This is not a textbook; I want to make that clear. I have been writing this book for a long time, four to five years, in the midst of creating and directing a world-class trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions treatment center; speaking and teaching about trauma; and writing pieces as I was whirling around in my life and the world. Friends and colleagues joked about “the” book, demanded that it be written, and lovingly chiding me that it was a ghost book, taking far too long.
The reality is this book wrote itself in the blood, snot, and tears of our beautiful alumni appropriately called Refugees. This is in honor of their completion of treatment at The Refuge, our treatment center in their forest. Their families and loved ones also shared their trauma histories, and many family members engaged in their own recovery process. These are the families that found real forgiveness, compassion, love, and intimacy, ensuring that the generations that follow are more capable of interrupting intergenerational maladaptive behaviors.
One gentleman admitted to treatment seven years ago as a result of turmoil created by trauma and alcoholism in his life changed dramatically because of his willingness to reach deeply into his soul wound. As a result of his example, thirty-seven other Refugees can be traced to him: family, friends, children of friends, neighbors, and even ex-spouses.
Twelve-step programs recommend that “it is through walking the walk” that people around us change, through “attraction, not promotion.” As we change, the people in our life feel safe to reach out for help because they want what we have. These folks come from all over the world. These “survivors” courageously offered their own stories among their peers, exposing their wounds as they guided our clients into their story. This book wrote itself in the voices of those who desperately want to heal.
Initially I was writing gingerly, cautiously, so as not to expose people too deeply; however, these stories have been handed to me by folks who want their story told, who want to be the hope and healing for others to experience. The purpose of this book is to invite those who suffer into the circle of healing, which then synergistically changes the family, the community, the world—if we dream big enough.
So will you learn some “textbook things”? Yes, my prayer is that there are folks who will pick up this book and have “Aha!” moments, puzzle pieces falling-into-place moments, heart-gripping revelation moments, because you may recognize your story and your behaviors through someone else’s work. Again, my prayer is that you will find hope and take a risk to explore your story.
This is my mantra:
When you unravel the trauma story, the behaviors make sense. When we can make sense of our behaviors, the behaviors of our loved ones, the behaviors in the people around us, healing can take place. First, we must do the hard work of unraveling the story.
Here is an example, silly on the surface but not so silly in the unraveling. I have a closet full of shoes. I know I buy them when I am lonely, bored, or insecure. Buying shoes gives me relief. I am always alone when I buy shoes. When I find a pair that I love, I buy them in every color. I have a closet full of shoes, many that I haven’t worn.
One day I thought about my favorite shoes as a kid. They were beautiful to me—I was probably ten years old. The shoes were brown with “peek-a-boo” toes and they had been given to me by a neighbor. I had one pair of shoes for school and a pair of sneakers and they both had holes in the bottom. I put cardboard in them to continue wearing them. This was pretty normal. We were a family of six: two parents and four sisters. I think my neighbor knew about my shoes! At least, that is the story I told myself.
Deprivation was my trauma and shoes were my solution, an expensive solution to assuage my shame about being poor and how others judge me.
So this is not a textbook; it’s an experiential book.
It’s been a good book for me to write: painful, gut-wrenching at times, joyful and satisfying at other times, and a revelation in so many ways. I’ve been doing my own work for years but writing this book has given me new information and incredible insights into my own life and my family. I was born in October of 1945 and I’m pretty sure I was responsible for the atomic bomb. I experienced enormous guilt and shame from my earliest memories until several years into recovery. I felt responsible and great personal shame for everything that was wrong in the lives of the people in my life. And I felt responsible to “fix” those things—a huge burden for a young girl. I even apologized to walls and chairs I bumped into. The phrase I used the most was “I’m sorry.”
Today I understand the concept of in-utero and intergenerational trauma, and realize that I felt that same shame and guilt that I carried oozing from my mother and aunt. I recognize clearly how those feelings and that energy impacted my vision of myself and my place in the world, just as it impacted so many others in my family tree.
My place in the world seemed so fragile and illusory that I searched for it in very desperate and lonely places. There was a divide between my immediate and extended family. We—my mother and father, three younger sisters and I—seemed to be the black sheep family. It was Gil, Ann, and “the girls.” We visited my grandparents’ house often, especially on family holidays. It seemed so big! There were four bedrooms and a huge room that used to be a plumbing supply store, as well as large family rooms, kitchen, dining room, living room, and a big backyard filled with blue hydrangea and roses. I have many photos of me and my sisters when we were very young, usually in a small wading pool, or in Easter outfits with cute bonnets and black patent-leather shoes. We were dressed for church, but we didn’t attend because of the “family secret.” The family secret was that my mother married my father against her family’s wishes. Daddy was divorced and had another child, my half-brother Larry, and Daddy wasn’t baptized. While “my” family remained home from church, all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins attended Mass and participated in the church rituals.
The guilt that permeated my mother and aunt centered on their choice of husbands. My mother was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. My Aunt Theresa was also my godmother, so at least, thank God, I was baptized. I may have been the family shame, born outside of the Catholic Church, but at least I was baptized.
I was the oldest grandchild. The energy in my grandparents’ home was so uncomfortable, angry, and judgmental with grandmom and my grandpop, a silent, brooding Irishman. My uncles and their wives and children seemed to receive all the family grace. Those were my feelings, my experiences. I was highly attuned to feeling shame, guilt, and judgment, especially from my grandmother. I was also attuned to the role I perceived that we had as the “less-than” and “black sheep” family. I took ownership of being the black sheep child.
That dark energy seemed to ease up after my sisters were born so they didn’t seem to experience life the way I did.
I didn’t know my uncles or their families’ very well. I often wonder how the rest of my family experienced this extended brood. I was close to my Aunt Theresa’s children; my cousins and I experienced some of the joys and the pain of their lives. But I often wonder about the experiences and perceptions of other family members. Did they understand or know my grandparents more intimately? Were they driven by family messages? Did they feel more connected or part of a bigger family entity?
I also experienced the world around me in very visceral, sensory, and cellular ways. My world was in living Technicolor with vivid experiences of color, sound, taste, touch, and smells. I loved every new experience and worked diligently to fit in with the rest of the world (despite feeling as if I didn’t belong), but this was often a place of loneliness. I learned about the world from movies and books. I remember visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris many years later, and feeling as if I’d been there before because I had embraced and internalized the world as my very own. I had a voracious appetite to know, to experience everything. This was certainly a necessary attribute for an addict.
I could “fit in” by being a chameleon, but usually as a “mascot,” an add-on, an outsider who charmed her way into the inner circle but never truly belonged. All of this history would become the cause, effect, and “cure” of my spiritual and internal pain, and would drive me to quite interesting solutions and adventures.
I grew up in a struggling blue-collar family in the 1950s and 1960s. I was a good girl with a spiritual connection who ached and yearned for human and emotional connection. However, deprivation was at the core of my spirit—emotional, physical, and economic deprivation. Thank God for my spiritual connection, my “God consciousness.” I was searching for my tribe from the age of five, maybe younger.
As my sisters and I grew up, with very different feelings and perceptions, I am always fascinated when we share stories. Often the things that I felt devastated by, two of my sisters would find humorous, but that was their coping mechanism. Humor is still what they often use to deflect pain.
I was truly a child of the sixties; sex, drugs, and rock and roll; rebellion and strong social ideals. I worked my way through school and freshman and sophomore year of college.
I was engaged to an army warrant officer, a Huey helicopter gunship pilot who went to Vietnam. I was supposed to be groomed as an officer’s wife. I didn’t fit that model because I found myself against the war—totally incongruent with my fiancé. Therefore, we didn’t stay engaged. (I know, but that was the insanity of the sixties.)
Yes, I was Jenny in Forrest Gump and this movie’s soundtrack was the soundtrack to my life at that time. When I saw Forrest Gump I laughed and cried over and over again, in recognition and empathy of the insanity of my “quest for spiritual enlightenment.”
My friends and I were arrested for our ideals, and, well, maybe a little pot. There was undercover law enforcement in our classes and I was really naïve. After that, my trust was truly broken. The establishment considered our ideals criminal. We were a bunch of idealistic, very bright college kids. Our arrest was in the newspapers from Valentine’s Day through May of 1966, and we were unjustly connected with everything from robberies to counterfeiting. I was humiliated, dropped out of school, and moved across the bridge to the big city, Philadelphia. The Vietnam War impacted my generation in enormous ways. We lost many young men from Camden High School and Woodrow Wilson High School Class of ’64, and many to the disease of addiction. Later, each of my sisters married Vietnam veterans; my second husband was a combat veteran as well. Ours was a wounded generation in many ways.
I continued to work two jobs and fell into experimenting with amphetamines. Of course, my reasons were justified: I needed to stay awake and have energy! As a result, I met the man of my dreams, a handsome Italian from South Philly. He invited me to his apartment and when he answered the door he was wearing knee-high jackboots, Jockey shorts, and a shoulder holster with a pistol. Suddenly, I was “in love!” Then I discovered he had a barrel of pharmaceutical-grade crystal methamphetamine, and I was truly and passionately in love—I’d found my soul mate.
Well, with my first “shot” of pharmaceutical crystal meth, the world changed. It was glorious, brighter, shinier—and so was I. I felt beautiful, brilliantly intelligent, taller, as though I was truly a unique and glorious being of infinite worth and potential, valued and loved beyond my comprehension. My soon-to-be husband felt that way too, powerful and invincible. It was a chemically induced illusion that hid the pain, loneliness, and fear. For twenty years I chased that feeling, never realizing that I was already a glorious being who needed to clear away the trauma shadows hiding that glorious being that I was. That we all are.
Tommy and I really were soul mates; we were two wounded individuals coming together to try and make sense of the insanity—and insane it was. Sometimes I look back and wonder who that young woman with all the broken dreams really was. I am horrified at the destruction of which I was capable. I have been shot, stabbed, and had many black eyes and broken bones. I’ve been arrested multiple times and been held physically and emotionally hostage. I spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital with methamphetamine psychosis, and a shattered elbow in a cast. I learned incredible criminal skills far beyond my college education. At the time, I was very proud of my new skillset.
I’ve betrayed my spiritual, moral, and ethical boundaries, and my beautiful, wounded husband was my mentor and partner in crime. He was a bright, shiny, brilliant man with a trauma story of his own, but we didn’t have that language or understanding then. He could have been saved too. We roamed the streets of Philadelphia to feed our addictions and our less-than-legal lifestyle.
We thought we were evil, bad, and defective. What I discovered is that, under the influence of any addiction, we are capable of anything. We must later pay the price for the moral injury we experience, and the moral injury we cause.
Tommy never got to hear the message that saved my life: “We are not bad people trying to get good; we are wounded people trying to heal.”
On March 25, 1973, after a night of using multiple drugs and alcohol with my husband, I came to and with horror discovered my husband was dead next to me. There had been many overdoses that year, but never in my wildest imagination did I consider death would come so close to our lives. So many more would follow that path to death by overdose and suicide throughout my life. My children were eighteen months, three years, and four years old when Tommy, their daddy, died. The story the family told for thirty years was that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the truth is Tommy died of an overdose. The family kept that secret because of shame, of course, and to protect the beloved son and grandchildren.
I know that my children and I experienced years of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), beginning in utero. Each of us has worked separately and together on our healing process. It took a lot of painful but truly healing work to process through the layers of trauma, loss, grief, guilt, shame, and remorse. It’s an ongoing process as long as we continue to experience life at its fullest, because life continues to bring grief and loss as well as joy and triumph.
In my wildest dreams—and I have many wild and amazing dreams for my life—I never would have expected to find recovery at forty-two, complete my master’s degree at age fifty, become licensed as a therapist at fifty-two, start a treatment center at fifty-seven, sell the treatment center at sixty-seven, and found another treatment center at seventy-one. I have always wanted to be a writer and here I am, at seventy-one—finally a published writer. I’ve always been a late bloomer. I never expected to be a leading voice for trauma treatment or trauma resolution, or the many aspects of the intertwining of trauma and addiction, trauma and mental health, and trauma and behaviors. I am a therapist, a teacher, a writer, and a thought leader. I stand on stages all over the world and openly share my experience, strength, and hope. I’m an expert at helping to heal wounded souls of trauma, and I could never have imagined a greater life’s purpose than to make a living making amends for my past.
I am sought after for my expertise and no one is more baffled or stunned than I am. My little girl sometimes comes out and questions whether I deserve to be in this place, but I have learned to shush that voice that says, Who do you think you are? We all have those voices and must learn to shush them.
I’ve worked within the criminal justice system, with pregnant and addicted women, the homeless, veterans, European royalty, cinema and theater royalty, and wealthy CEOs and their families. This I know: these individuals are wounded little boys and girls looking for love, connection, and to unravel and understand their story. Each of those wounded children wants to rewrite and claim their rewritten story. Most of them manage to embrace their rewritten story, but for others the trauma story has become so much a part of their identity that it becomes truly an existential struggle. We just have to continue the unraveling.
Please, please remember this: behaviors always, always, always make sense when you unravel the trauma story. Most behaviors germinate as survival mechanisms. We do a huge injustice when we point our finger and make judgment about behaviors rather than recognizing the innate goodness of most human beings.
Today I know that the pain and horror of my life are also the miracles and gifts of my life. As we walk through this work together, I hope you’ll unravel your story to understand the behaviors and the pain so you can rewrite your story. In The Trauma Heart I’ll give you a blueprint that can lead to your rewritten story. There’s a place of sadness in my heart for those who don’t hear this message or receive the gift of a triumphant rewritten story, which can take the broken shards of our hearts and fill the broken places with gold.
The person we judge the most is ourself. Let’s work to change those messages so we can understand the shining, glittering miracle that we are.