Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  The challenge, Bradshaw maintained, was to, individually and as a society, acknowledge traumatic patterning, to grieve traumatic losses (he called this ‘grief work’), and create new ways of being and relating, new kinds of masculinity and gender politics through lives and communities committed to healing and to developing the capacity to love. To some degree this is taking place, but resistance is strong in some quarters and progress is blighted by agendas of sabotage and nostalgia (chiefly among white men, but also among women suffering internalised sexism and Stockholm syndrome), backlash and ignorance. Bradshaw was out front in saying it would take conscious commitment and effort to undo the conditionings of patriarchy and to address a personal legacy of trauma, work that is hindered by denial, laziness and self-serving attachments to patriarchal payoffs.

  Despite his contention that for most of us the gains we make in the face of traumatic legacies require perseverance and labour, he did concede to the possibility of ‘spontaneous remissions’ from severe or chronic childhood trauma, admitting in an interview to Veronica Hay that ‘lots of people work through this stuff just out of their own experience and pain’. Having tried to do so unsuccessfully during his time at the seminary, he cautioned against putting the cart before the horse in terms of turning to religion or spiritual teachings (often rooted in patriarchal worldviews and scriptures) as a salve for the sufferings of chronic trauma. For some, he said, the tendency was to seek spiritual enlightenment as a cure-all to unresolved trauma rather than do ‘the pain work’ (by which he meant allowing previously repressed emotion to surface) in the human realm. ‘I don’t deny that someone could go into metaphysics and do the healing of this,’ he told Hay, ‘but my own experience has been that a lot of people go into various spiritual disciplines and they become what the Germans call “air people” – they’re not grounded.’ My father was not an air person – though I have seen such people at ashrams and Buddhist monasteries (they have a certain set smile, a saccharine niceness, a floaty benevolence I find hard to trust), but he did take refuge in spiritual teachings in refusal of the messy, oft-ugly business of affect and the struggle of human relationship. There were times when I felt this every bit as much of a barrier to our intimacy as if he’d been an alcoholic like his brother Hugh.

  As The Simpsons take-down of Bradshaw demonstrates, the concept of the ‘inner child’, which came to the fore in the 1980s, is an easy target for ridicule (and sometimes justifiably so – like any conceptual/linguistic metaphor, its viability and respectability depend on the way in which it is presented and configured). Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few decades, you’ll know that ‘inner child work’, as it’s sometimes referred to, charts a way of attending to childhood trauma from the vantage point of adulthood. In his book Homecoming, Bradshaw claimed the benefit of nurturing and learning to, in pop psychology parlance, ‘re-parent’ the ‘wounded inner child’ was a release of creative energy and the emergence of an essential, most valuable aspect of self, which Carl Jung termed ‘the wonder child’. Some people manage to manifest the wonder child despite chronic or extreme traumatic childhood experiences, and Bradshaw gave Veronica Hay the example of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose mother had wanted a girl (hence his middle name). Bradshaw told it this way: Rilke’s mother would say, ‘Is that the wonderful Maria at the door or the horrible little Rainer?’ Rainer would, of course, reply that it was Maria. ‘You either grow up to be a great poet, or terribly screwed up. Rilke became a great poet,’ he concluded. I became your garden-variety, terribly screwed-up poet.

  Much of what Bradshaw said about fathering still rings true for me, but there are flies in the ointment, the most obvious being the apparent heteronormativity of his reading. He never disqualified outright the potential for gay, lesbian, trans and non-binary people to form families, nor did he express any overt bigotry, but his lectures and writings assumed cis and het figurings of caregiver roles. To be fair, though, we need remember that general awareness of the diversity spectrum was far more limited in the 1980s and ’90s than it is today. His positioning of the father as crucial might appear to contribute to the problematic belief that any father is better than none. Headline after headline says otherwise: eleven-year-old Luke Batty is beaten to death by his father with a cricket bat at a sporting event. A Father’s Day visit ends in suspected murder-suicide. A mother says the accused murderer was a ‘loving father’ to her children.

  Bradshaw is right to identify a woundedness born of absence, physical and/or emotional, that is especially pronounced in a society that promotes a nuclear-family ideal of normal, but he disavows an obligatory duty to parents, acknowledging that, for some, parental presence can be far more wounding. Despite his focus on the damaging ‘father wound’, he questioned societal sentiment regarding parental reverence, telling Hay that he ‘was taught as a child to obey any adult simply because they were an adult’. This is, he stressed, a recipe for enabling child abuse. ‘We have been so indoctrinated into honouring Mom and Dad, which can be really dangerous. Obedience without content is very dangerous.’

  My father was not dangerous, but neither did he make me feel safe. I knew he meant me no harm. He would never hurt me the way some men hurt children, never do to me (or her) what my mother’s boyfriends had done, but I also knew he did not protect me. He was not, as Bradshaw’s fellow Texan pop psychologist Dr Phil likes to put it, ‘a soft place to fall’.

  He comes to visit and announces he’s taking me to the movies. I am excited. I love the movies. We have never been before. We drive to the theatre and he buys the tickets and we sit in the dark. I am twelve. It’s Barry Lyndon. I can’t follow and find it dull. It seems to go on for.ev.er.

  In the summer he takes me swimming. He knows secret little beaches around the harbour and often we find ourselves alone. I like these outings but, despite my child’s affinity with sun and water play, I never quite relax in his presence. Lying side by side on the sand, hot rays burning down, I’m still fretting over what he thinks of me, if he thinks of me, and what he thinks is wrong with me.

  Every now and then he makes an effort to take me somewhere both entertaining and educational, like The Rocks. We visit the Argyle Arts Centre, where we watch a man glassblowing and have a novelty photo taken, pretending to be of the nineteenth century. My father makes a fine gentleman patriarch of the Industrial Revolution. I make a suitably sullen pre-suffragette daughter.

  I didn’t notice The Son of the Holocaust Survivor (Act I: eighteen months) at first, but when he held me in his sea-sand eyes I felt myself divine. When he looked away I vanished and after that all I could see was the speed of his light. There was no lack of void. It was a crying shame.

  We were smitten, The Son of the Holocaust Survivor and I. It was the first profound connection I had known since The Idol, so why didn’t it work? We both came from ‘broken homes’, but plenty of long-term, successful unions are forged by people from fractured families. There was more to it than that. You guessed it.

  His father was born a Hungarian Jew and, as a child, lost many family members to the camps, a fate he escaped by being sent to Transylvania to live with Protestant relatives. His grandfather in Budapest was conscripted into the German army and died at Stalingrad on the Russian front. As for his mother, well, she bailed at the tail end of the second wave in a fit of women’s lib, leaving him and his younger sister in the care of their survivor dad, though in the spirit of challenging simplistic narratives about mothers who abandon their children we can perhaps assume there was more to it than this official family account allows. You wouldn’t guess any of that to meet him. You’d likely be dazzled, as I was, by his smarts, his high-voltage smile, his quick wit and warmth. He was a pockmarked Lou Reed lookalike and a charmer. We laughed and frolicked through that summer, holing up in his room at night, fusing a deep, beatific bond that within a year became an airless trap, a boxing ring in which we threw verbal hooks till we collapsed back between the po
sts.

  Drawing on the work of neuropsychologist Daniel J. Siegel and Brain-Wise author Bonnie Badenoch, Sharie Stines discusses the ‘painful consequence of interrelational disconnection’ that most of us, even those in the happiest of unions, have experienced. These theories and clinical frameworks pay particular attention to the way trauma affects neurology and the nervous system, in turn manifesting in relationships as dysfunctional and conflict-based behaviours that over time cement into patterns that seem impossible to break. Badenoch conceptualises the systems theory commonly used in couples and family therapy into a multidisciplinary take on ‘interpersonal neurobiology’ that includes a focus on attachment styles, the ‘neurobiology of shame’ and a therapeutic engagement with the ‘inner community’ – a subjective multiplicity, formed in childhood, and adapted throughout adulthood. ‘When a person is not properly attuned to as a child, secure attachment and healthy connection do not occur,’ Stines explains. Traumas relating to insecure attachment surface when the honeymoon phase passes: cue corresponding painful consequences of interrelational disconnection.

  Bradshaw calls the inevitable individuating phase of an intimate relationship ‘the Hatfields vs. the McCoys’. No longer on a high, secure enough to risk not being on best behaviour, and cast out of the Garden of Eden of early bonding, couples find pesky differences emerging amid their familiarity and start bickering over how things should get done, how the kids should be raised, and how and in what measure they fall short of each other’s expectations. The testy task of individuating while retaining a capacity for intimacy now begins, the Holy Grail of which is individual maturation and relational interdependency. But beneath surface tensions around daily rituals and damp towels left on bathroom floors, a more troubling Pandora’s box of unmet childhood needs, abandonments and unconscious traumas jacks open.

  A process of negotiating these trials ensues for each person and each couple somewhere on a sliding scale of consciousness and ‘dysfunction’. If attempts at resolution prove unsuccessful or inadequate, either the intensity level ratchets up or one or both parties in the relationship retreat. Bradshaw coined the clever catchphrase ‘Post-Romantic Stress Disorder’ to describe the meeting of human-condition relational challenges and trauma-bound interference.

  Trauma hinders emotional regulation, so it stands to reason that severely and chronically traumatised people often struggle to acclimatise in relationships. ‘Unresolved trauma,’ Stines says, ‘contributes to persistent chaos and rigidity and inflexibility to adapt to the circumstance of present interactions.’ In my adolescence and early adulthood, I was chaotic, perhaps mirroring and manifesting the tumultuous aspects of my childhood, but when I gave up drugs and alcohol I found out just how rigid, inflexible and fearful I could be. I became multi-phobic and unbecomingly uptight. These CPTSD symptoms fluctuate on a continuum, dependent on many factors, including general stress levels. Even now, I’m a high-functioning agoraphobe; even though I don’t fit the stereotype of the housebound shut-in, peering out from behind a closed curtain, I hate being in crowds and I often feel unsafe in environments others view as routine. I have a fear of flying, and exhibit OCD-like symptoms around the house, craving cleanliness, order and impossible-to-attain-and-maintain perfection. It was decades before I understood the connection between my history of trauma and familial violence and this pathological need for order and control. The first signs set in soon after Al left: I began to ritualistically prepare for school each night, painstakingly ironing and laying out my uniform over a dining room chair and arranging all the other items I would need in a particular, precise formation on the dining table. These obsessive–compulsive behaviours came, and still come, with a payoff. I experience relief when I sense I have re-established order in some way. It feels as if I can finally – at least momentarily – relax (until the next threat of disorder attracts my attention). Intellectually I know this is illusory folly, that there can be no absolute order, no sustainable cleanliness, no guarantee of safety, but trauma is nothing if not illogical. Since I no longer live with violence, my deeply ingrained hyper-vigilance manifests around ridiculous trifles – a cup where it ought not to be, the affront of dust collecting on the surface of the piano, an insistence on the kitchen sink being wiped down to a gleaming finish. This means that, unchecked, I am domestically unreasonable.

  Medicated – drunk, stoned or otherwise anaesthetised – none of this manifested. Back when I drank and did drugs I cared not for the minutiae of my abode. I walked around alone at all hours of the day, went out often and socialised madly, staying out for days at a time. I did not generally fear for my personal safety; in fact, I exhibited high-risk and sometimes downright hazardous behaviours, such as habitually walking out into heavy speeding traffic without looking left or right, cocktailing my drugs in life-threatening combinations, and occasionally partying with low-lifes and criminals. Sober, a different self emerged, one that I hardly recognised. A self preoccupied with safety (and perceived threats to it); a self who felt compelled to line shoes up against the wall with military-like precision, who found routine reassuring, who did Quixote-like battle with cat hair. I felt this version of myself was every bit as shameful as the out-of-control girl who blacked out and conned and game-played her way through life. In many respects this incarnation is still harder to live down than the deluded drug-ravaged one of my youth, which at least came with the balm of denial, and which has, in some circles, a little purchase on cool and romanticism.

  Integration, according to Stines, requires synergy between the two types of memory – implicit and explicit. She explains: ‘Implicit memory is perceptual, emotional, interactive, sensory, mental modelling, and priming. It is not aware of time. When a person experiences an implicit memory it feels as if it is happening in the now.’ This is in contrast to explicit memory, which places the recollection in its historical, factual context: ‘the person realizes that something is being recalled from the past’. In PTSD, implicit memory takes hold, resulting in visceral sensations of the past that can lead to overwhelming, excruciating implosions of affect – and even violence.

  Different parts of the brain are involved in the two types of memory. The amygdala – an almond-shaped cluster of neurons nestled deep in the brain – is crucial to implicit memory, and also controls our reactions to external stimuli. As Stines puts it, it is the ‘alert system in the brain’, and when it over-fires it can lead to anxiety. Explicit memory, on the other hand, is controlled by the hippocampus – elongated and ridge-like along the lateral ventricles – which is the part of the brain that connects history to memory. In order to make sense of the past, we need the ‘intention, organization, and categorization’ that explicit memory enables, especially if the raw emotional aftershocks of trauma have dominated via implicit memory.

  Stines cites research suggesting that amygdala activity decreases when a person can ‘name an emotion accurately’. In studies, this kind of internal labelling was associated with the activation of the middle prefrontal cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which led to the release of inhibitory transmitters that modulate the amygdala’s response and, perhaps, the subject’s anxiety. Siegel, notes Stines, refers to this process as ‘name it to tame it’. This is, of course, nothing new in a sense, harking back to the fundamentals of psychoanalytic ‘talk therapy’, which has long established the importance of linguistic communication in addressing trauma-induced states and neurosis.

  For a couple who decide to seek help, there are now myriad therapeutic models on offer, some departing from this cognitive-focused approach and its narrative bent. Regardless of the methodology, they all rely on neuroplasticity, or the brain’s potential for change. Stines says that ‘attuned, empathic relationships are what can aid in rewiring broken neural circuits’, which is why friendship, reading, therapy and support groups (granted, not all therapeutic settings and support groups are places of healing) help many traumatised people. And it’s also why tackling tra
uma in the context of a committed, intimate relationship, when both parties are willing to do so, can be especially soothing and rewarding. My longing to undertake that project with The Son of the Holocaust Survivor wasn’t fulfilled. We were trapped in a power struggle we didn’t understand.

  When I was down for the count after several rounds with him, I came across a book by Pia Mellody, a vocal public advocate of twelve-step recovery programs. An addiction and relationships educator, Mellody is a senior clinical advisor at The Meadows in Arizona, a multi-disorder facility that has been a model for inpatient services the world over – it specialises in the treatment of trauma via tailor-made therapies. Mellody has written numerous self-help titles, including Facing Love Addiction, which I initially greeted with the usual combination of disdain and desperation that I reserved for books of this genre. When I started reading it, however, I readily identified my own reactions, and my partner’s, in the destructive dynamic she outlined. A preface to introducing Mellody’s thesis: the love addict–avoidant dichotomy is a broad conceptualisation of trauma-bound relational dynamics. As such, it’s a framework that needs to be handled with care. Bleached of specificity and nuance, it can be applied too literally and heavy-handedly, as if we complex beings were a homogeneous mass easily split into two pre-fab typecasts, and as if there aren’t shades of grey and surprises and slippages that unsettle such formulations.