years enable us to look back at the hysterical women or the shell shocked soldiers and finally recognize the injustice done to them, we are not immune to selective blindness and denial. Just like Freud could not admit his own father or other “respectable” men of the city were committing atrocities on their own daughters, just like the generals could not accept that the decision to send young men into war was dooming their minds as well as their bodies, modern society struggles to accept that parents, teachers, lovers, doctors, and bosses are responsible for traumatizing millions under their care. Being able to admit the reality should not be about blame or retribution, but rather about truth and reconciliation. Until we are willing to face the facts, millions of people will be barred from true healing, and inevitably pass their pain on by traumatizing others in continued generational cycles.

Mind, Brain, Body

The other main takeaway of this book is the way in which the brain and body interact. Van der Kolk refers to a triad of “mind, brain, and body”, which has some nice literary overtones, the rule of three is a popular way to go. It also, I think, helps people to bridge a previously unbridgeable gap between mind and body. Starting with Aristotle and made ‘accepted fact’ by Descartes, a lot of people for a large part of history have believed that the “mind” is a totally separate thing from the “body”. Despite the fact that Descartes was a philosopher and had no physical or medical evidence to support his theory, it was so pervasive in the minds of the educated men that when modern medicine made the scene, no one really thought to challenge this “accepted fact”. At most, doctors believed that while the mind may be able to exert some control over the body through conscious effort or willpower, that the feed was strictly one way. ‘Mind over matter”, right? Wrong.

Advances in Science Change Our Understanding

As the study of neurology really came into its own in the 1990s, we got to learn all kinds of amazing stuff about how the brain works. The brain is a physical organ that runs on chemical and electrical reactions and controls the body, more or less. But… it is also where the mind resides. We still haven’t found the “seat of consciousness” in the brain, because it turns out that what makes us “us” is a very complex system of electro-chemical reactions, only a very small amount of which we are aware of at any time.

Start by thinking of your “mind” as the part that does the thinking (your “self”, your autobiographical memory, your inner monologue, and such); and your “brain” as the gray stuff inside your skull that releases hormones and neurotransmitters, and handles the auto-pilot for all the organs you can’t be bothered to think about (what does a spleen actually do? Your mind doesn’t know, but your brain does); and then your body is everything else. Then you can start to see where van der Kolk is going with this triad, but it’s not really three separate things, it’s more like three concentric circles. The mind, after all, resides in the brain, and the brain resides in the body. They are connected intimately and they are inseparable, and the flow of information goes in all directions.

We think of our body as being under our mind’s control, yet, that’s barely true. You don’t control most of your organs. You can hold your breath for a bit, and control your toilet needs for a short time, but other than that, you can’t really interfere with the body’s functions. Moving my fingers along the keyboard is a conscious effort of my mind, but if there’s an unexpected loud noise while I’m working, I will flinch and look around well before I’m aware of doing so. My “mind” doesn’t make that decision, my brain and body get on about it without me.

In fact, there is a lot that happens in our bodies that affect our brains, and then in turn change the way we think. For one example, the vagus nerve is a large nerve road that leads up from the gut into the brain, but most of the information that travels along it is not sending instructions down from the brain, but instead is sending information up from the guts/abdomen/lungs/heart to the brain. Van der Kolk examines the way in which mental health issues manifest in the body, and even more cool, how engaging the body in therapeutic techniques can help to heal mental health.

The Body Manifests the Damage of the Mind

In addition to the long list of mental health issues that can result from unrecognized PTSD or CPSTD, there are a lot of body health issues that can crop up as well. We can all think of physical reactions to stress like an upset stomach, or a headache, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As the trauma goes untreated and often suppressed or ignored, the body takes up the symptoms. Thus, the name of the book: The Body Keeps the Score. Things like asthma, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, epilepsy, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer are all common body reactions to long standing traumatic suffering. The ACE study (Adverse Childhood Experiences) done with the CDC and Pfizer found that people with an ACE score of 4 or more had a much much higher incidence of all these physical health issues*. That means that the more types of trauma children suffer at home, the more likely they are to be sick as adults.

*NOTE: the ACE study is not a diagnostic tool. It was a study of trends over a population and should not be taken as an indication for any individual. Many contributing factors for trauma and recovery are not accounted for in ACE. Not all children who experience multiple ACEs will have poor outcomes, and not all children who experience no ACEs will avoid poor outcomes—a high ACEs score is simply an indicator of greater risk

I was personally struck by the chronic fatigue and pain issues because I struggled with both while I was still a teenager living in my mother’s house. In the end, I was told I had fibromyalgia: a diagnosis that is based on patient’s reported symptoms and a lack of evidence for any other clinical diagnosis. I had many other health problems while under the control of my parents that diminished as I gained independence and distance, only to return in other stressful times of my life.

It’s All In Your Mind, But Not The Way You’ve Been Told

“Psychosomatic” is a word that is far too often used as a synonym for “imaginary”, and yet, that’s not what it means. Psycho means “of the mind” and somatic “of the body” so, yes, it means that a bodily symptom is caused in the mind rather than from an outside agent like a virus, bacteria, tumor, etc. Chronic illness sufferers frequently have physical symptoms ignored, dismissed, and even been accused of making things up for attention. Far too many medical professionals are stuck in an outdated model of medicine in which the mind and body are separate, and must be treated separately, so that if no evidence of illness exists in the body, then they believe no illness exists. Have you ever told your doctor something hurts only to have them say, “well, it shouldn’t” or worse “no, it doesn’t”?

As I read this book, I began to see the connection between my original trauma, my trauma triggers, and my health issues, and I gained validation for my rejection of the idea that any of my physical issues are “all in my head” in the standard western medicine pejorative use of the phrase. I learned a new way of understanding what “in my head” really means. Van der Kolk and his associates have conducted a number of studies that demonstrate that the physical symptoms generated by traumatic stress are real, and they can be healed by addressing that trauma. It may be “in our mind”, but it’s also in our brain and in our body because those three concepts are not truly separate.

How To Heal Trauma

Professional Help

Most professionals in PTSD/CPTSD agree that it is necessary to access and integrate traumatic memories in order to heal. Up until very recently, the primary way to do this has been talk therapy: a specialist helping to guide a patient to talk about the traumatic experience and then guide them into placing it in the past. Exposure therapy and hypnosis have also been used with alternating success. Hypnosis got a bad rap for supposed “planted memories”, and that turned out to be mostly media hype, but the damage is done. Exposure therapy can work for some things, but a lot of trauma survivors end up being re-traumatized by exposure therapy, not healed. Talk therapy has the best track record, but it’s hard because you have to form a trust-based relationship with a trained therapist which takes a lot of time and money.

There are a few other therapies that need to be done by a professional that use the brain body connection. One of these is EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), it uses bicameral stimulation to help patients access traumatic memories and to integrate them into the proper context. EMDR is not hypnosis; it does not require a trusting relationship nor rely on the doctor to uncover or interpret anything, and it has a pretty good success rate with very low recidivism. It works better on PTSD than CPTSD, and better in adult onset trauma than for childhood trauma. No one really knows why the bicameral stimulation works this way. The leading theory is that it simulates a sleep state (REM) when the brain sorts memories out of the “now” bin (hippocampus) and into the “past” bin (neocortex). Memory integration is a normal function of sleep, but traumatic memories are often stuck in the “now” bin, which is why they still feel so urgent. I know the chances of it working for me are not great, but I would still like to try it if I ever get the opportunity.

Another method is neurofeedback. Using an EEG to measure brainwaves, doctors can show patients what various parts of their own brains are doing by translating the brainwaves into audio or video signals. Then the patient can learn to control certain types of brainwave activity through a kind of trial and error while getting easy to understand feedback from the music or video. Being able to hear/see our own brainwaves gives us a concrete goal to focus on and enables us to use the mind to control the brain.

The last one examined in the book is “psychodrama“, which sounds like what you go through with your crazy ex, but it’s actually a kind of theater therapy. Actors and doctors worked together to create a variety of programs to help trauma survivors process their feelings. It can give patients a way to roleplay out experiences in a safe environment, thus getting resolution to previous instances, or plan on how to handle future triggers. It can help patients find words they need to express their feelings, or it can even provide words when the patients cannot find their own. An episode of the medical drama New Amsterdam showed the hospital psychiatrist making vets with PTSD put on a performance of one of Sophocles’ plays about a soldier abandoned by the military after being wounded. It is not a medically accurate TV show, but it was cool to see psychodrama being used in pop media, and that particular play is actually used in psychodrama therapy in real life to help soldiers process feelings of loss and betrayal in therapy for PTSD.

Self-Help

The big message of this book is that our mind, brain, and body are inextricably interconnected. We can’t treat symptoms without treating the cause. In order to heal, we must heal all three together. The mind-body connection flows both ways. The mind can make the body sick, but the body can also heal the mind. If you can’t afford or even find a therapist who is knowledgeable in CPTSD or the techniques listed above, you can do body work on your own.

Body work, or somatic therapy, is a way that trauma survivors can learn to feel safe and present in our own bodies again. Things like massage, yoga, meditation, dance, or tai chi can all help a trauma survivor to re-establish a healthy mind-body connection and learn how to listen to the signals of the body again. It’s not necessary to do those activities with any particular focus on your trauma because the benefit comes from establishing a deep connection between your mind, brain, and body, and these activities on their own have been shown to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, invasive thoughts, emotional dysregulation, and executive dysfunction when done regularly over time. 

It’s hard to believe that something so simple (and free) can have such a large impact on our mental and physical health, but if you’re struggling, then it can’t hurt to try. There are tons of free YouTube videos, apps and games for the phone, and even a few gaming systems that take all the guesswork out of what to do, just follow along for 10-20 minutes at a time. A quick Google search will turn up dozens, but here are the ones I use:

Yoga: I enjoy going through this 30 day challenge because it’s a little different every day, and I don’t get bored. It’s ok to skip activities that hurt or are too hard.

Grounding/Mindfulness app: PTSD Coach was designed for veterans and is sponsored by the VA, but you don’t have to be a vet to use it. Even though it’s aimed at combat PTSD, many of the free activities are good for anyone in need of more grounding and mindfulness.

The Tripp app on Oculus Quest: I know not everyone can afford a gaming system, but if you happen to already have one in your home, this is a stunning audio-visual experience that makes daily meditation and breathing exercises a real joy.

If you’re like me, and you want to see the science behind why this works, then there’s no better place to start than this book.

Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman

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I’m Mad as Hell, and I’m not Gonna Take It Anymore!

This book made me angry. Like, really angry. Not because it’s a bad book, on the contrary, it’s excellent. It just revealed a lot about our culture and society that infuriated me. This may be the OG source of the “C” in CPTSD, so props to Dr. Herman, but her main point is the rise and fall of realizing as a society that we f*ck over women, children, and powerless minorities inducing horrible trauma, and then we (again as a society) balk at horror of the reality of HOW MANY people are traumatized, abused, raped, assaulted, and systematically wrecked by status quo systems of power and authority and we then collectively decide it can’t actually be that bad, or that maybe it was that bad, but it’s better now, and we don’ have to think about it or look at it ever again. And that we have been doing it every few decades for at least 150 years. She somewhat optimistically follows this dire assessment with the cheerful notion that now we’re having a resurgence in awareness and it’s so good, so maybe we’ll learn something this time… only the book was published in 1992. So she was writing about the collective recognize-outrage-token-change-forget cycle in 1990-91 hoping it might be the last time, and I was reading it in 2020, in the wake of the 2017-8 version of #metoo and #blm (those are older than you think, too) going, “are you f@cking kidding me?! how long have we been doing this bullsh!t?”

She talked about how Freud, Mr. All-Girls-Want-To-Fuck-Their-Daddies-And-Rape-Isn’t-A-Thing-Cause-They-Secretly-Want-It-Freud actually wasn’t a total dickhead when he started. Originally, he worked with a bunch of “hysterical” young women (whoo boy howdy and that is a can of worms because the way those ladies were treated *before* him was even worse! seriously, just read the book). He tried the radical approach of (gasp!) actually talking to the women, an approach no doctor ever tried before. Said ladies revealed a lot of details of abuse and incest, which led Freud originally to begin to crack open the lid on trauma as a cause of both mental and physical ailments, but then he basically went, oh, wait, there’s no way that SO many respected, rich, men are doing this to their daughters and nieces, so they must be seducing these men! *gag*. Some sources imply the decision to change his mind came as a result of serious pressure from the gentlemen in his community. Either way, he recanted and we’re still dealing with that consequence nearly 2 centuries later.

She outlines historical occurrences where we (humans) start to realize what’s going on and then back away in fear and horror from Freud to the 1992 version of #metoo, which I vaguely associate with Grrl Power and Lilith Fair, and angrily singing Alanis Morrissette at the top of my lungs, but no real “movement” and certainly no substantive change. She doesn’t focus only on women or sexual abuse, but also men and the trauma of war. Over and over we’ve come close to understanding combat trauma only to turn away and reject it again. (the details of this cycle are more deeply covered by Van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score). Whether it’s sexual assault, domestic violence, street gangs, or war – the people who are hurt over and over are the young: children and young adults. She calls it “the adult conspiracy of violence” and it is a concept that fills me with rage.

The Adult Conspiracy of Violence:

Obviously it’s not a conspiracy in the sense that all the adults got together and decided to do this. It’s more like a set of unspoken and unbreakable rules. I suspect that Herman uses the word “conspiracy” to describe this phenomenon because although no organization exists, most adults are more aware of the violence than they are willing to acknowledge, and few are willing to break those unwritten rules. In my own understanding, it is the cycle in which every generation is abused and traumatized then goes on to grow up and fall into one of 4 categories (although fluidly and on a spectrum):
1) suppress what happened and live in denial
2) recognize what happened to them, but think that it a) is very rare b) doesn’t happen anymore
3) are angry about what happened to them and think everyone should suffer like they did
4) are greedy dickheads who don’t care who they have to hurt to get what they want

As a result, the next generation is subjected to just as much horror, abuse, and trauma by 3&4 while receiving zero support from the 1&2 adults around them who simply refuse to see it. I am infuriated because now that I’m “an adult” I can see it, I can see the whole cycle and the whole “conspiracy”, I can see it and I have no idea how to protect the kids from it. I have a niece and a nephew, I have friends with kids, I have students… I want to find a way to blow the lid off this thing, make a blockbuster movie, get a Greta Thunberg to stage a national school walk out in protest of violence against children, to make a giant statue you can see from space and paint it in Pinkest Pink and Vantablack so everyone has to go “why?” and we can explain the adult conspiracy of violence.

Note 2022: I’ve found that Alice Miller discusses this a lot as well in the two books of hers that I’ve read: The Drama of the Gifted Child, and For Your Own Good. Other authors discuss the effects of this cycle of trauma, but few delve deep into it’s roots as Miller and Herman do.

A good solid part of why this book made me angry is because in 1992 I was 14. I was already well down the path of being consumed by the adult conspiracy of violence. When this book was published, and this information was in the public eye, it did not find me. It did not find my friends, my sister. It faded from view and it’s wisdom was of no help to me in understanding or processing any of the things that happened to me as a child, a teen, and a young adult — when at various times I was neglected, abused, raped and my friends and family refused to see what was done to me. When instead they joined the conspiracy of silence and denial and told me it was nothing: you’re making it up, you’re exaggerating, it was your fault anyway, you must have wanted it, buyers remorse, be grateful anyone wants you that way, you weren’t really hurt, you have it so good, that never happened, I don’t remember it that way, look at how bad it could have been, be grateful it wasn’t worse, be happy, be silent.

She tried to reach people at a time it could have made a real difference in the course of my life, but it didn’t reach anyone close enough to reach me. I can’t help but think of all the 14 year-olds out there who need to hear this, who need to know about the Adult Conspiracy of Violence and be shown a way out.

There may be a fifth category that didn’t have a large enough footprint for Herman to write about 30 years ago: the cycle breakers. I see it more and more online in memes and YouTubes and blogs. The more young adults are normalizing therapy and seeking healing for past trauma, the more they want to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma and abuse. Only time will tell if this movement can truly challenge the Adult Conspiracy of Violence or if it is just another peak in the recognize-outrage-token-change-forget cycle.

Post Trauma Fantasies: False Healing

Aside from the above cycle of violence and suppression, the book had a lot of information that was in line with what I’d already read and served mainly as reinforcement. There was one other stand out concept in this book which was the addition of more types of post-trauma fantasies. I was already whammied by the Healing Fantasy that Dr. Gibson introduced me to in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, so I was intrigued by the idea that there were more. Dr. Herman talks about the Revenge Fantasy, the Forgiveness Fantasy, and the Compensation Fantasy. Being able to further recognize some of my thinking as fantasy was both hard to hear and somewhat reassuring. It was like being given permission to let those thoughts go.

The Healing Fantasy is the idea that you can make it all better if you just do the right thing. If you can heal enough for both of you, or if you stop doing whatever it is that makes them mad or sad or cold, if you can teach them to be more self-aware, if you can help them heal from their own pain so they stop allowing their own trauma responses to result in abusive or toxic behavior, whatever it is, you take on the responsibility of healing THIER trauma in hopes that it will get them to stop hurting you. Gibson says it’s the idea “that more self-sacrifice and emotional work will eventually transform their unsatisfying relationships” and that the “healing fantasy always involves the idea: It’s up to me to fix this”. If I just find the magic feather, then everything will be ok.

The Revenge Fantasy is where the American justice system and every Spawn fan live. The idea is that by taking revenge on the person or people who caused pain, that the scales will be balanced, the perpetrator will be filled with shame and remorse for their wrongdoings, and your pain will go away. That last part is the key fantasy part. Making someone else hurt doesn’t heal your own pain. On an individual basis, this can lead to a lot of anger and rage, since the fantasies themselves are often violent. On a cultural level, it results in people who are happy to imagine prison rape or delight in police brutality for “those that deserve it”. The preference to punish rather than reform, to see people suffer rather than receive help is, I believe, at the core of the rot in America’s criminal justice system, and as far as I can tell, it comes from a widespread indulgence in the Revenge Fantasy.

The Forgiveness Fantasy is the church route (any church/spirituality), if you let go of your anger and forgive the person who hurt you, then your pain will go away. Forgiveness may or may not be a part of your healing journey, but it’s definitely not the only thing. Forgiving a person without making any other changes will simply result in the pain getting shoved further down, where it will continue to harm you. In many of the forgiveness-fantasy cultures, you are expected to forgive a person who doesn’t apologize or change, and are often blamed/shamed for being unable or unwilling to do so. Some people who cling to this fantasy will also use the continued existence of the pain to prove that you haven’t “really forgiven” your abuser, shifting the blame for your own pain onto your “unwillingness” to forgive.

In another type of forgiveness fantasy you dream you can get the other person, your abuser or toxic partner, to understand what they did is actually hurting you, and then when they understand it, they will apologize and want to change! After all, people who love you don’t hurt you on purpose, an will totally stop when you say ouch. Healthy people and people who are trying to get healthy totally will, but Spoiler Alert: toxic people and abusers will never stop, and any apology they offer is just to get you to stay. I had fallen into trap this many many times before learning about it, and I now know the importance of letting this particular fantasy go.

I’ve also seen a large number of memes and tweets about cutting out toxic people that strike me as woefully unnuanced. Not everyone who hurts you is toxic/abusive, so how do you know when to give someone the chop? To me, the difference between a toxic person and a toxic behavior is the way they approach healing. Every traumatized person has toxic behaviors at some point, but only those who are willing to do the deep work of self reflection and healing will be willing to admit it and work to change. It’s important to communicate when we are hurt. Relationships of all kinds are strengthened by good communication and successful conflict resolution, but there also comes a time when the healing process becomes the Healing Fantasy and we have to let go. Dr. Gibson addresses this in her book, and I also found Conflict Is Not Abuse, by Sarah Schulman has a lot of good advice on how to identify and deal with the distinction between being hurt and being abused.

The Compensation Fantasy was the hardest for me. This says that you deserve good things in life for what you have suffered, that if you get those good things it makes up for the bad things. I realized in one terrible epiphany that I had been holding up my joy as the compensation for all terrible things I’d gone though. In 2012-14 I went through a round of therapy research and practice that focused on positive psychology, and centered around the works of Brené Brown and Martin Seligman. I learned how to be happy, like, really happy, not just wine-mommy happy. Then, it was somehow ok that I had suffered so much, because I had so much joy! The sudden removal of everything that brought me joy due to a global pandemic made me crash very hard. The pandemic had not merely deprived me of some fun trips, or a fulfilling career, it had taken away what I was owed for my pain. Obviously, that’s not true, and now I can work experiencing joy for it’s own sake and not as a trade off for pain.

30 years later

This is a great book that didn’t make it into my top 5 but is definitely in my top 10. Despite being 30 years old, it still has a lot of useful and important information, however it’s no longer the only source for such. I recommend this for older readers (who remember the 90s), for younger people who are interested in the history or may be trying to understand a parent (older relative), and for anyone who is doing a deep dive into their own Trauma and Recovery.

Books for Healing: A List

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I tried to write about my therapy books here because writing about the books was a way for me to process what I was learning without just vomiting navel gazing. It also helped to keep me on a task by thinking (or maybe fantasizing) that my book reviews would help others. I have an easier time spending energy on helping others than helping myself. I was also also starting to get mixed up about what was actually in each book because I was reading them so fast that the contents started blending together and I wanted to be able to go back and reference or reread or make reading recommendations based on content.

In October of 2019, I read Educated. In February 2020 I read Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Educated was the first time I looked at my CPTSD and thought it could be more than just the trauma from my adult life. Adult Children was a revelation. I don’t know how much more I would have done, though, if not for COVID. I spent years avoiding dealing with it. My method of avoidance was the pursuit of happiness, adventure, and meaning. Objectively better than drugs or alcohol, but no less an addiction (see In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts). Like a leaky roof, I only thought about my damage it when it rained. COVID was a monsoon season that lasted for 2 years.

I wrote as much as I could until I got to Gretchen Schmelzer’s book, A Journey Through Trauma, and I broke. It’s an amazing book. I just broke because it finally scraped through a wall of resistance I had inside and let a lot of scary goop come oozing out. I remember sitting in my room in the dark searching for my core (pre-traumatized) self and realizing it was just cracked up shards the whole way back. That book also made me believe that there was no way to heal without a trained and qualified guide (therapist, social worker, counsellor, group leader, etc), and I had to cope with the grief of the total unfairness of paywall blocking my mental health before I decided that it just wasn’t true.

I found two more book reviews in my drafts folder when I came back to the blog after my long break. I plan to publish them as soon as I get them cleaned up, but I don’t think I’m going to write any more of the book reviews after that. I’m still reading new and helpful trauma recovery books to this day, and hope to continue, but he process of writing out my thoughts and reactions to the books isn’t as helpful to me as it was when I started, and there’s plenty of online reviews out there.

My Reviews:

Educated, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents & Complex PTSD: from Surviving to Thriving are in A Trip Inside: Where I Went in 2020 (and was meant to be the first of a series).

The Tao of Fully Feeling & The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog are in Head Trip: (Therapy Books Cont. 2021)

Gretchen Schmelzer’s book A Journey Through Trauma got it’s own post: Book & Author Review.

Trauma & Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman & The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk are coming soon.

MY READING LIST:

Below is a full list of ALL the books I’ve read and think may be helpful if you or a loved one is trying to heal from trauma. Although I have no plans to write any further reviews, I’m happy to talk about the books if anyone has any questions.

TOP 5 (no particular order):

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk

CPTSD Thriving to Surviving,  Pete Walker

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson

Journey Through Trauma, Gretchen L. Schmelzer

What My Bones Know, Stephanie Foo

The only one of my top 5 that I haven’t written about is Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know. I just recently finished my first reading of that book, but the reason it made my top 5 is because she is a regular person (not a doctor or therapist) who started her journey of understanding and healing from her own CPTSD about 1 year before me and just published. Neither of is done with the journey, we’re just at a similar point. We are two people with very different backgrounds and life experiences. Foo is the daughter of Asian immigrants, and is a very successful reporter. Her trauma was not the same as mine, but I’ve learned a lot about not playing the Pain Olympics (don’t minimize your experiences by comparing your pain/trauma to anyone else; don’t make anyone compete to be “traumatized enough”). The part of the book that shot it straight to my top 5 was the process of revelation and recovery. The way in which even though our lived experiences of being traumatized were so very different, our experiences along the path to recovery were stunningly similar. It may not be a good book to start your own healing journey with, but I think it’s essential to anyone who’s been trying for a while and is feeling rough.

Family & Generational Trauma:

Mothers Who Can’t Love, Susan Forward

Toxic Parents, Craig Buck & Susan Forward

Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson

Emotional Inheritance, Galit Atlas

General Trauma & Healing:

Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman

The Tao of Fully Feeling, Pete Walker

The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller

Healing Trauma, Peter A. Levine

How to Do the Work, Dr. Nicole LePera

Topical:

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Bruce Duncan Perry (child abuse)

For Your Own Good, Alice Miller (the pedagogy of child rearing examined as traumatic abuse)

See What You Made Me Do, Jess Hill (domestic violence & coercive control)

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Maté (addiction as connected to trauma)

Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman (trauma responses)

Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, Richard C. Schwartz (founder of IFS therapy method)

What Happened to You? Oprah Winfrey (pop psych – learning to become trauma informed)

Educated, Tara Westover (personal narrative of escape and recovery)

Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa (personal narrative of discovery and healing)

Bonus Video Materials!

I know reading isn’t for everyone (most of these books are available in audiobook format for those who prefer), considering my current audience, I may be speaking to a higher percentage of readers, but maybe you want to loop in a non-reader or take a reading break. I also have a small list of videos that I found helpful.

The Crappy Childhood Fairy: also on Youtube, she is a person who is in recovery for CPTSD and has a lot of good stuff to share. Her insights into the problems with finding a good therapist were especially validating.

Patrick Tehan is a licensed therapist who specializes in family systems. He uses his knowledge mixed with his own experiences healing from childhood trauma to explain various trauma symptoms, coping mechanisms, and deeper paths to healing.

Dr. Ramani is a clinical psychologist whose videos target narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse.

Psych2go is a really calming and adorable animated info source about mental health. Sometimes, I just watch it when I’m not sure what advice I’m looking for.

Any of Richard Schwartz’s videos on Internal Family Systems. I watched several and a lot of them are repeats, but the practical demonstrations and guided meditations are the best.

Jane McGonigal’s TedTalk tells the story of how her app Superbetter helps people gamify healing.

plus FICTION!

Sometimes artists turn their healing journey into tv shows? I’ve talked before about Adventure Time & Steven Universe because I think they are very good shows for dealing with complex and nuanced emotions in a fun and often silly way. Very especially, the follow up, sequel mini series of Distant Lands and Steven Universe Future took off the pretense of being “just a cartoon” and dove into the serious work of trauma identification.

I also found Centaur World on Netflix to be a psychonautic musical journey into someone’s own Internal Family System’s therapy. The characters are fairly obviously exaggerated aspects of various trauma responses, and the bad guy, well… it inspires some deep thoughts for sure. And it has catchy tunes!

Is it all cartoons? Maybe… I do watch other shows, but for some reason cartoons lend themselves toward the balance of goofy and surreal that is needed to address trauma without drowning in it. The last one is animation, but not really a cartoon: Undone, on Amazon Prime. It’s about a mestiza woman who goes back in time to try and undo her generational trauma. It’s also pretty psychonautical, and was instrumental in my one of my own ah-ha breakthroughs about my family’s generational trauma.

Book & Author Review: Gretchen L. Schmelzer

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This started as just another book review, but it got into Dr. Schmelzer’s blog along the way, so now I’m writing a whole post about her and her stuff. I do want to make it clear that I have tremendous respect for her and the work she is doing. I found the book immensely helpful, and while I do have some criticisms on her body of work, this is not an attack or indictment. As a result of exploring my conflicting feelings about possibly her two most famous publications, I have found myself subscribing to her blog because it’s well written and thoughtful: bite sized pieces of the advice she gives in her book in a timely manner relating to what is going on in the world around us. I just… can’t go to the “parents corner” ever again.

Journey Through Trauma: A Trail Guide to the 5-Phase Cycle of Healing Repeated Trauma

This book is designed to be a trail guide to the path of healing from long term trauma. That is also a little misleading since you have to walk the trail about a million times before you “finish” because, as the author points out repeatedly, the healing journey is not linear with a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather like a progressive spiral. Imagine going up a mountain. You don’t just start at the bottom and go straight up. You either do switchbacks or walk a gentler sloping path around the mountain, getting a little higher up each time. The path of healing is like that. You feel like you’ve been here before, and you’ve seen this view, but you’re a little closer to the top every time you round the bend.

She also stresses that it’s impossible to walk this trail without a guide – a real human guide, not a book or map. She compares it to going up Everest, which is not a thing you do alone. Pretty much every book I’ve read repeats at some level the need to get professional guidance on a trauma healing journey. Even the ones that aren’t peddling therapy have still pointed out the absolute impossibility of fully healing from relational trauma without forming new bonds with other humans. I’m blocked pretty hardcore in this the same way all trauma survivors are (by my own fear and distrust, the worry that the other humans will hate “real me” or leave just when I’m starting to feel connected, etc), but I’m also blocked by Covid and living in this small town in Korea, which I also can’t change because of Covid. It’s getting really frustrating that not only is this pandemic taking away so many good things in my life, now it’s becoming a major obstacle to my healing.

Schmelzer reminds us of the need for a trained trauma therapist repeatedly and gives some very compelling arguments about it. I’ve been resisting finding a therapist since the fiasco in 2020 where I got 2 in a row that were not only unhelpful, but actively triggering me into worse and worse feeling states while offering zero support or recognition of that. Turns out, CPTSD is not a thing you can go to any ol’ therapist about. You really need someone trained in it, and who has done significant work on themselves in therapy as well. Armed by several of these books with a wish/check list of what I need in a therapist, I could look for one that will be what I need. Yet, I still have fear, I still have the “everyone lets me down always so I must do it myself” inner voice to get past, so when I went online just to look at options, I had a tiny baby anxiety attack and had to close the internet and go do other things. This takes work, but I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that it’s work I need to do with someone. My intake video appointment is now scheduled for early October.

I appreciate this book’s map of the healing process because it really is a good guide to the stages we need to go through over and over as we spiral up the mountain. I also enjoyed the detailed but simplified explanations of how the brain processes memory in regular events, one time traumas, and recurring traumas. However, these fade into the background next to my own big ah hah moment from this author:

The 3 Phases of Experiencing Trauma

She makes it clear that she is speaking of long-term trauma or repeated trauma, as opposed to a single traumatic event. It’s important to understand how these are different for several reasons, but mostly because it informs our healing journey. A single traumatic event like a car accident, a robbery or rape, or even a natural disaster like a hurricane can and will trigger the brain’s defense and panic mode (go go gadget amygdala!) which causes things like adrenaline and cortisol to flood the body, it changes the way the brain functions, bypassing the prefrontal cortex and going straight to action. It also changes the way that memory works, recording in HiDef everything that is happening and storing it in a special place in the brain. That’s part of why PTSD flashbacks can be so vivid. However, in the case of long term or repeated trauma, the brain simply can’t keep pumping out emergency responses day in and day out, so it shuts down certain functions. This impacts our emotions, reactions, memory, and many other things. It is part of the reason why CPTSD flashbacks tend to be only emotions without any visual/audio context because the memory storage function of the brain changed during that recurring trauma.

In long term, recurring trauma, you have three things to look at:

  1. What happened to you? – what was the actual trauma? This can be hard to answer in the beginning because protective measures in your brain are keeping you from looking at it head on. You may not even be able to put it into words because the speech and language center of the brain is actually CUT OFF from where the traumatic memory is stored.
  2. What did you do to protect yourself? – this may be conscious or unconscious actions. Unconscious actions are things your brain does on its own like emotionally numbing, dissociating, forgetting, and rerouting memory and thought connections. Conscious actions may be easier to remember because you probably came up with those in a less dissociative moment. We gotta see both.
  3. What didn’t happen? – not in the “well it could have been worse” sense, that platitude can die in a fire. In the sense of what did you miss out on? What developmental milestones, what life growth milestones? What were you unable to do, see, or grow from because you were trapped in trauma? And oh, wow, is this a doozy.

Don’t Live in the Past, But Do Visit There

I, like many of you, was taught by family and society at large that dwelling on the past is unhealthy and undesirable. “Just move on. Just get over it. You can’t change the past, so stop dwelling!” But if we don’t spend some reasonable amount of time “dwelling” then we can’t understand what happened to us and we will never heal from it. Shoving aside past trauma simply because the traumatic event is over is NOT HEALTHY. People will fight you about it because they a) don’t want to confront their own pain, so watching you do it makes them uncomfortable, or b) don’t want to take responsibility for traumatizing you or others, so listening to you work through it makes them feel shame and guilt, followed quickly by rage and blame.

Just… like…don’t talk to those people about your journey, but also, don’t let them stop you from taking it.

So here I am reading these three phases and going, “wait. what?” and revisiting all the little “if only” and “what if it had been different” thoughts I’ve ever shoved to the side because “you can’t change the past” and it was like a revelation to finally feel like I’m allowed to make space for those feelings. Yeah, no one wants to live in the past. That’s not the point of this activity. We suppressed, denied, and cut out the painful and traumatic parts of our lives in order to survive them as they were happening. Once the trauma is over, and we no longer need those survival tactics, we have to fully experience the things we locked away so that we can put them in the past where they belong.

COVID19 Is a Traumatic Event

In applying this to the Covid pandemic, which is a global scale recurring traumatic event, it made a lot of things fall into place for me. Like, why did we all go from panic to burnout so fast? Because the brain shuts down a bunch of cognitive functions when it can’t sustain ongoing trauma. We just did that collectively as a planet. The book has some examples of this kind of widespread, community trauma response in countries where there’s been war, intense civil unrest, dangerous political upheaval, or national natural disasters which destroyed large parts of the country. We have examples of how large populations experience trauma. This is just the first time in recent memory that we’ve had trauma on a global scale to contend with.

We can see phase 1 in the news every day: what is happening to us? A global pandemic, restrictions, closures, economic hardship, and of course illness and death. Most of us are at least marginally aware of phase 2: what we are doing to protect ourselves. I’m part of the Animal Crossing horde, and pretty much everyone in there knows that our intense obsession with the gameplay is a coping strategy for pandemic stress. Other people got really into sourdough. We’re all either numbing or dissociating to some extent whether we know it right now or not. However, we are all intensely aware of phase 3: what we’re missing out on. It’s easy to see the missed holiday gatherings, missed campus activities, missed vacations, weddings, graduations, and other milestones. I think in some way because it’s so obvious to think about what we are missing out on during this trauma, that it made it easier for me to understand how this is a part of all long term trauma.

Attachment Disorders

I had read a bit about attachment in a few other places, but almost everything that is published focuses on children. Which makes sense because attachment is a thing that happens (or doesn’t) to developing children. However, time keeps on ticking, and those children grow up, so what happens to adults who had attachment disorders as children. Again, there’s a little stuff on this, but mostly in terms of criminal or violent behavior. We do love a good “true crime”. This was the first book I found that had any real discussion of what attachment disorder might mean to me as a non-criminal, yet still affected adult. I honestly don’t think I could summarize it or explain it better than the original text, so brace for heavy quoting:

“And now, before every parent reading this section fears that they have ruined their child, what is really important to understand about attachment and healthy relationships is that it isn’t about getting it right all the time. It isn’t about being the perfect parent…In fact, powerful research shows that both parents who have secure relationships with their children and parents who have insecure relationships with their children get it wrong about the same amount of time (roughly 50 percent)…Getting it wrong is actually just part of what it means to be in a normal relationship. So what distinguishes a secure relationship [is] your ability to go in for repair. Parents who have a secure relationship with their children keep trying something else in the interaction until they get it right enough. Or they apologize for getting it wrong. Or they get it wrong and inquire. And this constant state of “try something — get it wrong — repair” is how we human beings teach each other how to be in a relationship with each other.”

This was a fairly large revelation to me, because I felt frequently that none of my parental figures (bio or step) were willing to do ANY repair work, or try anything different. If their way didn’t work, then clearly I was the problem. Why couldn’t I just figure it out/ get it/ do it/ stop whatever they didn’t like, etc. And it’s pretty shocking if you think about it, because this kind of behavior isn’t even close to what most of us think of when we think of abuse or even neglect. She goes on to explain the three main types of insecure attachment: anxious (preoccupied), avoidant (dismissive), and disorganized (fearful-avoidant). To help survivors in the journey toward recovery, Shmelzer says, “It’s helpful to think about each of the insecure attachment styles as a solution to a problem. Each of these attachment styles was the best solution that you could come up with to cope with poor, inconsistent, neglectful, or abusive caregiving.” Again, I think it’s relevant to note that “poor” and “inconsistent” are listed alongside “neglectful” and “abusive” because insecure attachment doesn’t only come from abuse.

Anxious (preoccupied) Attachment

“If you are anxiously attached, you decided to use a strategy of managing inconsistent caregiving by becoming hypervigilant – and anxious. You want to believe in relationships and you pay close attention to relationships, but you don’t believe in their reliability. Children who employ this strategy look clingy or fearful – never wanting to let go, for fear they will never be able to grab hold again. If you are an adult who employs this strategy you may find yourself assuming that no matter what you do, you will be abandoned by the people you love, or that the relationship is too fragile to handle your problems.”

I thought about this one. I do this sometimes. When I have in the past found a person that I thought had some special unique ability to care for me, I could be clingy, but I always hated it. I hated the way it made me feel, like why should I have to beg or struggle so hard just to be loved? A part of me knew that wasn’t right, and far more often than not, if a person wanted me to put on a show for their attention, I turned into this next attachment style pretty fast.

Avoidant (Dismissive) Attachment

“If you are a person with a dismissive attachment style, you settled on the opposite strategy – you decided that it was too hard or painful to try to rely on unreliable caregivers and chose to simply ‘not need’ anyone, seeing any of the normal proximity seeking as a weakness; you work instead to protect yourself through self-sufficiency. You often look pretty solid on the outside, but feel disconnected on the inside. Others may feel like they can never get close to you.”

I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time living in this style, too, but it felt like a cycle: I’d get lonely or optimistic and I’d start trusting and investing in a person (or people) and then they would leave, let me down, betray me, ask too much, give to little… in other words: be human… and I would withdraw, turn tough and self sufficient and disconnected. But then I’d get lonely again… It reminds me a LOT about the story of the Wise Turtle, which was one of my favorite books as a child. I may have even convinced myself that alternating between these two unhealthy coping mechanisms was somehow “wise”, but it turns out there’s another name for not being able to attach to an attachment style:

Disorganized (Fearful-Avoidant) Attachment

“[T]he last category of insecure attachment is called “disorganized” in childhood and “fearful-avoidant” in adulthood – and tends to be the result of the most abusive or neglectful parenting. In many ways it’s an attachment style where neither of the strategies of the other two, anxious or dismissive, worked well enough – neither getting close nor staying away was consistently successful – and so you may find yourself alternating between them in what one of my psychiatrist colleagues once described as a “closeness-distance” problem. As a fearful-avoidant person you can find no safe distance. Often the solution is a false self. You create a persona that looks good on the outside, but you believe that if anyone knew the “real you” on the inside, they would leave you, which forces you to work desperately hard to make the outside look good, which means that you have to hide your problems rather than seek help. And because you believe that this false self is a fraud, it’s hard to let anyone get very close for fear of being found out.

I really hate being called out like that.

This is a big step for me in my continuing journey to recognize that not everything that traumatizes us is violent or abusive. I know a lot of adults who suffer from a variety of mental and emotional issues that are almost certainly linked to insecure attachment who refuse to investigate the possibility because they don’t want to think of their parents as “bad”, or of themselves as “abused”. I argue that we don’t always have to choose between ourselves and our parents. Some parents are abusive, or so toxic that it’s just impossible to keep our own mental/emotional balance around them, but many parents tried their best, and are still trying. Recognizing what happened in the past isn’t the same as “blaming”, but we need to understand because we can’t heal if we don’t know what happened.

The Five Steps of the Healing Journey

Schmelzer breaks down the healing cycle (remember, you have to walk it many times) into 5 stages: Preparation, Unintegration, Identification, Integration, and Consolidation. Preparation is getting to a safe and healthy “basecamp”. Unintegration is taking all the broken pieces out of the box. She deliberately uses the grammatically incorrect “un” instead of “dis” because she wants to stress that it is an organized falling apart, a kind of “controlled fall” rather than an uncontrolled collapse. Identification is the time when we put words to everything, a repeated theme in many trauma healing books. Integration is taking the now named parts and putting them back inside us hopefully in the past where they belong. Consolidation is living with your new self for a while before you start the next cycle. Stages 2-4 are the most vital to have real, trained and skilled help with, and you don’t try to do everything in one go.

It’s clear reading this book that almost everything I’ve done in the last year and a half has been “preparation”. I’ve had a couple very tiny “training hikes” as it were by going through all 5 phases with one small part of my trauma, but the big work is still out there ahead of me. I toyed with feeling down about this, like, “man, I’ve been working on this for 18 months and I’ve not even got past stage 2?” BUT. Schmelzer compares a healing journey to climbing Mt. Everest, and it does actually take 12-18 months to prepare for Everest, and it involves training and practice hikes. It’s important to prepare well. AND. I am actually still experiencing trauma… the same trauma as everyone else on the planet, Covid! Schmelzer points out that we can’t heal from trauma while we are experiencing it, and although my past traumas are finished, I’m still having ongoing defense mechanisms to protect me mentally and emotionally from the trauma of the pandemic, so can I even move forward on any of it from here? I don’t know, part of why I need to findtalk to a trained therapist so I can ask. I don’t really have a happy ending for this book review. It helped me see somethings, but mostly what I see is a lot more work. Good, necessary, and ultimately rewarding work, but wow that mountain is really tall.

More From Gretchen L. Schmelzer

I loved the heck out of the book. I really feel like it helped me to frame my thinking and my healing journey. I especially respected the rhythm of her prose because she would introduce a key piece of information, and then return to it multiple times throughout the book, which is how our memory works to retain information. I enjoyed it so much, I perused the acknowledgements at the back to see where her influences were. She mentioned the viral success of an open letter she had published in a blog, and out of curiosity, I went to go read it. I do NOT recommend that you do, and I will not be linking it here.

“The Letter Your Teenager Can’t Write’ may be designed to help struggling parents of willful teens, but it is a HUGE trigger for the teens (or once teens) of trauma-inducing parents. I cried for a good long while after reading it. It felt like a complete betrayal of everything she wrote in the book. To see her console clingy and overbearing parents to “hold on to the rope” and fight with their teens “for love” made me want to vomit. This is not hyperbole, I had a visceral physical reaction in my guts to reading it.

Further reflection enabled me to understand that when she said “hold on to the rope”, she meant the belay rope. In the book, she talks about mountain climbing a lot as the core metaphor for trauma recovery. A belay rope is the rope that secures a climber if they fall while fucking around on the cliff face. Schmelzer relates this to her own experiences of learning top rope climbing, which requires a human partner at the top to help secure and control the belay line. It’s a lovely little metaphor for how we must learn to trust and depend on other humans that may or may not be totally ruined by the very real knowledge that there are automatic belay line techniques which do not require a human partner at all, but hey, we’re trying to maintain a metaphor here, let’s not get tangled up in reality. The point is, that in the book, Schmelzer explains what the belay rope stands for, but in “The Letter”, she does NOT. It’s just a rope, that parents have to hold on to while their children flail around on the other end of, fighting to be free.

I recognize that in her mind, the image of the (belay) rope is one of trust and safety, but that is not at ALL what it made me feel. I feel rope nets holding me down, chains shackling me, and sticky globs of giant spiderweb clinging to my skin. The rope is NOT a comforting image to me. It didn’t bother me in the book because she was so careful to talk about it in terms of mountain climbing gear that I didn’t even notice. When I realized that all my mental and emotional images of “the rope” of relational attachment are GROSS and ensnaring, enslaving things, I had to have another look at the section on attachment theory, and now I feel like I am going to need to spend some time focused on that. The visceral stomach churning, gagging, skin crawling feeling is definitely my body telling me a thing.

Follow-up:

I wrote to Dr. Schmelzer about The Letter (after I did the calm down and reflect thing) and shared some of my feelings and perceptions, and she actually wrote back. I’m not going to put the whole thing here, but some key phrases that I think helped me to understand more:

“The Letter” is not only for parents of teens, but “for anyone to understand why they may need to pull away or feel angry at the people who are helping them.”, ” for people who have experienced trauma what I describe is more what you may experience with a therapist than with the parent who raised you”

This is a good way for me to look at it, but I can’t help but wish there were some intro or postscript to the letter itself that expressed as much. I recognize that I do pull away from help, and I’m very aware that my sister may at any moment pull away from me if my helping becomes too uncomfortable. I just don’t know that I’ll ever agree that “fight me” is the right way to help. The Letter focuses a lot more on the fight than on the willingness to continue to love and support in the aftermath of the fight, and that doesn’t seem like the correct balance to me.

“Parents who think they are always right and make themselves a victim or a martyr would find validation anywhere they looked or dismiss the information if it doesn’t validate their view…That they could use or twist my words is a given, that is what they do, and I have no control over that.”

This is a thing I also understand. We can’t stop narcissists from living in their own little world. That “healing fantasy” was addressed for me early on in this reading process with “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”. There’s no way to write anything that will fix this problem, but we can and should put some effort into making sure that our words are not easy to misuse. It’s hard to place “The Letter” in context the way it is written and presented on the website, and it feels a little bit like a cop out to say “I can’t control how people take my words” when you literally can choose to just write a short disclaimer, or context clue at any time.

Finally, This kid. This 15 year old kid who wants love and comfort, to be seen and heard, and found the letter and went, “this is not what your teenager would write if they could”. This one teen comment in a sea of relieved and self congratulatory adults. Is fighting with your teen inevitable? Meh, probably, all people fight in personal relationships sometimes, but I think a lot of the typical teen/parent struggle is on the parents. I know if my niblings wanted to do crazy drugs and drinking binges the answer would be “no”, but I like to think that we could talk about what’s going on that makes them want to, and why moderation in consumption is important. A teen with strong self worth and a good attachment shouldn’t have the impulse to dive into self destructive and pain avoidance behaviors. Experiment and test boundaries sure, but If you raised them right, you should be able to have a conversation and not a fight.

Fight me.

In Conclusion

A Journey Through Trauma is likely to stay one of my top 5 trauma healing books. I’m not going to agree with everyone about everything and that is totally normal. Being triggered by her attempts to address an important and difficult issue does not negate all of the positive things I said about her book, her insight, and her writing style. I highly recommend the book to anyone struggling with trauma, and I plan to add it to my re-read pile. Additionally, I’ve subscribed to the blog and hope that reading her regular reminders of the healing journey will be a useful tool. On the other hand, I’m pretty confident I’ll always feel at least slightly uncomfortable if not positively outraged every time I see or think about “The Letter”, and that’s ok, too. The path to healing is not “one size fits all”, and we are never under any obligation to follow advice that is not helpful.

Thank you Gretchen for all your hard work.

Thank you for reading and continuing with me on this exploration. It’s summer “vacation” for me, which means no classes, but for the second year in a row, no travel either. Outside the US, vaccines are scarce, and restrictions are common. I’m pretty safe, and my uni has started the process of registering the profs for our shots, but I stare into the abyss a lot. These days my goals include: sleep a healthy amount (not less than 7, not more than 11 hours), eat healthy food (fruits, veg, low fat proteins, whole grains, not more than 1 dessert serving/day), move the body (30 min minimum on the VR dance game or similar activity), socialize (at least one day a week, leave the house and interact with humans). These are tiny, tiny goals compared to some of the literal and metaphorical mountains I have climbed in my life, but they are what will keep me at my “basecamp” until the skies clear. Even the Black Death only lasted 4 years, so while my hopes for a resumption of normal life by 2022 may be a little unrealistic, I know there must be a light at the end of this tunnel for all of us. Persevere.

A Head Trip (Therapy Books Cont. 2021)

/ Gallivantrix / 2 Comments

I had a plan to go through my books in order of reading, and that plan has, like so many before it, fallen totally apart. I am working on writing up thoughts and reflections on everything I read in 2020, but I’m still reading, and it seemed really easy to just write up the books as I finished them rather than to go back and remember. Plus, going back and remembering made me feel like reading those books again. Which I’m also doing, in between the new ones. So, to heck with linear time. I’m just going to put these posts out as I am able and try to put some temporal context in the beginning, like those movies that jump back and forth from “now” to some past which will maybe explain how we got here.

The Tao of Fully Feeling, Pete Walker

After re-reading CPTSD Thriving to Surviving, I realized I have a deep appreciation for this author. The Tao of Fully Feeling is a much earlier book by him, and he mentions it a few times in CPTSD, mostly in terms of what he felt he has learned since then, and things he wishes he could have included. I feel like reading them “backwards” was a good choice because I got to read Tao with the author’s hindsight in mind.

There are obvious similar themes dealing with childhood trauma and it’s effect on us as adults, but this book focuses on one main message: feel your feelings! This resonates with me because Brené Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability was a huge turning point for me in 2012 when I had been pummeled into a terrible life condition by an abusive relationship and ravaging illness back to back from 2004-10. I had started to physically recover in 2010/11 and by 2012 I was done wallowing in pain and decided to do something about it. Learning how to regain access to my genuine emotions was a huge step because we cannot, as Brené says, numb selectively, and if we want to feel genuine love, joy, wonder and other positive things, we must also allow ourselves to feel anger, sorrow, pain and other less pleasant feelings.

Things I particularly liked about the book include the myriad ways he gives examples of what kind of damaging behavior he is talking about, the way he is open about his own experiences without suggesting any need to compare experiences (it’s not the Pain Olympics, after all), and the absolute validation to go ahead and BE MAD. Grieving the loss of love, the death of a fantasy of parental security, the loss of who we might have been if we were not treated this way, the pain, the injustice… feeling all of that is important. He talks about how to feel and express the emotions of anger, sadness, grief, etc in healthy and cathartic ways, and advises on how to avoid expressing those emotions in ways that could harm ourselves or those around us.

Forgiveness

Walker approaches this concept from the goal of processing trauma, healing enough to curtail the damaging behaviors it causes in us, and learning to forgive. That last part is a little tricky. Walker himself was urged to forgive his abusive parents before he was ready, and it caused more problems than it fixed. He advocates against “false forgiveness”, and includes in that when we delude ourselves into wanting to “forgive and forget” in order to move on without doing the work. He says we have fully feel our anger, sadness, and blame impulses in order to process them. Suppressing the pain of past actions just means that pain stays around and sneaks out of us in messy and unexpected ways. He also stresses that forgiveness doesn’t mean we start talking to people who hurt us. Finally, he underscores the importance of forgiving ourselves. Many adult children of abuse, emotional distance, or neglect have internalized blaming ourselves for what happened to us. A critical part of recovery, Walker states, is forgiving our past selves for assuming and perpetuating that self-blame.

Generational Trauma & Empathizing With Your Parents

This is also the only book I’ve read so far that addresses the parents themselves as something more than merely the deliverers of trauma. He talks about discovering his parent’s own history of childhood abuse, and further, his grandparents’ painful youth. The generational trauma that goes back untold centuries can cause us to suffer for the abuse our great great grandparents suppressed and repeated. He acknowledges that we can have empathy for our parent’s extenuating circumstances (they were badly abused, they didn’t have any positive parenting examples, they did the best with what they had, but were pretty damaged themselves) while still being angry and sad that we were mistreated. Feelings aren’t simple and we can and should welcome ambivalence into our lives when it’s called for. There’s even a small section of the book directed at such parents who were both the victims and perpetrators of abuse/neglect on how they can work on healing themselves and on helping their adult children. The book ends with a helpful if not comprehensive list of things we can say to our children (inner children or the next generation) at different developmental stages to help them grow up feeling seen, heard, and loved with a strong sense of self-worth and curiosity.

The “Good Parent” Fantasy

My personal ah-hah moment in this book was realizing how it was possible for me not to see what my mother was doing for SO LONG. Walker explains that because children are so fully dependent on parents not only for physical security, but for emotional connection, self-esteem, and intellectual development, that young children simply can’t accept that their parents are unloving or cruel (intention on the part of the parent is pretty irrelevant at this stage of child development). As a result, young children develop intense defense mechanisms to simply not see or not remember when a parent acts in a toxic manner. Most children with early trauma have massive memory blocks that can last from birth to 12 years old. Although many start developing memories as early as 5, the memories are heavily redacted by the brain’s own internal self-guard. In my case, my father was scapegoated for leaving (took me 20+ years to learn that my mom gave him a pretty good reason for that), and my step parents were not … kind. It was easy for me as a child to revile 3/4 of the parental figures in my life, but then I turned all my need for parental connection and love onto my mother, who was oh so narcissistically happy to have it. Even when I knew things were bad between us, I assumed it was my fault and although I didn’t give up on being independent or moving out, I did seek to regain a loving connection with her after I’d been an adult for a while. I don’t think it was until I saw her repeating her behavior towards my sister’s children that I really broke through those decades of denial. When I did recognize my mother’s abusive and toxic behavior, I tried instantly to shift my ‘good parent’ fantasy over to my dad, which didn’t work because … well, he isn’t. He may not be as bad as my mom wanted me to believe, but that doesn’t erase the very real damage he did.

When Is Confrontation Helpful or Harmful?

I spent most of my life thinking that I had to confront my father (or anyone else who hurt me) in order to express my pain and move on, and Walker helped me to realize that is not only unnecessary but potentially harmful. Yes, a person (parent or otherwise) who is continuing to act toxically in the present needs to be addressed. We shouldn’t ignore it, and as Schulman suggests in Conflict is Not Abuse, we also should not simply cut people out of our lives for bad (non-abuse) behavior, but we might need to give them limits to protect ourselves if they are unwilling or unable to stop the harm.

Tao of Feeling helped me to understand that part of the reason I struggle so hard to have any kind of adult relationship with my father is that every single time we are together, I’m in a state of emotional flashback and hypervigilance. I want to have an adult relationship, but I can’t help but clench every muscle in my gut when I see his name in my inbox. I’ve learned in the last year or two that I need to take my time with those emails, get mad/sad, yell/cry, etc. then sit down to respond after a few days when the emotional flashback is subsiding. I know that identifying this is a good step, but as of this moment, I’m still not exactly sure what to do with it. I’ve done a little verbal or written ventilating since starting my recovery work, but I need to do more. Verbal ventilating, as Walker defines it, is a process of giving our past traumatic experiences and feelings words. It’s a huge part of healing because most traumatic memory and pain exists in a non-verbal part of the brain, and transferring it into words gives us the power to process it in to the past. This is the root of my feeling that I had to confront someone to “work it out”. A confrontation would force me to put it into words, which is the actual healing tool. The other person does not need to be there. As much as I need to say it, my father doesn’t need to hear it. Yes, he needs to understand there was hurtful behavior if we are ever to move on together, but he will not be served by listening to or reading an unexpurgated recollection of our time together the way I will be helped by saying or writing it.

If another person’s behavior is causing harm in the present (recent past, likely to happen again if not addressed) then you need to address it with the other person, but if our own emotional flashbacks are causing us to have disproportionate emotional responses, we have to address within ourselves. This is no place more difficult than with parents. A parent’s past abuse or neglect is the source of the trauma, the original cause of the painful emotions, while a parent’s mere existence in the present can be a trigger which causes an emotional flashback to that trauma they caused before. It’s almost impossible to untangle. For example, when my friend acts like my mom and triggers a flashback, I can (now) realize what’s going on, tell her I need a time out to handle my flashback, then when it’s passed, I can talk with her about what the trigger was and whether it’s something that she needs to take any action about. However, when I see an email from my dad, or some FB memory of my mom’s emotional manipulation, I can get triggered into a flashback in a snap just by seeing their names. How do we deal with that? Walker says I need to get it all out by fully feeling; remembering enough of the painful history to rail against it in full expression of bodily rage, and total surrender to open grief. It doesn’t sound fun, but it does sound better than squashing all my feelings because I can’t confront them directly.

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Bruce Duncan Perry

I was very skeptical when this book popped into my inbox. I didn’t actually remember placing the library hold, so clearly, I’d been waiting for it for a long time. The title also made me worried that I was about to read a non-stop trauma-rama of abused child case studies. However, it turns out that it is much more a ‘Neuroscience for Non-science Majors’ kind of book. Dr. Perry is an accomplished scholar, doctor, and researcher who spent most of his career on the cutting edge of childhood trauma research and treatment. The book does include several case studies, some of which are pretty much guaranteed to make you loose faith in humanity, at least temporarily, but it isn’t a voyeuristic inspiration-porn thing. There’s just enough details to give you the basic idea, then there’s a lot of discussion of therapy sessions, research, and basic neuroscience.

Neuroscience for Dummies

I’ve personally been fascinated by neurology and neuropsychology since I learned about it mumblemumble years ago. I enjoyed reading books by Sam Harris, watching every TED Talk on the function of the brain, perusing studies performed with the wonderful fMRI, which wasn’t even invented until 1990 and certainly not widely available for random research for a while after that. Plus lab research takes TIME, so the late 2000s to early 2010s was kind of an explosion of neuroscience research into the public sphere. I often wish I had been born just a little later, so that I could have found out about it before I went to college. I’ve also had some very financially irresponsible thoughts about going back to school just for this, but … money.

In general, if you need a good intro to the science of neurology with a focus on child development and trauma, he does a great job of explaining a very complex topic in easy to follow and engaging ways. I share his hope that by understanding what is happening inside our brains and the brains of those around us, we may learn to be more compassionate with ourselves and others when we are not able to instantly achieve best behavior through willpower alone. I think that is also a big reason I tend to talk about mental illness and trauma in terms of brain function so much. When we think of this as a physical function, like a diabetes, asthma, or myopia, then we can recognize that no amount of wishing or positive thinking will make it just disappear. (yes, positive thinking plays a very important role in healing, but it’s not The Secret). We need to learn to live with it, how to accommodate it and treat it, but also recognize that it isn’t going anywhere, and it isn’t a moral failing or lack of willpower.

The Evolution of Trauma Science

The other part of the book I enjoyed was the historical perspective. It is a bit painful to realize that I’m talking about events that happened in my own lifetime as “historical”, but in the last 40 years, there’s just been so much growth in research, understanding, and treatment of childhood trauma (and adult trauma for that matter) that I can’t really think of it as anything besides a historically important development. He talks about the things that even well regarded doctors believed in the 80s, how very very wrong they were, and some of the absolutely terrifuckingfying things that “professionals” advised parents do to “treat” /problematic/ children. (No amount of punctuation is going to express my combination horror-disgust about this.)

He walks us through the neurological renaissance of the 90s and the way that understanding the physical function and development of the brain changed the way we understand behavioral problems and mental illness. The book was published in 2007, so there have been even more developments since then, but the big re-think definitely started in the 90s, and it gives me a lot of hope for the people who are parenting now and have access to this kind of information that my parents just didn’t have. Maybe, just maybe, if we understand these new discoveries and the long term damage that trauma does (even when it happens on the watch of or at the hands of well-meaning and generally caring parents) then we can stop the cycle of generational trauma and start raising whole and emotionally healthy human beings.

There were several cases and studies refereed to by Perry where physical symptoms provided the first clue to doctors that there was a bigger problem. I don’t mean “mysterious bruises”, but issues of sleep, appetite, weight gain or loss, resting heartrate, and so forth. There were also discussions of how often children were being misdiagnosed with behavioral or learning issues even when the trauma was a known factor. Trauma from abuse, neglect, or other traumatic events in a child’s life was often totally disregarded because the pervasive attitude of the day was “kids are resilient, they’ll be fine” or “they’re just doing that to get attention”. This argument is still used today to downplay things like the traumatic impact of school shootings, ICE camps, catholic priests, and anything else that’s too inconvenient to stop doing because it primarily affects children.

Expert Validation

Part of the reason I think case studies and personal anecdotes are important in the field of trauma psychology is the same reason group therapy works. We need to see our own experiences reflected in others to feel valid. Every time an expert in this field says something that resonates with me, I feel a little more validated and a little less broken. I had another “omg that’s my mom” moment while reading this book. On it’s own, the fact that multiple authors have described my mother’s toxic behaviors is kind of stunning. It reveals the fact that she isn’t even very original in her crappy behavior. Perry says, “people like [that] have a pathological need to be seen as nurturers and caregivers”. I had been trying to find a way to verbalize this aspect of her narcissism for a while. A lot of narcissistic people want to be seen as attractive, smart, better than you in every way that matters, but my mom’s narcissistic ideal is to be seen as the most wonderful caring nurturer in the world. It was so liberating to see this renown psychiatrist go, ‘yeah, that’s a thing that happens fairly often, usually in healthcare workers who were also abused or neglected as kids’ (check and check). Knowing that my mother’s specific type of narcissistic abuse is common doesn’t fix it, but it does help me feel more grounded in my own experience – less gaslight and more electric bulb, if you know what I mean.

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

Spoilers. For those of you reading and thinking, “ok, but what about that boy in the title? What kind of shitty parents did he have?” I will relieve you of your mystery. The case was an infant (Justin) whose parents were unable to keep him at home, but rather than go in to foster, he was left with a relative (Arthur) who had zero childrearing experience, but did breed and raise dogs. “Left to his own devices, Arthur made care-giving decisions that fit his understanding of childrearing. He’d never had children of his own and had been a loner for most of his life. He was very limited himself, probably with mild mental retardation. He raised Justin as he raised his other animals—giving him food, shelter, discipline and episodic direct compassion. Arthur wasn’t intentionally cruel: he’d take both Justin and the dogs out of their cages daily for regular play and affection. But he didn’t understand that Justin “acted like an animal” because he’d been treated as one—and so when the boy “didn’t obey,” back into the cage he went. Most of the time, Justin was simply neglected.”

This is terrifying, but it isn’t evil in the way that many stories of extreme childhood abuse can be. The man didn’t hate or resent the child, he simply didn’t know what to do, and in addition had his own cognitive challenges which made him unable to process this new task. It is a good (if extreme) example of how a damaged/ignorant yet caring parent can fuck up royally.

The absolutely most terrifying part of this story isn’t that Justin was left with a mentally challenged man who treated him like a dog. (yeah, that’s not the worst part) The worst part is that the DOCTORS WHO SAW JUSTIN DECIDED HE WAS JUST RETARDED. Arthur didn’t try to hide anything. He took the boy to doctors when he realized that Justin wasn’t developing into a human child. The doctors who saw Justin in his first few years of life actually did some very intense testing including chromosome analysis and brain scans searching for the cause of his developmental delay and just NEVER ASKED about the boy’s home conditions. They told Arthur that the child was permanently brain damaged from an unknown birth defect and would never be able to care for himself. They straight UP abandoned this child because they did not want to look for trauma. This happened in the 1990s. If not for Dr. Perry’s intervention (1995), Justin would still be trapped in the life of a dog, unable to speak, or connect with fellow humans. You can read the full excerpt on Oprah’s website, but honestly, I’d recommend just reading the whole book.

Adventure Time: Distant Lands

This is not a book, and it’s not labelled as therapy (although I am of the opinion that the creators know what they are doing). Adventure Time is (ostensibly) a children’s cartoon set in the far future of Earth, now called Ooo, where mutants made of candy, ice, fire, and slime rule the many kingdoms. Our hero Finn is the only human, and he is 11 when the series starts. But I am not writing about Finn’s adventure. After 10 seasons of watching Finn cope with puberty and adulthood, the series came to a close, but the world of Ooo was not finished. A few longer episodes were released under the title “Distant Lands”, a nod to the theme song, and cover what is happening with a few of the supporting cast outside of the main series. Maybe you can watch it as a stand alone, but I don’t feel like it would make any sense, and I know it would not have the same emotional impact.

Why am I talking about a cartoon here?

I have noticed a trend in newer cartoons toward addressing actual emotional issues children experience rather than the things adults think are happening. I don’t really understand this disconnect. I can only assume that most adults forget or more likely suppress the memories of their own childhood, because I can’t understand why else they have no idea how complex the inner world of children really is. Not to sound like an old biddy, but “when I was a kid”, most of our cartoons were meaningless advertising for toys, cereal, or anti-drug campaigns that did no good whatsoever. Going back further, cartoons were full of casual racism and violence along with some war propaganda. I love some classic Warner Bros, but dang. And, I think it’s totally fine for cartoons to be meaningless entertainment. Not everything has to be a PSA or a life lesson. (NevergonnastopbeingmadatSpongebobforpromotingbullyingtho) Ahem.

But it IS nice to see kids content that actually deals with emotions and childhood issues in a genuine and healthy while still being fun and entertaining way. I’m pretty blown away by the reboot of MLP compared to the original. Same for the new She-ra. Big fan. There’s a growing number of these sort of “art house” cartoons that help children navigate the language of emotions and interpersonal conflicts. I mentioned Steven Universe in my last post, and I’ll talk about it again because it’s been a part of my healing journey. Today, I’m talking about Adventure Time.

Distant Lands episode 2 “Obsidian”. Spoilers ahead.

Marcelene spent her whole life feeling like a monster, acting out, being angry, feeling unlovable. Her father was a demon king, so I guess she was sort of half monster, but that’s not really what this is about. For Marcelene it was a thousand years of teen anxt, shitty abusive relationships, trying and failing to have an adult relationship with her estranged father, and deeply self destructive behavior before she found love and learned that being a half demon vampire queen doesn’t make her a monster because that’s not what “monster” means.

In “Obsidian” we learn that she feels this way because her mother sent her away as a child after her (demon king) father abandoned them. As a child, she used her demon powers to defeat a mutant wolf threatening her mom, then shortly after, her mom lied to her about some stuff and sent her away. Child Marcelene didn’t know why her mother would do that, so her child brain made it her own fault. “Mom is scared of me and ran away because I’m a monster.” A thousand years later, she learns the truth: her mom was sick, dying, and not only couldn’t care for her daughter in the hellscape of postapocalytic Earth/Ooo, but also didn’t want her daughter to see her that way.

The problem is: It doesn’t matter why parents push us away- illness, stress, survival, 3 jobs, personal emotional issues, divorce, any number of reasons that are very legit and do not involve a lack of love on the parents’ part and are frequently things they either can’t control or don’t know how to start to change. It doesn’t matter because the child will always find a story that makes it their own fault.

Mom and/dad can’t be sick/weak/crazy or I could die (literally small children can’t survive without adults), so I must be the problem. I must deserve this. I am broken. I am a monster.

Somehow, reading this in multiple books had not had the deep emotional impact that seeing one of my favorite characters experience it would have. It hasn’t been a thousand years for me but it feels that way. It has been a lifetime of anxiety, shitty abusive relationships, failed connection with an estranged father, deeply self destructive behavior and a thorough feeling of being a monster who is unworthy of love. I cried and cried and screamed and raged, and then cried some more. (Remember, Pete Walker says we need to do that.) I’m angry that I have felt this way as long as I can remember and I’m just now finding books and shows to help me understand it. I am angry for myself, but I am so hopeful that the existence of cartoons like this means we are starting to teach people how to see it and talk about it before a lifetime goes by. Our inner child needs to heal just as much as our adult self. Maybe these cartoons are a good companion to books and therapy as a way to reach that part of us. I couldn’t connect the child in me to the words I was reading in the books (and there’s good neuroscience about why), but seeing young Marcelene on the screen, hearing her sing about being an unlovable monster, it reached deep down to my past child self and brought those feelings home. After I cried it out, I was able to use the words from my books to connect my present adult thoughts with my past childhood feelings, and that’s healing.

Thank you for reading and for coming along with me on a very different type of travel. I know that this blog started as travel and adventure, but not all journeys are geographical. I look forward to the day we can visit each other’s nations again freely and safely, but until then, the internet remains to connect us all, and we must tend to ourselves and each other during this time of global trauma. Be kind, be gentle, persist.

A Trip Inside: Where I Went in 2020 (1/?)

/ Gallivantrix / 3 Comments

TW: sexual assault, abuse. There are NO graphic details, but I don’t want to take anyone by surprise. I hope that those of you who are able will take the time to read this, and those of you who feel you are not will get help with your own trauma soonest. You deserve to heal, too.

In early 2018 I experienced a(nother) sexual assault. I talked about it to some friends, and I pushed it away so I could start my new job. I thought I was going to be ok. Then, in late 2018 and into 2019 I began to experience severe panic attacks. I didn’t recognize them as panic attacks at first. They didn’t present like the typical media depiction of a panic attack. I didn’t even see it as a pattern until the third one. When I started to try to understand what was happening to me, I discovered the role of the amygdala in panic attacks including it’s tendency to shut down the prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain where all your thinking lives). I began to understand that I was experiencing an amygdala hijacking of my brain. I tried a few things to help like grounding and meditation exercises, but what I really needed to do was find out what was causing (and triggering) my panic attacks.

I thought seriously about the events that preceded each one and I discovered that it was happening in response to a feeling of having my clearly stated boundaries ignored and trespassed or of feeling trapped in a painful situation with no escape or relief. I thought more about where this was coming from. Where was it rooted? Triggers are events that involuntarily force us to relive past traumatic events, they aren’t the cause of the feeling, merely the catalyst. I realized that I hadn’t properly dealt with the trauma of my assault. Then in working toward a healing process, I uncovered a larger pile of unprocessed trauma relating to previous assaults and an abusive relationship. Although I had spent some time on each of these, I had never finished processing them, and they still had hooks deep in my subconscious, controlling my involuntary fear response and amygdala hijacking.

In 2019, while trying to work through some ongoing conflict with my mother, her behavior induced another panic attack. In the months that followed, I realized (with much pain) that she was unwilling to take any ownership of her role in our conflict and I imposed a cessation of communication with terms. In simpler language: Because she was unable and unwilling to even try to find a mutual solution, I had to stop talking to her until such a time that she would be willing to engage in healing work. As of this post, she has declined to make the effort. I’m not going to go through all the horrible things. You can think I’m a “bad daughter” or that she is a “bad mother”, but reality is rarely that cut and dry. In the present, I can see that we are two hurt people who (without understanding) sometimes have allowed and still allow our pain to cause us to hurt others. The nature of our relationship has changed from parent – dependent child to parent – adult child, which could allow us to examine, understand, and heal if we both work at it. I am working on that in myself, but I can no longer safely engage with her until she is willing to do the same. I also have to accept that day may never come, and that I have no control over it.

The upshot/side effect of all this is that I was working hard to understand myself, the origin of my trauma and how it was impacting my quality of life and treatment of others by the end of 2019. The advent of Covid-19 and it’s isolating effects have given me a lot of time to read and think. Along the way I have come to understand that it was not only the traumas of assault and abuse I experienced as an adult that were hanging around my neck, but also those of my childhood. I’ve learned a lot about trauma: causes and responses, PTSD/CPTSD, conflict, abuse, toxic behavior, misplaced blame, blame vs responsibility, shame vs understanding, and hopefully … healing. I am by no means finished, but this has been the journey of my last year, and as this is the place I share my travels, I thought I’d write this one too.

I’d like to share a list of the books that have helped me so far, along with a short description of the main ideas each one brought to me. I highly recommend and and all of these book to everyone because even if you yourself are lucky enough to have no trauma, I guarantee you that someone you love is carrying their past around in painful ways, and understanding them may help you both.

(caveat, I read A LOT, and my brain operates on an “absorb information until critical mass causes transmutation of thought” principle, so some of the things that I’ve been thinking/working on are a result of all the things I’ve read, including the 2019 long list of history books, any number of random TED Talks, and the ongoing sci-fi fantasy background reads. I can’t possibly include them all, so this list is very focused on books which I think of as “breakthrough books”)

Educated, Tara Westover

I did not seek this book for help with my trauma. It was recommended by a friend, and since I’m a teacher, I thought that it was about … education. It turns out to be autobiography of a young woman who was raised in a closed off, survivalist minded, fanatically religious family and her process of waking up to what was happening to her. There’s a lot of baggage that gets shoved onto this. When you read the synopsis or reviews you see a lot of focus on the physical abuse (present but not a dominant theme), or on the nature of the religion itself (Mormonism, but also going to Brigham Young University is what helps her), or the “crazy” things her parents believe. A lot of people react with “how could she not know?” and shut it down, preferring to believe that she is lying or exaggerating or anything other than the idea that an intelligent, well loved, and compassionate person might be unable to recognize abuse when they are stewing in it.

When I read it, I was also curious how she could not know, but instead of dismissing that possibility I tried to actually understand the answer. I knew already going into this book that I had been unable to recognize my “bad” relationship as real abuse until a couple years after I was out, some legal battles, and some therapy. I experienced a lot of shame about it, but I’ve come to realize that it’s actually terrifyingly common for intelligent educated people to become trapped in abusive situations. In Tara’s case, it wasn’t the few instances of physical abuse from her brother, or the content of her father’s beliefs that were the real problem. It was the gaslighting, the control, the neglect and failure to protect.

I was told my whole life what “abuse” looked like and I had been wrong about it in a romantic relationship. Reading Tara’s experience, I knew that the details that happened to us were different, but I began to realize the feelings we had were eerily similar and maybe I needed to take a good hard look at my upbringing. The fact that I was several months into not speaking to my own mother, and many years into an uncomfortable estrangement with my father at the time this book compelled me to have this thought is just more evidence and how good we humans can be at justifying, ignoring, or minimizing the damage caused to us by those we love and who are supposed to love us.

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD

I was unprepared to think about my parents in terms of “abuse”, but I was willing to explore the idea that they had unintentionally damaged me due to their own psychological issues. I was (am) still suffering pretty hard from a pile of trauma related symptoms, and the only way to get at those is to find the roots. I wanted to start trying to understand what had happened to me and how it was affecting my adult life, and I wanted to find some tools to help me communicate with my parents and finally get a healthy, meaningful, and fulfilling adult relationship with one or both of them. This seemed like a good book for that.

The book itself doesn’t focus on what is or isn’t “abuse” which I think was helpful for me where I was. Instead it talks about behaviors that can cause painful feelings and lasting behavioral problems, how to recognize them, how to heal from them, and even how to cope if you are stuck in a situation where you can’t avoid or reconcile with the parent(s) in question. It very much confirmed for me that many of the feelings and thoughts I have that I find damaging are directly connected to my parent’s behavior.

People get hung up on the idea that if you had your needs met, and weren’t being beaten or regularly shouted at/called names, or (worst case) sexually abused as a child, then you are FINE and STOP WHINING. Of course those thing are terrible, and the children who experience them most likely have varying degrees of lasting trauma, and they have very valid feelings of anger. I felt a lot of conflict about coming from a middle class family that provided for me, even above and beyond my basic needs in terms of food, shelter, education, healthcare, and opportunities for creative and intellectual outlet, yet still feeling like there was something wrong, something so bad that it was a dark painful secret I could never talk about, never tell anyone I was hurt from.

This book gave me permission for the first time to acknowledge that what happened was NOT OK. That I (and every child) deserved better. That my feelings were valid, and that my trauma was real. That there are things which happen when a child is totally dependent upon one or two adults for everything in life that do not fit the current social understanding of abuse, and yet do comparable lasting damage which can even be measured with an MRI, or even worse damage because the survivors don’t feel like they can ever get support for their experiences and feelings or even be able to acknowledge the root cause of their pain in later life.

There’s a lot of useful stuff in this book, but one more thing that really dinged for me was the idea of the Healing Fantasy. Dr. Gibson gives some advice on how to interact with such parents after we become adults, and most of it is “avoid/minimize contact”. I really did not want to hear that. I wanted to find a solution. I wanted to fix my relationship with my mother. I missed her and desperately wanted to restore a loving relationship. I needed to know what I could do or say to reach her, to help her, to make things better, and Lindsay told me that I had to let that go. She told me about the Healing Fantasy:

“In addition, [some adult children of emotionally immature parents] are secretly convinced that more self-sacrifice and emotional work will eventually transform their unsatisfying relationships. So the greater the difficulties, the more they try. If this seems illogical, remember that these healing fantasies are based on a child’s ideas about how to make things better. … Their healing fantasy always involves the idea It’s up to me to fix this. What they can’t see is that they’ve taken on a job nobody has ever pulled off: changing people who aren’t seeking to change themselves.”

There was a lot more on the Healing Fantasy, but this was dead on ME, and the book really made me own the fact that I cannot be responsible for healing my mother, or my father for that matter, because they both insist they do not need to change in any way. I cried a lot. I went through a very real grieving process, I had dreams about my mother the way I have done in the past when someone I love has died, but instead of nice conversations and happy times, these were dreams of my mother behaving as she always has, as I now recognized as unacceptable and damaging, and me standing up to it over and over until I wrenched myself awake as if from a nightmare. I suppose it was. I am pretty sure I’ve gone through all the stages of grief about this multiple times (the acceptance doesn’t reliably stick either). It’s slowly getting better, and I couldn’t have started the rest of my healing journey without the “ah hah” moment offered by this book.

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Pete Walker

Definition of CPTSD as paraphrased from the book:
a more severe form of PTSD, different from PTSD in 5 main features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self abandonment, a vicious inner critic, and social anxiety.

I stopped writing and went back to read this again because it’s just that good. The main things that I got from this book the first time around were the “four Fs” and “emotional flashbacks”. The second time through felt like a deeper layer, a more nuanced understanding. The basic ideas were no longer a shock, I wasn’t fighting against certain healing concepts anymore the way I had been last year. I don’t know if I’ll reread it every year, but I think it should probably go in a not more than 5 year rotation.

The Four Fs are an expansion on the “fight/flight” premise. All humans (and really most animals) have a response to fear or attack known as “fight/flight”, but more extensive study reveals there are 2 more options: freeze and fawn. Most people are familiar with freeze as “a deer in the headlights”, and fawn is when the being feeling in danger sucks up to a bigger stronger threat to placate it or gain protection, perhaps an example in nature can be seen in dogs who grovel to bigger dogs or their owners when they are being scolded. These 4 Fs can manifest in a LOT of ways in humans that are not super obvious, like fight doesn’t have to mean yelling, screaming, punching walls (although it can). It also manifests as narcissism, passive aggression, and controlling manipulation. Flight may look like perfectionism, workaholism, or OCD. Freeze can be lethargy, daydreaming, reading/playing videogames, or even dissociation. Finally, fawn can look like caretaking, people pleasing, co-dependency, or never expressing one’s own opinions/needs. There’s a longer explanation on his website:
http://pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm

Walker says that every traumatized person is likely to have one dominant trauma response trait, and one secondary. We can all end up using any of the four depending on the situation, and there are HEALTHY manifestations of all 4 as well, but the book focuses on how they manifest in unhealthy ways and cause us lifelong mental and emotional health issues. I personally recognized the freeze behavior in myself in another “get out of my mind’ moment. The author self identifies as a flight type and I wasn’t really feeling any connection to what he was saying. Then he started describing freezers, and I was like, excuse me but you don’t have to call me out like that! It’s still hard, but now I can see what has been happening to me for so long, I can start to make sense of it and to notice it when it happens in the present. My dissociative episodes were incredibly strong when I was a child and teen, to the point that I drifted well away from reality, even having hallucinations and fantastical delusions. I was petrified of going to a doctor because I knew in my very bones that my mother would use any diagnosis to control me forever, and I’d never be free. The farther away from her I got, the more grounded in reality I became, but I’m still missing huge chunks of my memory both from my time in her home, and my time in my abusive relationship because my “freeze” nature caused me to simply check out from as much as I possibly could.

The other huge lighting bolt moment of this book was the revelation of the emotional flashback. Just like soldiers with PTSD have flashbacks to the war, CPTSD sufferers can also have flashbacks. However, where PTSD flashbacks tend to incorporate a visual element (sufferers report being able to see/smell/hear as though they were back in the moment of trauma), CPTSD emotional flashbacks do not have any context. They’re all emotion, no visual cue. It can be impossible to identify what is happening because you simply start to feel a strong and terrible emotion. We often end up linking it to whatever or whoever is triggering that flashback, but it’s not the case. A trigger causes a flashback, causes a (C)PTSD sufferer to relive a past trauma. It happens in the “experiencing” part of the brain instead of the “remembering” part of the brain, so it feels like it is happening right now. So when we feel a strong negative emotion, it can be very easy to say that it was caused by whatever just happened in the present. But the present action is merely the trigger.

I’ve found that some of my triggers are things that will never be “ok” behavior, like “don’t violate my consent”. Someone who ignores my “no” and keeps going is never in the right, but my flashback will cause me to have a disproportionate emotional response that may result in a laundry list of symptoms and could take days to resolve. Other triggers are behaviors that are genuinely innocent in most people but were at one point weaponized against me by an abuser. These are much harder because the person in the present didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m suddenly having a full amygdala hijacking. The thing is, realizing that my feelings, my fear, anger, suicidal ideation, and my inner & outer critic were all results of an emotional flashback and NOT based on real present dangers or attacks was mind-blowing.

In addition, Walker provides a very helpful 13 step list on how to handle an emotional flashback when you realize you’re in one: http://pete-walker.com/13StepsManageFlashbacks.htm

I can’t recommend this book enough. The author is deeply compassionate in his explanations. He offers vulnerability of his own experience, as well as case studies, and references from other psychiatrists whose work focuses on trauma and recovery. There is so much more here like understanding how emotional neglect causes CPTSD, how CPTSD causes us to minimize or deny our own damage if it wasn’t “as bad as” some others, how anger and crying can be used for good, and how we can manage day to day the long process of coping and healing with an appendix full of tool kits.

Please stay tuned for part 2 and more excellent books.

If you are feeling upset, anxious, or find yourself retreating into a trauma response or emotional flashback, please follow Pete Walker’s 13 steps, practice a 5-4-3-2-1 grounding activity, a parasympathetic breathing activity, or other soothing action such as a hot shower, a hug from a trusted person, or a few episodes of your favorite feel good cartoon. Mine is Steven Universe.

Myths & Tales from China 08

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

This episode is all about animal women: the spirits which are mostly animals, but sometimes turn into beautiful maidens that hapless mortals fall in love with. Lots of cultures love spirit animals that turn into women who marry worthy or clever men. China is no exception. Here’s three stories about a peacock (well, peahen), a snake, and a mollusk who bridged the gap between the spirit, animal, and human worlds.

Peacock Princess

A long time ago, beside the Lancang River was a beautiful Peacock Kingdom. The Emperor and Empress had seven daughters altogether. Each one grew up to be extremely beautiful, and moreover, as long as they wore their dazzling peacock feather robes, they were able to fly. Every day they flew far from home to Jinhu, the Golden Lake, to bathe.

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One day they went down to Golden Lake again, continuously playing until the sun set, and only then hurrying ashore to dress. But as for the youngest little sister, Nanmu Ruona, her peacock feather robe was nowhere to be seen! They searched all over the surrounding meadow, but simply couldn’t find it. Just then, a young lad carrying a feather robe walked up and went over to Nanmu Ruona. He very courteously apologized to her and said he was alone and meant no harm, merely to express his feelings of admiration. Actually, he was Prince Shao Shu Tun of the country Meng Ban Jia. While hunting, he was chasing a golden deer to the bank of Golden Lake where he saw the peacock princesses. He was immediately smitten with their beautiful figures and flower-like smiles, especially that of the youngest princess. Thus he took the feather robe of the seventh princess, Nanmu Ruona.

At that moment, the six elder sisters were all urging the youngest princess to quickly return home, but the young princess saw that the prince was handsome, tall and sturdy, and fell in love with him, so she lowered her head and said nothing. Thereupon, the eldest sister took charge and agreed to let the youngest sister stay behind at Shao Shu Tun’s side. Soon after the six elder sisters and younger sisters shed tears and said farewell, then flew back to the Peacock Kingdom.

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The grand wedding ceremony for Shao Shu Tun and the Peacock Princess Nanmu Ruona was barely finished when war broke out at the border lands. Shao Shu Tun had no choice but to bid farewell to his newly wedded bride and lead his troops to the front line to fight. In the beginning, news came in every day of Shao Shu Tun’s defeat in battle, and the King, Shao Meng Hai paced frantically in circles. Then, an evil wizard said to him, “Nanmu Ruona is a demon transformed, it is she that has brought about this disaster and misfortune, she must be killed at once.” Shao Meng Hai heard what the wizard had to say then ordered the Peacock Princess to be burned to death.

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Nanmu Ruona was carried down to the execution grounds. Her face was streaming with tears, and she begged Shao Meng Hai to let her dance one more time, and Shao Meng Hai agreed. Nanmu Ruona spread the brilliantly colored peacock feather robe over her shoulders and began to dance elegantly. She danced and danced, and then she flew up into the air.

Not much later, Prince Shao Shu Tun defeated the invading enemy and returned to the palace. After hearing the news that his wife had been falsely accused and had flown away he was completely brokenhearted. In order to comfort him, his father the King had all the most beautiful women in the kingdom go to the Shao Palace for him to choose among. But the Peacock Princess was the only one in Shao Shu Tun’s heart, and he resolved to find his wife and bring her back. Even if the Peacock Kingdom was as far as the horizon, he would go.

He walked and walked; he walked for ninty-nine days. He experienced countless trials and tribulations, and at last arrived at the Peacock Kingdom and found the Peacock Princess. The estranged couple were reunited. In that moment, a hundred flowers bloomed and a hundred birds sang, and all over the Peacock Kingdom the young men all cheered for their pure and sincere love, and the young women all danced for the reunion of husband and wife.

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Note: I think this story is very similar to our own stories of swan lake and the swan princess. It also might be the closest thing to a Disney-style princess idol because there are a lot of little girl peacock princess costumes on the Chinese internet. If you would like to watch the cartoon these images are from, please follow the link.

Lady White Snake

A long time ago, on top of Mt. Emei (in Sichuan), there was a white snake and a green snake, they had been practicing Daoist austerities for the last thousand years, and had both cultivated the ability to change into human shape. They very much yearned for a life in the human world. One year during the Tomb Sweeping Festival season (April), the two were unable to hold back their curiosity, and decided to take a tour of the human world. The white snake transformed into a beautiful and dignified lady and took the name Bai Suzhen, which means ‘pure white silk’. And the green snake transformed herself into a servant girl called Xiao Qing, which means ‘little green one’. And they both went down to Xihu (West Lake) to go sightseeing.

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On the Broken Bridge, they were in the middle of stopping to admire the view of West Lake when suddenly it started to rain. Bai Suzhen and Xiao Qing wanted to find some place to avoid the rain, and just then a scholar unfurled an umbrella for them to block out the rain. Bai Suzhen and the scholar fell in love at first sight. Xiao Qing saw it in their eyes and quickly said, “May I ask, oh noble son, what be thy august family name?” The scholar replied, “I am called Xu Xian, and I live beside the Broken Bridge.” From then on, they made arrangements to meet, and before long the two had married and become husband and wife. They opened up “Bao He Tang” pharmacy (which means ‘the Hall of Preservation of Harmony’) beside West Lake. Bai Suzhen used her magical powers to cure many people’s difficult and complicated illnesses. What’s more, for the poor, they would examine them and prescribe medicine and not charge a single cent, so the business was flourishing. The people affectionately nicknamed Bai Suzhen as “Bai Niangzi” or White Lady.

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However, Bao He Tang‘s prosperity offended one person – the Buddhist monk Fahai of Jinshan (Golden Mountain) Temple. Because everyone was getting cured at Bao He Tang, the number of people coming to Jinshan Temple to burn incense and pray to the Bodhisattvas was shrinking. One day, Fahai came to Bao He Tang’s main gate, he watched Bai Niangzi give one person a treatment, then attentively do a dozen more, a-ya! In truth, this White Lady isn’t an ordinary person, but rather a snake spirit! Therefore, Fahai found an opportunity to bring Xu Xian into the temple. He told Xu Xian that his wife was a transformed snake spirit and taught him a way to cause Bai Suzhen to appear in her original form. Xu Xian listened to this, half believing and half doubting.

In no time, the Dragon Boat Festival arrived (autumn), Xu Xian, in accordance with the method Fahai taught him, ceaselessly urged Bai Suzhen to drink Red Orpiment wine. Bai Niangzi was unable to put it off, and had no other option but to drink several glasses. The result was that she soon changed back to her original shape. Xu Xian saw the white snake and fainted dead away. After Bai Niangzi cleared her head, she revived  Xu Xian. Xu Xian knew that Bai Niangzi was truly his own beloved one, and no longer minded whether she was a human or a snake spirit, the two of them were even more in love.

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Fahai saw that his strategy failed, so he once more tricked Xu Xian into coming to Jinshan Temple, and pressured him to leave home and become a Buddhist Monk. Xu Xian was not willing, so Fahai locked him inside the temple. Inside Bao He Tang. When Lady White didn’t see Xu Xian return home, she burned with impatience. She asked about and heard that Xu Xian was being held by Monk Fahai at Jinshan Temple. She quickly took Xiao Qing along to Jinshan Temple, and begged Fahai to release Xu Xian. Fahai was indifferent, and Bai Niangzi was quite furious. In spite of the fact that she was pregnant, she drew her golden hairpin from atop her head, shook it into the wind, and summoned up a torrential surge to flood Jinshan Temple.

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Fahai promptly took off his kasaya robe and transformed it into a dam, blocking off the temple gate. If the flood waters rose a foot, the dam also grew a foot taller, so no matter how big the waves got, they could not go unrestrained. Bai Niangzi was pregnant, so she couldn’t really fight Fahai and had no choice but to flee under the protection of Xiao Qing. While they were fleeing to the Broken Bridge, they ran into Xu Xian by chance, also fleeing the Jinshan Temple.

Several months later, Bai Niangzi gave birth to a son. Many people came to congratulate them, and Fahai also came. He held in his hands a begging bowl of a Buddhist Monk, and worked an enchantment on Bai Niangzi. The alms bowl slowly rose into the air, and suddenly emitted ten thousand golden rays of light. Bai Niangzi was illuminated by the rays, and immediately became weak all over, she was powerless to resist, and was collected into the bowl. Fahai pushed her down under the Leifeng Pagoda beside West Lake.

Xiao Qing was no match for Fahai, and had no choice but to retreat to Mt. Emei, go back into the cave and return to practicing Daoist austerities. Twelve years later, she had finally completed the True Fire of Samadhi, and came to find Fahai for revenge. There was nowhere for Fahai to escape being burned by the True Fire of Samadhi, so in a great rush, he hid inside a crab shell. Leifang Pagoda collapsed, and Bai Niangzi was saved. From then on, she and Xu Xian, Xiao Qing, and their child all lived a blessed and happy life together.

These beautiful stills are from the newly released (fall 2019) feature film. 

The Shell Maiden

A long time ago, there was a young man in a village. From the time he was little he had no father or mother, and his family was also poor. At twenty years old he had still not taken a wife. He could only work and suffer hardships, and every day he worked hard manual labor in the fields. One day when he was working in the rice paddy, he accidentally picked up a large periwinkle mollusk. He thought that was very strange, so he took it back home and kept it in a water jar.

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Time passed quite quickly; in the blink of an eye three years had gone by. Then one day the young man finished work and returned home to discover that the table was spread with delicious and savory food. He looked left and right, but didn’t see anyone. He thought it was very strange, but was very hungry so regardless of the consequences, he sat down at the table and began to eat. The flavor of the food was really good. He thought while he ate, who could have cooked this delicious food? The even stranger thing was that from that day forth, every day he came home to see a table full of delicious rice and vegetables, and that the house had been put in order, neat and tidy without one speck of dirt.

The young man thought this was becoming increasingly strange. He thought to himself, “I can’t be sure it isn’t Mrs. Li from next door doing me a good turn.” Thus, the young man found Mrs. Li to thank her. The Mrs. Said, “It’s not me! I actually heard cooking noises from your kitchen and thought you had come home early!” This time the youth was even more confused, unable to make heads or tails of it. He was determined to figure it out.

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The next day, just like normal, he carried his hoe over his shoulder and went down to the field. A short time passed, and he stealthily ran back home, hid outside the door and peeked in. Soon it was midday, and from inside the water jar stepped out a goddess-like beautiful young maiden. She first adeptly cleaned the house, then went on to skillfully prepare a meal, at once stir-frying and deep frying, and delicious food quickly filled the table. When the food was finished, she laid out a bowl and chopsticks. When everything was properly arranged, she went to hide in the jar. The young man was baffled.

The next day at noon while the maiden was concentrating on preparing the food, the young man suddenly pushed open the door and rushed inside. The maiden saw him and was happily surprised. She wanted to hide in the water jar, but the young man rushed to step forward first and bar her way. He noticed that floating on the water in the jar was a periwinkle mollusk shell.

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Could it be that this maiden was the periwinkle mollusk transformed? The young man thought this as he pulled the empty mollusk shell out and threw it on the ground to break it. The maiden looked at the broken shell and immediately felt deeply hurt and began to cry, as she cried she told the young man the story of her life, “I am a periwinkle mollusk, many years ago I carelessly fell into an old fisherman’s net and was carried to the market to be sold. A small boy going past the market saw that big periwinkle mollusk drying out under the sun and took pity, so he bought me from the old fisherman, and returned me to the rice paddy. That small boy was a previous incarnation of you! We have been brought together by fate, this year we meet once more, you kept me in the water jar for three years, I did all this to pay a debt of gratitude… but now my mollusk shell has been broken, and I cannot change back into a periwinkle mollusk.”

The young man was deeply moved, and was profoundly attracted by her kindheartedness and beauty. He took the mollusk maiden’s hand, and sincerely requested that she stay and become his wife. The maiden blushed and nodded her head. Later on the two became parents; they had a pair of children, a boy and a girl. The more days passed, the happier they became.

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There are multiple books and animations of this, though no Disney-esque princess movie in the works that I could find. The cartoon I used is a much simplified (and possibly kinder) version of the story where the young man doesn’t break the shell. If you want to see the short animation, follow the link.

Myths & Tales from China 01

/ Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Have you ever wanted to know about the myths and legends of another culture? How are they similar or different from your own? What are the stories that everyone knows as well as we Westerners know Noah’s Ark or Little Red Riding Hood? Well, now’s your chance to find out. In one of my language learning fits, I purchased some children’s fairy-tale books on a trip to China and spent many restless, dictionary-filled hours translating them into English. 

Please keep in mind, I didn’t write these, I’ve only translated them.  It’s a little sad to think about now, because I did all this work at a time before Google Translate. Just for giggles, I plugged the Chinese in to the translator and, to be honest, I was expecting word salad, but it came out pretty smoothly. This is my translation, not Google’s, but it really puts my efforts as a language learner and teacher into perspective that Google 2019 did in 0.3 seconds what took me several hours in 2010.

Once upon a time, I dreamed of turning it into a kind of bi-lingual children’s book series with mini language lessons, but the publishing just isn’t happening. Oh, why lie, I haven’t even tried. So, here it is — blogger style.

Pangu Splits the Sky and Earth

In a far distant age, a time immemorial, the Universe was like a huge egg the like of which had never been seen before nor since.  From the pitch blackness inside was born the ancestor of all mankind, Pangu. 

After sleeping inside the Egg for 18,000 years, Pangu finally awakened. He opened his eyes and looked all around, but he could see nothing besides the darkness. All over his body, from head to foot, he felt hot and dry. He wanted to stretch out his muscles, but he was so tightly caught up in the Egg that he couldn’t even move an inch. Just breathing was becoming more and more difficult.

Pangu became very angry. Effortlessly, he took hold of the ax at his side and brandished it at the darkness before his eyes, chopping it in two — Crash! After a burst of deafening sound, the pieces of Primordial Chaos gradually began to separate. Those parts which were clear and light slowly rose upward and became the Sky. Those parts that were murky and heavy sank down little by little and became the Earth. All around, it became brighter and brighter. Pangu suddenly felt clear and refreshed.

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Sky and Earth were separated, but Pangu was worried that they could still rejoin. Therefore, he spread both his feet apart and raised both his hands, and pushed against the Sky. Every day the Sky rose  by ten feet, and every day the Earth sank by ten feet, and Pangu grew bigger and taller along with them.

No one knows how many years passed, until finally the Sky could not go any higher nor could the Earth go any deeper. By this time, Pangu had exhaused all the strength in his body. He let out a long sigh, lay down on the Earth, and closed his eyes. This great hero died, but his body did not fade away at all. His left eye became the Sun, his right eye became the Moon, and his hair became the Stars. His four limbs and body became the Five Sacred Mountains, his blood became the rivers and lakes, his skin became ten thousand miles of fertile land, and his bones became the trees and flowers. His teeth became the rocks and metals, his marrow became bright pearls, his sweat became the rain and dew, and his last breath became the wind and clouds.

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Pangu used his life and his whole body to create a beautiful world, and set aside a vast and limitless treasure for future generations.

Nuwa Creates Mankind

Pangu had established the Sky and the Earth and used his body to make the Sun, Moon and Stars, as well as the Mountains, Rivers, Grasses and Trees. The murky air that remained between Earth and Sky slowly transformed into the Insects, Fish, Birds and Beasts, bringing life into the deathly still World.

One day, the goddess Nuwa who had the head and torso of a woman, but the body of a snake, was traveling along this lush and verdant open country. She looked all around: up and down the mountain range, along the swiftly flowing rivers, at the plants striving for splendor, at the hundreds of birds singing as they flew through the sky, at the beasts galloping across the ground, at the fish frolicking in the water, and at the tiny insects jumping in the grass. Ordinarily, it would be said that the World was already quite beautiful, but overall she felt a kind of loneliness she couldn’t express.

At a loss, she sat beside a pond and looked at her own reflection in the still water. Suddenly, a leaf floated down into the pond, and the stillness of the water was full of ripples that made her reflection start to sway and rock. She suddenly realized why she wasn’t happy: there was no other kind of creature like her in the world. She thought about this, then immediately swept up some clay from the bank of the pond. Next, using her own reflection as a guide, she began to shape it. She kneaded and kneaded the clay, and when she was done it was a very small thing that looked more or less like herself. It also had five senses and seven qiao, as well as two hands and two feet. After she finished her work, she placed the thing on the ground where it unexpectedly came to life. Nuwa was truly happy and she shaped many more. She called these tiny things “Humans”

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The humans gathered around Nuwa, cheering and frolicking for joy; they were extremely lively. Nuwa’s lonely heart all at once became nice and warm. She thought she would make everywhere in the World have Humans, so she shaped one, and another one. But after all, the world is so big. She worked for ages, until both hands were numb from the work, but the little humans she shaped were still too few upon the face of the big Earth. She thought that going about it this way would never work. Just then, she broke off a handy nearby vine, extended it into the quagmire, dipping it in the mud, then shook it towards the dry ground. The result was that the little drops of mud each became a tiny person that looked just like the ones she had shaped using her hands. This was not only faster, but created more at once. Nuwa saw this new method was quite effective, and she sprinkled the mud with increasing energy until the whole of the Earth was full of people. 

Nuwa then made it so Men and Women could get married and raise children so that humankind would continue on from that time to this.

Book Review: “Girls of Riyadh” by Rajaa Alsanea

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I know there’s a lot of book reviews in a row, and I promise this isn’t a book review blog, it really is a travel blog. But right now, since I’m only getting ready to travel to Saudi Arabia, I’m sharing my preparations, which include reading a lot of books, watching a lot of films and documentaries, and filing a tremendous amount of official paperwork.

I finished this book in a single day because I could not put it down. I read it in my office between phone calls, at my regular Tuesday karaoke outing between songs (don’t judge). Only skipping reading while at the gym because I couldn’t hold the book steady while working out, I finished the last few chapters in bed.

This book is hailed by many reviewers as being “Sex in the City” in Riyadh, but I’ve never watched that show, so I have no idea how accurate that comparison is. All in all, I think I’m grateful for that, because I may have missed the deeper messages in the book if I was just looking for a sordid tale of Saudi sex life.

I am a little bit confused as to why my Saudi employers recommended this book to me as preparation for my move to the Kingdom a) because the book is banned in Saudi Arabia, and b) because it shows parts of life there that Saudis do not (as a rule) like to admit exists in public. The girls in the book are all upper class, and quite well off, so this isn’t necessarily a reflection of all economic strata of Saudi life. So I wonder, will my students be like these girls?

I found myself having imaginary conversations with Saudi women (and men) about my own values for love, dating, and marriage. I am a spinster in their eyes, an anathema or at very least an enigma. Yet, we are not so very different, for all that women’s lib has brought me. Perhaps this book can be a launch point for many real discussions once I settle in and make some Saudi friends.

On to the book.

downloadI’d like to recommend that anyone who wants to read this book get a good and thorough (mis) conception of Saudi life. Many things discussed in the book are only titillating in the context of a society that entirely bans the social interaction of men and women who are not family. In America, these kinds of romantic stories are common enough among middle school girls: texting or talking on the phone until dawn, showing off gifts from an admirer, even a timid first kiss!

The girls may be catty, shallow, brainless and hopelessly in love, but they are loyal to one another in a way rarely seen in the West. What does this say about the way we compete for men? Is it that cultivating male friends makes women in the West less trusting of one another? Or is the Arabic language so ill equipped to express jealousy? I certainly do not know the answer, but if there’s a way to restore strong female bonds, cooperation, and genuinely being happy for each other when fortune comes our way without sacrificing our hard earned civil rights, I’m all for it.

In the beginning of the story, I found myself marveling at the daring and audacity of these young people, the way that they cleverly pursued romance in the face of their cultural restrictions. Then I became disgusted with the school girl crushes being described (not the least because they reminded me a bit of my own adolescence). And finally I came to see the beautiful subtlety that Alsanea used to create four (or 5 if you count the narrator) stunning avatars of women’s love.

They are Lamees: a model of blissful marriage to a first love, Gamrah: a cheating husband, and a tragic divorce resulting in single motherhood, Sadeem: who loves a man more than he loves her, and settles in the end for something safe, and Mashael (who I personally most identify with) who upon finding her first love not strong enough to fight his family to be with her, determines that she will not settle at all, and instead lives her life for herself.

I may be biased, after all, I am a “liberated Western woman”. Divorce is common in my family, and dependence on men has never been. I sometimes feel that the amount of time and effort women put into the pursuit of a husband is insane. However, I don’t think it is unique to Saudi culture. They are reflections of women everywhere, and I think women of any cultural background would find themselves and their friends echoed in the Girls of Riyadh.

Book Review: “Understanding Arabs” by Margaret K. Nydell

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As I continue to work my way through my recommended reading materials in preparation for the move to Saudi Arabia, I bring you another review.

ua_5This is a simple and easy to read book. The writing style is not overly academic, and the pictures Nydel paints of the Arabic people and culture are quite vivid in the imagination. However, the depth of understanding of Arabic culture and history leaves something to be desired.

The first 10 chapters are almost like a step by step guide on how to understand, communicate with and even integrate into Arab culture. Behaviors and customs are explained clearly, and a solid list of do’s and don’t’s is presented. Nydel is clearly enamored of the Arabic cultures, and it shows in the unapologetic positivity of these chapters.

Chapter 11 addresses the differences between Islamism (extreme fundamentalists) and mainstream Islam, leading into  chapters 12-13 where Nydel takes up the task of explaining the anger and violence between Arabs and the West from both sides. She relies heavily on quotes from media outlets and statistics to demonstrate the points in as non-emotional a way as possible. While this is a stark contrast to the joy of the first 10 chapters, and did make this section more difficult to read, I can understand why she would handle such a delicate matter this way.

Chapters 14-16 are a breakdown of Arabic culture by region, and country. Wikipedia articles can tell you more about these countries history and current economic, social and political climate than the brief 1-2 page whitewashed versions presented by Nydell. I was really disappointed in the elementary school social studies approach to the region, especially after the first ten chapters of beautiful cultural presentation.

She finishes off with an Appendix on the Arabic Language, but again, much like her country by country analysis, the linguistic introduction does not tell you much that would be useful if you do not intend to study the language, and doesn’t tell you anything that a first year language book would not cover. Her information does not appear to be incorrect, merely superfluous.

Overall, the first ten chapters are great for anyone seeking to better understand the (pan-)Arabic culture in a positive light. I really enjoyed reading about the cultures and customs from the perspective of someone so clearly in love with them. If made a nice contrast to the negativity so often presented in Western media. However, the remainder of the book is really only useful to those who are complete newcomers to the study and understanding of the Middle East.

I especially do not understand why this book was recommended to me as a preparation to go to Saudi Arabia, as Nydell routinely reminds the reader that her descriptions of delightful Arabic culture exclude Saudi Arabia without being able to say what the culture is like there instead, and moreover that the brief section on Saudi Arabia in Chapter 16 demonstrates further her lack of knowledge, experience and enthusiasm for that country.

So, enjoy the book for what it is; give it to someone you know who needs a little mind opening about the region, but I wouldn’t rely on it for a guide to Saudi life, or deep political understanding of the current conflicts.