At the party and with a drink in her, a friend pulled her aside. “Elise, you should know, Michael is not a very nice guy and I just want you to be careful because I don’t think he has good intentions.”
“That’s honestly the last thing I remember,” she told me.
Later, when whatever drug that Michael had put in her drink kicked in and he took her back to his house and raped her, there would be a sense not just of losing consciousness, of slipping into darkness, but of dying or something close to dying.
“I kept passing out,” she explained. “I have no idea how long it went on.” Between the long stretches of darkness, there would be flashes of clarity. “I would wake up for a moment and then feel my head being smashed into a wall and then I would go under again. I knew he was going to kill me. I’m surprised I lived. I honestly don’t know why he didn’t kill me. And I honestly have no idea why after he raped me, he dropped me off at home the next morning. These are things that make no sense to me.”
Afterward, when Michael, whose last name she could never recall, dropped her off curbside, as if the whole thing had been a date, she went straight upstairs and crawled into bed, not telling anyone about her ordeal. What could she say? It was still early in the morning, predawn, and the darkness hid her bruises, her concussion, her broken ribs. Even she didn’t know how bad off she was. The next day, when she woke up, her roommate got a look at her in the light and “pretty much freaked out.” Her roommate managed to collect herself, and together they went to the hospital, where Elise stayed for a few days.
She had never been close to her family. There are those truly awful families that resemble warring tribes and there are those other families that fill the world with their light, make the universe seem like a safe, nurturing place. Elise’s family was somewhere in the middle, but her rape seemed to her to be more than they could handle.
“My mother was completely crazy,” she explained. “Telling her would’ve made things so much worse for me, so I never told my family. I kept it within my circle of friends in the city. I was so ashamed about it. I thought being raped was my fault. I knew I had been partying too much and for years I thought I had somehow brought it on myself.” Along with her friends and the policemen who took her statement, a plan began to take shape in Elise’s mind, a plan to prosecute Michael, to bring him in, make a case. The police were encouraging and told her, based on what they had, that the chances of getting him were good.
Around this time, Elise’s father fell ill and was hospitalized with a lung infection. When he died a few weeks later, it was like a world ending. It was a one-two punch. “I’m pretty sure I had PTSD already but when my dad died, it just spun me. My whole concept of reality just stopped. I don’t want to say that I should’ve been institutionalized but I needed to be in some kind of facility.”
After her father passed away, Elise began to lose track of time. She was alive, technically speaking, but she was mostly just going through the motions, each day a photocopy of the one before. She would get up, put on layers of makeup to cover the bruises, go to work, come home, and then immediately crawl back into bed. Eventually, the bruises went away, but the routine remained. Wake, work, sleep, repeat. Months went by. She quit acting and took a job at a cosmetics counter in a department store. “Sleeping my life away was just my way of not facing what had happened. I just couldn’t deal with the world any longer. To me, the entire world was a dangerous and frightening place and I couldn’t handle even the slightest bit of attention. In social situations, people would look at me and expect me to say something and I would just get beet red. Somehow I got by but I was so hypervigilant, so locked into fight-or-flight mode that I can only remember parts of my life, bits and pieces. The entire world was a trigger for me, but my number one trigger was men. I was completely unable to handle attention from any male in any capacity.”
About the only man she could handle was her childhood friend, Martin. One day, out of the blue, Martin asked if she wanted to drop some acid. Sure, she said. “I figured I was probably gonna have a bad trip. So I told him, ‘I honestly don’t think my life could get much worse than it is right now.’ I think I just needed some chemical to rock my world. There was no reaching me. I saw a therapist at one point but it was useless. I would just shut down. So I dropped acid and it was just a classic hippie experience,” she said, laughing. “We were frolicking outdoors like children, becoming completely obsessed with individual blades of grass, wandering through the park and thinking it was a cow pasture. It was stupid and I don’t really recommend it, but dropping acid helped knock me out of my depression and woke me up a little bit. I remember saying to Martin, ‘It reminded me that there are small things that you can still enjoy. I had just been so preoccupied with these huge questions, like why did this happen to me?”
Elise had been very unlucky in some ways, but in another way, she was very lucky: she had a solid group of friends who knew her and understood that something needed to change in her life. When Martin and some of her friends decided to go to Europe for a few months, even though she didn’t really want to, she decided to tag along. Even in Europe, though, it was like she was a ghost inhabiting her former self. “My memories of the continent are so disjointed. People ask me about Germany and England and I know intellectually that I was there for months but I can remember almost nothing about my time there. And my sense of direction was completely messed up. I was in Galway, this really charming town in western Ireland with my friends for a few months and they would tell me to meet them somewhere in town and I would just get completely turned around. They all seemed to be able to navigate the town pretty easily but I was just hopeless.”
The trip was originally intended to be for just a few months, but she ended up staying in Europe for close to three years. At one point, she found herself helping to manage a bed and breakfast in a small village in Belgium. Being in a completely different place helped her put some distance between her and her past. It was almost as if there was a healing power in the new geography, a way of drawing a line behind you, and even if you were the same person, you were in a new place, which made you feel new in a way.
When she finally returned to New York, Elise felt a little bit better, but she was still at odds with herself. “I kept obsessing over what had happened. The trauma continued to ring through my head and I just couldn’t get it to quiet down. I knew I needed to get well and start taking care of myself and so I started going to the gym. In Europe I had been drinking a lot and smoking a ton of hash and with the gym, it was like I just traded addictions. I was working out three hours a day every single day, just in there sweating out my anxiety. And the stronger I became, the more confident I became. For a while, I took self-defense classes with a guy who used to train the Green Berets.”
Good things were happening now. Every day, Elise was more in control of herself, more alive, more comfortable in her body. But the real game changer was yoga. “I know I sound like such a hippie but I remember one day after a really good session, the instructor had us just lie there completely still for like fifteen minutes, focusing on our breathing. It just really calmed me down, and it was honestly the first time in six years where I felt genuinely calmed down and in some way, almost . . . nurtured. Ever since the rape, I had just been running, running, running even when I came back from Europe. My entire life had become a treadmill, go, go, go. I just didn’t want to face it.”
Yoga worked, walking her off the knife-edge of hypervigilance she had been on for six years. After a couple weeks of classes, she could feel herself beginning to inhabit her body again. She began to bond with her yoga instructor, Susan, the only one she’d had up to that point. “I just recognized that she had something that I wanted. She had a confidence. She was calm and assuring and centered and welcoming and open. I was the complete opposite. I was closed and terrified and defensive and avoiding eye contact. I ended up going to her for a solid year.” Eventually, the two became good friends outside of class, occasi
onally having dinner, which only served to underscore the differences between the two, how much time she’d lost. Susan, it turned out, was actually a few years younger than Elise, but Elise saw a strength of character in her that she envied.
After attending classes for a year, she was ready to take the next step, and after talking it over with Susan, Elise quit her job in the city and moved to a yoga ashram in rural Quebec. “There’s just fucking nothing up there, man. Just emptiness followed by more emptiness.” Inside the ashram, things worked on an almost military routine. Yes, you could make friends and chat over lunch with the other people inside, but mostly what you did was get up early, chant, practice yoga, and do chores. “I pretty much did nothing but yoga and meditation from six o’clock in the morning till ten o’clock at night for two months.” She noticed that there were other people there working through various crises. A rumor going around was that one of the cooks at the ashram was an Iraq veteran.
The ashram was designed around a thirty-day certification course in Sivananda yoga. The idea was you showed up, put in a month, took a couple of exams at the end, and then returned to the outside world as a bona fide yogini. But at the end of her month, Elise wasn’t ready to go back yet. It was one of a series of active choices she took to get her life back. “I didn’t want to leave until I knew I had my life under control, so after I got my cert I stayed on for another month.” About her time at the ashram, she said, “It was the single most impactful thing I’ve ever done. I say sometimes that it returned me to myself, which isn’t entirely true because I was nineteen when I was raped, but it returned me to a place where I could deal with life for the first time.”
Once she went back to New York, things started happening fast. After being back for a couple weeks and dealing with the reverse culture shock of living in a big American city, she knew she needed to escape and start over somewhere. One day, she was sitting in a café with her friend Martin, talking about moving to California, when she saw this hippie-looking guy with a gray ponytail and an odd look about him. As this stranger turned and walked out of the café, she saw two words printed on the back of his T-shirt: HEAD WEST.
“So it was pretty much decided at that point,” she said.
When I first met Elise, she was teaching yoga in Long Beach, sometimes leading sessions down at the end of a peninsula where enormous yachts passed a small grassy park right on the water. “Coming to California was like hitting the start button for me. I was like, okay, Elise, who are you now? I knew I needed to be somewhere warm, somewhere with a healing energy that I could tap into, where I could just live a simple life and do a couple things. I figured I would just get an apartment on the beach and work as a waitress.”
After heading west in 2002, Elise ended up getting her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UCLA and marrying an architectural engineer, who sits in on her morning yoga classes sometimes.
When I asked her why yoga was so powerful for her, she said, “Western therapy just didn’t work for me. Sitting there, talking with a therapist who’s like ‘Hey, let’s sit down and relive the thing A to Z, and go over it again and again and again in your mind’ didn’t help me. I just became a sobbing hysterical mess. I couldn’t get through it. I refused to take medications. I had a strong desire to be clean, even though I ended up drinking a lot. I was trying to feel my way out, and yoga made me feel better, so I went with it. It worked.”
Elise’s story is not unusual. The fact is that for many people, Western talk therapies do not work for post-traumatic stress. Modern psychotherapy, partially inspired by the Freudian ideal of catharsis via verbiage, is in some ways the last thing some people need. As anyone who’s experienced true terror will tell you, the essence of the experience defies words, a fact that only serves to irritate some therapists, many of whom cling to a sort of crackpot wisdom that says that disclosure is the only way out. Jonathan Shay, a VA psychiatrist, describes in Achilles in Vietnam a situation similar to what Elise saw. “During the early days of the current era of PTSD treatment, mental health professionals shared a folk belief that simply ‘getting it all out’ would result in safety, sobriety, and self-care. The consequences of these well-intended ‘combat debriefings’ were catastrophic, resulting in many suicides.”
As an alternative to mainstream talk therapy, yoga stands out as a uniquely effective treatment, precisely because it insists that people shut up and start listening to their bodies. Yoga works to correct the central lie of Western philosophy, which goes all the way back to Descartes, who said that the body and the mind are distinct entities that exist independent of each other.
It is almost as if researchers have been talking to Elise: a number of recently completed studies, including one conducted by David Emerson and Bessel van der Kolk at Harvard Medical School, have shown that yoga is very effective at reducing the hypervigilance and hyperarousal associated with PTSD. If you’re familiar at all with yoga practice, it’s not hard to imagine why. Yoga teaches mindfulness of breath, calmness, and connection to the rhythms of your body, allowing you to feel “at home” in it. All of these core practices serve to repair the damage done by trauma. As van der Kolk points out, “Neither CBT protocols nor psychodynamic therapeutic techniques pay sufficient attention to the experience and interpretation of disturbed physical sensations and preprogrammed physical action patterns.”
One of the major long-term goals of any trauma therapy is to get survivors to change their perception of time, to focus less on the past and focus more on the present. Yoga seems to do this by encouraging you to focus on the “now” of your physical self, a form of nonthinking that might seem counterintuitive at first. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this state as one of flow, arguing that “after an episode of flow is over, we generally emerge from it with a stronger self-concept . . . The musician feels at one with the harmony of the cosmos, the athlete moves at one with the team, the reader of the novel lives for a few hours in a different reality. Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.” (Several trauma survivors have told me that they found the focus on “being present,” as described in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, to be strikingly powerful for them. As Tolle argues in his book, “To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.”)
Yoga is also, as Elise readily admits, ridiculous. There is nothing sillier than seeing a bunch of people standing around in a park twisted into enlightened pretzels, repeating words from a long-dead language. Yoga is moronic, which is part of what makes it so great. In the Marine Corps, we had a saying: “If it’s stupid but it works, then it isn’t stupid.”
Personally, I plan on doing stupid, functional things like yoga for the rest of my life.
Anton Chekhov, who was a doctor as well as a writer, once observed that “if many remedies are prescribed for an illness you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” There are many remedies recommended for post-traumatic stress, a truly bewildering variety of choices that can seem at times like a psychological supermarket. Some of these alternatives seem at first like applied common sense, while others seem more like applied hobbies, ideas that took root after someone found comfort in them and began recommending them to friends. Some of them sound suspiciously like religious cults. Many of these therapies exist on the margins of modern science and are only now being explored by researchers. One review of alternative therapies published in the VA’s PTSD Research Quarterly in 2012 concluded that “the most striking finding overall is the relative lack of empirical evidence for CAM [Complementary and Alternative Medicines] for PTSD.” Very few of these alternatives seem genuinely harmful or dangerous, except possibly to your bank account. The sheer number of them speaks to the magnitude of the problem, the inherent complexity of PTSD, and the extremes to which people will g
o to seek relief from their symptoms. With the growth in popularity of the PTSD diagnosis and mounting concern about the welfare of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, alternative therapies are showing up everywhere these days.
One crowdsourced website I consulted, which maintains a regularly updated database of therapies for PTSD, lists seventy-nine such remedies, including acupuncture, art therapy, biofeedback, fish oil, gardening, hiking, hot tea, journaling, marijuana, MDMA, meditation, moving to a new city, Reiki, “using a clear shower curtain,” vitamin C, vitamin D, walking, white noise, yoga, and zinc. Mingled with these curatives are a host of general lifestyle choices, such as getting exercise, eating well, enjoying nature, playing sports, going to church, and spending time with friends. In the course of researching this book, I crossed paths with advocates for boxing, cycling, horseback riding, in-line skating, mountaineering, Native American sweat lodges, rifle marksmanship, tai chi, and warm water therapy as post-trauma treatments. In 2011, a journalist friend of mine spent several weeks in Georgia interviewing members of a Christian group that performs exorcisms on traumatized people.
In Southern California, where the military and the West Coast self-improvement culture often overlap, a cottage industry of PTSD curatives has cropped up, with yoga practitioners, tai chi devotees, fitness professionals, and virtual reality researchers all advertising help for the traumatized. One mixed martial arts gym a few blocks from my house has a vets-only team whose organizers promoted its benefits for veterans with PTSD. At the beginning of my research, I ran into a retired couple in the mountains north of San Diego who were putting together a horse ranch for traumatized veterans. Perhaps the most entertaining remedy came from a man from Texas who touted the benefits of Tetris, claiming the classic video game helped him with his PTSD. In short, there is no shortage of ideas for PTSD therapies, nor is there a shortage of concerned citizens with advice for those who struggle with the condition.
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