Read Online Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mac McClelland
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suddenly I was seeing them again, and they made me want to curl up into a ball and gouge out my eyes. Anything could trigger it. A smell vaguely reminiscent of the raw sewage at the displacement camp where I’d thrown up and swallowed it, or a smell—or a sound or a sight—I hadn’t even registered. Or nothing. Triggers, I was learning, are often senseless, impossible to pin down. I was scared, and I was humiliated. I was joyless, and I couldn’t sleep. Relaxing my body, even a little, shattered my tenuous emotional stability, possessing me of an instant certainty that I would die. When I went to a steam room to try to unwind, I ended up panting out loud to myself, naked in a San Francisco spa where people get $155 facials, “It’s OK. It’s OK. Shhhh, you’re OK.”
On the way to and from work, I walked down the street looking around with a wild-eyed disconnectedness, watching reality unfold like a video game, and not the one I was supposed to be in, and where all the colors were too bright and the noises too loud. Standing in line with my best friend Tana as she got coffee once, I became so confused by what was happening around me that I took to reminding myself quietly, with the pace and nervousness of a tweaker while her drip brew filtered, “This is San Francisco and you live here. ThisisSanFranciscoandyoulivehere .”
As the weeks went on, and I didn’t get better, shaky all the time— all the time, whatever I was doing, and I didn’t want to get out of my bed or even from under the covers, though staying there afforded me little relief—Meredith kept reminding me in successive sessions that it was all just the normal course of a not ideal but perfectly common response to a terrible thing.
“You have PTSD,” she would say.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” I would say, though I could match my symptoms to the DSM ’s criteria plain as day. PTSD was for veterans. For people who had seen a lot of people killed, and who had nearly been killed, or for people to whom other actually terrible things had happened. I kept shaking my head at Meredith. “That just doesn’t seem right.”
* * *
Psychological trauma is an experience or witness of threatened or actual death, serious injury, or sexual violence.
Though these scenarios are generally associated with feelings of extreme fear and helplessness, a victim needn’t experience them or even be in danger to become traumatized; emotional disasters, such as the death of a loved one, can also produce traumatization. Further, hearing about any of the above happening to a loved one can be traumatic, as can being consistently exposed to details about any of the above for work. Post -traumatic stress disorder is simply a nervous system’s inability to return to its normal baseline after the trauma is over, a body perpetrating or suppressing memories of the incident long after the fact and firing life-or-death stress when those reactions or survival mechanisms are no longer necessary.
It’s actually pretty straightforward. But given trauma’s complicated relationship with the world, and even within psychology, the discipline to which it belongs, perhaps some understanding could be extended to my profession for its lack of openness and regular conversation about it. (One might feel less generous toward the Committee to Protect Journalists handbook at the time for including advice about such extreme scenarios as smearing oneself with mud and leaves to hide from rebel forces—but not a word about sexual harassment and sexual violence on the job.) In a 1992 book that was crucial—to psychology, to humanity—clinical psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman documents how political and controversial the very study of trauma is and always has been. Because, she explains in Trauma and Recovery , it can’t be done without naming and confronting the people who perpetrate it and acknowledging its victims’ experience. Without belief in victims’ stories
On the way to and from work, I walked down the street looking around with a wild-eyed disconnectedness, watching reality unfold like a video game, and not the one I was supposed to be in, and where all the colors were too bright and the noises too loud. Standing in line with my best friend Tana as she got coffee once, I became so confused by what was happening around me that I took to reminding myself quietly, with the pace and nervousness of a tweaker while her drip brew filtered, “This is San Francisco and you live here. ThisisSanFranciscoandyoulivehere .”
As the weeks went on, and I didn’t get better, shaky all the time— all the time, whatever I was doing, and I didn’t want to get out of my bed or even from under the covers, though staying there afforded me little relief—Meredith kept reminding me in successive sessions that it was all just the normal course of a not ideal but perfectly common response to a terrible thing.
“You have PTSD,” she would say.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” I would say, though I could match my symptoms to the DSM ’s criteria plain as day. PTSD was for veterans. For people who had seen a lot of people killed, and who had nearly been killed, or for people to whom other actually terrible things had happened. I kept shaking my head at Meredith. “That just doesn’t seem right.”
* * *
Psychological trauma is an experience or witness of threatened or actual death, serious injury, or sexual violence.
Though these scenarios are generally associated with feelings of extreme fear and helplessness, a victim needn’t experience them or even be in danger to become traumatized; emotional disasters, such as the death of a loved one, can also produce traumatization. Further, hearing about any of the above happening to a loved one can be traumatic, as can being consistently exposed to details about any of the above for work. Post -traumatic stress disorder is simply a nervous system’s inability to return to its normal baseline after the trauma is over, a body perpetrating or suppressing memories of the incident long after the fact and firing life-or-death stress when those reactions or survival mechanisms are no longer necessary.
It’s actually pretty straightforward. But given trauma’s complicated relationship with the world, and even within psychology, the discipline to which it belongs, perhaps some understanding could be extended to my profession for its lack of openness and regular conversation about it. (One might feel less generous toward the Committee to Protect Journalists handbook at the time for including advice about such extreme scenarios as smearing oneself with mud and leaves to hide from rebel forces—but not a word about sexual harassment and sexual violence on the job.) In a 1992 book that was crucial—to psychology, to humanity—clinical psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman documents how political and controversial the very study of trauma is and always has been. Because, she explains in Trauma and Recovery , it can’t be done without naming and confronting the people who perpetrate it and acknowledging its victims’ experience. Without belief in victims’ stories
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