I Want to Learn the French Art of Living

May 1, 2024April 29, 2024 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Why are you going to France?

It was astonishing how many people asked a version of this question. While it is true that I often travel for a job, I’ve visited 5-6x as many countries for pleasure as I have for work, and until this spring when I decided to stop working in order to take my holidays at a nicer time of the year, no one asked me why. “Because I want to”, was the real answer, but it seemed to confuse people. Other times, I told people I was going for the food, but most who have never been to France simply can’t imagine the food here being that much different. I once counted myself among them, but after my first meal in France, I thought that I had died and gone to food heaven.

Now that I’ve been in France for a couple of weeks, I know that what I was struggling to find the words to say was that I wanted to go to France to learn the French art of living. The French call this “Joie de Vivre” (Joy of Life), but it is perhaps better translated as “The Art of Living Joyfully”, and it’s a very deep rooted value in French culture. Joie de vivre isn’t about parties or euphoric joy, it’s finding happiness through living. Since arriving in Tours, I have been receiving a swift and enlightening crash course.

Musée des beaux-arts – “La Joie de vivre” (Victor Prouvé, 1904)

Practicing Kindness

I will say again that French people in general are more likely to be kind than rude (I’m sure they can be rude when called for, and that there are some percentage of rude people everywhere, but rudeness is not the default way of life). My first week in town, I had to run errands and do shopping while jet lagged and after my 3.5 hour French immersion class which left my brain feeling like a wet noodle. I could barely make comprehensive sentences in English (my native language) let alone in French. Despite my overt disorientation, every shopkeeper was kind and patient with me, most were even happy to use both French and English with me when I explained I was learning, giving me a chance to practice but also helping when the language was outside my skill.

I have not formally studied French since middle school. I came into this language program with a hodgepodge of random vocabulary and grammar that does not conform to standard learning levels in any way. I am not a quiet student, but I also felt that if I asked about everything I didn’t understand, I would derail the whole class. On my second day, I experienced an intense moment of frustration, and the teacher worked very hard to find out what was confusing me. I wanted to shut down and look it up later in private, but she worked it out with me in class. In the moment, I wasn’t happy to be the focus of so much time and attention, but in retrospect, it was a glorious act of kindness and support on her part. I’ve done the same for my own students, and it’s eye-opening to feel it from the other side.

I also had some disappointment in the apartment when I arrived –the washing machine was broken, and there was no Wi-Fi. In most other places I’ve lived, these kinds of problems were dismissed and I was left to handle them on my own or forced to nag the property manager (my last apartment in Korea was a nice exception, those people were great). I didn’t feel any animosity at the lack of amenities. I had of course emailed ahead of my flight to be sure that I would have access to a washing machine and Wi-Fi (among other things), but my response to the absence of promised resources while traveling abroad is less often anger and more often resignation.

To my surprise and delight, the owner of the school arranged for me to get 120gb of data for the month so I would be able to do things like make video calls, watch YouTube, and write in my blog. His efforts were above and beyond what he needed to do to meet his obligations to me as a paying student. The landlady came the next day with a repair man to fix the washing machine, so it was working again before I had a full load of laundry. While we waited for the repairman to finish his work, she engaged me in conversation, despite not speaking any English, and was patient and kind with my poor French, repeating things more slowly or finding simpler phrasing. She told me about several beautiful tourist attractions around the area that I look forward to exploring.

It’s hard to believe, but even panhandlers on the street here are nicer. I don’t speak French well and in any case have fallen out of the habit of carrying cash. I have nothing to give them, but even after I tell them this, they smile and ask where I’m from, try to speak some English with me, and wish me a good day.

Receiving Kindness

This is all in stark contrast to my experience in Sénégal where I was promised support and given none, treated brusquely by shopkeepers, and viewed as a walking wallet by most. Even in the US, my job had offered support and fallen short, resulting in an overabundance of stress, and my co-workers (who are nice people) still took a couple months to really warm up to me.

My knee-jerk response to this level of kindness and support was shock. For the first several days, every time it happened, I gawped like an idiot, stunned for a moment before a part of my mind went, “it’s ok, relax, trust, let yourself be supported by your fellow humans not because of prior relationships, not because of obligations, but merely because we are humans together.”

It wasn’t until later when I went to write about my experiences that I realized how much I craved this kind of human connection. I love my friends and family, I enjoy forming relationships with my coworkers, but there’s something deeply healing in looking up from our bubbles and saying “hello fellow human, this world is tough enough, so let’s do our best to make it softer for each other while we’re here”.

A Culture of Joyfulness

By the middle of my second week, it was apparent that the effect of joie de vivre is exponential. When everyone is focused on enjoying the little things, it’s easy to be happy and kind which makes everyone happier and kinder. Joie de vivre isn’t at its best when experienced in isolation, it’s something that needs a majority of people to buy into in order to reach its full potential. I can feel it soaking into me, too. I don’t need or want to run around looking for one exiting experience after another because the everyday life here is good. Not ecstatic, or overflowing with awesome, just persistently good.

_{Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/}

The other day I gave my seat on the tram to a mother with two younger girls. I enjoyed watching them interact on the trip. The girls were talking about my blue hair, and when they got restless, the mom played “find that body part” (where’s your nose? touch your ears!, etc.) which was also fun for me because I’m not the best at French vocabulary. I was able to relax and enjoy the experience. It made me smile to see their small delights. No one was giving the mom dirty looks for her kids being kids, and the mom didn’t have to be self-conscious about playing with her kids on public transit.

Joy and Other Feelings

Joie de vivre could be compared to the practice of mindfulness, in that one of the goals is to be present in the present. Lingering over a meal, sharing an afternoon with friends, and watching kids on the tram are all wonderful examples of the everyday, but international vacations and once in a lifetime experiences are not excluded. The definition of joie de vivre isn’t what you are doing, but how you are doing it: a lunch without an agenda, a hangout with friends for no reason, an international vacation without the stress of focusing on what could go wrong, or what is waiting for you when you get back.

Joie de vivre also isn’t about being happy all the time. Obviously the French have “negative feelings”, I mean, have you read Sartre? But a range of feelings is the normal human experience. The impression I get is that “pretty good” is the baseline here, and feelings of more extreme happiness, sadness, anger, boredom etc. are all coming from and returning to that. In contrast, when I look at people in the US and a few other places I’ve lived, I see them defaulting to a baseline of “meh” (numbness or boredom) or even a baseline of anxiety and sadness. _{Image Credit: https://sketchplanations.com}

Regardless of what culture they are from, people are capable of feeling a full range of emotions, and a normal human will experience most of them in a lifetime, but living in a culture that forwardly values kindness and everyday joy makes a difference in everyone’s quality of life.

Can Americans Live Joyfully?

My initial answer to the question “Why are you going to France?” was often greeted with the suspicion that anyone going to live in a foreign country and not work for a couple of months just to enjoy things was dangerously decadent. This happened so often that I began to become suspicious of myself. Was I leaving my students and co-workers in the lurch? Would they be ok without me? Could I really justify the expense, not only of the vacation but of the time spent not working? The regular messaging of the culture around me made it harder and harder to be sure I was making the right choice.

There is a tendency in (but not exclusive to) American culture to view any action that is not productive (making money) as frivolous (selfish, useless, a drain). For me, joie de vivre is more likely to involve things that make you happy but don’t make money, nor lead to making money in the future. These are things that you do just because you like them (and that don’t hurt anyone else). I rate this kind of joy as sitting from tier 3-5 of the Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s hard to go after it when you don’t have basic needs met, but I would argue that it’s integral to love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization.

Side Note: money, privilege, poverty trauma, and first world problems. I could write entire essays on these topics, but I am not doing that here. TLDR; I know I have privilege; I know a lot of people genuinely do not have money for travel; I know poverty trauma (for those of us who were either raised in poverty or spent years as adults in poverty) has long-term effects on our spending and sense of worthiness; and I know that being able to afford a luxury that you don’t feel like you deserve is a first world problem. I am using my trip to France as a stand-in for a wide variety of frivolously enjoyable experiences in order to examine why many people struggle with letting themselves fully enjoy things.

When I started telling people instead that I was going to France to study French, they seemed much more comfortable. Once there was a cultivation of skill involved, it wasn’t just frivolous happiness, it was productive, and that was more socially acceptable. One day as I was hand-wringing about whether I needed to justify my trip to France, someone said to me, “Why are you beating yourself up about this? You deserve this. You can do this without going broke or wrecking your life, so go enjoy it.” It was an extremely succinct account of the two most important obstacles to frivolous (non-monetizable) happiness: Can you afford this? Have you earned this?

Can you afford this?

It’s a valid question, but I don’t think it’s the only hurdle to frivolous joy. There are many people who do not have travel money, or have other challenges to travel such as health and children, and I’m not suggesting (as I have seen other travel bloggers do) that one can simply manifest global travel with enough bootstraps. Maybe they can’t afford a trip to Paris, but what types of joie de vivre can they afford but are held back from doing because they feel guilty about it?

During my experiences in developing countries where almost no one has enough money, the social values writ large tend to be more focused on “slow living” and finding joy in daily experiences such as community, shared meals, nature, children, and expressing creativity – things that don’t cost much if any money. While people in these cultures may feel guilt about spending money on themselves instead of their family or community, they don’t seem to have any trouble enjoying themselves when it’s not a question of money. Even in Japan and Korea, wealthy countries famous for overworking, I still noticed people placing importance on these types of low cost joys.

Have you earned this?

American culture is embedded with an exchange rate of work for pleasure. You must burn x number of calories to “earn” dessert. You must work x hours to “earn” a break. I talked to people in my income bracket and above who can absolutely afford to travel, but felt that they could never possibly, because they haven’t hit the ever-shifting goal post of “enough work” to earn the pleasure.

The earning in question isn’t financial; it’s the unspoken moral economy. Many Americans have internalized the idea that we don’t really deserve to feel good (at least until we’ve suffered enough to “earn it”, which may mean never). But because we are human, we sneak around with minor infractions we call guilty pleasures while lacking the ability to fully feel the delight these activities should bring because we are too busy feeling guilty and wondering how we’ll be judged.

What will people think? If I eat a second slice of cake? If I skip mowing the lawn to have a nap in the afternoon sun? If I take my kids out of school for a day to drive up to the mountains and splash around in a glacial river? If I leave my spouse to feed themself and the kids and they end up eating Cheerios and ice cream while I have a nice dinner with my friends? If I leave the office when there’s a big project (and there’s always a big project) and my co-workers all have to pick up my slack while I’m tasting wine in the Loire Valley?

Look at the horrible social media backlash that middle and lower income people get for having nice things deemed by society to be “too luxurious”. When they use food stamps to buy steaks instead of rice and beans, or dare to have a new phone, a nice laptop, play video games, drink frilly coffee, eat avocado toast or anything else that might make life bearable, the internet loves to pile on. Grind culture tells us that the one true path to financial success is to have nothing that brings joy, and only to work as much as possible until you can earn your way to a house, a car, and a (maybe once yearly) family vacation to a theme park.

Let me be clear, none of these examples are likely to result in anything bad actually happening, but the real world consequences are not reflected in the imaginary consequences of people who are held back by these thoughts. The extreme version of this is called “catastrophizing” and people who suffer from this type of anxiety (as you might guess) imagine catastrophic results of actions they perceive as risky. The less extreme version is a bunch of people who don’t critically examine what is likely to happen, they just feel the guilt and shame as a gut-level reaction.

A New Way of Thinking

I don’t take these internalized feelings of guilt and shame lightly. They are deeply ingrained in us from childhood, and can feel like an irrefutable pillar of reality. But they need to go. Maybe in the way black mold or an insidious termite infestation needs to go, or maybe in the way a cavity needs to go: knock down a wall, drill a hole, excavate the rot and repair the damage. It isn’t something a person can just do –wake up one day suddenly be free of the pressure of guilt induced by unproductive pleasure. However, I suggest that everyone reading this start the long and difficult process of releasing the weight of these fears and finding the freedom to do things just for fun.

“[Joie de vivre is] revolutionary because for work-driven, vacation-and-long-lunch deprived Americans, it almost requires brain surgery. Why? Because to make that lunch a moment with a French touch it has to be just for fun, no rush, no agenda. An American [said] that her French women friends, who are physicians, ‘work long hours but find time to meet their friends, take vacations, and indulge in the life part of life, which is as important or perhaps more important to them than work.'”
— Huffington Post, “What is joie de vivre, and why are the French so good at it?”

This isn’t “run away with the circus” advice. I do not advocate joy at the expense of security or community. We still need to be able to answer the question “Can I afford it” with “yes”. Please do not go into debt chasing a consumerism driven idea of happiness (been there, done that, regretted my financial choices). It’s important to balance joy and responsibility, but until we learn what things are truly our responsibilities and what things are the weight of other’s expectations and demands that we have taken on unnecessarily, we won’t be able to say “yes” when asking “Do I deserve it?”

Once we are able to accept that we deserve to enjoy things without having to earn the moral currency to do so, there is a different way of life ahead.

They Say You Can Never Go Home

April 21, 2024April 21, 2024 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

“When I’m talking and someone else is listening, I am invariably left with the uneasy suspicion that I’ve made myself quite tiresome. If one is really bursting with things to say and has no one to say them to, perhaps the only recourse is to go forth and accomplish earth-shattering deeds, so that when the time comes for an autobiography, one need no longer be concerned that no one will take any notice. This is a childish fantasy, of course, of which I have been disabused as I have slowly come to realize that I have scant hope of becoming a celebrated public figure worthy of a best-selling autobiography. Better, then, to write a little about myself and let off some steam, so that I don’t become an insufferable chatterbox when I get old.”

Written on Water by Eileen Chang, Chinese-born American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter
— written in Japanese occupied Shanghai and first published in 1944.

My last post was more than 8 months ago as I left Senegal to return to the US. I always seem to have a hard time writing when I’m in the US because it doesn’t feel like “travel” or “adventure” to me the way being in other countries does. When I return to Seattle, I focus on enjoying my time with friends and family, having quiet daily experiences of shared meals or parallel play, and even when blog-worthy things do happen, the stories feature people who trust me not to share their private lives online. So, I end up not writing at all.

When I made my plans to return to America in 2023 I told myself and others that I would stay for at least 6 months and not more than 12. I looked forward to it. I felt that I had been away for so long that a quick pass wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to “water my roots”. I wanted to bask in the everyday mundanities of my friends’ lives, to see the seasons change, to celebrate the holidays of my childhood. Being a long term expat means never giving up on the idea that our country of birth is our true home, while also never quite being as comfortable there as once were.

I wanted to work in the US, not only for income, but also to give my days structure. COVID era Korea and the schedule nightmare of Senegal left me for years in a state of temporal blur where days ran together and there never seemed to be a good enough reason to do anything. During my sojourn in the US, I neither wanted nor needed to work full time. My goal was to soak up my community, not to sink into a daily grind. A part time job would keep me from decimating my savings, and give me a regular routine, but leave me with plenty of free time to enjoy being home.

In reality, I accepted a full-time position teaching an English immersion course for immigrants and refugees. The position came with a lot of challenges, but possibly more rewards. Being back in a physical classroom with a regular schedule and the ability to form a relationship with my students was so good. Learning the bureaucracy of the WA state college system… less so. (drawing of me teaching courtesy of a student’s daughter. I was wearing a floral patterned mask, not speaking with a mouthful of marbles, lol)

Meanwhile, when it came to housing, I knew I didn’t want to rent my own apartment since that would mean committing to a full year lease, and likely cost 1500$+ a month. Therefore, I arranged to move into the spare bedroom of a former roommate. After just 3 months of living together, it became clear that whatever had changed for us since our last cohabitation made a reprise totally impossible. I moved in with some other friends of mine who agreed to let me stay at least through my current work commitments. (pic of the backyard below) That beautiful home with a healthy family and 2 bright and loving kids was an absolute balm to my soul after the back to back combo of the pandemic isolation and the Senegal experience.

Nonetheless, it was always destined to be a short term solution, and I had to start seriously considering my options: renew my contract at this reasonably good job and work on finding a place of my own in the USA or bounce?

Reverse Culture Shock

Coming back to a life in the USA isn’t as simple as it sounds, and however much I may love my home and my community, there is no going backward when it comes to the march of time which wreaks changes in both society and personal growth. When you travel, you leave your familiar surroundings and go to a place where you are shaped by different forces and grow into a new version of yourself. While you are gone, the place you left behind also continues to evolve, shaped by local and world events, so when you return, you no longer fit. It is uncomfortable, and often more unnerving than the experience of not fitting in with a foreign culture. Abroad, you know you are the alien, but at home a part of your brain is constantly telling you that you are SUPPPOSED to fit here. It’s a dysmorphia of the whole sense of self.

But Kaine, you’ve been back to America since you left in 2014, you saw the changes as they happened! Yes and no. I saw America during my vacations the same way any tourist might see a country they visit for only a few weeks. I focused on excursions and experiences, the only real difference was that I made excursions of visiting friends and family rather than visiting tourist attractions. I planned sailing days and camping trips and cookouts. I went to house parties and dragged people out to karaoke nights. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the cost of groceries or what was happening in politics. For those few weeks at a time, America wasn’t my “home” it was my holiday, and it wasn’t until I was back in my home abroad that I returned to viewing the US economy and politics through the lens of the internet.

This is an excellent article about the experiences of long term expats returning home, and honestly reading it made me feel both seen and called out.

“Americans often develop new attitudes, values and perceptions as a result of their travels. These can often cause stress on reentry.

I see America through a sharper lens, both its strengths and weaknesses. I no longer take this country for granted and I really resent unbalanced criticism by Americans who haven’t experienced the rest of the world.

I see the validity of at least one other culture. That makes me realize that the American way is not always “right” or “best.” I am impatient with people who criticize other countries and blindly accept everything American causing them to never question anything.

I have an unclear concept of home now.

I place more value on relationships than other Americans seem to. People here are too busy for one another.

Everyone in America is always so stressed and frantic. They never relax. I feel like I can’t relate to others

The Economy

It’s normal to become critical during the second phase of culture shock. I’ve published about these effects before, and the article above is great for explaining how it manifests in reverse culture shock. Nonetheless, even while I was still in the first (honeymoon) phase during August & September, I started feeling the negative impact of some big changes in the US.

I needed a car because it’s almost impossible to navigate American cities via public transit, but I was absolutely shocked at the prices, even on used cars! In 2015 when I was in the US for a few months doing the paperwork for my Korean work visa, I bought a car for $1,750, drove it while I was in country, then sold it for the purchase price when I left. In late 2023, I couldn’t find a used car for less than about 7k$, and those were very sketchy.

My plan to buy a clunker for under 3k and sell it on to a poor college student went up in smoke. I ended up buying a used car from a dealership and hoping that the good gas mileage makes up for the loss in sticker price when I sell it back.

Then there are the grocery stores. I can’t say exactly why, but sometime after I moved to Korea in 2016, American grocery stores became increasingly overwhelming. I can’t even say it’s the size, because I have successfully gone to large box stores like Home Plus and Carrefour in other countries and not felt the pressure that American stores give me. I remember walking into a Safeway in 2019 and just staring at the wall of ice cream for a full 5 minutes, totally flummoxed by the array of nearly identical products.

When WA grocery stores became liquor sellers (2012), they had to figure out how to add new products without removing existing ones. The eventual solution was that many stores made the aisles smaller so they could incorporate more shelf space in the same square footage. The aisles got narrower, but stores didn’t replace their shopping carts with smaller versions. By 2023, the sensory overwhelm had gone from merely being too many choices and no way to choose, to a feeling of being totally lost and crowded in by impatient and frustrated shoppers in narrow aisles with giant carts which made passing an Olympic sport.

The products and packaging were unfamiliar, I struggled to assess healthy and frugal choices. Products that I did know had somehow doubled in price, overtaking average inflation at light-speed. In 2008, a person could buy a whole roasted chicken for $5, eat it for several meals AND make soup. An organic bird would be $7-9. Now the conventional chickens are $10+ and the organic/farm raised $12-18. In the end, I found that the only store which didn’t make me want to run away screaming was Trader Joe’s, and I did 99% of my shopping there.

Not only grocery stores, but the nature of in-person shopping had changed across the board. In-store service and options had become extremely limited. Once 24 hour shops had become practically European in their hours, and stores were chronically understocked and underserviced. Several times when I popped into a shop to pick up a small item or to look for something I could touch, measure, handle, or try on before buying, I was told plainly by the clerk that it was out of stock and I should look on Amazon.

Eating out was another huge sticker shock. My favorite Seattle staple food is pho (the Vietnamese noodle soup). At my graduation lunch in 2007, we could get a big filling bowl of rich meaty pho for about $5. Now a bowl of pho is $12-15. I went to a couple of what I would call mid-range independent (not chain) restaurants and dropped $80-100 on a single meal (after taxes and tip). Many places I lived and visited abroad, you could get a high-end meal out for between $25-40 (inclusive of taxes and service).

*mahalie from International District, Seattle, Washington, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons*

The Food

Food remained a contentious issue for me the whole time I was in the US. In the past, I have had food intolerances which contributed to chronic inflammation, pain and fatigue. I stopped eating dairy and wheat back in the early 2000s and it made a huge difference. Starting in 2008, I experimented with eating wheat and dairy in other countries as compared to in the US. Country after country, as long as I avoided imported US foods, I could eat what I liked and feel fine. However, in the US, it seemed my body only tolerated organic wheat & dairy products, and conventional ones still resulted in inflammation (a general flu-like bleh feeling all over). I thought as long as I managed my bread and milk, food in the US would be easy enough. My body laughs at me when I think like this.

It has been widely discussed that the quality of food in the US is very different from that of other countries. There are hundreds of articles about pesticides, hormones, preservatives, and processing chemicals out there you can read, and I’m not going to recap that here other than to say it is a well documented issue that food in the USA is problematic and contributing to many health problems for her citizens. (pic below, my first and only experience with Chicago deep-dish pizza)

After a couple of weeks of eating novelty junk treats and processed frozen meals, my body protested loud and clear. I had to be pickier and pickier about what I would eat and eventually, food that was too sugary or over-processed simply stopped tasting like food. I remember taking a slice of a cake that looked so delightful, then on my first mouthful wondering how it tasted so awful. The cake was sugary and vaguely spongy, while the frosting tasted like it was actually made of melted plastic. The people around me seemed to enjoy it. I visited a friend’s house where they made a meal I would have made myself 10 years ago and been happy with. I took a small amount to be polite, but again, my body made sure I knew that what I was eating had only a passing resemblance to food.

Not only did I feel constantly disgusted by the majority of US food, I felt bad about complaining or even abstaining when others around me were eating, enjoying, and offering to share. Sharing food is one of the most fundamental social bonding activities humans can engage in, and my friends, many of whom are still in financial struggles, wanted to share their food with me. How could I tell them that my body didn’t think what they were eating was food? (pic below, a Thanksgiving “turkey” made of Baskin Robbins ice cream and frosting, just one example of the absurd food-options that abound in the USA)

And, despite my caution around eating, and reintroducing an exercise regimen, I GAINED weight in the US. It is my belief that the food itself was the bigger part of the problem, but I also tend to overindulge in sugar when I am stressed, a condition that pervades the life of any American trying to achieve work-life balance. I don’t know what it would really take for me to be food-healthy in the US long term, but I expect it would require a LOT more work and money than would be required to eat a basically healthy diet almost anywhere else.

The People

I had to confront the feeling of failing to fit not just in the larger cultural sense, but also among my own friend/chosen family community. I changed and grew, and so did they. Most of them for the better, thankfully, but in all cases they weren’t quite sure where to put me in their lives when I was in town for months rather than weeks. When I was only available for 12 days, it made sense for people to rearrange their schedules for a unique event, so vacations were filled with revelry and reunion. However, I feared that living there would make my presence mundane, banal, and that my friends would think there would be time later, so they wouldn’t make time now. Thankfully, that fear did not come to pass. Although some people I saw only once or not at all during the 8 month stay, many others made time for me or invited me to planned events at least once a week. I treasure my community.

“General Challenges

People at home aren’t as interested in hearing about your foreign experience as you are in telling them about it .

You aren’t as interested in hearing about what has happened at home as they are in telling you about it.

You miss the tight-knit foreign affairs community you were a part of.

I have learned over the years that people stuck in one country (especially Americans) have strong feelings about listening to my adventures. Some of them love it, they see me as their own personal documentary, and it’s delightful. Others are busy comparing their lives to mine and dislike hearing about what I’m doing abroad. I try to respect everyone’s wishes in this, but it can be hard since 95% of the last 10 years of my life has been abroad and I can’t tell stories about my life experiences without involving travel.

Whichever way it goes, it’s massively different from talking to other expats. I had almost forgotten how much I loved swapping stories among the expat community when I ran into another long-term expat at a party in early April. I realized that it was the first time since coming back to the US that I felt comfortable talking about my life abroad for more than a few minutes or in any detail.

It felt like I was holding my breath around my friends and family. I talked about my American experiences with them all the time, shopping, work, things happening at the home I lived in or with other friends’ lives, but I minimized my expat-self, trying to fit into the shape that was left for me. I don’t think my friends consciously asked me to do this, and many would be shocked or saddened to learn that I had been suppressing a part of myself for their comfort. I know they love me and I chose to change the way I interacted with them to make them comfortable because I love them. Call it masking, call it code switching — choosing to focus on a different part of my life and activities when I’m with different people is normal. However, it has made me realize that I can’t live with ONLY this kind of interaction. I need the expat community too, which makes long term residence in the US challenging.

The other difference I noticed in people was more general, society at large. I don’t mean the blatantly obvious “us vs them” divide in America that you cannot help but see if you follow any news at all, but a quieter and less politically motivated change. The shared trauma of COVID changed everyone in some way. I cannot speak for the whole country, but in and around Seattle, people were more closed off, less trusting, less willing to be open.

It’s part of my mental health journey to notice nice things and to make the world around me better than I found it, so I trained myself in the habit of talking to strangers, offering compliments and help whenever I can. I made a game of my daily commute to see how many drivers I could be nice to each day as a way of fending off road rage. (strangely, the commute was one aspect of American life that didn’t bother me) Yet I found that often my overtures of friendliness toward strangers elicited a mixture of confusion and even suspicion before giving way to acceptance and relief.

I am far from the first or only person to notice this trend. A simple Google search will reveal many think pieces searching for reasons why Americans are becoming less social and more isolated, most stressing the dangers for our collective mental and physical health.

My friends who had regularly exchanged hosting dinner and game nights had stopped during lock-down and never re-started. The feeling I got was that the inertia of staying home was so strong that going out required a more special occasion than “dinner and board games”. I also tried for a little while to make some new friends or even (gasp) date. I met people who seemed nice, who I was happy to spend time with and get to know, but they had no ambition to do anything different in their lives. They wanted a new friend or a partner who would fit seamlessly into their existing lifestyles without necessitating a change of habits or hobbies.

People know they crave connections, but seem unwilling or unable to sacrifice even the tiniest bit of safety and comfort for the privilege. People who have been isolated for long periods of time can absolutely suffer increased social anxiety. When I floated this theory past an expat friend of mine who has been back in the US about 18 months longer than me, she said it wasn’t exactly social anxiety, but that everyone felt “tight”, and I understood exactly what she meant. I sympathize with how difficult and uncomfortable they must feel, but it’s both sad and horrible to see.

The American Dream?

Americans are also feeling a lot of financial anxiety. Almost all my coworkers were working overtime, some as much as double time (two full time class loads!) and felt completely unable to stop, either from the weight of their financial obligations (high cost of living) or from a fear that setting any boundaries for work-life balance would cost their job. I had coworkers who were astonished (and envious) that I simply didn’t read work emails outside the office. Others who fretted and stressed that their quarterly contracts might not be renewed despite the massive teacher shortage and high demand. The insecurity was so strong that even though everyone I talked to had noticed certain problems, no one wanted to speak up about them. (Did I? Yes, but it was neither easy nor consequence free. Still glad I did it.)

It was also hard for me to reconcile the gulf between online calls for social justice with the fear people experienced of getting personally involved. Having watched the struggle for civil rights and equity in the US take place almost entirely online for years, it had seemed to me like more people were getting involved, but after living in the US for a few months, I am concerned that the involvement is performative. People can safely speak out online and issue company memos to make themselves feel involved (or if you’re more pessimistic, to make themselves look better to others), yet when it comes to real practical solutions for enacting these policies, no one seems to want to take action. The college that claimed the top ranking for social justice, equity, and accommodation in the region had completely failed its non-English speaking students in this regard and when it was pointed out, they simply changed the subject. Only one person in the whole administration ever actually admitted to me they were failing in that area, and they still didn’t know what can be done about it.

To me, the fear of getting involved in social issues seems like an extension of the same fear that is preventing people from forming deeper social connections, and that fear feels to me like the fear of a child who has skinned a knee falling off their bicycle and doesn’t want to ever ride again. “No, no, walking or being driven is safe and comfortable, the bike is too risky, too painful, I don’t really need it anyway.” Yet, we tell our children to get back on the bike because we know that the better part of life isn’t about falling, it’s about getting back up, and that while it may not be strictly necessary for a safe and comfortable life, the joy of riding a bike with the wind in your hair, and the feeling of freedom it brings is worth the risk of a skinned knee.

Get Back on the Bike

The decision for to strike out again was unexpectedly difficult. My emotional and mental state had become a mélange of post-Covid insecurity, second-hand PTSD, and of course – reverse culture shock induced depression.

My “secondary trauma” (also called second-hand trauma and compassion fatigue) came close on the heels of all the work I did to process my own primary trauma. Secondary trauma is what happens when you are repeatedly exposed to other people’s primary trauma. It’s usually care providers like doctors and psychiatrists who treat trauma sufferers that get this, but it turns out aid workers in developing countries and teachers of students fleeing violence are 100% exposed to secondary trauma. Oh look, it’s me.

This combo meant that my overall resilience was lower, my anxiety was higher, I was less able to focus on new ideas, got tired more easily, had brain fog, and difficulty generating enthusiasm. Even after I decided that what I needed was to travel for joy (rather than work), I had trouble feeling excited or engaging in research and planning. This was especially devastating since prior to COVID, one of my favorite activities was researching and planning my global vacations. (the color coded spreadsheets brought me joy!)

One of my friends also pointed out that I was likely reluctant to make plans to leave because I was in a safe and comfortable place. There simply wasn’t anything uncomfortable (enough) for me to run away from anymore. What a wild notion. I’ve known for several years (thanks therapy) that when I started this journey I was running away from who I was in the US at least as much as I was running toward adventures and experiences in other countries. On this visit, armed with the new tools of my COVID-isolation induced therapy work, I was better able to be a person that I liked while in America. And due to quirks of fate, I found myself living in a home that had the kind of “good enough” parenting and comfortable easy love that I dreamed of having in my own childhood home. Who would want to give that up?

Yet as I cast my gaze across the sea once more, the idea of going to France for the spring took root in my brain. The lack of enthusiasm and general feelings of ennui made implementing any sort of plan quite challenging. I dragged my feet on making any decisions or booking anything for so long. People would ask me if I was excited to go to France, and I would lie and say “yes”, while inside I had a nightmare vision that I would do all this work and spend all this money and somehow arrive in France but be just as unenthusiastic as I was in Seattle. It was an act of faith on my part that I would do the minimum needed to embark, and that my sense of adventure would catch up to me at some point. And now, here I am in Tours, in the Loire Valley, taking French lessons and eating at a boulangerie every day.

Although it took weeks (maybe months?) for me to imagine and enact my plan, it only took a few days after my arrival for the fog to lift and my enthusiasm to come rushing back, but I don’t think it was the change of scenery (or quality of food) alone that performed this seeming miracle. Every single person I have met and interacted with in this historical French city has been open, kind, generous, and trusting with me. At first, I too was surprised, suspicious and even resistant, but when I let myself relax into it, I found that I could take joy even in the simple act of ordering lunch.

I may not be able to change the economy or the political landscape of my country, but I do have the power to change myself. I can decide to take risks and to be open to new experiences, even when I don’t feel like it. My favorite part of all my adventures has always been the people, and yet the people I love most are suffering in isolation. Perhaps the way forward is to put in some work towards rebuilding openness, connection, and wonder, and trust that the absence of an instant reward is not indicative of failure. Thanks to a combination of the support of my chosen family, my willingness to work toward a goal in the absence of enthusiasm, and the relentless kindness of a whole bunch of strangers, I’m finally feeling less “tight” and more excited for the future. I hope you can, too.

Aventure en France, me voici!

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk

September 9, 2022September 30, 2022 / Gallivantrix / 1 Comment

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.

안녕히계세요 Korea: The Insanity of Online Teaching

September 2, 2022August 12, 2022 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Another big reason I decided it was time to leave Korea has been my career. Before COVID broke the scene, I had already decided it was time to move on. At the time, my goal was to get into a PhD program and study the use of Global English (or English as Lingua Franca) in the classroom. I took many materials with me on holiday in January 2020, expecting 2020 to be my final year at my Korean university before moving on. What is it they say? Man plans, the gods laugh?

I like and respect my former employer, the University, and my co-workers. For the 2 years I was there before COVID, it was the first job I’d held in a long time that I had that I liked going to in the morning. I liked the freedom and support that I had there. I liked it when struggling students had breakthroughs because I helped them. I liked the challenges of updating the materials to reflect the students changing needs. I liked the way the teachers collaborated and shared materials. Sure, there were imperfections, but I had some pretty serious job satisfaction, and even though I never intended to stay quite as long as I did, my intention to leave after 2020 (a decision I made before COVID) had more to do with my own goals than anything at the school.

During COVID was a different animal. Although I know that my coworkers and the university administrative staff were doing everything they could in a difficult and unprecedented situation, it was miserable. The beginning felt like rising to a challenge, but over time, it just became an endless slog. Online teaching broke my soul, and after 5 semesters of waiting to hear “we’re going back to the classroom”, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

What Is Virtual Learning?

Virtual learning existed before COVID, but most people didn’t have much experience with it until they were suddenly trying to log into their own or their children’s classrooms in 2020. Good virtual learning programs are out there. It’s possible, though I remain skeptical, that some of them might even be for language learning. We did not use any of those at my university. As I understand it, most of the schools in the world that had no previous online course offerings before COVID floundered in a big way and did not look at previous models of successful online education as a guide. For the non-educators in the audience, here’s quick and basic overview of the main types of online learning:

1) MOOC: Massive Open Online Courses: These are basically self study. You watch the videos, read the articles, take the computer graded quizzes, participate in a “discussion forum” with other students, and if you pay for it, you get a certificate of completion at the end. This is really great for people who want to just learn about stuff on their own. It has zero guidance from a teacher, however, so if you get lost or have questions, you are limited to your peers on the discussion board. I’ve used these for career development and for personal growth, and been pretty satisfied. I would NOT recommend them for regular 4 year university students, and would shun them completely for k-12.

2) Asynchronous Learning: you and the teacher are not in sync for most of the work. Teachers prepare lessons, videos, ppts, worksheets, etc. It’s very similar to the MOOC in that you work your way through the material at your own pace (with completion goals to meet the school schedule). It’s different in that your teacher is available to you. Some asynchronous classes have scheduled video meetings with the teacher either 1-1 or in groups of various sizes, some will just be via email unless a student specifically requests a video meeting. In an ideal world, teachers also provide some feedback to the students on their assignments and evaluations, which is not an option in MOOCs.

3) Synchronous Learning: The teacher and all the students go into the same online platform together and have class together. This is my least favorite form. If you’ve ever been in a Zoom meeting with more than about 5 people, you will understand why. There are some cases where this is a great way to deliver a presentation or lecture – when there is only 1 (maybe 2) speakers at a time, and everyone else is just listening, with the occasional question in the chat box or a structured Q & A at the end. It supposedly supports “breakout rooms” for discussion or interaction in small groups, but I did not find those effective. (NOTE: some people like breakout rooms, but it’s highly dependent on the course and level. It works best when a dedicated leader is in each small group, and when the participants speak up. It works less well with language barriers when everyone in your host country is too shy to speak – eg, my situation, or if the internet is to be believed, any classroom of students between the ages of 11-30).

4) Hybrid Styles: there is no one hybrid style, it just means a mix and match. Maybe your class would be 3 times a week, so now it’s a hybrid asynchronous with 1 time a week synchronous and the rest is on your own time. Maybe you have small groups at different locations, so you live cast from one classroom into a second. When offline became an option again, my school offered a hybrid that required teachers to set up the synchronous format in a classroom on campus and simultaneously teach the students in the room, and the students online. Thankfully, someone talked the English department out of that option.

About Education in Korea

A tangled web of bureaucracy means that the Korean government doesn’t seem to have any way to prove students completed the required work for a class other than literally making sure their butts are in the seats for those hours. This goes back to some scandal of last decade where students were getting A’s even though they didn’t attend … or do the work, because of nepotism or bribery or something sinister. As an American, I hated mandatory attendance courses in college, and they were rare because mostly it wasn’t possible to pass a class you never attended. Also most American professors have no qualms about failing students who didn’t earn the grade, and hey, if you want to waste your money taking a class you could pass without going, that’s on you.

The Korean approach is quite different, largely based on the Confucian cultural standard of “it looks good on paper”. (Confucian descended cultures, those heavily influenced by China at some point, like Korea, Japan and some SE Asian countries). It is required to have certain courses or types of courses on a transcript, and better to have the higher grade for an easier class. It is insanely common for students to blow off schoolwork and then do a ritual apology and beg for a grade increase at the end and get it. In an attempt at fairness, the government resorted to attendance minimums so that at very least the students must physically put in the hours. As far as my experience goes, this just resulted in a lot of students who thought they couldn’t fail if they met the attendance requirement and were often shocked to discover actual work was also required.

The school year in Korea starts on March 1. K-12 schools have a winter break for lunar new year, but they come back in late February and seamlessly move one grade up in March. Universities tend to go on winter break (or winter class schedules for make up classes) sometime at the end of December and not come back until March. I myself only came back into Korea at the tail end of February, a plan I’d made when everything was normal. We delayed the start of the semester 2 weeks, hoping that the plague would pass (oh sweet summer child). When it became apparent that COVID wasn’t going away fast enough, my uni started online classes for “just for a couple of weeks” and hasn’t stopped since. The online classes were ported over from regular class lesson plans in a big hurry in March 2020, because it was “temporary” and “an emergency”. Imagining that it would end shortly, the school didn’t see any need to update the online methods for long term use, so I’ve been trapped in virtual class hell for 2.5 years.

Why I Got Stuck With the Worst Way

Before COVID the English classes met only once a week for 100 minutes (which is already not a great way to teach a foreign language). Even when students do have more speaking time in an offline classroom, they are often speaking with peers, and I can only listen to one pair at a time. They don’t get much of my undivided attention this way. After researching online learning styles, I decided I wanted an asynchronous style where the lesson slides and lecture would be made as a video, and the slides, book pages, examples, etc. would be available to students for download. Watch the lecture, read the download, do the homework – and then once a week meet in pairs with the teacher for 15 minutes of dedicated speaking practice. However, due to the aforementioned bureaucracy and scandal, the university would not approve of such a plan, Long story short too late, asynchronous classes were off the table.

Korea decided the only way to really make sure students were doing the work and not … I don’t know cheating or whatever, was with live synchronous online classes. Ok. We want all the students together at once, so how then do we deliver quality educational content? Do we choose a platform built for educators? Do we take advantage of any of the existing software already in use for online learning? Oh, no! We get a business platform, designed for corporate needs. It’s called WebEx, and I’m sure it’s fine for what it is, it’s a lot like Zoom. This poor decision making was by no means limited to my University or even to Korea.

A lot of classrooms at the university level are just big lecture halls where the only person who talks is the teacher. I’m also not a fan of lecture hall classes unless they are supplemented with small discussion groups. However, Korea loves passive learning even more than America, so the school probably thought it was fine for like 95% of their stuff. As it turns out, medicine, archaeology, music, art, and a few other hands on topics don’t actually do that well in a pure lecture format. Also, languages. Teaching a foreign language is unlike many other types of teaching, and requires a huge amount of student talk time. You can’t learn a language through passive listening no matter what those “learn Spanish while you sleep” CDs say. In addition, being able to see each other is crucial. Facial expressions and hand gestures make up so much of communication.

The school administration surely imagined a virtual meeting room where every student sat attentively with their cameras on, hanging on the teachers every word, and jumping in to participate in speaking activities quickly, all while the teacher wrangled the slides, the virtual whiteboard, their own camera and mic, looking at the students camera thumbnails to check if they are paying attention and comprehending, and playing tech support for every single glitch. Of course, none of that happens. Students log in from their phones in the back of taxi cabs, play video games while waiting to hear if their name is called, or just sleep. Teachers can’t possibly manage the number of plates spinning, and often have to take 2-3times longer for every single activity than planned for. Not a lot of actual education was happening.

My Online Classes: A Timeline of Deterioration

Spring 2020: A small team of English teachers (including myself) met on campus daily and tested out the software and different methods of implementing student talk time. We came up with a string and paperclips barely functional version in time to start after the two week delay. After classes started, it was impossible to teach from my computer in a shared office with other teachers talking all around me, so I taught from home, a folding tv tray across my legs in my bed because my apartment was too small to have an “office”. I was so wrapped up in COVID that it wasn’t a priority to make changes to the massively ineffective and frustrating to all education delivery system. I told myself that in the long run, it didn’t actually matter if the kids (young adults) learned any English. They were stressed out af, and not English majors. I did my best just to get us all logged in every day, and to make the required classes as painless as possible for me and my students while still meeting the university minimum requirements.

Fall 2020: I felt like I was no longer struggling just to conduct a class, but I had to adapt the fall semester courses to online. I found a day of the week where I could come into the office to do necessary work without cross talk during my class time. As teachers, we’d picked up some few helpful tricks in the first semester, but we were still struggling.

Partner conversations (a key part of language learning) could not be done in the main meeting room. We had to have mini meets, not unlike the suggestion I made for asynchronous learning, but no, I’m not bitter. These mini meets had to happen while the teacher and students remained logged into the live WebEx class which was recorded to be sure of meeting minimum educational standards. I tried multiple platforms for that, all of which had issues. At one point, I was using 2 computers and my phone just to conduct a class in which some students only had a phone, or were on a free public Wi-Fi system that choked their data and kept the voice and video functions lagging.

I felt as though I could not be a good teacher in this environment, I couldn’t catch the falling behind or accommodate the struggling. I had a disabled student enroll who had a special helper assigned by the government (a normally nice accommodation). The student was stuck in another city and the helper couldn’t log into the virtual class live from where they were, so he was entirely unable to function in the class. When I tried to speak with co-workers (both foreign and Korean) about any of these issues, no one seemed to be able or willing to work on solutions. As with many places in the world, the pandemic served to highlight pre-existing systemic issues that leave the vulnerable behind.

Spring 2021: It was supposed to be the last. The plan was in place to get public schools back in the classroom and we would surely be in lockstep. I buckled down and did my best. I was able to replace my lowest level class with the advanced course, thinking that teaching higher levels online would be better for my sanity. Mostly, that was true. The new crop of incoming students had experience with online learning and weren’t as scared and confused as those in 2020. I also moved into a nicer apartment with more sunshine and a dedicated work space. I was so sure that I’d be able to travel, and we’d be able to go back into the classroom in 2021 because the vaccine was out! Neither of those would come to pass. It was my last “good” semester.

The Teacher Becomes the Student: Over the summer, I signed up for a Korean language class online, hoping to improve my Korean, but also to experience the virtual language classroom as a student to get some perspective and ideas. It didn’t do much for my Korean skills, but it definitely helped me to understand my student’s struggles. I found the synchronous virtual classroom to be wildly difficult to learn in, and was myself often muting the sound, turning off my camera, or playing video games when the class got too boring (and I’m somewhere between Hermione Granger and Amy Santiago on a teacher’s pet scale).

The big thing I learned from the teacher was to really let go of “normal” classroom management, and be ok when we just don’t get through the material. It still makes my eye twitch when I think about that, because it is unfair to the students to be in an environment where the goal is “just get through it” instead of “learn something new”. If I had been taking that class to prepare for the TOPIK (test of proficiency in Korean) to qualify for a visa, I would have been very disappointed in the class. It’s hardly surprising that students all over the country began to experience virtual learning burnout.

Fall 2021: It all broke. The student enrollment plummeted. Students who spent their last year of high school online and were missing out on the cultural joy of first year university were disillusioned and either dropped out or took only the minimum requirements. Not just at my university, but all over the country. Classes that have less than a certain number of registered students (at that time 5) are usually dropped from the roster. I lost 5 of my 6 courses because 0-3 students were registered for each. The school tried their best to make up my required classroom hours by offering me the “language lounge”, a sort of tutoring/practice lab, but they were not able to offer enough to make up the difference, and I was told I would have to teach an extra two courses to the following semester to make up for it. I did try to get them to just deduct the money from my paycheck since I was financially ok, what with zero international travel for over a year, but they declined.

Other departments were increasing offline options. Majors which required hands on labs or used specialized equipment or travelled to locations as part of the curriculum could not fulfill their educational requirements online. It’s hard to dissect a cadaver or dig up an archaeological site from a Zoom meeting. There were also a few test that required specialized proctoring in designated locations that students were required to come to campus for. It was a struggle for the students to be in the disorganized pseudo-hybrid learning environment. They weren’t living on campus full time nor attending offline classes regularly yet, but neither could they do everything online. It required many of them to travel by bus or train to Gyeongju just one day a week or less while they lived full time in their hometown (often still with their parents and younger siblings, a big crush for a young adult who had been expecting the independence of dormitory life).

The Liberal Arts classes were not considered essential enough to receive offline dispensation, so we continued to slog by with our WebEx meetings. I only had one real class, once a week, and the rest of the time, I had what I referred to with great distain as “the Schrodinger’s classes” because I didn’t know if or how many students would come until I opened the virtual meeting room. I then had to explain Schrodinger’s cat to way too many people. I hated these so called “classes” with a burning fiery passion. Try making an hour of activities for an unknown number of students in a vague skill range when you have no idea what their actual teacher is working on this week. See how much effort you are willing to put in when over and over 0-2 people show up and don’t even have their book. Or a microphone to speak with. You may also have noticed, I didn’t post anything on the blog from the summer of 21 until the spring of 22. Dark times.

Spring 2022: While I was waiting for the semester to start (and to learn my schedule’s fate) I had a lot of anxiety about a repeat of fall 21. There had been a failure to launch “Living with Corona19” and the activity restriction level was at 4 (the highest /most restrictive) for most of the winter break. There was no way we’d be back in classrooms when we couldn’t even eat at a restaurant after 9pm! I was deeply worried about my salary and my future employment options, too. I had already been told that I couldn’t make up my missed hours over the winter course selection, and rumors abounded that the graduation rate in 2021 was lower, that the national exam (Suneung) scores were lower, and that overall expected enrollment of new students was … lower.

NOTE: Returning students have classes in Jan/Feb, 3rd year high school students – aka the graduating class – take their Suneung in mid-November and although they go back to classrooms, they are not expected to do much work since the test results will determine their university eligibility. As a result, by early December, the scores and numbers of graduating students is already known even though the school year does not end until February of the following calendar year.

Some schools were shutting down, or cutting programs. The public schools were all fully back online (with exceptions for outbreaks), but the university deemed it was too difficult to contain a spread at a school where students came from all over the country, and would engage in socially risky behavior (like partying without a mask). The existing round of contracts were not set to end until February of ’23, but if my hours were continuously docked I might not be able to afford to wait that long. My school sent out emails urging anyone who wanted to resign before the semester start to come and talk to the office.

I had zero control or input over my schedule either. It changed more than once before March 1, and continued to change for the first several weeks of the semester! The university’s federal allotment was reduced, and budget cuts ensued. The minimum number of students to keep a course was raised (from 5 to 10), and the maximum number of lounge hours was lowered. Because some majors had gone fully offline by this time, the school decided to offer a small number of face to face English courses, but I was not given any chance to volunteer for those.

In the end I was assigned 8 regular courses (my 6 contracted+ my 2 make ups) and kept only 3 due to low enrollment. I had an additional 4 online lounge hours, and 2 “in person” lounge hours each week, the later consisted of me sitting in an empty classroom for the whole time, because it was “my duty”. I know that this was a result of my admin going to bat for me and pushing to add more lounge hours so that I could get paid, and I really appreciate the way she had my back, but the whole situation was absurd. I had come full circle back to desk warming. I was not only an English Robot*, but I was a virtual English Robot. It was time to go. I turned in my 90 day notice near the end of the spring semester, my last day of classes was June 21, and my last official day of employment is August 31.

*English Robot is the term I use to describe any “teacher” whose job is primarily to stand in front of the class and be a Happy Foreigner ™, giving out set phrases in that coveted native accent. I think that it can be good for the kids to be exposed, but it’s soul sucking to the human being who has trained to be a teacher to be trapped in the role of living doll. Most of these jobs also entail mandatory hours of just existing at the school, to be seen and so they can tell the parents about how the foreign teacher is available to their precious children all day. In EPIK, they call it “desk warming”.

What’s Next?

I’m saving the details for a surprise revelation post (though some of you already know). I did find a good opportunity that will start in October, and it’s different from anything I’ve done before. The university I’ll be working with doesn’t have an English Department (yet), so there’s no strong expectations that I have to follow a preset curriculum or meet certain bureaucratic minimums. There will be plenty of other challenges (no shortage of other types of bureaucracy), and my work will not be limited to within the university. Also, the country I’m going to doesn’t have as much online access as Korea, and hasn’t been enacting much in the way of COVID restrictions or accommodations. There are some virtual conferences and workshops among teachers and teacher trainers, but no widespread virtual classrooms for regular students. Finally, the nature of the project itself has a greater chance of being more “meaningful impact” and less “English Robot”, providing me with a level of job satisfaction I haven’t felt in many years. I’m not saying it’s going to be a cake walk, but it will definitely be entirely different from everything I’ve done in Korea, and that is something I am looking forward to immensely.

Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman

August 26, 2022September 4, 2022 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

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.

안녕히계세요 Korea: The COVID Experience in Retrospect

August 19, 2022August 20, 2022 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

I’m leaving Korea! The decision to leave has been a long time coming and involves multiple factors. One of the biggest stresses on my life (on everyone’s lives) over the last 2.5 years has been COVID. My experiences with COVID in Korea are quite different from what my friends and family in other countries experienced, and have played a large roll in my decision to move on.

Flying Internationally at the Start of a Global Pandemic

COVID dropped in late 2019, with the first case arriving in Korea on January 20, 2020 while the school was on break and I was on holiday in Spain. It didn’t seem to be impacting my US friends yet, but I knew that my return flight From Spain to Paris through Shanghai to Korea would be impacted for sure. It was no surprise that the flight was cancelled, but I found information online that it had also been rescheduled as a direct flight from Paris to Seoul. When I checked into the flight in Spain, they seemed to think everything was fine! And when I arrived at the counter for my connecting flight in Paris, I was told I didn’t have a valid ticket to board. I was given the runaround for 9 hours as the three companies involved all blamed each other (the company that owned the plane, the company that owned the flight, and the company that I bought my ticket from).

I would say avoid buying from 3rd parties for this reason, but in reality, that often costs much more and even if I had, there were two different companies involved in the flight itself (the owner and operator being different). I was told to wait, to collect my luggage, to go talk to this or that office or desk, to call this business number, to wait more, to just buy another ticket and eat the loss (like it was my fault), and finally after just being a crying mess in front of the Air France desk for the 3rd time, they found a flight to put me on the next day. No one offered to pay for my hotel in recompense for my lost ticket, but they did help me to find a place nearby with a free shuttle. It beats out “Stuck in Bangkok without a Vietnamese visa on Tet Weekend” as my worst airport experience.

So Much We Didn’t Know

In late February, what I like to call “the Daegu Panic” started. Patient 31 (yes the mere 31st person to test positive in Korea) began a super spreader event because they couldn’t stand the idea of not going to apocalyptic megachurch/cult (Shincheonji) and freaked everyone including the KCDC right out, in no small part by lying about their membership and meetings. The government took very strict measures to contain the spread including mask mandates closing/restricting borders, implementing curfews, regular temperature checks, restrictions and bans on gatherings over a certain size, and school closures as well.

When I arrived back in Korea, I self isolated for 14 days (quarantine policies were only in effect for travelers from China back then, and thank gods because the early quarantine hotels were HORRIBLE). The start of the school year was delayed as we all waited to find out what would happen. I remember some of the other Americans in my office saying it would all blow over in a few weeks and scoffing when I said I thought the problem would last anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. Denial was really strong in the early days, and the Korean government issued advisories and policies as if they also expected the entire thing to be gone within two weeks. Every two weeks, a new policy or policy extension would come out, and it felt very disingenuous. At the same time we had a government response that was praised globally as one of the best, we also had this sense of denial pervading everything. Not the denial that existed in the US, no one here really thought it was a hoax or a “mere cold”, but denial about the amount of time and impact it would have on all our lives.

B.V. – Before Vaccine

In early 2020, Korea was having a massive (by early standards) outbreak while the USA was still thinking of COVID as something that only happened to other countries. Looking back at the numbers of the original scary outbreak, they seem so small. 900 new cases a day was a national emergency. Now, we’re happy if it’s less than 90,000. The Korean government acted very quickly, and so we never had the ice trucks of bodies in hospital parking lots. We did have an early mask mandate, swift implementation of limits on gathering and public events, really effective contact tracing due to the way phones are linked to national ID numbers, and everyone who got COVID was 100% covered unless they had broken a ban. By the end of 2020, despite only having 6.5x the population, the US had more than 400x the positive cases and more than 500x the deaths as South Korea*. I felt very very safe. Even safer than many of my other teacher friends who had been forced back into a classroom before the vaccines were out because my university continued to use online classes exclusively for the entire first year and only implemented face to face classes for a small minority of necessary training courses after that.

The population of the US is roughly 6.5x that of South Korea (51m/328m). A recent spike to 300 new cases a day and being brings the 10 month total to 30,000 cases (not deaths, just cases). The US has a larger population, but 300 x 6.5 is just under 2,000. Can you imagine your life in America if there were only 2,000 new cases a day instead of (checks notes) 120,000? 30,000 total cases x 6.5 is just under 200,000, but the US has a total case count of over 12 million. The total death count as of today is 501 x 6.5 that’s 3,257. Meanwhile more than 250,000 have died in America.
A country with 6.5x the population has 400x the new daily cases, 400x the total cases, and 500x the deaths.
Me – November 20, 2020

Every single major event was cancelled. All travel abroad was cancelled. I’m struggling to remember exactly when the curfews went into effect, but since I don’t live in a big city, I didn’t personally encounter them in 2020. It was lonely and boring, but I often felt like I had no right to complain because there were no piles of bodies, no one I loved was on a ventilator, I wasn’t in any danger of loosing my job, my home, my health insurance. And, for the most part, Korea was already a mask wearing, cheap delivery food having country before this hit, so the infrastructure of contactless shopping was solid.

Vaccine Rollout

Then in 2021 the news of the vaccine rollout was everywhere. My friends in Seattle were proudly posting selfies and adopting “I was vaccinated” frames on their profile pics. My family in the south were avoiding it like it was worse than the virus. (EDIT: I tried to give some credit to some family members for doing the right thing, but it turns out they don’t want it, and seem to have doubled down on the Kool-Aid since I last looked). Everyone in America I knew who wanted them had both doses, pharmacists and doctors were looking for volunteers to get the shot so they didn’t have throw away soon-to-expire vaccines, and I was still waiting for my first. Where was the vaccine, Korea? What happened to all the marvelous organization displayed in the crisis response last spring? Get me my jab!

It wasn’t until the SUMMER that we were even allowed to sign up for a vaccine appointment. I got a window of time assigned to me to log into the website and sign up for my vaccine location and time. The demand was so high that the website would not be able to stay up without throttling the access. I understand the desire to prioritize high risk people, but I just never got a satisfactory answer as to why Korea took so very long to roll out the vaccine program. Someone suggested they delayed intentionally in the hopes that a domestic brand would be finished soon, but were forced to give up on that idea. I got my first shot in August, my second was pushed back an extra 2 weeks due to supply issues, and happened 6 weeks later at the end of September. My third this past January was much easier to get as fewer people were scrambling for a spot and supplies were more available by then. I did have to wait again for my assigned window, but it was an overall smoother experience.

The vaccine experience: A huge community center building was converted for the sole purpose of administering and tracking vaccines. Outside, people waited in orderly chairs to make appointments, I assume they could not use the online signup. I showed my appointment confirmation text and went in. There was a long intimidating medical consent form in Korean only. A nurse helped me to understand the consent and allergy questions, then directed me to a seat. After a few minutes three of us were escorted to the next building, asked to take a number and have a seat while we waited to have our forms and ID verified. Then I was sent to another area with another block of chairs and another number dispenser to wait to consult a doctor.

There were 6 private booths, and even though not all of them were in use, it moved pretty quickly. The doctor explained the risks and effects in decent English and told me that they’ll watch me for 30 minutes because of my history of asthma (most people are observed for 15). He advised me to take Tylenol when I got home, and very gravely urged me to get to an ER if I had any chest pain, arrhythmia, or sudden rashes. He put a red 30 minute sticker on my hand and sent me to the next number dispensing area. Here I didn’t wait at all but went directly into a booth where the nurse verified my name and what arm I want the shot in. We chose with left because it was closer to her. It was a short sharp jab and she said something I didn’t understand in a reassuring tone.

There was one last counter to hand over the paper I got at the beginning, now covered in notes from the people I’ve seen. I was given an informative pamphlet on side effects and a paper to bring to my second dose appointment. While sitting in the observation room, in socially distanced chairs waiting to be sure I don’t have some kind of hideous reaction to Pfizer, I got my confirmation text (verifying my first dose is complete and second is scheduled) before I even left the building.

The process of the second shot was similar to the first but much better organized and more accessible to foreigners. They had forms in multiple languages and plenty of staff to assist. I went through the whole process in about 30 minutes from arrival to certificate, and they were even able to print my certificate in English in the vain hope that I would get to travel again! Plus, I got this cute button. The third shot, the booster, was held at the local hospital instead of the community center (which I gather had been converted to a testing center by that time). The organization and support vanished and the hospital seemed completely unprepared to deal with foreigners, but that’s what Google Translate is for.

The Restriction Rollercoaster

There was a tiered restriction policy based on the number of new cases per day in a certain area. (if the website is no longer working, you can see a pdf below). It was a little bit of an organizational nightmare, but it was fairly easy to check online and know the particular restrictions in any given city. The number of people in a café or restaurant was lowered and some places were limited to take out only. Private gatherings and the number of people allowed to sit together outdoors or at one table restricted to as low as 2.

Korean social distancing system Download

Every place had temperature checks, and when you went in, you had to either use an app to register or sign in manually. Even shops without food were limited. I saw a line outside Louis Vuitton of people waiting for another shopper to leave so they could enter. Bus stops had sanitizing sprayers on an automatic timer, and buses had bottles of sanitize duct taped at the entrance and exit. From spring through fall, people could be satisfied with outdoor activities, and the case count dropped to under 100/ day for much of that time. The cold weather drove people indoors and to close windows. By December the daily case count was over 1,000.

In 2021, America tried desperately to “return to normal” with predictable disastrous results. Korea, made mistakes too. Many businesses were hemorrhaging money as a result of the restrictions and were demanding a return to normal. In the second half of 2021, the government lifted too many restrictions too soon and the cases “skyrocketed” (again, in a very relative way think 100s–>1,000s), resulting in an even more severe clampdown than before. I didn’t write about a lot of this stuff while it was happening so I don’t have the best timeline, but I know I went out during the summer with reasonable safety precautions (level 2), and by my birthday in December, any business with food or drink had to close at 9pm (level 4). We joked for months that COVID wakes up at 9pm. I think it was a result of the “Living with COVID19” plan that started November 1st that year and failed like a week later.

Vaccine passes were on every phone, swipe your QR code to enter. Businesses were limited in capacity and often forced to closed early. We went to each other’s houses and probably acted dumber than we would have if we’d just been allowed to stay out until after midnight. It was like we all turned into teenagers sneaking out after curfew. I never understood the logic behind it. I tried to keep to a small group and be safe, but most of Korea just… did what they wanted. It’s an open container country, so you’d see swaths of people just sitting on the curb drinking after they got kicked out of the bars. Police only hassled foreigners about it.

Internal travel was largely unaffected, but external travel was prohibitive. I couldn’t travel abroad at all for any non-emergency reason before the vaccine rollout. Even then, 14 day quarantines, multiple rounds of PCR tests that would not be covered by the insurance since it was for fun. Airfare was 2-3 times more than pre-COVID prices. I spent months checking and rechecking and investigating in the hopes of travelling somewhere that winter since I was finally fully vaxxed. No such luck. Daily cases crept up faster and faster towards the end of the year and the 9pm business closures were not stopping it.

The Phobias aka The Bigotry:

Blaming foreigners isn’t unique to the US, either. Although the level of anti-foreigner violence never reached the peak here that it did in my home country, it was a challenging time, nonetheless, when locals were often scared of us or refusing us entry or service. It’s sadly normal for a culture, any culture, to blame the outsiders for whatever ills befall. While America was busy with Asian Hate, there was a generous helping of xenophobia and homophobia that accompanied the virus in to Korea.

These are not new problems. Enough Koreans were bigoted before COVID that we all felt it. Taxis that don’t stop because you’re skin is the wrong color. Restaurants that suddenly don’t have room to seat you. Shopkeepers who are sure they don’t have your size (even though you can see it hanging in the display). I’ve written about the homophobia in my Seoul Pride posts, but during COVID, there was a small outbreak traced to a gay bar in Itaewon. It was so much smaller than the super spreader events linked to the megachurches, but it was all the homophobes needed to blame the gays for everything.

The majority of my local crowd are also foreign, though I’m pretty sure I’m the only American. I do have a few Korean friends, but they are the kind of people who like foreigners. There are a couple other English teachers from Canada and South Africa, and then a whole bunch of other nationalities represented from all over the Middle East and Asia. I get to hear their experiences too, and even though I deal with discrimination here, it’s nowhere near what the POC foreigners have. Even in Korea, white privilege is real.

The number of incidences of “no foreigners” signs on businesses increased dramatically. There are very poor anti-discrimination laws in Korea. It’s technically not illegal to discriminate against anyone for anything, and so it was pretty impossible to get any action taken. (there are ongoing efforts to pass some anti-discrimination laws, but the Korean version of the alt-right has so far been successful at blocking them) Additionally, we had experiences of being forced to leave public spaces, like beaches or parks, because Koreans called the police on us… basically for being foreign, because we were following social distancing and masking rules. I went on a group tour over the summer to Namhae beach. The tour company had to jump through so many hoops to ensure the permits, and we were all so happy to be out enjoying the sun.

We were carefully separated into small regulation size groups at generous distances and only removed our masks to eat or swim (seawater in a mask is no fun). The locals called the police, and although we were doing absolutely nothing illegal, we were asked to leave. I stayed because my friends had gone on a banana boat and left their things on the beach with me, and I didn’t feel right just taking off without them knowing what was going on. 90% of the group on the beach left. Another friend went on a trip to Jeju and her group was denied access to just about every tourist attraction even though the tour company had procured the permits ahead of time. The employee at the gates simply refused to accept it and turned them away.

The rules were designed to protect us all against large scale risky behavior, but unfairly targeted foreigners. Local/natives could flout restrictions and face nothing worse than a small fine, a few faced the possibility of jail time for knowingly spreading the infection (breaking quarantine while actively sick). A foreigner caught breaking a COVID rule could be deported. 5 people at your dinner party instead of 4 could get you deported. In March 2021 the provincial government in Gyeongi-do ordered all foreigners to be tested. Only foreigners. Other regions swiftly followed suit.

One of the worst was Halloween 2021 when the government announced a literal witch hunt, targeting any place likely to hold Halloween celebrations, which is more often celebrated by foreigners and not a commonly observed holiday by Korean natives, and threatening to deport any foreigner caught at such a party. Also, at one point the mayor of my city actually publicly advised citizens not to go to foreign owned businesses or associate with foreigners. (I don’t have a link as this was something my Korean speaking friends showed me and translated). It was rough. I felt conflicted as well, because however much discrimination we faced, we were physically safe compared with our counterparts in other countries.

The New Normal

In 2022, the government finally realized that containment was a thing of the past, and started to focus on keeping the death count low. With most of the population fully vaxxed, they started to open more things up and that trend remained. Daily cases quickly climbed from a few thousand in January to a high of over 600,000 in March. I myself caught COVID in this time. I had my booster, and I felt safe. A lot of us did, and we were so exhausted of the curfews and the isolation. I went to several smaller (under 50ppl) events and was fine. Then all of us caught it at one birthday party. It was the first real party we’d had since the curfews were lifted, and we were all so excited.

*The chart starts Feb 20, 2020 and goes through April 2022. You can see a current version here.*

I was sick, it sucked. For me it was definitely worse than “the flu” but not as bad as the bird flu I got when I first arrived in Korea at the EPIK orientation. I wanted to just assume I was contagious and self quarantine for 2 weeks, but my school was trying to get me to come in for a face to face tutoring hour. I got a home test from the 7-11 and when that came back positive, I went to the testing center. PCR tests are free if you have a positive home test. I had the oh so horrible experience of the nasal swab, and got my results by text the next day. I worried about the taxi driver who had to take me, even though we were both masked, but I didn’t have any other options. My “flu like” symptoms lasted a couple weeks, and my fatigue and brain fog lasted much longer. Several of my friends who caught the same strain said they experienced similar.

The spike lasted maybe a month, and although the daily new case count is still measured in the 10,000s rather than the 1,000s, it’s getting better, and most people have mild cases and easy recoveries. The last restrictions were lifted including the outdoor mask mandate and the travel quarantines. Outdoor festivals are back this summer, and no one has to scan a QR code at the door of every café. We still mask up indoors when not eating, on transit, and even outdoors if it’s quite crowded. I went into Busan yesterday, and noticed that there are no longer temperature checks at the department stores and sign-ins at the food court. My dentist didn’t spray me down with full body disinfectant at the door like they did last time. Everything looks the same as it did before COVID except now there’s more masks. It looks like Korea will be ok.

As frustrating as many of these things were, I am grateful to have been in a place where almost everyone worked hard to keep each other safe, with a government that offered full medical coverage for vaccines, tests, and treatments regardless of citizen status. The experience was psychologically grueling, but I had a great luxury of safety in my health and my job. Just my luck to make it through all the hard parts and go when the sun comes out. Though as much as I treasure my time here, I don’t think even a fully functional Korea can fill the hole that COVID has left in my soul. I need more. It’s time to go.

Books for Healing: A List

August 12, 2022August 12, 2022 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

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.

Memorial Day Weekend: Korea Edition

June 3, 2022June 20, 2022 / Gallivantrix / Leave a comment

Yes I’ve been radio silent almost a year. Maybe I’ll write about why someday, but the important thing is, I’m ok and I’m slowly starting some new adventures. Thanks for being here always!

In Korea, Memorial Day (현충일) is June 6th, a week later than my American friends and family celebrate the memory of our soldiers with lavish summer backyard barbeques, overt displays of patriotism, and caring about disabled vets for a few days out of the year. I’ve never really noticed any block party style celebrations of Memorial Day in Korea, as it seems to be a more solemn day, but of course, everyone loves a three day weekend, so I expect there will be lots of people going out and enjoying the beautiful weather we are having. There are also official memorial ceremonies at military graveyards and Korean War Memorial sites. But why after 6+ years of living in Korea am I just now choosing to write a Memorial Day post?

*(UN Memorial Cemetery in Busan, Gallivantrix 2016)*

Connected to my last several posts and my year long absence from the blog, I have recently been digging into my own family history. I’ve always known that my paternal grandfather was an ace pilot, and that his general age range put him as “probably served in Korea?” but I never had any facts. My grandfather died when my father was only 10, and as a result, my father has shared fairly limited information about him with me. Since Korean Memorial Day is all about those who fought and died for the Republic of Korea, that means that the vast majority of the focus is on the Korean War (1950-53), so I’m going to tell you about my grandfather, Captain Kenneth D. Chandler.

My grandfather was actually born in Canada, which came as a surprise to me, in 1923. Then his family lived in Arizona and southern California, answering some questions about my father’s family diaspora. Even though they moved around with the military, and I know they were stationed in Hawaii in 1948, because my dad was born there, it seems my grandfather never stopped loving the American southwest. My grandmother lived in Arizona until she died and my dad took me on trips all over the southwest on our family vacations.

I knew that his family was Mormon (LDS) and that he had left the church because when I was driving across America with my father to move to Seattle, we stopped in Salt Lake and found his name in the big Mormon Book of Families (not actually what they call the book). I remember feeling that it was very strange, since he had chosen to leave, and yet the church insisted on praying him into heaven after his death. I suppose that’s kinder than praying his soul into hell, but still kind of creepy. On more than one occasion, the LDS Chandlers have sent me mail. They still track out family tree, but since I have no kids, and I’m my father’s only child, there’s really nothing left here for them to track.

On October 25, 1942, my grandparents were married. Kenneth was 19, and Rose was 16. I can only assume they rushed an early wedding so that Kenneth could could go to war and Rose would not be left with nothing if he died because my grandfather’s military career also began in 1942. I haven’t yet found details of his military record for WWII, but I do know that he was a fighter pilot and flew in Europe. When he returned alive, he and Rose had three children (1946 uncle B, 1948 dad, 1950 aunt M) two of whom I have never met. I’m told that he was a fairly distant father, which is a bit sad, but hardly surprising given that something in his childhood caused him to cut ties with the church and by implication the rest of his family, and that fact that he likely already suffered some form of PTSD by the time his first child was born, and definitely by the time he returned to his family after the Korean War. (I did say I was doing this research for generational trauma healing purposes, right?)

I had already known he was an ace pilot in the Air Force, because my father’s own air force career (not a pilot) was inspired by his father’s. The Air Force family way of life was a pretty big deal in both my homes growing up, as my step-father was also Air Force. I went to air shows, and military parades, and there’s really nothing quite like the 4th of July on a military base. I also had the benefit of travelling widely as a child, and getting early exposure to different cultures and value systems. Although I decided the military was not for me, I think it had a strong impact on who I am as a person, both in my globetrotting tendencies and in many of my morals and ethics. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but I was instilled with the ideals as a kid, and that sort of thing stays with you.

I had further suspected that my grandfather fought in the Korean war, but had no details. The internet, however, provides a near endless resource of information and human connection. Koreanwar.org is a website that connects survivors, veterans, and civilian aides from the war. When I searched for my grandfather’s name, I found a message from 2006, practically next door to where I was living that year. Yun-Kuk (Ted) Kim wrote:

City and State: Edmunds WA
Service or Relationship: friend of a veteran
Comments: Captain Kenneth D. Chandler shot down a MIG-15 in North Korea in December 1951 over Cho-do area. His aircraft, however, was disabled by a MIG’s debree [sic] ingested into his F-86’s engine, knocking it out. He bailed out over the off-shore island of Cho-do. I was stationed there with a US Air Force combat intelligence unit as an interpreter. I happened to be on the beach that day, supervising unloading of a US Navy landing craft. When I saw a Sabre pilot bail out over the Cho-do Bay, I and another Korean airman rowed out into the bay in a row-boat and waited for him. When Capt. Chandler (probably) fell into the water, we grabbed him and pulled him into the boat. We rowed him to a waiting US Navey [sic] helicopter and delivered him to safety and home. I am looking for Capt. Chandler if he is the one I rescued and if he is still alive. (He should be between 85 to 90 years old now.) Appreciate any help. Ted Kim, Edmonds, WA.
Entry 57095 May 10, 2006
https://www.koreanwar.org

Fam, I was shook, and strangely involuntary tears came to my eyes as I read the words of this man who had pulled my grandfather from the sea. It’s not quite as time travellery as that my father would not be born without him, since my father was 3 years old when this happened. Nonetheless, to see that there was a Korean man who touched my family so closely had lived so near to me (I was in Seattle at the time, and regularly drove in and out of Edmonds which is a part of the greater metropolitan area), and that here I am now in Korea looking at his words. I wish I could visit Cho-do bay, but sadly it’s north of the 38. Also, sadly, there’s no email for Ted (김윤국), and I can’t extend to him my multigenerational thanks. Luckily(?) someone replied to Ted later that year to let him know about Captain Chandler’s death.

Thanks to the extra research of a friend after reading this post the first time, I now know that he flew alongside Colonel Dayton Ragland, the only African American to shoot down a MiG-15 in the Korean War. On November 18, just a few weeks before he was pulled from the sea, my grandfather and then Lieutenant Ragland strafed an airfield destroying at least 4 MiGs and damaging 4 more. Although at the time, the destroyed MiGs were all credited to Captain Chandler, I suspect that’s not entirely accurate. Ten days later Ragland shot down the MiG that earned him his only credited shot, and was himself shot down and taken prisoner. Ragland’s story is infinitely amazing, if you want to read more, check out this twitter thread by @hankenstein.

A handful of years ago, when I was visiting my father, he showed me a shadow box he had made of his and my grandfather’s side by side military careers and told me the story of when my grandfather won the Bendix Trophy race.

The Air and Space Museum in D.C. claims that they have the original trophy on display, but my dad says that’s not true, because during the year that it was in his house (1957), my age 9 dad-to-be broke it. One side of the propeller was broken off, and my grandmother had it brazed back together leaving a small bump.

When my then-adult dad had a chance to visit the museum, there was no trace of the damage and repair, so he reasoned it can’t really be the original. A few more tidbits about the race I learned later in my own research: He broke the race’s speed record that day, the previous record was 666 mph, and he flew 679 mph. He was also a wingman to Chuck Yeager in the movie “Jet Pilot” where he flew the plane of the plane of the Russian character Lieutenant Anna Marladovna (Janet Leigh). I don’t know if the two men were friends, but they certainly were colleagues and comrades in arms.

Captain Chandler and 1st Lieutenant Frank Latora, both of the 343d Fighter Group, were killed when their Lockheed T-33A Shooting Star jet trainer crashed 12 miles (19 kilometers) north east of Parker, Colorado, while on a ground-controlled approach to Lowry Air Force Base on the night of Friday, 28 March 1958. Captain Chandler’s remains are buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park, Whittier, California.
Bryan R. Swopes, 2018 http://www.thisdayinaviation.com

My grandmother held on to the Bendix trophy for the next 2 years. She refused to surrender it until there was another winner. There was no official race in 58, 59, or 60, and so no winner was named. I suppose it was a piece of her husband that she didn’t want to relinquish after his death, and she was so determined about it that the race authorities threatened both to remove Captain Chandler from the official record and to put my grandmother in jail before she finally gave up the trophy. Even though she turned it over, the trophy never lived with another family, as it was retired before the next official race in 1961.

My grandfather died tragically at the age of only 33. My dad says he never really got to know his father, who tended to show more interest in the eldest son. Perhaps if he had lived a little longer he would have shepherded his middle child into adulthood, or perhaps he would merely have contributed a different legacy to our family’s generational trauma, but regardless there is no denying that Captain Chandler would certainly have been proud of Colonel Chandler, and I hope of Professor Chandler as well.

This Memorial Day, I remember Captain Kenneth D. Chandler: WWII & Korean War veteran, ace pilot, Bendix Race winner & record setter, and my grandfather. May your memory be a blessing.

*Captain Kenneth D. Chandler, with the Bendix Trophy. (Jet Pilot Overseas)*

Book & Author Review: Gretchen L. Schmelzer

July 21, 2021July 21, 2021 / Gallivantrix / 1 Comment

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:

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.
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.
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)

June 30, 2021June 30, 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 Surv iving, 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.

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