trauma
MOLLY MIELKE
second-hand trauma
I waited, my breathing hitched and tight, my mind racing. I could still feel a memory of the reverberations of the door slamming and the sound of muffled tears as my hand hovered above the worn brass handle. A thousand thoughts were ricocheting in my mind: Is it time yet? What do I say? How is this my fault? What does she need to hear? Did she find out about my vocabulary quiz? Why am I such a failure? Focus. Focus. My wrist turned shakily, slipping on the knob. I took a breath and gripped harder this time, a short and practiced grip that knew exactly when to slow to minimize the sound of the lock clicking. Opening the door a crack, I tiptoed slowly through the dark to perch myself on the edge of the bed where she lay crying softly. Her cries were more deep and somber now, a sign that the anger and smashed plates directed at me a couple minutes before had turned inward. My hand wavered as I slowly lowered it to touch her arm. “I’m sorry Mom. You were right. I’ll clean up before you get home next time.” She turned over and I felt a wave of pain as I caught a glimpse of her tearstreaks glimmering in the moonlight. “Am I a terrible mother? What am I doing wrong with you? I just don’t see the point anymore.” I struggled to stifle my anger, all of the similar nights leading up to this point flashing in my mind as I swallowing the lump in my throat. “No Mom, it was my fault, I’ll do better. You’re the best Mom in the world.” Minutes passed as we stared at each other and I saw, not for the first time, a reflection of trauma in her eyes, empty and disconnected amidst a violent storm of tears, clinging to the immediate problem to avoid the underlying issue.
It is rare that we are aware of trauma as we are experiencing it, our human tendency to go into autopilot too often taking control as we recite those familiar, rehearsed lines, our awareness becoming temporarily sedated to deal with the issue at hand. Trauma is rarely coupled with awareness, and when it is, it is jarring. Emma Gonzalez’s speech at the Washington DC “March for Our Lives” rally was a perfect example illustrating the complexity of trauma. The Parkland survivor’s speech did something truly magnificent; it transcended words. The nineteen-year-old activist began her speech by delivering her familiar but powerful message, calling for stricter gun laws and reciting the names of her classmates that paid the price. Then, for four minutes and twenty-six seconds, she was silent, her face a mask of determination and grief as she held space in time for the deaths of her classmates. It was both deeply moving and heartbreaking. She was able to capture both the pain of the act of the shooting, as well as the lasting effect it imprinted on her and the world, all without saying a word. The pain permeated through all the same and placed the audiences into her world, into the reality that she and so many others like her will now never be able to escape. In this way, she opened up and showed the way a shooting stays with you, those four minutes and twenty-six seconds forever burned into your mind. This display was both a powerful call to action and a hint at the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, on the survivors of these shootings, a topic that is extremely difficult to explain, much less demonstrate. Gonzalez’s trauma is not an isolated case. She represents a way of dealing with an experience that shakes you to the core and estranges you from your world. I see pain implicitly represented in Gonzalez’s speech, her tears carrying a weight she and so many others are now forced to carry. I see too a passive anger, strong yet subtle, estranged from her surroundings and burdened by experiences she should never have to carry. A broader scope reveals the way this form of gun-inflicted PTSD functions in enabling and perpetuating more deep-rooted cultural phenomena, specifically our inability to cross the threshold between experiencer and onlooker. Gonzalez attempts to cross that threshold, challenging the bounds of American empathy. While we may feel for her in the moment, our short attention spans quickly jump to the next disaster, riding a rollercoaster of catastrophe from Columbine to Las Vegas to who knows where. When I read the headlines describing the latest shooting in detail, I am hit with a wave of sadness. I feel for those that will have to grapple with what they have experienced for the rest of their lives, but also for the ripple of grief and trauma that will affect everyone around them. I notice the limits of empathy on full display in the towns and cities whenever another shooting rips through our nation’s headlines. In this crisis state, the limited number of people the public extends empathy too often barely includes all of the victims. Immediately under the pressure of action and the next impending shooting, a brutal selection of the most traumatized people is made for the public to empathize with, those excluded often subtly denied and sometimes even blamed. While the physically injured survivors of these shootings are usually offered the resources they need by the community, those not physically impacted or not at the scene when it happened are often pushed to the wayside and invalidated. Chelsea Sobolik, a survivor of the Aurora movie theatre shooting, reported in an article published by The Huffington Post that: As a survivor who wasn’t physically injured or didn’t lose a family member, I wasn’t included in a lot of the community fundraising. All of that went to people that were physically injured and spent time in the hospital, as well as families of people who died. People who experienced just psychological trauma, or didn’t have any physical injuries, weren’t included in that at all.
6 IN
American adults or someone they care for have experienced gun violence*
*Approximate. SurveyUSA Market Research Study. Data collected from December 7, 2018 to December 11, 2018.
It is hard not to compare the difference in degree of attention physically traumatized survivors are awarded when compared to psychologically traumatized persons. Furthermore, stepping back one more step reveals those lurking just outside of the realm of experience, deeply impacted by the experiencer’s trauma, yet denied the little support that is offered the experiencers. These people, often the children of survivors, are rarely granted the luxury of empathy from others, yet are expected to support and uphold the experiencers while going through their own grief. Miriam Vogel, a Holocaust survivor, describes in her article, “Gender as a Factor in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma” this phenomena, labeled as “inherited trauma,” or an instance “when it is the client’s parents or other adult caregivers who have experienced the traumatic events in response to which this person (the client) now suffers inexplicable symptoms of fear, anxiety, depression, flashbacks of things never experienced, nightmares, and obsessions with phenomena out of the range of their experience.” This concept was further legitimized by Rachel Yehuda, a psychologist at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in the Bronx, who described in an article by Judith Shulevitz for New Republic that from studying the offspring of Holocaust survivors, she found that “the children of PTSD-stricken mothers were diagnosed with PTSD three times as often as members of control groups; children of fathers or mothers with PTSD suffered three to four times as much depression and anxiety, and engaged more in substance abuse.”
These effects ring especially true to me from my own experience growing up with a mother suffering from PTSD. I first met the reality of PTSD by waking up to the incessant sound of pacing and the low undertones of someone trying to speak quietly. My ten-year-old self groggily padded down the hall, following the coiled red telephone cable into my mother’s bedroom where she had now seated herself with her back to me. When she turned to look at me, I immediately knew something was wrong. There was a faint twitch to her and her eyes looked empty and erratic. “Honey, last night I went out with Win to see why Matt had not come home from Cape Viscano and we found him dead.” I gaped for a second and probably said something inscrutable, to which she continued, saying, “He was shot in his car. We don’t know who yet.” I solemnly sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at her. She turned back to her phone call. Everything after that point was a blurred week of man-hunts, more shootings, SWAT teams, investigations, school lockdowns, premature celebrations of life and intense feelings of isolation. It felt as though my mom and I were floating through a nightmare, disconnected from the world around us. I would only collect the bits and pieces of the story many years later, learning that Matt, my mom’s coworker and our family friend, had not only been shot several times with a semi-automatic rifle in the middle of the woods while he was surveying the land, but that the shooter, Aaron Bassler, had proceeded to defecate on his body immediately after.
Bassler was mentally unstable and had decided that night it was time to shoot a stranger in the middle of the woods twice with his “Chinese-made, modified Norinco SKS Sporter 7.62x39mm semi-automatic rifle” (Revelle, Tiffany). When the manhunt that followed concluded, the total body count had reached three, but the psychological impact on our tiny town was incalculable. I watched my mother as she struggled to cope, she herself describing herself after the shooting as Edgy and on high alert at all times. I did not sleep well and had terrible nightmares. I was suspicious of those I had previously trusted (at first we did not know who had killed my coworker, and I wondered if it was someone I knew). I lost my innocence as a result of the shooting — I no longer could believe that people were fundamentally good… I shut down for a long time and tried to “soldier forward,” continuing to go to work and push onward. (Morris) I can attest that from my perspective, she seemed to completely detach from the rest of the world and I worried constantly about her safety and stability for years to come. I recognize that same ostracization that Sobolik describes in the way my hometown community treated my mom for years following Matt’s murder. While she was not the one who loved him the most, she is the one who will never be able to forget the sight of his dead body. Being the only constant in my mother’s life at the time, it was heartbreaking to watch her faith in humanity shatter so instantly and so irreversibly, similar to the dishes she would often throw to the ground in rage after. The way that we deal with trauma is both unique and universal, an interesting blend influenced by culture, upbringing and situation. It is inescapable and irreversible, a perfect problem for our results-driven, problem-solving society. As Matthew Friedman of the US Department of Veteran Affairs articulates, PTSD includes “re-experiencing, avoidance, arousal, and negative changes in beliefs and feelings.” Trauma can be categorized as any instance out of the usual palette of human experiences, an outlier that does not fit in with the rest of the individual’s perception of the world around them. Trauma can be big or small and the response of the individual varies greatly. Cathy Caruth, a specialist in the impacts of trauma, wrote a book titled Trauma: Explorations in Memory that describes the particular brand of trama my mother experienced as “a peculiar kind of historical phenomenon… in which the overwhelming events of the past repeatedly possess, in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them” (151). Those overwhelming events lead to what a study by the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies evaluating the psychological state of victims of a 2011 shooting in Norway found to be “psychological reactivity to reminders, pervasive negative emotional state, and the arousal symptoms of hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response, difficulty with concentration, and sleep difficulties.” PTSD causes these symptoms due to these traumatic memories’ refusal to be integrated into the rest of the person’s life and the weight it manifests into that the individual is then forced to carry.
While I hear the faint echoes of truth in Vogel’s concept of “inherited trauma,” I am immediately hit with a wave of guilt and grief for stealing away any of the limited empathy that was awarded to my mother. Herein lies a difficult problem; despite acknowledging the weight of my inherited traumas, I still feel that I cannot afford myself the space to grieve, subscribed to distributing the limited empathy from the public to the friends and family of the victims first, then those directly impacted by experience (such as my mother) second. Yet in doing so, there is no empathy left for me even within myself, cutting off the ability for the trauma to ever become fully resolved and estranging myself from either identifying as a victim or an onlooker.
There exists a divide between those that have experienced these atrocities and those just outside the realm of experience. For years after Aaron Bassler had long been dead, I still found it difficult to empathize with my mom. Factually, I understood. I understood that she had been through something that nobody should have to go through. I understood that the experience haunted her and made her unable to care for me in the way that I needed, and yet still, I was resentful. I was resentful that I felt as though I had lost my childhood to my mother’s PTSD. While other children were trying on identities and distancing themselves from their parents, I was forced to endure years of nightly unfounded anger directed at me. In a study by C.P. Sullivan, et al. of Virginia Tech following the effects of PTSD on mass violence survivors, the team found that “anger may be an adaptive response to threats among individuals with PTSD, which may contribute to feelings of detachment from others.� At the time, however, I did not know that this was normal, nor was I ready to take it on by myself. After an outburst, I would then be called on to stuff my own emotions away when our familiar cycle progressed and it became time for me to persuade her to come back from the mental ledge, convincing her that she was a good mother. At that point her work and I had became the entirety of her world, our home becoming an isolated island of anger, grief and instability. I would often cry on the bus ride home, dreading going back to that island but feeling a deep sense of responsibility from knowing I was all she had left. I lived in fear of losing her, but felt I lost myself in the process.
So what does all of this mean? I do not want to be the victim, nor do I believe I have earned that luxury. I am not the one that lives still with these impossible to place, horrific experiences. I am not the one that received the limited services that were granted to my mother and that is as it should be. However, I believe it is important that everyone affected by events such as these be granted the space to articulate the ways they have been impacted and validated in their experience. Only after moving across the country, far away from my tiny town, was I able to loosen the binds I had created around myself and let myself begin to feel the grief I had been unable to express when I still needed to make room for my mom’s PTSD. I often think about the five stages of grief when I watch or read the stories of victims of shootings. These stories remind me that in many ways I disagree with what Elisabeth Kubler Ross of the Kübler-Ross or “Five Stages of Grief ” model detailed because I see far more complexity to grief than she awards and little to no linearity. In my experience and observation, trauma is not straightforward, reaching one level and continuing to the next, instead growing more tangled and twisted than America’s relationship to guns as it remains unaddressed. Is it not telling that the item that causes the most violence in our society has such a strikingly traumatic relationship with its people? PTSD is intimately intertwined with guns and yet both are dealt with with a similar lack of empathy or remorse, our blatant lack of understanding of trauma consistently on full display.
Furthermore, what are the stages of grief for those that are not granted any space to grieve? More personally, should I grant myself the space to say that I deserve to be able to grieve? This argument is an ongoing debate inside of my head, one side denying me the luxury of victimhood while the other seeming to almost exploit it, using it to justify my actions. I am sure Elisabeth Kubler Ross would say that I am ultimately going through the same five stages in my own time and that grief is grief, but I am not so convinced. By putting my own needs at the bottom of the priority list for so long, the more experienced caretaker inside of me constantly invalidates my own pain. While I know this will change with time, I also know that my aversion to recreating my mother’s grieving process will take me down a different path. In part, I have taken on my mom’s unresolved traumas, but where I will go with them I do not know and how I should feel about that is also unclear. I still worry about my mom everyday and I doubt that will ever change. Mental and physical trauma permeates our culture, whether experienced or inherited, perpetuating our issues and impossible to disentangle from the past and the present, compressed into our very culture. Understanding the ways trauma can be inherited provides a broader context to which we can view the ways America relates to issues such as gun control, yet offers no resolution to trauma’s inability to be assimilated. While the boundaries around our ability to exclusively empathize for who we deem to be “survivors” may be strong, they are not impenetrable. Sometimes I notice my hand shaking as it hovers over a doorknob, internally reciting the lines I’ll say. My mouth still forms familiar shapes automatically in the face of difficulty, the practiced phrase, “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I’ll do better next time.” While I am hesitant to label my experiences as trauma, bringing them out of the dark bedroom stretches the boundaries of public empathy and begins to steady my hand, just a little.
Works Cited Almendrala, Anna. “‘I Remember Feeling Really Scared That He Could Be around Any Corner, Because We Weren’t Sure Exactly Where He Was.”.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 22 Nov. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aurora-theater-shooting-chelsea-sobolik_us_5a0a3830e4b0bc648a0d5889. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Hafstad, Gertrud Sofie, et al. “PTSD Prevalence and Symptom Structure of DSM-5 Criteria in Adolescents and Young Adults Surviving the 2011 Shooting in Norway.” Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 169, Dec. 2014, pp. 40–46. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.jad.2014.06.055. Revelle, Tiffany. “Aaron Bassler’s Father Responds to DA Report on Shooting.” Ukiah Daily Journal, Ukiah Daily Journal, 14 Aug. 2012, www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/article/zz/20120814/NEWS/120815993. Orfalea, Gregory. “Self-Inflicted Carnage.” Commonweal, vol. 144, no. 13, 11 Aug. 2017, pp. 17–20. EBSCOhost, proxy.library.nyu. edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=124342914&site=eds-live. Shulevitz, Judith. “The Science of Suffering.” The New Republic, 16 Nov. 2014, newrepublic.com/article/120144/trauma-genetic-scientists-say-parents-are-passing-ptsd-kids. Sullivan, C.P., et al. “Network Analysis of PTSD Symptoms Following Mass Violence.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, vol. 10, no. 1, 01 Jan. 2018, p. 58–66. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/ tra0000237. “PTSD: National Center for PTSD.” How Is PTSD Measured? — PTSD: National Center for PTSD,1 Jan. 2007, www.ptsd.va.gov/public/assessment/ptsd-measured.asp. Vogel, Miriam L. “Gender as a Factor in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma.” Women & Therapy, vol. 15, no. 2, 1994, pp. 35–47., doi:10.1300/j015v15n02_04.
MOLLY MIELKE is a designer, writer and artist
living and working in the Bay Area. Her work focuses on identity, trauma, environmental issues and the concept of utopia.
WWW.MOLLYMIELKE.COM
second hand