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| Jean, Age 9 |
Part I.
The following post, Part I and Part II, is my attempt to describe my internal experience of trauma when I was a child and later, when I was a woman living in a domestic violence situation. As I mentioned in the introduction, this morning I realized that my inner battle appears to be over--the white flags are up. Am I healing? Yes, I believe so. I am, as people say, "cautiously optimistic." However, PTSD and C-PTSD can be healed, and after so many, many years of internal struggle, I believe I am at last experiencing the peace I have worked so hard to achieve.
As I wrote this first section, I felt a deep sadness for the little girl I was. Nobody knew I had been sexually abused by the neighbor woman or abused by my parents, and nobody knew how hard I struggled to do what I was supposed to do at home and in school. Nobody knew about the war inside me and the constant screaming and sobbing. There simply was nobody I could tell. And even if there had been, what could anyone have done? During the 1940s, probably nothing! I might have been sent to an asylum, in fact, diagnosed as being schizophrenic.
Thank God that we now know about C-PTSD and "parts"! And thank God for the rugged spirit of my Scottish coal-miner ancestors. They didn't give up, and neither did I!
As I was drying my hair this
morning, I suddenly became aware that my head was quiet. The hairdryer was the only sound I
heard. When I turned it off, I thought
of the song “The Sound of Silence”: My
head was silent. Peaceful. “Do you suppose the war is over?” I asked myself that question, wanting to
answer “Yes!” but afraid lest I be wrong.
When I was five, I thought
the violent activity in my body was butterflies, huge butterflies batting their
wings against my insides. I tried to
trick those butterflies by bounding out of bed as soon as I opened my eyes,
thinking that I could somehow leave those pesky insects in my bed if I got up
before they did. At that age, the war
was confined to my stomach. By the time
I was old enough to go to school, however, the battle had spread to my head,
and I knew I was dealing with more than just butterflies: There were people inside my head, and those
people were fierce fighters!
But how did those people get
inside my head? I didn’t know. But I was certain there was a war going on
inside my head because I could feel
that war. I felt the unrest and the
anxiety, the battle for my consciousness.
I sensed the artillery fire and the explosions of land mines and
grenades. I could hear the screaming and
the dying. The moaning of those in
pain. But who were those people? I didn’t know them, or so I thought. And if I didn’t know them, why would they be
fighting in my head? I didn’t know—I
just didn’t know.
I remember sitting at my
desk in the elementary school classrooms.
In those days, the desks were nailed to the floor. The desks, like the teachers, were
immovable. As I sat at my desk, I, too,
was nailed to the floor. And the battle
raged within me. I was tied up, gagged,
and held hostage in my classroom as the battle raged within me. The teacher closed the classroom door, my
stomach lurched, and I knew there was no escape. I didn’t always make it to the bathroom
before I threw up.
In the upper grades and
junior high school, the academic material became more challenging. I worked hard at forcing my mind to think
when I needed to think. I pushed myself
until I thought I would, like Humpty Dumpty, shatter into tiny bits and not be
able to put myself back together. Thus,
I managed to override the violent sounds in my head most of the time, but even
when I was at the blackboard solving long division problems or complicated
multiplication problems, I could hear the gunshots and the screams in the
background. By then, I was aware that
there was more than one place in my head—a thinking part and the part where the
battle raged, and I became an expert at forcing myself to access the thinking
part so I could get my schoolwork done.
By the time I reached high
school, I was so good at thinking and dampening the sounds in my head, that the
battle noises seldom bothered me. Oh, if
I deliberately tuned in to them, I could still hear the screams, the sobbing, the
crashing of metal on metal, the shattering of glass, but normally the war
remained beneath my awareness. For the
most part, my thoughts predominated, and I heard my thoughts and not the battle
sounds. This relatively peaceful
condition prevailed until sometime in 1980, and when the battle noises in my
head broke through in 1980, I knew I needed help!
End of Part I
Part II Coming Soon
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