His Story
Alan grew up poor. He was poor in every way imaginable. The second of six children born to a day laborer and a stay-at-home housewife, there was never enough of anything at his house. Not enough food, not enough beds, not enough supervision,
not enough conversation, not enough attention, and not enough love. In fact, although he would never come out and say it, there was no love. There was sex, violence, chaos, manipulation, victimization, brutality, martyrdom, filth and neglect. Not much room for love.
There were two main bullies in the family and two predominant victims. Looking at a family photograph, it’s easy to see who was who. The oldest brother and the father were tall, broad, scowling men. The mother and Alan were shorter, slight, and instead of anger and hatred in their eyes, their gazes were full of resignation and sorrow.
Alan’s older brother practiced his boxing skills on Alan. He rarely stopped until there was a knockout. Then he’d sling Alan over his shoulder and carry him upstairs and drop him unceremoniously on the bed they shared. Alan complained to his mother one time. He was told to shut up. She had serious things to worry about.
Alan never told about the other kind of abuse. Some days when Butch the Bully was feeling magnanimous, he’d order Alan to perform oral sex on him. Or he’d sodomize Alan. Those were Alan’s two options: sexual abuse or physical abuse to the point of unconsciousness. Alan preferred getting knocked out.
Other crises plagued their lives as well. Alan told about a time when he was eight and the phone rang. Alan answered it to hear a woman’s voice demanding to speak to his dad. He called for his dad to come to the phone because some lady wanted to talk to him. His father left the house shortly after that and stayed away for three years. The family blamed Alan. It was three years of intense poverty. Mom took a job working three to eleven. Alan, at eight, nine and ten, made dinner for the four little ones and got them to bed. Butch was out on the streets commencing his lifelong drug habit.
Dad came back and Mom took to the couch with a meandering stream of illnesses. What cooking, cleaning and laundry got done, Alan did. For what he did accomplish, he got no credit. For what he didn’t, he received constant criticism and blame.
Only three positive memories remain from his childhood. Evenings, two or three a week, or whenever he could sneak away, he’d run the six blocks to the railroad track and hop through the open door of a freight car to sleep in the peaceful, rocking, safe haven of a wooden box on wheels. In the middle of the night he’d rouse himself, roll out of the boxcar, and sit beside the track until another slow-moving train appeared going back the other way. Most people would have called it “toward home.” Alan simply said, “Going back the other way.”
A second positive memory was the little hideout the mother of one of his friends fixed up for him under her porch. She somehow knew something was going on and that it was awful. She showed him the opening under the porch floor. I’ve always envisioned one of those porches with a lattice covering between the porch and the ground. She put an old sleeping bag and a pillow there. He’d come, sporadically, to find a candy bar or a pop or perhaps a sandwich made from her family’s leftover supper. She apparently never said a word about it to anyone. She simply, silently, offered him shelter. When I saw Alan as a client, this woman was in a nursing home suffering from cancer. Alan was her most regular visitor.
And the most pervasive positive memory of Alan’s childhood was school. Alan was brilliant. Math, science, music, art, writing, reading--twelve years of straight A’s. Alan graduated as valedictorian. He was awarded a free ride to college. Then he chose law school. He thought the greatest power for change and justice was through the legal system. All the way through school, he stood out from the crowd.
He married his high school sweetheart and opened a private practice with a few colleagues in his home town. Alan and Anne had two beautiful daughters and then a handsome, dimpled son. They bought a lovely big home with lots of land all around it. He was highly regarded as the guy you went to with any legal problem of any kind. His partners made the big bucks, but it was Alan who brought the clients in the doors.
His Signs
As an adult, everyone loved Alan. He was wise, compassionate, funny, charming and unceasingly kind. Everyone loved him. But, no one knew him. He trusted no one. Not his wife. Not his family. Certainly, not his mother. Not his colleagues at work and not his clients. Everyone was kept at a distance. He set up his life so that no one could hurt him. But, of course, they did anyhow. And, when you try to keep people from hurting you, no one can help you, either.
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When you shut people out so they can’t hurt you,
No one can help you, either.
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Alan gave of his time and his expertise. He always ran late with his clients because he wanted to be sure that everyone who interacted with him got everything they needed. He needed to continue to be held in the highest esteem. No one could be dissatisfied with him or critical of him in any way. He worked tirelessly to prevent any negative view of himself. He needn’t have worked so hard. He was considered the best lawyer in town, the one who could find a way to save your house or get your children out of trouble or help you sue the doctor who hadn’t done his job or probate your crazy grandmother. You went to Alan with a problem, and he found a legal solution.
Somehow, though, it didn’t seem to make any difference to Alan that everything he had worked for had come true. He was living the rags-to-riches American dream, but nothing was enough because nothing could fill the void his childhood of abuse and neglect had created. He was empty inside.
The first outward symptom that materialized was his eating disorder. He tried to fill that bottomless emptiness with food. The pounds slid on and then a beard materialized to hide the extra chins. He worked harder, had increasingly less time, and took increasingly casual care of himself. He was making apparent and obvious his long held belief that he didn’t count.
Next came a divorce, which seemed for a while to bring about some peace and a new, hard-won self-esteem. The weight came off; the teeth got whitened. An expensive new haircut and tailored clothes made him look and feel like he was taking charge of his own life. He devoted himself to his children, determined to be the best dad possible.
He was unconsciously re-parenting himself as he parented them. He played for the first time in his life.
Then came the hard-fought awareness. He was gay, not straight. He was a homosexual. What a conundrum for a lawyer, as it has always been for doctors and teachers and Boy Scout leaders and any one else we respect as a civic leader or allow to have access to our children. (This stiffly held prejudice shows such a lack of understanding about pedophilia--an ignorance, let’s say. But, that is someone else’s book.) Alan kept his sexual life absolutely separate from his children, his family, his friends. He worried unceasingly about being found out. His liaisons were on dark streets in other towns. His self-esteem plummeted. The cost of being gay, for him, was to live a secret life. Be true to himself about his sexual orientation? No, better to live a life of secrets and shame.
He said he was finally able to relax and feel safe when he could lie in bed with a lover after sex and rest his head on the other man’s bare chest. (Remember our saying the only time a trauma survivor can relax is after the trauma? In this case, perhaps the only time Alan could relax was after a re-creation of the trauma of same gender sex.)
Alan had a client who was suing a young, attractive female attorney. He vacationed with a group of young professionals, all single, which included the attorney his client was suing. He was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with this young woman. According to the allegations, he had violated a lawyer/client relationship when he had begun a sexual relationship with the opposing counsel, which was an ethical violation since it involved a dual relationship and a potential abuse of power. First of all, Alan as an abuser of power was non-credible to anyone who knew him. Secondly, this struck me as ludicrous because those of us who knew he was gay, knew he wasn’t going to be in a sexual liaison with a female.
Months later, Alan, who had been “gay” for about four years, told me that he was, in fact, dating the young woman with whom he had been accused of impropriety. His total confusion about his own sexuality, I have come to understand, is a cruel and despicable remnant of same gender sexual abuse. As if the trauma of it all wasn’t horrendous enough, the resultant confusion and lack of peace about one’s own sexual orientation has got to be one of the most damning legacies of this kind of PTSD.
The shame and the guilt from the allegations compounded Alan’s inner turmoil and deepened his depression and heightened his anxiety. He tumbled off the pedestal of respect he had worked so hard to ascend and a vicious downward spiral of shooting himself in the foot started and seemed as unstoppable as the freight trains of his childhood. He closed the lucrative, successful private practice and downsized to a solo practice in a smaller office and then to a room in someone else’s practice. He seemed unable to notice or comprehend that his clients followed him wherever he went. It was apparently too little too late. The last I knew he had taken a job in another town in a neighboring state working as legal counsel at a children’s home. I’ve always thought it the most poignant job change and amazing metaphor. His PTSD had made Alan feel like an orphan all his life. Perhaps working with other orphaned, abandoned children would help him free himself from his childhood demons.
The big house was sold and the succession of bad business decisions and mistimed moves no doubt added to the agony of his feelings of defeat. He was still young, under forty. I can only hope that some of his later steps, those of which I have no knowledge, have proven healing and redemptive. I do know what earlier steps he had tried, and they were credible and creative.
His Steps
First of all, there were the medications. Because his brother was a drug addict, Alan was very cautious with all medications. He would try half dosages and always used as little of something as he thought might possibly help. Nothing seemed to touch his depression. To take as much medicine as might begin to make a difference, he’d start getting neurological side effects, tics, for example. His eyes would twitch as if he were having involuntary spasms of some kind.
This inability of some PTSD survivors to tolerate medication is another horrible,
cruel legacy of their traumas. I believe it to be so (from my reading and workshops), because the early trauma, as we’ve talked about, keeps the body in a state of hyper-arousal and alters the body’s chemistry and the body’s sensitivity to and ability to absorb and digest all kinds of things, hence the problems with medications as well as the gastro-intestinal problems like colitis and Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel syndrome as well as joint and nerve and immune system illnesses like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, and, probably types of cancer.
When a body is kept on hyper-alert and filled with tension over long stretches of time, how could there not be wear and tear which would break down every aspect of the working mechanism? A car which is kept running all the time in preparation for a fast get-away is going to have more mechanical failures than a car that is turned off every night and has eight to ten hours of rest before the next spin on the freeway of life.
But, try medication he did. He tried every anti-depressant that came on the market and quite a few anti-anxiety medications as well. In addition to medicine, which is the first avenue of relief, Alan tried a number of other things.
He entered into therapy with a gifted older woman in another town. He was always worried about discretion and about being “found out.” He would stay in therapy for a couple months, and then he’d take a break for a couple years. He seemed as unable to tolerate the emotional/mental relief that therapy might have provided as he was to tolerate the potential relief that medication might have offered.
Alan joined a men’s support group and stayed active in it for as long as I knew him. This was clearly one of the most helpful choices he ever made. While he still had trouble trusting, there were a number of men in the group who over time and with predictability came to be true friends. The men’s group read books like Iron John by Robert Bly, they wrote poetry, they formed a drumming circle, and they discussed and processed their challenges as men in this time.
Alan also took music lessons and derived great comfort from being able to soothe himself with music. The discipline, the focus, the affirmation, the process, the pride in his previously undeveloped talent were all great aids to his mental well-being and all fed his spirit.
He painted his house. Again a previously undeveloped artistic talent gave him great pleasure. He chose gutsy colors and allowed himself the pleasure of experimenting with color and texture and pattern and tone. He had to sell the house, but no one could take away from him the satisfaction of having created such a joyous haven.
He threw fabulous, happy parties and surrounded himself with people who truly cared for him. As his life took its downward spiral, he closed himself off from more and more of his friends, but, again, he had proven himself capable of more than just acquaintanceship.
He also did some writing, some published, some personal, some for gifts. He gave workshops and presentations and did extensive traveling, all related to his career. These things, too, build one’s reservoir of self-esteem and self-reliance. That Alan’s life fell apart was not due to the fact that he didn’t try with all his might to hold it together.
My Story
Alan’s PTSD was horrible by anyone’s standards, and his childhood had ill-equipped him for a healthy, resilient adulthood. In a family of burly, blue-collar workers, he was a geeky artist. In a hard, brittle, cynical concrete-thinking family, he was a soft, pliable, abstract thinker.
Alan, like so many other PTSD survivors, was quite adept at “faking good.” He looked and acted “normal.” He had appropriate social skills and could read verbal and non-verbal cues accurately. He was marvelous with his own children and with his clients of all ages and ethnicities. People considered him gifted, as, indeed, he was.
Nothing he achieved, however, was able to fill the emptiness inside. He would be quoted in the paper one day and give a presentation to his peers the next, but his successes never seemed to offer him the confidence or satisfaction to help him alter his old childhood view of himself. His childhood perceptions remained his adult reality. Nothing filled the bottomless pit of need and sorrow. He was unable to change his self-image. As the dissonance of his wise, educated, professional adulthood challenged his early poverty and abandonment, he stayed, in the mirror through which he saw himself, a powerless, loveless, deserted child.
This dissonance--what Alan had become in the present compared to how he thought of himself from the past--has become for me a measuring stick which I use to caution all other survivors. I think for Alan the disparity was far too great. The distance between where he started and what he achieved was too mind-boggling. I have imagined that if he had been a starving artist or a struggling musician as an adult, his PTSD would have been less disabling.
The great lesson he taught me, then, was the lesson in my favorite movie: What About Bob. Baby steps. Baby steps. Baby steps.
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BABY STEPS
BABY STEPS
BABY STEPS
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If we break a leg, we go from lying flat to sitting up in bed, to dangling our legs over the side of the bed, to a walker, to crutches, to a cane, to walking slowly and carefully, to walking more naturally, to walking farther, to jogging, to running on a treadmill, to running on a track, to running on a sidewalk, to . . . I’m sure I’m beating a dead horse, but you get the idea. Baby steps.
When we experience a psychic wound, we definitely need baby steps. Three of the PTSD survivors I currently see as clients I’ve seen for an average of fifteen years. Recovery from a psychic injury, a soul injury, is a delicate, slow process. I think Alan’s great legacy to me was one of patience. And of faith. And, actually, of acceptance.
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God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
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On a personal note, my grandmother cross-stitched The Serenity Prayer for herself, no doubt to help her try to heal from my grandfather’s suicide. I think it would please her to know that this “needlework” now hangs on the wall of my home office, which doubles as my kitchen. I know it pleases me.