Her Story
Mary appeared in silence. She had practiced and perfected invisibility.
She was about thirty. Who could tell? Her brown hair hung over her face and eyes. Her brown glasses were all you really saw. She wore, for eleven of our twelve group sessions, a brown shirt, brown pants, brown socks and brown shoes.
The group she was part of was a research project run by the School of Nursing at a Midwest college. The counseling department had been contacted to send a graduate student to help facilitate the group. They sent me. This was my theoretical introduction to PTSD. It was baptism by fire.
The group was structured so that each week one of the participants would tell her story, and the other group members would listen, empathize, support, encourage, validate and brain-storm. I don’t know how many lives the group changed. What I do know is that it changed mine.
The stories were incredibly difficult to hear. One woman told us about her father being her pimp. First, her father introduced her to drugs. Then he helped her become addicted to drugs. Then he withdrew the drugs. He would give her the drugs to which he had addicted her only in exchange for her having sex with whomever he brought home to her. He was not only her pimp, but her constant “John” as well. Her mother was elsewhere in the house when she was being raped by either her father or someone he met on the street.
Another woman told of her husband’s violence and torture. She, like Brenda, said she lied to the emergency room doctors. Once, she said, she had told the truth at the hospital and her smooth-talking, maniacal husband had her committed to the psychiatric unit. The one detail of her story I remember most clearly was what she did for therapy. She cleaned her entire bathroom with Clorox and a toothbrush. It gives some indication of how dirty she felt.
A third woman’s poignant story was of her and her sister and the bedroom they shared. The steps came up in the middle of the room and her sister’s bed was on one side of the landing, and her bed was on the other side. She would lie still under the covers at night and listen for her father sneaking up their steps. Her mother was asleep downstairs.
She would pray that just this night; he would choose her sister to rape. But, then, if he did, she would writhe silently and sob soundlessly, stricken with guilt that she had prayed such a selfish prayer and that in her childlike understanding God had answered her prayer.
The story Mary had to tell was radically different. Her tormentor was her older brother. He never laid a finger on her, and he never talked to her. But from the time she was eleven until he left home eight years later to join the service, he and his friends had a little game they liked to play with her.
Her brother had drilled, hammered, knocked out, hollowed out and, in many other ways she didn’t know, made holes in the floors, walls, ceilings and doors of every room in the house. Mary never knew when her brother and his friends were watching her through the peepholes.
She told her mother about it and was slapped and told never to say such things about her brother, the golden child in the family. She told her father and he said, “So? Don’t do anything you don’t want him to see.”
For eight years, then, about three thousand days, Mary had a viewing audience. Every time she ate a bowl of cereal, read a book, watched television, scratched an itch, took a bath, changed a tampon, or looked at herself in the mirror, someone else might be watching, too. Oh, sometimes she knew for sure he was watching. Sometimes she knew for sure he wasn’t watching. But most of the time there was uncertainty. Constant, predictable uncertainty.
Her Signs
It’s hard to identify Mary’s signs. There were so many, and they all seemed to flow into one another: hyper-vigilance; low self-esteem; inability to interact with or relate to others; lack of eye contact; soft, hesitant, mumbled speech; dullness; helplessness; lack of vitality; no trust in self or others; paranoia. You know the old joke: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not following you, or, in this case, watching you.
Perhaps Mary’s most difficult symptom was her lack of interest in anyone or anything. She didn’t look at anyone, wouldn’t talk to anyone, never said hello or “screw you” or anything else. She simply moved through and around other people with no engagement. She held a minimum wage job as a cleaning person, which meant she was never able to emancipate and establish any independence. She was therefore doomed to live in the house with no privacy. So, she remained at the mercy of the mother who slapped and the father who blamed, and, with or without the brother, her need to stay invisible continued.
Hopelessness was her most loyal companion. She felt absolutely and eternally stuck. Her father, a deacon in a fire and brimstone church, insisted on her attendance.
“If you’re going to live in my home,” he thundered, and then he told her the rules. So three times a week she had reinforced for her the lessons of wrath and vengeance and penitence. It also might have been mentioned once or twice that God was watching us and saw everything we did. God, also, she was reassured, was keeping a divine accounting book. All of which added up to Mary’s belief: Not only was this world unpredictable and unsympathetic and unsafe--so was the next.
Her paranoia was a logical extension of her lifelong struggles. She was, reasonably, unable to trust anyone. She had no self-esteem and no belief that she herself was capable of anything other than being psychically invaded, scrutinized, observed, and, most of all, found inadequate. She felt unfit to live and unfit to die.
Her Steps
It was week ten when Mary came in wearing barrettes in her hair. It was not a flattering hair-do by any means, but we all told her how good she looked because we could finally see her pretty face. This was a huge leap of faith for her. She showed herself to the group. The turtle’s head came out of the shell.
Week eleven Mary told her story. Despite her expectations, which she falteringly expressed, she was not minimized or marginalized. These other trauma survivors could not begin to imagine what eight years of day and night hyper-vigilance must have been like. We all wanted to tar and feather her parents. We uniformly found her brother despicable. And the entire group encouraged her in every way they knew how.
They talked about affordable housing, re-training programs, and existing groups which they had found and which would provide long-term support. They threw out a mountain of suggestions about self-help and self-esteem. She listened. She looked at the speakers. She cried, and she smiled.
This very vital third step, drawn hopefully from the previously unknown comradeship and compassion of the group members, allowed Mary to be able to receive. She actually absorbed our empathy, our hugs, our ideas, our presence, our honest concern for her. She took it in. She seemed that night, before our eyes and with our help, to decide she was fit to live.
Week twelve, the final week of the group, after she had revealed herself to us physically--by showing her face--and emotionally--by telling her story, Mary arrived at group wearing her hair pulled off her sweet face. Her brown glasses, her brown pants, her brown shoes and brown socks were still there, but her blouse was pink.
A note on being able to receive: As I’m writing this book, I am, of course, continuing my “day job,” as they say, and seeing clients. Last night I was talking with a woman of about thirty who came rushing into my office and sat down, sighing, “Ah, peace. I can completely relax here.” I asked her about her home and whether there wasn’t somewhere at home that she could relax. “Only my bed,” she said. Her house is almost completely bare. Nothing on the walls, nothing comfortable on which to sit. She feels she has to be prepared at every moment to leave, to run, to escape. She told me about traveling. She always wears tennis shoes and carries only one bag. If anyone approaches her or bothers her, she is prepared to drop her bag and run. (She’s a professional athlete and she knows she could outrun most people.)
Now here’s what I believe this has to do with her ability to receive. She cannot take inside herself any kindness, any generosity, any safety from anywhere in the world. She must always be hyper-vigilant to risk and danger. Her hyper-vigilance demands that her radar never be shut off, except when she sleeps. Because she is so busy keeping out danger and pain, she is unable to take in peace or pleasure. She is unable to receive the beauty of art work on her walls or the vibrancy of paint. She is unable to do as her husband wishes and buy comfortable furniture. She is unable to receive love. She and her husband have been married five years and have not yet consummated the marriage. In all ways, she has been unable to receive.
*****************************************************
If we are busy keeping danger and pain out,
We will probably not be able to let peace and pleasure in.
*****************************************************
My Story
The story of Mary may seem like a strange choice, but it provides us with an incredibly valuable lesson about PTSD: its variability. Not all traumas are of the same magnitude, and not all trauma survivors would be equally affected by similar traumas. What makes trauma so variable is how it is absorbed and stored in the body of the victim. I’ve already relayed the idea that veterans coming back from war, if they had fairly normal, loving families and fairly uneventful lives before deployment, are less likely to have as hard a time with trauma as those who were traumatized as children. This is because trauma grows on trauma. Trauma provides fertile soil for the rooting and propagation of new experiences to be stored as traumatic. Each successive trauma a person survives deepens and compounds the damage from each previous trauma.
Mary’s family set her up to take the blows of life very hard. She had no support, no affirmation, no kindness, and no compassion. Her family’s way of being in the world and her family’s beliefs about God, that God is vengeful and punitive, denied her the existence of any softness or succor. She was born into a life of isolation and she was ill-equipped to rise above it or to separate herself from it.
The early lesson I have carried with me from this brown, broken child/woman, was very Biblical: Judge Not. We cannot know what might be stored by one human being as trauma based on genetics and environment. If we are chemically programmed for anxiety or depression, or if we have hormonal imbalances, or any of the other many vagaries of composition which make us more “fragile,” we are more likely to be afflicted.
Others of us seem to have been programmed with additional resilience.
My childhood friend, Karen, for example, who lost a teenage child and withstood incredible coldness, cruelty and lack of support from her husband for their thirty-some years of marriage, is one of the most cheerful, upbeat, positive people I have ever met.
She continues to astonish me, and she is not acting. This is who she is. What has made her so resilient, so tough, when others crumple under much lighter burdens? It’s a mystery to me. But, I am aware of it and I am respectful of it. We are not all created equally in our ability to withstand the tsunamis of life. I am mindful not to judge others by Karen’s standards. We’d all fail.
*****************************************************
I am proud of my resilience.
And I will not compare it to that of anyone else.
*****************************************************