therapy

10 Years of Being The Gallivantrix:

/ Gallivantrix / 2 Comments

At the time of writing, Gallivantrix has 290 posts which average 4000 words each. That’s over a million words or two copies of War and Peace. 

In 2024, I watched as my 10 year achievement flew by. It’s hard to mark a life of gradual change with anniversaries, but a decade is a good amount of time to take stock. I started the blog in May of 2014 while I was preparing to re-launch my international ESL teaching life by heading to Saudi Arabia that September.  As I noticed both of those decade markers fly by in 2024, I thought to myself how nice it would be to sit down and quietly reflect on what the last 10 years has brought and how it has changed me. It is only now, staring down the barrel of the New Year that I finally feel like a quiet sit-down is possible. Still, better late than never. 

A Life Dedicated to Travel

In the last 10 years I have lived and worked in 4 foreign countries, and visited an additional 27. That’s more than ¾ of the international travel I’ve done in my lifetime so far and nearly all of the travel I have done as an adult. But what does it mean to live a life that nomadically?

One of the big things that I encounter when I tell people how I live is envy. I have no illusions about how amazing the experiences of my life have been, nor do I think I live in a way that is accessible to everyone. It can be a bit strange to remind people that I’m not rich, and in fact, have spent chunks of my life being poor, eating from food-banks (charities), and relying on friends for a roof over my head. And, no, I didn’t win the lottery or get an inheritance. Luck, circumstances, and the support of others have played a big role, but also I made a conscious choice to prioritize travel over almost everything else in my life, and then I worked very hard to make that happen.

I found a career that allowed me to work in a variety of countries. I took extra education to gain the necessary credentials. I took terrible jobs to build experience. I reduced my life’s possessions to what would fit in 2 large suitcases and a carry-on. I had no home, no car, no bed, no books, no dishes, no spouse, no children, no pets, no musical instruments, no garden, I gave all my art away, and my sister is keeping the few family heirlooms we treasure. I ate cheaply, used public transit, and wore free, thrifted, or clearance bin clothes. I bought second-hand phones and cheap laptops and used them until they died, relying on my office computer for any big projects. I only got a portable video game system during COVID because I couldn’t go anywhere.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on these things because I don’t have them, but I think it’s helpful to remember that no one actually “has it all”. The people who envy me usually have stable, local jobs, a lease or a mortgage, a car (and payments), kids and pets, a multi-seasonal wardrobe, hobbies and crafts, new phones and complex computer set-ups, and a lifetime of memories in the form of stuff that has to have a place to exist. They can’t afford all of those things AND prolific travel, but neither can I. I didn’t make that choice all in one go, either. It took years of gradual change to reach a point where I have a 2-suitcase life. I had plenty of chances to change my mind and back out, but I *like* my life. I just want others to understand it isn’t a traditional life + travel, it is a life purpose-built for travel.

From the Inside

10 years is a long time no matter what lifestyle you have, and I hope that everyone grows and changes in that amount of time. It is a well-studied phenomenon that travel has a big impact on the human brain, and sustained travel with its joys, challenges, and culture shocks has forced me to look more closely at myself and my place in the world.

Although therapy didn’t take a starring role in the blog until COVID-times, it’s been an on and off part of my personal journey for a while. In the 2 years leading up to the launch of Gallivantrix and my international life, I dedicated a lot of my free time to researching and practicing positive psychology. TED has a wonderful series of talks on the subject and several practical resources that I still recommend to people like Superbetter and AuthenticHappiness.

I believe it was a direct result of this work that I was able to embark on the journey, but it did more than give me the strength to adventure. From 2015-2019, I gradually changed the way I approached interactions with others. Some of this work resulted in stronger, healthier relationships and some resulted in the end of years-long ties. The people who remain in my life are strong communicators & loyal friends. Those who left were, for the most part, not “bad people”, they simply had their own struggles with trauma and healing that left us incompatible. Perhaps the hardest of all of these was with my mother.

From 2020-2022 I dove back into the world of mental and emotional health, this time with a focus on childhood experiences and generational trauma. You can read through my book list in the archives if you’re interested. Even though I made good progress using these tools, the circumstances of the pandemic meant that by the end of 2021 I needed to make plans to leave Korea and get out in the world around other people in order to keep improving. 

Bouncing off to Senegal after years of isolation may have been a bit like trying to ski black diamond right after recovering from a compound fracture. It hit me hard, and you can see most of it in the essays I wrote during that time. I will be forever grateful for the experience, for what I learned and how it changed me, but it was not the joyful return to global travel that I had been craving. It took me 9 more months of trying various things and eventually moving to France to finally find what I was looking for in myself that I thought I had lost in 2020.

10 years of international living, a global pandemic, and a deep commitment to emotional healing later, and I am now a much more emotionally mature person than I was in the past, capable of identifying and sitting with my feelings to understand what is reasonable, and what is reactionary. I am able to approach conflict resolution with an eye toward responsibility and solution instead of blame. I know my limits mentally and physically and I plan my life, work and travel in such a way as to protect the hard limits while pushing soft ones. I want to make the world around me a better place, and while I’m ok doing that one person at a time, I’m also interested in how I might do more. I have learned so much about the world and the human race, that I will never be able to look at it without that knowledge seeping in. At some times that is beautiful, and at others it is profoundly painful. I have flaws, just like every human, but I am learning to love myself, and to extend grace and compassion inward and outward for flawed humans everywhere. I don’t want to look away.

Accommodating My Needs

Whether you want to call it chronic illness, invisible disability or anything else, there is a growing awareness of this category of health issues that limit what people can do without making us unable to work, travel, and live independently. I received my first couple diagnoses as a late-teen/young adult, so it isn’t new to me, but as I age, not only does the list get longer, my ability to simply push through my limits is sharply diminishing.

Back in 2018, I had a real “come to Jesus” moment during a long summer holiday backpacking across Europe. It made me start rethinking my priorities and what tools I could use to make the most of my travels without destroying my physical and mental health in the process. Over the next three trips, and the pandemic induced therapy-work, I slowly built not only a list of practical tools to make travel easier and more enjoyable, but also the ability to accept my limitations. The second one means I don’t get so tempted to do things which will result in burnout later on, and I get to enjoy things I am able to do without dwelling on regrets, missed opportunities, or generally hating my body.

I am more likely to book larger seats on long haul flights because I know the difference it makes in my recovery time and pain levels. I always check the accessibility options for places I will stay, including distance from transit, number of required stairs, and how far the toilet is from the bed. I take extra time when walking everywhere, usually planning at least double the Google Maps estimate. I carry snacks, meds, and water everywhere. I keep a little extra in the budget for when I need to catch a taxi or ride-share because the walk/transit is too much. I accept that hot weather means I’ll need extra rest and extra painkillers, and I must plan to do very few things. 

That last one continues to boggle the mind. Spending spring in France, I was able to walk longer distances and do things for hours, even spending 12+ hours a day walking around some places! I’m never going to be up for a 5k run, but when the weather is mild-cold, I have so much more energy and mental focus and so much less pain. It has become important for me to keep notes when I am in different climates because it’s easy to forget how dramatically the heat affects me, and I need to be able to reference daily and weekly records of my experiences to hold onto the fact that it’s real and not a trick of memory.

Even knowing this, I still choose to go to hot places sometimes, like India… in August. But I made sure to always keep water and NSAIDs on hand, to walk very slowly, use a sun-shielding umbrella, and crank the AC in the car and the hotels. I was exhausted by the end of it, but I got to see some very amazing cultural and historical sites. I also went to Taiwan for 3 months starting at the tail end of August, knowing that the weather would be too hot until October. For the first 5 weeks, I did almost nothing besides go to class and get food. I knew heading into Taiwan that I would not be able to do a bunch of touristy things, but I still wanted the language study and cultural experience, so it was worth it.

Accepting my limits doesn’t keep me from going places, but it changes the way I go and what I expect to get out of it. I may not get as much out of my trip to India or Taiwan as a more healthy and fit person, but I definitely get more out of it than someone who never goes at all.

From the Outside

When I started the blog, I harkened back to the early days of social networking (Live Journal, My Space, and even bulletin boards!) where everyone who was online in those days was producing what we now call “content”. I know I sound like a get-off-my-lawn antique (and I am GenX), but objectively, it’s not just me that’s changed in the last decade. The internet / blog-o-sphere and the world at large have also undergone some dramatic makeovers in that time, too.

Demographics

It’s always hard to compare the present to memories of childhood, so I can’t say how much of what I recall about the travel I did with my family as a child is accurate, but one thing I think is objectively measurable is just the sheer number of people flooding popular travel destinations.

When we lived near the beautiful white sand beaches of Panama City, Florida, my mom and I joked about buying shirts that said, “I’m not a tourist, I live here.” because we felt like we could hardly go near a beach without being accosted by cheap seashell trinkets (made overseas) and green key-lime pie (it’s supposed to be yellow!). Perhaps because of this formative childhood experience, I have never enjoyed a tourist trap even though I have not always been able to avoid them. Yet, when I lived in Florida, the population of the US was 107 million fewer people than it is today. Not all of them visit Floridian beaches, but it stands to reason that the population rise alone will result in more humans per beach.

This NYT headline said in 1984, 27 million Americans travelled abroad, a new record at the time. By 2014 that number was 68 million, and by 2023 it was 98.5 million. Data on 2024 isn’t out yet, but I would bet it breaks 100 million. And that’s just Americans!

The global population has risen by almost a billion (that’s B) in the last decade, and more and more of them are living higher wage, higher quality lives which include international travel. Over 1.1 billion tourists (15% of the global population) travelled internationally in 2014, in 2019 (just before the pandemic) it rose to 1.5 billion (roughly 19-20% of the global population). Obviously, the pandemic saw a lapse in travel, but most statistical analyses agree that in 2024, international travel levels caught up with and then exceeded 2019 levels.

Also, there’s more people living in most of the popular locations. Only a few countries have been experiencing declining populations. Meanwhile, swift urban development and technological advances mean that a smaller percentage of people are living a rural/agricultural life, choosing instead to flock to cities and suburbs for better schools and higher paying jobs. In many places, migrant workers who come in to do things like drive taxis, work in kitchens, clean homes, and do construction do not show up on official statistics of urban populations, yet they certainly contribute to the body count.

When I arrived in Senegal, many people told me that the city had nearly doubled in size since the start of the pandemic, and that the cost of living was skyrocketing as migrant labor from the villages flooded in. Although official statistics show about a 3% yearly rise in population for that city, that is still much faster than the infrastructure can keep up with. Senegalese citizens and immigrants from less stable West African countries want to live in the city because they can earn more money to send home to their families. The flood of people coming in has resulted in overcrowding, lack of adequate sanitation, lack of housing, lack of food, and lack of employment. 

Dakar isn’t a hotspot for tourism, but many developing countries that rely on tourist dollars are experiencing a similar trend, meaning more locals are in the cities we travel to and more of them are struggling to get by. My foray to Zanzibar in East Africa highlighted this most dramatically where I would walk through a neighborhood with no running water to reach the high end resort hotels on the beachfront. As hard as it might be to live in a developing country and see first world lives on TV and the internet, how much harder must it be to see them across the street when you must carry water from the well and dig a hole for a toilet?

Among the expat communities, people who live and work abroad, not just traveling for fun, we have anecdotally noticed an upturn in the tendency to be treated as a “walking ATM”. The rise in the number of locals living in cities but struggling financially has led to a (totally understandable) level of desperation in the competition for foreign dollars that hasn’t always existed. And don’t get me wrong, I feel an enormous amount of compassion for those less fortunate than I who have not had the chances and support or even the citizenship that give me my advantages. However, I cannot singlehandedly change the fortunes of a developing economy with my few thousand dollars. 

Then, when I come back to the US, I am shocked at prices and poverty here, too. 100 million of us may be able to travel internationally this year, but how many of those scrimped and saved to do so? How many are using airline miles they earned buying groceries and gas? How many only go once a decade or once in a lifetime? How many are taking on debt to do it? And of the remaining 235 million, how many are food insecure (47 million), how many are one paycheck away from homelessness (200 million). People shouldn’t travel if they can’t afford it. Please, do not travel on credit! But regardless of how we pay for it, most people can’t afford to go over a carefully planned budget while on holiday.

I want to spend my money on local small businesses when I travel, but it isn’t fair to be treated like a bottomless money pit because we were born in affluent countries. What’s more, it makes for a very unpleasant experience which will only damage the future of their tourist economy. I work hard to avoid these kinds of situations, and have developed tactics over time to deter scammers and hawkers, but it’s exhausting and demoralizing to be walking around a beautiful historical and/or sacred monument only to have to fend off junk-sellers every 5 ft. Many take “no thank you” and move on, but others will follow you around telling sad stories about their kids to try and guilt you into buying some cheap trinket you don’t want.

This experience isn’t new in and of itself, as I recall having had it in China back in 2005, but it feels like the number of such “sellers” and their persistence, willingness to invade personal space, and leverage emotional manipulation has dramatically increased. I think it was one of the big reasons Senegal was so hard for me, as well as the main reason why in places like India and Egypt, I opted to hire local drivers and guides who I can budget a gratuity for in advance, and expect them to act in part as a barrier to the other hands being held out for cash.

The upshot of all of this population growth, demographic change, and economic inequity is that many places are more crowded and fighting harder to extract every penny from the visitors that they can. There are still places in the world that do not have this problem, or at least do not have it in excess, but I feel like it’s much harder now to plan a trip that avoids them, especially if you have any bucket list items that include major historical sites, world-class museums, or unique natural wonders. Maybe it’s easy for me to say because I’ve already gotten to visit quite a few of these, but now when I give travel advice, I tell people to focus on small local experiences rather than grand bucket list ones since you’ll be more likely to have the space and peace to enjoy it.

Going Viral

In addition to the population and economy, there’s one more very large factor that’s changing the face of travel and travel-blogging: the social media revolution. My 5 week stay in Tours France was relaxing, idyllic, and felt almost nothing like tourism at all, but when I left Tours and went on my color-coded-spreadsheet trip of tourist highlights including Disney, Lyon, Marseille, and all the big bucket list spots in Paris I had somehow never gotten around to like the Louvre and Versailles. Although almost every place I went was new to me, the experiences of being a tourist all seemed eerily familiar.

Authors and researchers like Jonathan Haidt have been studying the changes in social media over the last 10-15 years, and there are some fairly strong conclusions about the manner in which content is created and consumed. Other old-fashioned travel bloggers like me who want to share personal content over rubber-stamped listicles are also expressing frustration.

As social media drives attention to ever more similar short-form bucket lists and glam photos, tourist attractions have also started to become homogenized. This isn’t all bad, nor is it fully ubiquitous. I have written before about the fact that cathedrals in western Europe are all kinda the same in the way that roses are all kinda the same, and I still like them both every time. Huge enough attractions like Disney and Versailles don’t need to change too much to keep attracting visitors, and they will always be tourist processing machines filled with photo-happy crowds and overpriced souvenirs. Yet, everything in between seems to be riding a post-Instagram, post-COVID wave of striving to provide travellers with photo-ready experiences that exactly mimic what they have already seen online. Stand in this line to get the perfect photo, order this dish at the restaurant, look for this “hidden gem” that’s now overrun with tourists, and always post your best photos!

I have been going to Angelina’s in Paris since 2015 (that makes it sound like I go a lot. I do go at least once every time I visit, but it’s only like 6-7 times total) and yet sometime between 2019 and 2024 it got internet famous, and for the first time ever, when I went this year, there was a LINE out the door and they were no longer accepting reservations. My patience was rewarded in the end, and when I went back a few weeks later at a better time, there was no line at all. Despite Angelina’s appearing to have handled their newfound fame well, many local restaurants that receive viral treatment do not.

Internet fame can send tourists in droves to small businesses that are unprepared for the volume of new customers which ends up leading to disappointing experiences and bad reviews. Some businesses overextend themselves financially trying to keep up, only to be left with debt when the viral spotlight turns elsewhere. Very few small-scale restaurants survive viral fame, and even fewer benefit from it. Additionally, the desire to have a replica of the online experience leads to long lines at one location while those around it languish. This is bad for both local businesses and for the tourists themselves. The joy of a hidden gem or hole in the wall is that it is unique, different, likely thriving off of local and seasonal ingredients meaning that the dining experience is different from day to day. Meanwhile, viral sensation seekers want to experience what they have seen online and nothing else.

Jerusalem Demas famously wrote, “Tourists are like bees. I don’t want a bunch of them circling around me, but I also don’t want them to disappear.” Developing countries are not the only ones that are both economically dependent on, and simultaneously damaged by increasing tourism. Many large cities in affluent developed nations are experiencing an overdose of tourists that is causing chaos and unhappiness among the locals. This Forbes article goes into more detail of the struggle between reliance on tourism for economic success and the damage that over-tourism brings.

Viral fame hasn’t just damaged food experiences, but also art, music, and nature. One beautiful Mediterranean beach may be edge to edge bodies while a few villages over, a pristine beach boasts only a few locals. The government of the Philippines had to shut down some extremely popular tourist beaches because the sheer number of tourists was damaging the environment, yet there are hundreds of practically empty beaches around the Philippines that no one is going to. Is it because they don’t know about them or because they want to recreate that experience they saw online?

Imitate and Recreate

When “influencer” first became a job, they would try to use clout or ad space to get free meals and accommodations. A very small number of extremely successful ones still can, but remember a billion+ people are traveling every year, so an influencer with a million followers is only 0.1% of the potential market, and most of their followers aren’t actually going to travel, because travel lifestyle influencers are largely aspirational.

Now the issue is less influencers trying to get free stuff and more that a small number of tourists with influencer dreams have their hearts set on recreating a viral photo or video on location. Surveys and polls vary a bit, but generally speaking somewhere between 50-80% of Gen Z consider influencer a desirable and realistic career option, with more than 40% of adults overall feeling the same.

As a result of this, you get people doing choreographed dances in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage site, or self-employed ‘models’ posing over and over in front of the thing that literally every other tourist there wants a photo of. This has gotten so bad that in many places, the government or local businesses have posted signs banning tripods and costume changes.

I am not criticizing dancing nor taking photos. Normal polite people usually spend a few minutes taking photos, arranging poses, and checking to make sure no one was making funny faces before moving on. On the rare occasion I indulge in a selfie, I tend to take a handful before I get one I don’t hate. I think it’s fair to want to look your best in your photos. But these people will stay for 30 minutes to an hour, taking pose after pose or restarting their dance 17 times, all while blocking everyone else from being able to take photos of the site. Tourists are often on a tight schedule, and will end up missing out on their photo ops for their own memories because a wanna-be influencer can’t share.

Even when they aren’t taking photos, they will often sit or stand in desirable photo-op spots to scroll their phones instead of moving off to the side to allow others a chance. And again, I’m not criticizing wanting to check your phone while at a famous landmark or museum or whatever. They might want to make sure photos turned out; they might be checking their itinerary for the day; they might be reading about the site they are visiting to learn more; they might be trying to contact their group; they might even just be scrolling because it’s so crowded and overwhelming that they need a break. All of these are fine and valid reasons to be on your phone. None of them are reasons to block the view while you do it.

AI photo editing has made it easier to cut out unwanted hordes of tourists, but it can only do so much. Plus, my photos are primarily a gateway to my memory. I can wait for the perfect shot or edit out a stray person in the background, but if I look at the photo and remember the obnoxious influencers and pushy junk-sellers more than I remember the awe and beauty of the place I came to see, then what am I even doing?

What Am I Even Doing?

In 2014 when I started this website, there were (according to Google) hundreds of thousands of travel bloggers across several platforms. Now in 2024, those same estimates place the number of travel bloggers in the millions. Far and away the vast majority of them are just in it for the money. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to a bit of extra cash to support an already expensive hobby, but the current monetization model of social media pays for eyes, for attention, for engagement, and so using keywords and creating short 1 min or less content allows social media influencers to maximize money while minimizing effort. Millions of travel content creators exist, yet the format for a travel blog has been trimmed down to those few most monetizable models on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, meaning everything is starting to look the same while containing less and less original or unique information. 

I have never thought of Gallivantrix as something to monetize, no matter how many times well-meaning people suggest that I turn this hobby into a side hustle. I hoped my blog would primarily serve as a way to connect with my loved ones while I was abroad, give people a deeper perspective of the world, and maybe add a soupçon of helping other travelers. 5 years ago when I checked in about my motivations for writing, I stood by my long-form and intermittent style and I am still drawn to long form essays with no particular schedule, but the content of my writing is changing.

I have always been an essay writer, tending mainly towards narrative essays. I used to call my writing style “narrative nonfiction”. Sometimes, I write descriptively, giving detailed accounts of what an experience is like, to paint a picture that my readers can imagine. Sometimes I involve research and write more informatively to talk about the history or broader context of an experience. Since COVID, my writing has taken a more personal bent, with liberal doses of expository and reflective writing.

Writing narrative essays about my experiences not only allows me to share my adventures, it gives me good motivation to go out and do things and to live mindfully while experiencing those things. By setting myself up to notice things “for the blog”, I’m more likely to have a deeper and richer experience and remain mindfully present. Later, writing the memory allows me to review all the photos and relive the experience vividly in order to record it. I may not want to do this for every single place I visit, but it’s a great tool to have in the box.

During my France holiday, I wrote narratively about Tours, and I meant to do the same for the other places I visited, but over and over I came up against the idea that I could not say anything that was not already said both more succinctly and more informatively. 

It seems now when I’m travelling in places that are inevitably viral, I no longer have any interest in publicizing my journey. I still take photos and share them with my friends, and I write little highlights for myself, things that in the past would be the notes I used to write blog posts from later, but I don’t have any interest in spending hours creating content that a million other people have already created. I found that when I am already in a good headspace mentally and emotionally, I am able to be mindful and present in the experience. It isn’t necessary to try to find ways to make yet another blog about Disney, I could just enjoy it.

When I went to South Asia, I was surprised and inspired by Sri Lanka in part because since the civil war and the earthquake, not a lot of people have focused on tourism and travel there. I never have time to write while travelling, so I tucked it away for later, only to be confronted with the contrasting experience of India, and capping off my South Asian odyssey with a visit to a third wildly different environment in Nepal.

I knew I didn’t want to write a bunch of blogs about sightseeing and history at places which have been endlessly blogged about, but I started to think about how I would like to write about South Asia. Nestled in between my May and September decade markers, the trip made me think about who I want to be in my next decade as Gallivantrix. I thought about the essays I wrote in the pandemic about deep emotional issues, those that I wrote while in Senegal about the social, political and economic impacts of colonialism and white supremacy, and about the essay I wrote in France about finding joy in the everyday. I want to combine my experiences as an expat and tourist with what I have learned about the world, historically, politically, and economically, and how the countries I visit fit within that broader understanding. I don’t intend to fully discard narrative or informative writing, but I want to embrace the personal and the reflective.

Is anyone even interested in reading something like that? Wouldn’t it do better as a podcast? A video-essay? Is my approach too old-fashioned, too long, too nuanced, or just not cute enough? Eeehhhh. There’s millions of travel bloggers out there, but I don’t need an audience of millions. I hope there are a few people in the world who will read and think and share those thoughts with others. In the end, I write what I most need to say in order to process my experiences and ideas in a flow of words that may be only for the void.

If you happen to be here in the void with me, Happy New Year.

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk

/ Gallivantrix / 2 Comments

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.

Books for Healing: A List

/ 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 have their own posts as well.

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 us 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!

The last recommendation: 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.

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. If you’re into reading your fiction, then I highly recommend Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series.

A Head Trip (Therapy Books Cont. 2021)

/ Gallivantrix / 2 Comments

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

The Tao of Fully Feeling, Pete Walker

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

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

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

Forgiveness

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

Generational Trauma & Empathizing With Your Parents

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

The “Good Parent” Fantasy

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

When Is Confrontation Helpful or Harmful?

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

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

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

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

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

Neuroscience for Dummies

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

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

The Evolution of Trauma Science

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

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

There were several cases and studies referred 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 [sic]. He raised Justin as he raised his other animals—giving him food, shelter, discipline and episodic direct compassion. Arthur wasn’t intentionally cruel: he’d take both Justin and the dogs out of their cages daily for regular play and affection. But he didn’t understand that Justin “acted like an animal” because he’d been treated as one—and so when the boy “didn’t obey,” back into the cage he went. Most of the time, Justin was simply neglected.”

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

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

Adventure Time: Distant Lands

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

Why am I talking about a cartoon here?

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

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

Distant Lands episode 2 “Obsidian”. Spoilers ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/ Gallivantrix / 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Educated, Tara Westover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Pete Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please stay tuned for part 2 and more excellent books.

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