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Authors: Mac McClelland
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night, I couldn’t coax my body into relaxing. I was tenser in my shoulders and pectorals. More hunched.
But it didn’t last. The next day, I went with Ruben to “church,” a low and tight sweat lodge made of tent and animal furs on a hill in Ponca City. Stripped to a sports bra and sweating buckets, I sat in total darkness close to a handful of old men singing in Sioux around twenty steaming boulders that had been engulfed in flames all day. The leader, the oldest, reminded us that we were there to suffer for a couple of hours, to restore balance to ourselves and the universe, and while Ruben called out under the noise of the songs that he was thankful for the old man, who’d taught him that not all Indians were drunks or fighters, and prayed for his life and that he might do better in it, I lay down and put my mouth to the earth. Sucking air, they called it—trying to pull oxygen from the dirt that was cooler than the air in the tent, which was so hot it singed the inside of your nose and throat as you consumed it. The heat was suffocating, forcing any tension out of my chest just so I could breathe. When church was over, and everyone’s best intentions collectively aspirated into the inferno, I crawled out flush and dripping, reborn and open , even as I could hear the coyotes, the ones I’d earlier feared would disperse my carcass, screaming in the surrounding plains.
So I’d been less than invincible on assignments before. But I’d regained my equilibrium. I’d always been human, but rebounding, on my assignments—and in my life—before. Never once had I completely fallen apart, or felt incapable, or stopped functioning.
No, I’d never experienced anything like that.
4.
Dissociation. Noun. An altered state of consciousness. Characterized by “partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s psychological functioning.” In which cognitive, psychological, neurological, and affective systems interact in a complex process triggered by an event. A common response to trauma, a defensive psychological retreat, a trick of detachment as coping mechanism. An escape from feelings when feelings are too much.
If only that were all it was. “Terror leading to catastrophic dissociation,” as clinical psychologist and NYU professor Ghislaine Boulanger puts it in her book Wounded by Reality , “leaves a lasting biological impression with profound psychological reverberations.”
The morning after I got home from Port-au-Prince, I cried while I was checking my e-mail before work. I cried when I got to work and one of my coworkers said, “Hey! How are you doing?” I went to see Meredith—I recognized a crisis, even if I didn’t know what it was—and I cried on my bike on my way there, the Golden Gate Bridge in my blurred periphery, and I cried from the beginning to the end of our session.
This wasn’t like me, I sobbed to her. This wasn’t like any sane person. I told Meredith I had no idea what was happening and no idea what to do. I’d experienced stress and fear for brief periods like anyone else, but now it felt like stress and fear were the only things holding me together. And only tenuously. And remarkably unpleasantly.
Meredith said that I was exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
I said that that was absurd.
My symptoms would need to persist for a couple of more weeks for an official PTSD diagnosis according to the thirty-days rule of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . But given their severity, it certainly appeared they were going to.
And that they certainly did.
I cried in the shower. I cried through most of a one-and-a-half-hour yoga class. Several times. The crying was at least better than the gagging, which was similarly unpredictable and sent me running into bathrooms and heaving over the garbage can underneath my desk at work. I had flashbacks of things I’d seen in Haiti, so that
But it didn’t last. The next day, I went with Ruben to “church,” a low and tight sweat lodge made of tent and animal furs on a hill in Ponca City. Stripped to a sports bra and sweating buckets, I sat in total darkness close to a handful of old men singing in Sioux around twenty steaming boulders that had been engulfed in flames all day. The leader, the oldest, reminded us that we were there to suffer for a couple of hours, to restore balance to ourselves and the universe, and while Ruben called out under the noise of the songs that he was thankful for the old man, who’d taught him that not all Indians were drunks or fighters, and prayed for his life and that he might do better in it, I lay down and put my mouth to the earth. Sucking air, they called it—trying to pull oxygen from the dirt that was cooler than the air in the tent, which was so hot it singed the inside of your nose and throat as you consumed it. The heat was suffocating, forcing any tension out of my chest just so I could breathe. When church was over, and everyone’s best intentions collectively aspirated into the inferno, I crawled out flush and dripping, reborn and open , even as I could hear the coyotes, the ones I’d earlier feared would disperse my carcass, screaming in the surrounding plains.
So I’d been less than invincible on assignments before. But I’d regained my equilibrium. I’d always been human, but rebounding, on my assignments—and in my life—before. Never once had I completely fallen apart, or felt incapable, or stopped functioning.
No, I’d never experienced anything like that.
4.
Dissociation. Noun. An altered state of consciousness. Characterized by “partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s psychological functioning.” In which cognitive, psychological, neurological, and affective systems interact in a complex process triggered by an event. A common response to trauma, a defensive psychological retreat, a trick of detachment as coping mechanism. An escape from feelings when feelings are too much.
If only that were all it was. “Terror leading to catastrophic dissociation,” as clinical psychologist and NYU professor Ghislaine Boulanger puts it in her book Wounded by Reality , “leaves a lasting biological impression with profound psychological reverberations.”
The morning after I got home from Port-au-Prince, I cried while I was checking my e-mail before work. I cried when I got to work and one of my coworkers said, “Hey! How are you doing?” I went to see Meredith—I recognized a crisis, even if I didn’t know what it was—and I cried on my bike on my way there, the Golden Gate Bridge in my blurred periphery, and I cried from the beginning to the end of our session.
This wasn’t like me, I sobbed to her. This wasn’t like any sane person. I told Meredith I had no idea what was happening and no idea what to do. I’d experienced stress and fear for brief periods like anyone else, but now it felt like stress and fear were the only things holding me together. And only tenuously. And remarkably unpleasantly.
Meredith said that I was exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
I said that that was absurd.
My symptoms would need to persist for a couple of more weeks for an official PTSD diagnosis according to the thirty-days rule of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . But given their severity, it certainly appeared they were going to.
And that they certainly did.
I cried in the shower. I cried through most of a one-and-a-half-hour yoga class. Several times. The crying was at least better than the gagging, which was similarly unpredictable and sent me running into bathrooms and heaving over the garbage can underneath my desk at work. I had flashbacks of things I’d seen in Haiti, so that
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