What we give our attention to - stays with us. What we let go of - will let go of us.
Cat Forsley
The pink snowsuit my father's parents got me for my second Christmas
My mother's youngest sister died Friday. In January, her oldest sister died. Both deaths rocked my world. My aunts were potent symbols of a childhood world where I felt safe and loved. I was the third grandchild in my mother's large family and the first grandchild in my father's smaller family. In my father's family I was spoiled, no doubt about that. At Christmas, I was showered with presents. My mother's parents couldn't afford to be so generous with things, but they more than made up for it with people. Their house overflowed with people and there were no strangers in that small rural community where my mother grew up. Most people knew my name and, if they didn't, all they had to do was ask my mother's name, and then they knew who I was. I loved that sense of belonging.
Me in Kentucky with one of my uncle's dogs, circa 1955 (personal collection)
I felt safe and loved at my grandparents' houses. My own home was sometimes full of fighting. My parents were young and when I was born my father was patrolling the DMZ in Korea. When he got home, adjusting to each other and a new baby created tension and fighting. The fighting frightened me. And that's why I felt safe with my grandparents.
I loved visiting my father's parents where I was the center of attention. I remember Grandma asking me what I'd like for lunch; I always asked for the same thing: Campbell's Cream of Chicken Soup and a peanut butter sandwich made with Skippy's peanut butter. Afterwards, if I'd been good I could go to the cookie drawer and get a cookie. Sometimes, I spent the night and Grandma would tuck me in and tell me, "Nightie, night." Grandma taught me how to play cards and we played game after game of War. When I turned eight, my grandparents got me a record that played, "Happy Birthday to you/Happy Birthday to you/Happy Birthday, dear Angela/Happy Birthday to you." I still have that record. It's bent after all these years and I have no way to play it, but I keep it in a box with other treasures and sometimes I take it out and think about what it was like to be a beloved grandchild. (photo above, me and my father's mother, circa 1955)
My mother's house was a busier place. I rarely had my grandparents full attention and that was just fine because the house was full of uncles: my mother's four youngest brothers. We sometimes played Chinese checkers together and hung out together and sometimes, because they were teens after all, they loved to tease me. Once my Uncle Sam scared me with a devil's darning needle, a kind of walking stick that was actually harmless. Best of all, was when my uncle Clifton, the tallest of my mother's brothers, would lift me up on his shoulders and I felt like I could touch the sky. (photo: Clifton and me, circa 1962)
When we went to Kentucky, we were "going home," or "down home." My mother took me there for the first time when I was only six weeks old because she wanted her family to see me "real bad." The house was full of people, including my ailing great-grandfather.
We went to Kentucky every summer. My grandparents would be waiting in the front yard when we drove up and my grandmother would always say the same thing, "I looked for y'all to come today," and fold us into her arms. My grandfather was quieter, but, in his own way he welcomed us too. My grandfather died when I was 12 and, after that, us girls slept in grandma's room. I loved her room. It had a screen door that opened onto the front porch and lots of windows and even in the Kentucky heat, it was cool and comfortable. Grandma would tell us stories as we were falling asleep and after her voice stopped, I could hear the whip-poor-will calling from the woods across the road.
On the day we left, Grandma would give my mother a jar of her homemade strawberry jam and they would hug and then we would get in the car and my father would back down their red clay driveway to the road and head north.
What's the take-away from all of this? For me, these good memories gave me something powerful to hold onto. The love I found with my grandparents and my mother's family, helped me weather the terrible times after I lost my daughter. Was my childhood happier than other people experiencing similar trauma? Maybe not. What matters, according to an article in Psychology Today, was what I felt about my childhood. Those happy memories gave me resilience. That reminds me of my Kentucky grandmother and her hollyhocks. Every year, my grandmother would plant flowers and every year her chickens would scratch them out. The only flowers that survived were the hollyhocks. Hollyhocks grew at the back of the house and I can picture them now: resilient flowers that were strong, beautiful, and chicken-proof.
In other ways, however, my childhood was no bed of roses. (More on the vulnerabilities and losses of childhood and how they relate to trauma in my next post.) Meanwhile, here is a song that expresses the bittersweet feeling I have about losing my aunts. Bitter because so many of the people I love are now dead. Sweet because when I hear this bluegrass tune, for a few precious moments I'm back at my grandparents in Kentucky with the television tuned to the Nashville station. Maybe the Grand Ole Opry is on and old-timey music is playing and I'm happy. Those memories are talismans I can hold onto as I keep going, living with PTSD.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I Can't Hear Your Pain
"I need to minimize my exposure to your pain," a friend told me recently, while we were discussing some of the traumatic events we've both experienced in our lives. Sadly, this isn't the first time I've heard those words. Another friend told me that "it makes her stomach hurt," to hear about my past experiences. The friend who I met for coffee last week, happens to be the father of the daughter I relinquished for adoption: aka my ex. The original intention of our reunion was to discuss and heal from the experiences of the past. Now, he's decided that he doesn't have room in his life for me anymore and he doesn't want to hear anymore about my grief. What he had to say hurt, but I had seen it coming for a long time and I wasn't surprised.
The Loneliness of Trauma
Processing trauma can get very lonely at times. Therapist Dr. Kathleen Young refers to this as trauma stigma and her take on what silencing can mean to trauma survivors is worth reading. I am a trauma survivor with complex PTSD and complicated grief recovering from and processing multiple traumas that took place over 20 years of my life - ages 17 to 37. That doesn't mean that I talk about trauma all the time. Far from it. I would get exhausted. However, there are times when I want to share how I'm feeling with friends, family and - in the case of my ex and my husband - those who have gone through traumatic experiences with me. I have several wonderful friends who are not afraid of my pain. They can let me feel what I feel and be who I am. This is not a small gift. Others - even people I love - behave as if trauma is contagious and the less said about it the better. I like to give them the benefit of the doubt and think that they can't really understand what it means to be silenced. Sometimes, however, this is no longer possible. It is not healthy to be silenced. The problem isn't that I MUST always speak about my pain. The problem is that the traumas I experienced are a part of me and, even though I am working on healing, the pain may never be entirely gone. And so, I have to limit my exposure to people who want to silence me.
Speaking Up
My ex followed up our talk with a hurtful email that said, amongst other things, that being reunited with our daughter should make up for any trauma that I experienced in the past and that he wasn't interested in holding my hand while I continued to grieve. If it were only that simple. My relationship with my daughter is a tenuous thing and she hasn't spoken to me in over a year, while my ex sees her and talks to her regularly. Both my ex and my daughter imply that "if only you would change and let go of the past everything would be great." That might be true. But it is hard for me to believe. Telling people that "if only you change, I'll love you," rarely seems to work, at least in my experience. My therapist has often told me not to disown that part of myself that experienced the trauma. I also know that if I tried to silence that part of me, not only wouldn't it work, but I would have to erase a large part of myself and I can't do that. It reminds me of the hikers we met along the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island. There was a large dead seal near where they had pitched their tent They had simply thrown some dirt over the seal and moved their tent 20 feet. Both black bears and mountain lions frequent that stretch of the trail and neither animal would be the least bit fooled by dirt. Trying to cover up trauma and grief can be that way: only the person burying it thinks it's hidden. To get back to my ex, I responded to his email with one of my own. Amongst other things, I said that "I am tired of your anger and your inability to accept me for who I am." And that's what it comes down to: acceptance or silencing. I have silenced myself for many years and now that I am learning to speak out, I can't stop. I have a voice and I need to use it. That doesn't mean I have to speak out at inappropriate times and places. All I know is that I don't want to be silenced again. And after I sent the email, I felt a burden lift from my heart. Below, Dr. Maya Angelou reads her poem "And Still I Rise," Her poem evokes the beautiful resiliency of the human spirit under difficult circumstances. It is a poem that resonates with me.
Has anyone ever silenced you when you were sharing your feelings about past traumas or your grief? What did you do?
This is the first in a series of posts on trauma within communities and why trauma survivors need to speak out in order to heal.
Anger isn't good or bad. It's what we do with anger that makes the difference. This afternoon, I was angry with M. (the father of my oldest daughter - the one with the new girlfriend). You could call it anticipatory anger. Here's why. Yesterday, my therapist agreed that now that M. has a girlfriend, he may not be in touch with me when I am back in Michigan. This is distressing because, as with many people in adoption reunions, I've weathered more than one period of silence and thought we were, at last, beyond that. Last summer M. told me that, "You haven't lost me. Our relationship has entered a new phase." I'm pretty sure that he didn't mean silence when he said, "a new phase." So, I'm angry because I'm afraid that I'll never hear from him again. This is an inevitable - and very real - fear in adoption reunions.
I don't know that M. will disappear, but the signs are there. And so, I'm having anticipatory anger because I'm at home where I have a safe place to be angry in and I hope that being angry now might help to ease the pain I may face in Michigan. (Well, who said I was rational?) Besides, I can't seem to stop what I'm feeling. Not surprising. People with PTSD often fall into negative emotional loops that are hard to get out of. My usual loop is sorrow, shame and self-blame. Maybe anger is a step up, but it still feels painful. Malcom X said, for example, that anger is better than being sad. "Usually when people are sad," he said. "they don't do anything. . . . But when they get angry, they bring about change." Writer Thomas Moore said that, "Anger gives you the impetus you need to change conditions that need to be changed."
So, what is it I need to change? I think my anger is telling me that I need to keep myself safe and not be so open with M. It's not possible to be open to another person and put up a wall at the same time - it's like how you can't simultaneously open and shut a door. That makes me sad because I thought we were making progress. Now, I can see that it wasn't that simple. M. wants to get on with his life and, despite what he said and even promised, probably isn't ready to process the hurt we went through together and be friends, as we both hoped. At least, that's my therapist's take on things.
Putting up a wall won't be easy because trauma survivors have an overwhelming desire to re-write the traumas of the past and create happier endings. When it comes to M., I have this in spades. This phenomenon is known as traumatic reenactment. In our case, this is reinforced by the powerful biological drive to be a family that two people who have a baby together experience. For M. and I, that family was destroyed but the part of our brain that stores trauma doesn't realize that it's too late to become a family now - at least a family that is raising a baby. Which brings me back to anger. I know anger is warning me to go slow and be careful and it is also telling me - which I do not want to hear - that I don't have any control over what M. does. I only have control over how I respond. And that's scary. I'm afraid I'll be too angry to cope at a time when my parents need me to be calm not enraged. Anger can be either constructive or destructive; it all depends upon how you handle it. So far, I'm managing but I don't like the way anger feels and I'm pretty sure that I'm in for another roller coaster ride on the PTSD emotional express. I have that same queasiness in the pit of my stomach that you get just before the car plummets down the first steep slope. Courage, I tell myself, courage. But only time will tell "which of them I'll become" - the out-of-control angry person or the angry person who looks her anger in the face and tries to hear what it's saying.
How do you cope with difficult emotions? Which emotions do you find the most difficult?
