Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Mellody describes relationship co-addiction as a debilitating and progressive process in which both partners compulsively play out the roles childhood experience has primed them for. One partner tends to crave love as a result of neglect or abandonment in formative years, having formed a survival fantasy that somebody (my father; the past in the present) will show up to fill the void, rescuing them from loneliness and the isolation of traumatic shame, and affirming that they matter. ‘Love addicts’, Mellody explains, unconsciously choose partners prone to ‘avoidance’: inclined to be unresponsive, to neglect the relationship, and to actively avoid the intimacy and enmeshment the love addict seeks. Though there are warning signs from the start, the love addict – in a state that combines the ingrained rescue fantasy with transference – initially denies the reality of their partner’s unavailability.

  When cracks inevitably appear in that denial, the love addict ramps up efforts to secure the attention and affection of the avoiding other. This happens even when there are opposing commitments: in the psyche of an ardent feminist, for example, or someone who intellectually values independence and self-sufficiency. Shit gets cray cray, escalating out of control, because the more the love addict pursues, the faster and further the avoidant runs, and the more the avoidant runs, blocks and walls off, the more the love addict pursues and hammers, flipping between manipulative and more overtly controlling strategies. Both roles play out across the gender spectrum but, with aeons of patriarchal conditioning, women are more prone to, and commonly identify with, love addiction, and men are more prone to, and commonly identify with, avoidance. Whichever way you cut it, the trajectory of each partner is rooted in formative traumata.

  We crashed and burned. On the rebound, The Son of the Holocaust Survivor hooked up with a chic seventeen-year-old. I tried to weather the emotional fallout, but faltered and, demented with anguish, took up with Mr Wrong (five years). He stormed around the stage, part Pozzo, part Lucky. You find it tedious? He was younger than me and twisted by rage that simmered daily. Determined to be a better man than his brutish father and loathing of woman-beaters, he was loyal and could be caring (once driving from Brisbane to Sydney in one stretch to be with me when my mother was dying). But he was wrong for me and I got stuck. Scared of being alone I took the coward’s respite and years passed, moving between restless sleep and discontented wakefulness.

  The union of two people with corresponding traumas is, John Bradshaw insists, no accident. As he explained to Hay, it’s the central paradox of an adult relationship informed by childhood trauma: ‘A woman will find a man who basically treats her in the rejecting way that her father treated her … A guy that had a controlling, dominating mother who hated it, marries a woman that’s controlling and dominating.’ It’s not always quite so clear-cut or obvious. Sometimes people go the other way and choose a partner who seems to be the opposite of what they grew up with, but that can lead to a different set of problems or a mere reversal of roles in the dynamic.

  During this draining dance, cycles of intensity and ‘bombing’ – acts or exchanges designed to engage the other, albeit in a dramatic manner – and withdrawal take the place of healthy intimacy and communication. According to Mellody, love addicts are often attracted to people with process (work, sex, gambling, gaming, etc.) or substance addictions. Through their process or substance addiction, the avoidant partner seeks to medicate their childhood history of engulfment by a needy, possessive or domineering caregiver, while the love addict seeks to medicate their childhood history of neglect or abandonment by obsessing about their partner. In other words, the love addict is addicted to the avoidant partner, who is addicted to [insert addiction of choice here].

  When love addicts go cold turkey – either when their partner leaves, or when they end the relationship in an effort to maintain or reclaim their sanity and dignity – they experience harrowing pain and may seek relief in other people, other addictions, suicide or some form of revenge. Hard-core love addicts frequently end up dying prematurely, or being institutionalised in prisons and psych wards, and, according to Mellody, this dynamic underlies many cases of intimate-partner violence.

  The tragedy is that both the love addict and love avoidant share the same fundamental fears of abandonment and engulfment, though they operate in different orders of priority. The primary fear for the love addict is abandonment and the flipside fear of engulfment lies dormant so long as the desired other is significantly unavailable. Conversely, the love avoidant predominantly fears engulfment until and unless the other pulls away, triggering a latent fear of abandonment. These secondary fears are not as baffling as they might at first seem because, as the theory goes, being engulfed by a caregiver as a child also involves abandonment since being forced to meet the needs of an adult means critical childhood needs go unmet, and for a person perversely bonded to abandonment and unaccustomed to deeper experiences of intimacy, it can, though craved, feel frightening and overwhelming. If two love addicts get together, they are likely to form a highly dependent and enmeshed relationship in which they lack individuation and differentiation. If two avoidants hook up, they usually form a very low-intensity relationship with minimal emotional engagement, each putting their addictions ahead of time and intimacy with one another. To make matters even more distressing and confusing, an individual can switch between love addiction and avoidance. When you get two people frequently doing that within the one relationship, it’s loony tunes. If they’re lucky, they’ll break up or get to therapy.

  Several of my significant relationships wound up in couples therapy. The ones that didn’t weren’t spared that fate because they were healthier, but because they were significantly less so. As seasoned at therapy as I became over the years, I still find partner therapy harder than any other to endure. If you’re committed enough to each other, if you stay in the process long enough, if the relationship still has some juice in it, and if the therapist is any good, all the collusions and sickly micro-contracts, all the pettiness, the grudges, the housework gripes and ridiculous resentments come creeping out. You feel unbearably exposed, ambushed, ganged up on, misunderstood – and heard. The intimacy is, at times, intolerable, and in those moments when the dust settles you find yourself looking across the room at your partner and you see their suffering in its pulsing poignancy and you find out just how damn loveable they are. And of course, you discover your own story. You find out where it all began.

  He comes to visit and takes me to my grandparents’ place, where fairies live in the garden. My grandmother makes nice roasts and homemade ice-cream and I like the food. But I don’t think she likes me. She grills me about my mother and she’s always praising my aunt and cousins. They are prettier and cleverer and better in ways I can’t see. My father leaves me alone with her in the sunroom for hours on end while he takes long naps and my grandfather tinkers away in the shed. I go home with tension migraines – until the day my mother announces he’s not allowed to take me there anymore.

  Sometimes I ask my mother why my father doesn’t love me. He loves you, she tells me, he just doesn’t like children – which is basically saying he doesn’t like what and who I am. I try to understand. I do not exist. I do not have a father.

  By the time my father returned from Brisbane after the collapse of his second marriage, I was a teenager, and it was my turn to disappear. In my compulsive travels, I all but forgot about him. He did not exist. I saw little of him in my comings and goings, and when I did it was the same as always, only I was older and I could escape and drink. I have a father. I am confused. I do not have a father.

  In my late teens my father bought a property in an idyllic location in northern New South Wales. He transformed it into what he imagined to be a haven for the family come the Next Big Depression. He badgered me to leave the city and move to the country. He built an extension that was never used and bought games for my brother’s children that rotted unopened. It was his turn to wait. He spent
almost two decades there alone and he did not understand. Eventually he moved closer to town and met a woman who did him a world of good, and with whom he now passes his days with great mutual respect and fondness.

  I visit my father’s house in my early twenties. He seems to want to bond, but I’m hard to reach and I remain uncomfortable in his presence. It’s an unsettling mix of intimidation, unease and shame, and it renders me stilted at best and speechless at worst. He is disappointed I am like this. He drags me out on bushwalks, but I’m a city girl and I don’t enjoy them. I feel a low, slow burn that I later identify as resentment. I do not feel I belong to him and yet he is of great importance to me. I no longer dance. I am depressed and I want to go home.

  In my thirties, some years after I quit drinking, I went to live in a city nearer my father and for several years I saw more of him. There were times I found his presence surprisingly soothing. Age was mellowing him and loneliness was softening him, or maybe I was just growing up. I began to inhabit my skin. We became friends, even close. But the past in the present still continued when it came to my relationships with men. When it ended with Mr Wrong I went to live with my father while I finished my master’s thesis and contemplated my next move. We hadn’t lived together in decades, since I was four or five, but we made it work. Better: we forged a connection. It was as if we loved each other.

  I married The New Yorker (six-and-a-half years) on a cold afternoon in February 2001 on the Upper East Side. I was thirty-seven and wore a champagne Audrey Hepburn dress from Barneys; the highlight of our small and hasty wedding was a gate-crashing by a posse of Long Island gossips, friends of his mother who showed up uninvited. We lived in Manhattan for two years before relocating to Sydney. He was a kind father figure, the kindest. We shared continents and lives for a time.

  In many respects, that marriage was my most successful relationship to date. My American husband was smart, cultured, generous and gentle. He earned a decent income and was happy to financially support a writing wife struggling with chronic illness in the form of Hepatitis C, contracted years before during active addiction. It was a relatively peaceful union, but it failed to flourish. The honeymoon ended abruptly seven months after we wed, on a sunny Tuesday morning when terrorists flew two passenger planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, with a third hitting the Pentagon and a fourth crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. This event instantly triggered a major decline into severe CPTSD symptomology. For weeks I struggled to eat, battled diarrhoea and had trouble sleeping. Living through constant bomb scares and high alerts in Manhattan, the beating heart of the biggest city of the US, eroded the fragile sense of baseline safety I had managed to establish.

  Large-scale traumatic events take place all the time, but never before had humanity experienced one quite like this. Wilfully causing horror and diabolical shock is inherent to terrorism – to conventional warfare too, but in terrorism the inflicting of trauma amid the general population is a prime objective, not regrettable collateral damage. The horror and diabolical shock of 9/11 was amplified by location: terror had struck New York and Washington, the centre of the so-called ‘free world’. It was the first time a nation-state created in the image of white people had been directly and spectacularly attacked by a rogue entity. This was not the young man throwing rocks or the bus explosions by lone suicide bombers that had become routine in the protracted conflict of the Middle East, and nor was it traditional guerrilla warfare. This was a sophisticated and highly technologised organisation that had coordinated a suicidal visitation of multi-pronged mass destruction designed not only to kill and instil terror, but also to enact economic sabotage and unleash ideological mayhem. That this calamity unfolded in such a heavily mediatised period of civilisation resulted in real-time transmissions and a wildfire of affective distress – fear, anger, sadness – sweeping across the world, making the events of 9/11 an unprecedented global traumatic event that announced a new world order. Millions were traumatised in the world wars, in civil wars around the world, and in other long, brutal armed conflicts over aeons, but never before had so many far and wide been traumatised, to varying degrees, in one moment.

  Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American: ‘Just watching television footage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was enough to cause clinically diagnosable stress responses in some people who did not even live near the attacks – let alone the millions of people who did.’ Quoting researchers Priscilla Dass-Brailsford and Yuval Neria, Harmon reports that traumatic reactions do not necessarily indicate PTSD, while the conventional wisdom on PTSD – that those closest to and most physically affected by an event will be the most traumatised by it – does not necessarily hold. Another article claims that while 90 per cent of people will experience traumatic stress in the wake of a major event like 9/11, symptoms gradually subside over a period of several weeks through a process of ‘natural recovery’. In line with this, Harmon reports on a 2006 study in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease that showed PTSD rates in New York decreasing from about 5 per cent a year after 9/11 to 3.8 per cent two years later.

  Socioeconomic factors are thought to play a part in the development and longevity of PTSD, along with the amount of graphic television footage people view (I still avoid watching footage of the planes hitting the towers). In 2011, The New York Times ran an article titled ‘10 Years and a Diagnosis Later, 9/11 Demons Haunt Thousands’, in which Dr Margaret Dessau, who lives close to where the towers stood and witnessed the attacks first-hand, describes her experiences of trauma to journalist Anemona Hartocollis. Having heard the noise of the first hijacked plane hitting WTC 1, she had run naked from the shower, only to see the gaping hole in the tower. ‘The flames get worse, and then I start seeing all these people hanging out there. The guy with this white towel, and he’s waving it.’ When he jumped, she heard children screaming from a nearby school. Therapy eventually helped ease Dessau’s severe PTSD symptoms, but when her husband died in 2009 of lung cancer (possibly associated with the toxic fallout of the attack) Dessau found herself sliding backwards into the complicated grief and anxiety disorder often indicative of PTSD.

  Hartocollis taps into the spooky resonance between stories of suffering when she writes that Dessau ‘sees 9/11 and her husband’s death as part of a continuum’: Dessau’s parents had escaped Nazi Germany, a relative had died by suicide, and she had been a student in Israel during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. For Dessau, 9/11 was ‘corroboration of the evil of human beings’. Hartocollis and Dessau gesture towards a principal reality: as random, as erratic, as crazed and surreal as events like 9/11 seem, they are, like the Arab–Israeli War, like Nazi Germany, like all of the mass traumatic events throughout history, grounded in the social system of patriarchy and its manifestations in institutionalised religion, politics, imperialism, and aggressive forms of liberalism and capitalism.

  On the ground in New York in the aftermath, it seemed like everyone knew someone who had died in the attacks. In our case it was a family friend’s son, who had been working in one of the towers. We heard many other accounts – from neighbours, conversations among passers-by, news reports. For many New Yorkers the eyewitness stories about the jumpers (those who jumped from the upper floors of the towers rather than burn) and the photos of ‘the falling man’ were the stuff of a wide-awake nightmare that, paradoxically, only dreamless sleep could relieve. There were scores of painful posters posted on buildings downtown, bearing once-smiling faces and pleading descriptions of the missing. For months afterwards I passed fire stations all over Manhattan with images of the fallen, wreaths of flowers, drawings from children and messages of gratitude. I thought of the helpers, galvanised and too busy to tend to their own trauma, of a city tenderised and unified by grief. At times it seemed like everyone I came upon was being braver than I was, but I knew that behind closed doors others were suffering unspeakable torments: I could only imagine the devastation of the families of those who w
ere killed and the fresh PTSD of many who were closer than I was to Ground Zero on that infamous autumn day. I could only trouble over the injustices that American Muslims and other people of colour around the country faced, suddenly finding themselves cast as the enemy, abused or even murdered in hate crimes of deranged retaliation.

  Born and raised in New York, my husband, along with millions of other Americans, must have felt the impact of 9/11 in ways I couldn’t share. Even though I was living in Manhattan on the day of the attacks, they hit, in some psychic sense, on foreign soil: much as I loved New York, it did not yet feel like home. At the same time, I felt more directly threatened by the attacks than many of the Americans around me. It was a predicament both my husband and I struggled to make sense of. The months passed and his tolerance thinned. I felt ashamed and embarrassed that I was so disproportionately affected, and despite seeking counselling I remained in a state of hyper-vigilant anxiety until long after we left New York for Sydney. We relocated partly because my ageing grandparents were declining rapidly, but also because, in my unstitched state, I longed for whatever sense of security I could find, and that meant home.