In twenty years as a marriage and family therapist, I have learned a great deal about Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, hereafter PTSD. I have learned every bit of it involuntarily, by working with survivors who had themselves involuntarily become victims. No one volunteers for PTSD.
This book is organized around case studies and client profiles. All of the profiles have been fictionalized, as I have combined various stories and changed all identifying details.
From these courageous people, I have garnered what it means to have survived a trauma which, by definition for PTSD, is a trauma outside the normal realm of everyday life--with all of its inherent wounds and pain. As clients have shared with me their heartaches, their hang-ups, their suffering, their sadness, their depression, their anxiety, their weakness and their indomitable strength, I have pieced together, from many faces, the picture of the trauma survivor.
This book is my attempt to share with each of you what has been given so generously to me as clients have allowed me to learn with them and from them and because of them. One of the best ways to get through a trauma is to find meaning in the trauma. This is what Betty Rollins did with her cancer experience when she wrote First, You Cry. Viktor Frankel also wrote Man’s Search for Meaning at least in part to find empathy for himself and others and to help us learn from his traumatic experiences at Auschwitz.
Let me introduce you to PTSD in much the same way I was introduced to it: one story at a time. I think you, too, will come to see the many faces of PTSD--perhaps especially the one looking back at you from the middle of the cover of this book. It is my hope that you will come to understand and appreciate with great compassion the multiple effects, often lifelong, of trauma, whether it be your own trauma or the trauma of another.
One important, irrefutable caution: I attended a weeklong workshop run by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. It was a workshop on death and dying, and at least half the participants were terminally ill. The rest of us were those working with the dying. One of her resounding messages, as each of us tried to minimize our own grief, was that “it doesn’t matter if the elephant is standing on your little toe or your whole foot.” In other words: DO NOT compare your pain or your trauma to that of anyone else. Trauma is trauma. Honor it.
After the stress of trauma a number of resultant devastations litter the psyches and behaviors of survivors, like the branches and debris on the ground after a storm. The smaller the storm, the smaller the amount of fallout. The greater the storm, the greater the number of casualties, including the wounded and the dead, whether literally or metaphorically.
Let me also say how important it is that the psychic house one has built be strong. Biblically, the prescription is to build our houses on rock, not sand. Obviously, a child has only a sandcastle, a structure easily destroyed in the slightest of storms. And, indeed, it is the rare adult whose psychic house is so firmly constructed that the house can withstand trauma.
Our psychic houses are a multi-generational construct. Their foundations are a legacy from our grandparents and parents of good discipline, security, joy, encouragement, sound boundaries, strong values, reasonable beliefs.
Our culture and societal group decides what the houses look like, how they present themselves to the world. To use some popular stereotypes: is this house going to be a fanatically clean, hard-working Germanic home or a sprawling, colorful, easy-going hacienda? Then we furnish it with what’s important to us: books, music, the latest technology, beautiful clothes and jewels, children, pets, fancy furniture or comfy stuff, food from gardens. You get the idea. Then we go about either welcoming people in or keeping them out. Those lucky enough to have been gifted and prodded to create strong houses will be much more likely to come through a trauma psychically intact. Soldiers, for example, who went to war with no previous traumas in their lives, had a template against which to contrast the irrationality and insanity of war.
Enough introduction. Still, that’s more than I had before I met Brenda.