Trauma does not leave you

I listened to an authority on trauma being interviewed this week in relation to the 20th anniversary of the Bali bombings in which many Australians lost their lives.. The doctor in question said that people who suffer trauma are often told stupid and impossible things like “needing to put it behind them” or “get over it.” However the truth is there is no easy formula for addressing trauma and traumatic events which according this man end up leaving a permanent scar on the soul for the rest of a person’s life. That said there is also a phenomena of traumatic recovery which has been given the name post traumatic growth and this means that as a result of suffering wounding or trauma we learn a lot and may develop qualities like a deeper sense of empathy, compassion and understanding of the path of both suffering as well as reaching for recovery in the after math of things that cause difficult feelings and results for us.

In the same program a survivor was interviewed and he shared how coming out of the experience of being wounded and traumatized following the bombings in which he lost friends he struggled with suicidal depression for a long time. In time he found ways to address the trauma perhaps due to the fact he had a loving partner who stuck by him through thick and thin but still getting help for him was not easy and he even rejected some attempts by others to help him which is something I could really relate to coming out of my own trauma..

When you are living on the inside of the trauma you do not have the ability to objectify it at all, as outsiders have done.. Not having bodily gone through the experience you do not really know how it feels at all, since you did not go through it, so often being told things like “i understand how you feel” is not really all that helpful and may be met with rejection from a trauma survivor.

Living on the inside of trauma there is a lot going on that you have no control over such at the deeply embedded somatic recall that may not even be present beyond the level of unidentifiable sensation that overwhelms you.. There is an expert on trauma Peter Levine who works with those undergoing the bodily sensations through a process to which he has given the name somatic experiencing. In this experience he helps people to enter the symptoms for a time to make sense of them but not stay there in a frozen state to the point of being totally immobilized, in fact in some of his work with victims who had a trauma that completely overwhelmed and immobilized them, Levine will get the person to either make running movements or imagine themselves running away.. He may also get them to pendulate into and out of the experience and work to get them to shift the focus from the paralysing Gorgon’s head effect and magnetic attraction of the traumatic event/sensation onto something in the present or past that was life affirming or gave their spirit a sense of uplift, life, positivity, joy or hope.

Anyway on this issue of other’s not understanding and so feeling upset I found myself getting super vocal and angry today with a family friend talking over how trauma affected me in the absence of empathy or understanding in my family. Coming out of my near death accident at 17 I was never given any counselling at all. I know times are very different now, or things are changing, after all this was toward the ending of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s when not as much was spoken of in terms of anxiety, depression, trauma and mental illness.

So it was interesting last night to listen to an interview with a rock journalist Jonathan Seidler who was diagnosed with Bi Polar 2 disorder in his 20s. Jonathan has recently published a book about his father’s struggles, mental illness and suicide It’s A Shame About Ray which he discussed on the program. Jonathan had his own issues in the 80s and was a resident of Eastern Sydney, he came from an affluent family and his father was quite a compassionate man, a doctor by profession. If you would like to listen to the interview the link is here.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/jonathan-seidler-it-s-a-shame-about-ray/101529498

It was good to hear Jonathan talk about the issue of opening up around mental health issues. As a music lover and rock journalist he also related to those of his contemporaries in the rock industry that either made attempts on their life or struggled with mental health. Like many of us Jonathan had been using writing as a way of working through complex feeling of being a person with a multi-generational history of Holocaust trauma which no doubt played a huge part in him developing Bi Polar 2 although that history was only alluded to indirectly in the interview with ABC journalist Andy Park last night. But hearing these stories of how others cope and the struggles they had in coming to terms with both trauma and mental illness must surely make those of us also working through our trauma and family suicide issues feel less alone.

Actually speaking all of this through with Kat in therapy today I said to her “I don’t really have a right to be angry about not getting any kind of support after all of my trauma do I, really, after all they were different times?” But Kat affirmed that I do, that my feelings have value.. But you see the way I was conditioned in my life was not to protest as when and if I did protest then I would be seen in some way as the problem. So what I did instead was take myself off or try to manage everything on my own.. It started as a young child turning to books and films to try and make sense of things that confused me and it continued on in that way for so many years. And so my fight impulse got dumbed down and I so often learned to fawn or freeze or revolve around the needs of the one s who could not see mine or even allow me to have and experience those needs without feeling shame. But after all, as I am seeing, my parents were never parented so how could they parent me as I needed to. And just like Richard whose father suffered and struggled I absorbed the pain into my own body where it festered and then broke out in a series of accidents that nearly cost me my life and one which occurring at the age of 43 nearly totally derailed the next 15 years. That is a lot to have gone through and a lot to accept and it is a process coming to terms with these things part of our deep soul journey whose imprints, in reality, never really leave us.