It was the robocall that got me. Thursday, October 1, 2015. 3:30 pm. Nassau County executive, Ed Mangano, was on the phone:
“Hurricane Joaquin could reach Long Island by Tuesday morning. Now is the time to get your emergency Friends and Family plans in place. And prep those go-kits.”
His voice releases a nasty kaleidoscope of images, sounds, and sensations.
Flash back to October 29, 2012: cold water, gushing through the walls. Jump cut: squished in the attic’s cramped crawl space watching water inch up the aluminum stairs. Natural sound in background, with 110-mile-an-hour winds banging the silver spruce against the roof.
(If the tree crashes into the roof, I’m dead.)
“You don’t have to watch this now,” I remind myself, while breathing in a wave of soothing indigo. As I exhale the color grey, the images fade and I start to relax into the present. (Color breathing is one of the keys to Emotional First Aid, page 63.) The coastal weather forecast says that Joaquin will soon head out to sea. No landfall this time, at least not here. (Whew!) Packing 155-mile-an-hour winds as it whips through the Caribbean and up the South Carolina coast, Joaquin will end up taking thirty-four lives and causing $200 million in damages. In the meantime, no harm in being careful, right?
My go-kit is parked in the front closet. For two and a half years after Hurricane Sandy, I checked that bag twice a week. I know it’s ridiculous. No one else ever touched it. In fact, no one even knew it was there. My ritual of taking everything out, counting supplies, and putting them back, is a sheer waste of time and effort. Each time I unzip it, I cannot help laughing at myself. Like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I have no way to turn off this compulsion. I must complete the entire ritual until the go-kit is repacked and safely parked in the closet.
Good news: The robocall makes me aware that I haven’t checked my go-kit in at least six months. Coming up to the third anniversary, it’s a sign I’m getting better.
I cannot suppress a smile or two when I reacquaint myself with all the wonderful goodies that are going to save me in the event of another disaster. I know it’s absurd to feel happy about rubber gloves and a dust mask, but what really lifts my spirit is the RESTOP. Boy, am I glad I now have RESTOP#1 and #2.
This may be too much information, but after creeping upstairs to the crawl space, dripping wet, the sound of rushing water made it impossible not to feel the need to pee. My prepping had brought in thirteen gallons of water, a year’s supply of plumbers’ candles and matches, six flashlights with batteries, and two emergency radios with LED lights, one of which could be powered by a solar panel, batteries, electric power, and/or a hand-crank. Plus blankets, pillows, and lots of towels. But when that call of nature came—and given the suggestive power of rushing water, you can imagine that sooner or later it had to happen—I wished I had remembered the RESTOP portable toilet I had given my daughter prior to her trip to Thailand.
“I’ve never been to Thailand,” I’d told her. “But I’m thinking that the toilet facilities are probably not what you’re used to.” Who’d a thunk that Mom should have kept a RESTOP or two for herself?
Artfully arranged on the tile floor are my rubber gloves, dust mask, dry cat food (for Bogart in case you’re wondering), wet wipes, water purifying tablets, mouthwash strips, first aid kits, and assorted emergency toiletries in a Red Cross bag. Not to mention a smorgasbord of Meals Ready to Eat (MREs), including beef stroganoff with noodles (contains wheat gluten, hydrolyzed corn gluten, sugar, and “flavoring,”) chili mac with beef (contains potassium chloride, maltodextrin, disodium inosinate, and disodium guanylate), sweet and sour pork (contains maltodextrin, hydrolyzed corn gluten, and “natural flavors”), and scrambled eggs with bacon. Don’t ask.
No peanut M&Ms? Hmm. What was I thinking?
After reading the labels, there is no way I’m gonna pop open one of those aluminum pouches. MRE could stand for More Retching Expected.
What if I swapped them for boxes of peanut M&Ms? There’s nothing like a handful of peanut M&Ms. Sweet, salty, and crunchy, they have to taste a lot better than those MREs. I can probably use them to barter for items like batteries and toilet paper. With peanut M&Ms in my go-kit, I’ll be the most popular girl in the shelter.
A Hypervigilant State
As defined by www.brainworks.com, hypervigilance is:
“A heightened state of awareness is part of the fight / flight response, resulting in a state of chronic hypervigilance . . . brain resources are on constant alert, causing inappropriate or even aggressive reactions in everyday situations.”27
Two words: coastal flooding.
That’s all it takes, and I’m running to the closet to make sure everything is there. I keep a local tide table app on my phone so I can stay alert during high tide. Not that I can do anything about it except watch, knowing I am helpless. I would force myself to stay awake through the early hours, unable to go to sleep until the tide started to ebb. Trapped in cognitive dissonance, I understand that choosing a behavior that leads to helplessness is counter-
productive. But PTSD has its own logic. The hypervigilant state feeds my illusion that if I do (x), then I will be safe.
After a few years, it tends to subside, although friends report that they will sit up through the night, watching for water gushing down the street whenever there is a “coastal flooding” weather alert.
This leads to an obvious question: Why continue to live near the water? It’s a question I ask myself every hurricane season. People come to the sea to relax and to let go of worry, grief, and sorrow. The ocean can absorb those feelings, replacing them with calm and hope. At the same time, loving the ocean is like being in a relationship with someone who has extreme mood swings. Maybe it’s insane, and sure, it’s calmer in the hills, but I get claustrophobic when I’m stuck more than thirty minutes from the coast.
Most of my friends and neighbors feel similarly. A neighbor who rebuilt her home after Sandy described her life as “living in a house of fear.” Asked why she didn’t move, she told us, “I need to be close to the ocean.”
Flashbacks and STUGs
Now I can laugh at myself when hypervigilance is driving the personality. But there is nothing humorous about a flashback. In less than a heartbeat, you find yourself back in the experience you wish you had never had. PTSD behaves like a retro virus. Dormant for years, it can come back unexpectedly years later, triggered by a few bars of music, a smell, or the touch of a breeze against your skin.
Sensory based, a flashback feels a lot like its cousin STUG: a Sudden Temporary Upsurge of Grief. You’re driving, and suddenly Judy Garland is singing Over the Rainbow, and you can hear your dad crooning along, only he’s dead. He’s been dead a long time, but Over the Rainbow whacks you in the heart, and then you’re crying as if it had just happened.
Your body remembers. Your limbic system stores the molecules of emotion going back to birth. A few bars of music, the delicious smell of turkey roasting on the holidays, or the sensation of an ocean breeze against your cheek—any sensory trigger can release a cascade of powerful memories.
For Marcel Proust, the gentle scent of a madeleine cookie on a late afternoon released a flood of recollection that became his seven-volume masterpiece À la recherché du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past).
Literary references notwithstanding, flashbacks are like Post-it’s stuck inside you for the sole purpose of reminding you never to forget. It’s a life lesson I first learned after working as a reporter in Chile.
“It Can’t Happen Here”
Six months after a military junta seized power and assassinated the country’s democratically elected president, Chile was in a state of siege. American and British journalists who had been there prior to the coup had been expelled after reports about mass executions and disappearances. Soldiers were raiding homes and seizing books, which were burned in giant bonfires. Suspicious of ideas they did not understand, the militias even burned Revolution in the Arts and a book on Cubism, believing it referred to Fidel Castro’s regime.
As a young, bilingual journalist with an unquenchable thirst for adventure, I had arrived in Santiago, Chile, after days of traveling overland through the desert in the hope of avoiding any unpleasant questions about my portable Olivetti typewriter and the letter of introduction to the Santiago bureau chief of United Press International.
A few minutes after reading the letter, he put me to work. During the next few months, I covered a search team from Chicago that was looking for information about the death of twenty-four-year-old Frank Teruggi, an American student who had been killed in the first few days after the coup. Teruggi and filmmaker Charles Horman were last seen in the Chilean national soccer stadium, where some 20,000 people had been rounded up—forty-one had been shot in public, including Victor Jara, a folk singer who had been ordered by soldiers to play the guitar. When he sang Venceremos, the Latin American version of We Shall Overcome, the soldiers shot his hands until they were bloody stumps. Jara continued to sing until he was executed. Charles Horman, who was also killed in the national stadium, became the subject of the movie Missing (1982), directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon. Teruggi’s story remains untold.
Nothing prepared me for seeing troops with machine guns stationed behind sandbags at everyday intersections. You couldn’t get to a grocery store without passing a checkpoint.
Chileans coped with dark humor. As dinner would end, someone always joked, “We’d better get home before we’re corpses in the street,” a reference to a 10 pm curfew.
If you were not indoors by then, you could be shot on sight. After midnight, it was not uncommon to be woken up by lions in the zoo across the street, who roared every time there was a burst of machine-gun fire.
Even more unsettling were the reports of concentration camps and torture centers. The family of one of President Allende’s ministers took me under their wing. Letters from the concentration camp arrived heavily censored, but we learned that in Dawson Island, near Antarctica, former cabinet members were forced to do heavy manual labor outdoors without gloves or winter clothes.
The family of former Defense Minister Jose Toha, who stood at six foot seven inches, was told he had committed suicide by hanging—in a room with a four-foot ceiling. Later, they learned he had been taken from Dawson Island to the military hospital in Santiago, where he was interrogated, tortured, and ultimately killed. The Chileans’ nickname for Dawson Island was “Disneyland South,” and “Disneyland North” was somewhere in the desert that I had somehow managed to cross without attracting attention.
“We always thought it could never happen here,” people used to tell me.
Considered the Switzerland of South America, Chile had been a stable democracy since 1932 with a constitution and three branches of government modeled after the United States. Sitting in the living room of my friend’s mock Tudor home, surrounded by pine trees and roses, I couldn’t help but think it looked a lot like Scarsdale. Like Alice in Wonderland, maybe I had slid down a rabbit hole to some weird, distorted version of life at home. But, of course, it could never happen here. That’s what I kept telling myself, just like everyone else around me. I couldn’t help hoping that if I repeated it enough, it would turn out to be true.
Without going into the complicated back story of how President Nixon, his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the CIA supported Chile’s military junta, suffice it to say that it wasn’t until 1988, some fifteen years later, that democracy was reinstated in Chile.
According to a 2011 Valtech Human Rights Commission report, 2,279 people were killed and more than 40,000 were detained, held without charge, and tortured as political prisoners during that reign of terror. My friend’s husband, Orlando Letelier, was eventually freed and granted asylum in the United States. He was assassinated by a car bomb in Washington, DC, on September 21, 1976. His murder was a contract hit ordered by the Chilean secret police to be carried out on US soil. I was privileged to have gotten to know this intelligent, charismatic man before his death.28
The Rule of Three
I don’t know what was more unsettling—the mask of normalcy during the daylight hours or the dark nocturnal silences, punctuated by random gunfire. You could walk through a fragrant park, admiring the majestic snow-capped cordillera to the west of the city, but when you sat down to lunch, the conversation inevitably turned to people being arrested by secret police in unmarked cars. Reports of torture included beatings, rape, waterboarding, and excruciating electric shock.
A detention center in the middle of the city, Palace Grimaldi, was nicknamed “The Palace of Laughter.”
A few weeks after I received an assignment from Newsweek to work on a six-month anniversary background report, I was awakened around 1 am by the sound of an engine idling. It was a Mercedes bus with blackened windows, an ominous presence in the middle of the night. As I watched, a neighbor in the apartment building across the street was hustled onto the bus, in handcuffs. I never knew who he was, but I knew as sure as I was standing at the window that it could have been me.
With that unsettling knowledge, I continued interviewing sources for the Newsweek piece. The bureau chief who had given me the assignment wanted me to find out the number of desaparecidos—those who had disappeared—since the military coup on September 11, 1973.
A close friend had called in a favor to get me an interview with a prominent lawyer. He would know, I was told. But when I presented myself his first words were “I just want you to know that I hate Americans. I hate journalists. And I especially hate American journalists.”
Then he asked what I wanted.
“I’m looking for the number of desaparecidos,” I said, making eye contact.
“Desaparecidos? I can find out for you,” he sneered, picking up the phone and calling the office of General Agosto Leigh, one of the three members of the military junta. Word on the street was that the air force intelligence officials were the most vicious during interrogations. The palms of my hands broke out in sweat and I seriously considered jumping out the window.
But I was in luck. It was a Friday afternoon in February, which is mid-summer in the southern hemisphere, so General Leigh had choppered to his villa on the coast. At least that’s what my source told me the general’s secretary had said, adding that I was to present myself in General Leigh’s office on Monday at 9 am so he could answer my question.
Right.
“You have to go into hiding.”
My boss, my friends, and the family who had taken me under their wing were unanimous. To this day, I have no idea where they brought me. I remember scrunching down in the back seat of a sedan and someone holding a coat over my head while I scurried indoors. There were no flights back to Lima until Wednesday. From Lima, I had an open ticket to New York. From what I remember, I vomited several times, then wrapped myself in a blanket, huddled in a fetal position on a cot, while friends trickled in to comfort me and bring me food.
About twelve people came to say goodbye the night before I was to leave. We were joking about the Rule of Three, a draconian order that said no more than three people were allowed to assemble at any given time. In the wisdom of the junta, four people would be enough to hatch a plot to overthrow the military. Citizens were encouraged to inform on their neighbors, and had anyone been watching, they could have had us arrested for violating the Rule of Three.
Around 9 pm, there was a loud knock on the door. A chilly, clammy sweat broke out at the back of my neck, and I can still feel the sensation of one cold wet drop of perspiration slithering along my spine. I noticed that the young man across the table was staring blankly ahead, his pupils swollen and dark, in contrast to his complexion, which had suddenly transitioned to a waxy glaze.
“They’re looking for you,” my boss said. “You never showed up for your appointment on Monday.”
“They’ll never find her,” said someone else.
Of that, I was not sure.
Then someone joked, “Maybe we’ll get to visit Orlando in Disneyland South.”
“It’s going to be the Palace of Laughter,” another friend said.
I realized that it didn’t matter, in the end. There were more than three of us and we were about to disappear.
By that time, everyone had stopped speaking, and I think we were all holding our breath. I know I was. Someone answered the door and shrieked. I slid off my chair, hoping I could hide under the table. But it turned out to be a shriek of unexpected happiness. My friend’s father had driven past several checkpoints to hug me goodbye.
The next morning, with my notes taped to my body, I went through three checkpoints and watched calmly as soldiers emptied out my suitcase and carry-on bag. They were suspicious of the poor Olivetti.
“Why do you have that?” two of them asked.
I smiled as sweetly as I could and lied.
“My fiancé is in Vietnam and I write letters to him every night.”
They let me on the flight.
Jorge Chavez International Airport, named after a Peruvian pilot who crashed his plane into the Alps, had never looked as good. There were no incidents and I got home in one piece—sort of.
Lima, Peru, used to remind me of the Bronx with palm trees. Even though it was grittier than Santiago, after my experience there Lima seemed like an apex of civilization. I was welcomed back with dinners and nightmares and lots of cigarettes and wine. Due to severe censorship in next-door Chile, neither my bureau chief nor my friends in Peru had a clue as to how bad things were there.
Six months later, back in New York, I was working as a reporter for the United Nations news service. My apartment, across the street from the UN, overlooked a pocket park. It was about as peaceful a setting you could find in midtown Manhattan, except in the middle of the night when sanitation trucks rolled up for their nightly collection. When a truck drove over a manhole cover, releasing a loud crackling sound, I rolled out of bed onto the floor and rolled myself under the bed, hyperventilating. I spent the rest of the night there, waiting for a knock on the door.
If it only happened once I would have written it off, but it soon became a pattern. There was not a lot of information about post-traumatic stress disorder in 1975 B.I. (Before Internet). Working in newsrooms in New York and London in the early 1970s, I had produced several stories about Vietnam veterans having similar reactions in public places.
That couldn’t be happening to me.
I was never in the military and did not think I had been through anything comparable to Vietnam. But when the pattern persisted, I went for psychiatric help and was relieved to find out that yes, escaping with my life counted, and yes, I had a classic case of PTSD.
“Let Us Dare to Be Tender”
My first resolution after being diagnosed was to volunteer with human rights organizations: Amnesty International and the National Council of Churches human rights division.
Nobody wanted to know. Concentration camps? Those ended with Hitler, I was told. Torture in Chile? Isn’t that the country that Henry Kissinger called “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica?”
It was an uphill shlog. My UN colleague, Lelai Lelaulu, and I started a human rights committee at the Overseas Press Club in 1976 and in 1980, I suggested to Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review that there was a need for an independent organization dedicated to helping journalists in other countries who were often targeted for indefinite detention without charge simply for doing their jobs. That suggestion led to the formation of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which continues to fight for journalists’ rights around the world.29
Ten years later, after I got sick due to burnout while covering the Iran-Contra hearings at CBS News, I changed careers. After completing a doctorate in cognitive psychology, I started my practice specializing in helping people through acute stress and traumatic situations.
The most important work to grow out of my experience as a young reporter in Chile is the commitment to be present with those who have gone through life-shattering events and to offer information and support so that they do not have to go through it alone.
In addition to years of clinical study, specialty certifications, and work in the field, I believe that my biggest strength is living with PTSD. Time and again, I get feedback that because I know what someone is seeing, hearing, and feeling—because I have been through it myself—it has helped someone to accept that it is normal to be wounded and it is okay to feel hurt. With humility and patience come the acceptance that opens the way to a path of healing and growth. After our descent into the heart of darkness, we can now begin moving towards the light.
In the words of Belguim’s King Philippe, on the first anniversary of a terrorist attack that killed thirty-two people and injured some 320, “Let’s learn to listen to each other again, to respect each other’s weaknesses. Above all, let us dare to be tender.”
Keys for Living with PTSD
Ask yourself: