Trauma

  • Content advisory

    Some of the posts on this page contain graphic descriptions of death, loss, and the effects of trauma that came after. Please read with caution.

    These events occurred in March of 2017. Names have been changed. All else is as remembered.

  • Revenant

    It’s been almost two years since I last published something on this page that no one reads. My girlfriend-turned-fiancé stopped periodically checking the tab she always kept open on her phone, I’d say, half way in. As with all things we love, delaying my return to it meant that the eventual revenant treatment had to be bolder, grander, something to justify the length of time. I don’t remember ever reading this rule but it’s sure stuck in my mind as well as the mind of, and I make myself feel better by writing this, the mind of every creative type.

    It had become a Big Thing.

    So big in fact that I’ve given up on it entirely. “Oh, but you’re here!” you say so kindly. And that’s true. I am here. But the idea that I had once stuck to this blog like a branding iron applied red-hot has faded into a flat, white scar. It’ll be there if you look for it but it won’t define it.

    So then, what? I am a writer therefore I must write. I adore capturing the stories of others, true or otherwise, and that love hasn’t gone anywhere. In fact, and I feel I should clarify here, this isn’t about change for the sake of loss but rather for gain. I’ve spent the last two years actively repairing a very broken mind. And I think that’s worth sharing. For I, too, am a piece of The Collection.

    This is my story.

  • Trauma

    ~

    The cancer had reached Jasmine’s brain. After years of prayer, faith, tears, begging – Jas was still losing. I’m reminded of the time in Dee Why, years before, when we gathered around her and prayed. As instructed in the Word, multiple people were gathered and praying and our faith was strong. In that moment of fervour, I truly felt like the cancer would simply slide out as one, grotesquely-symbolical tumour and Jasmine would be completely healed. We were doing, and had done, everything “right”; and yet, God had failed. Jasmine was going to die.

    The image of us all praying that day sits at the front of my mind. Played over this image is the chorus of “West” by Sleeping at Last. On repeat. Hours and hours on repeat. Disbelief, confusion, terror, grief have all pressed at once, crushed my heart and shattered my mind. I stay lost in that musically-nauseous fugue the entire day of her brain surgery.

    Not long after the surgery, Jasmine has a seizure. She had seemed to be doing well. Alert, talkative, we ate dinner together and talked finances the night before. Mama found her – in the early hours of the morning. She woke me up at just before 7:00 and said she needed help. Jasmine’s lights were off and curtains drawn but she was lit by the morning light coming in from her bedroom door. In the dimness I could she that her bowels had released a month’s-long blockage. Blood and filth covered her bedsheets. Covered her. She was moving erratically – thrashing but slow. She seemed confused but determined to do… something? She made little grunts. Mama asked me to help get her out of bed – out of that filth but I couldn’t bring myself to touch anything. It was only myself and mom living with Jasmine so I was the only one who could help. I tried to use the tips of my fingers to touch the few, unsoiled spots remaining but I was hotly aware of how little I was doing. I tried so hard to push past this panic yet…

    I don’t remember what happened after that. We ended up in hospital.

    There, Jasmine started to wake up but she wasn’t the same Jas we had talked to only the night before. She seemed like a child – terrified and confused. She was in a lot of pain but couldn’t say where. So they gave her morphine injections in her belly. Jas begged them not to – almost as if the drug had the opposite effect it was meant to. The doctors gave her two injections anyway. She screamed and screamed. And she never stopped screaming. From that day, she would constantly scream. Mostly it was the word “NO.”

    No. Nooooooooooo. Noooo

    There was so much terror and anguish in every cry, it bled into everything. It was constant, piercing, and overwhelming. It stopped only when we, she and then us, finally fell into an exhausted sleep. It was all I could hear and feel – so I stopped feeling. We tried to figure out what was making her scream. We covered her mirror in case she was afraid of the sight of herself. When we tried to give her something to drink her cry changed to “bucket!” and she vomited whatever we gave her. At one time, her partner shouted “hey! I love you!” and she shouted back “I love you! Nooooo!”. Despite knowing that she was aware of what was going on around her, I was so afraid to be in the room with her.

    She couldn’t eat or drink so her body quickly grew emaciated. Her shoulders stuck out. Her ribs showed. Her face was hollow and gaunt. At one point I was gently pressed to sit in the room with her – just to be there with her while I still could. I did so, only obligingly. I sat on the floor of her dim room and listened to her scream. I tried to think of something to say but I don’t remember if I came up with anything. She stared at me while I was there but it didn’t seem like her anymore. Or, rather, I didn’t think of her as Jasmine and I felt repulsed by that thought. I must have eventually left.

    At one stage, hospice nurses came to help. They gave us anti-seizure medicine – a strong tranquilizer. It was blue. We were instructed to squirt a dose into Jas’ mouth if she started to seize or “get too worked up”. I don’t remember being given a definition of “too worked up.” The responsibility for this fell to Mom. Administering a dose was easy because Jas’ mouth was always open, screaming. The medicine made her stop screaming. The nurses also showed us how to apply an adult diaper. I was used as the example body – shifted around on the floor, knowing I would have to soon do this to my sister. I was too numb to care.

    The night of the diaper demonstration found Jasmine choking on vomit. Mom had given her a dose of blue only hours before and she must have fallen asleep face up, vomited, and aspirated on it. We desperately tried to help her cough it up. We even turned her over and hung her over the side of her bed in an attempt to get it to drain out. It didn’t work.

    Every breath sounded like rolling thunder. I called Alex, our younger brother, we knew this was the end. We told Jas that Alex was on his way. Then we took turns saying our final goodbyes. My turn came sooner than I expected and I didn’t know what to say. In the pressure of the moment, all I managed to whisper was,

    “We were supposed to go on so many adventures”

    I felt so selfish. I had wasted my final words to my sister and my best friend. Alex got there. He got to say goodbye and immediately after he did Jasmine took two more struggled breaths and was gone. I cried but my sadness felt like it was screaming behind a barred, steel door. I was wearing the watch Jas had given me for a birthday so I was the only one who could call the time. I don’t know why I felt the need to do this. It was 11:40.

  • Afterwards

    “There’s no rulebook for this.”

    Afterwards she was left in her bed for a day. Eyes permanently, partially open. We got that one day to come to terms with it. There was so much to do now.

    She wanted to donate her body to science. A university in Sydney was happy to oblige. They told us she was going to a forensic science lab and they would send us her ashes. They never did.

    We reached out to our local church, desperate for help with anything. They clutched their chests and feigned grief while offering to do anything they could. My mother simply asked for someone to help clean the house, as it had become so messy in our listlessness and the church promised to send someone. They never did.

    We wanted to celebrate her life with everyone. But everyone was spread across two countries and three states. So the next three weeks or so were spent travelling, organising venues, thanking people for their sympathy, and floating through a fog of apathy. People we hadn’t seen in years gathered and mingled and apologised for not reaching out more. They promised to from now on. They never did.

    Death is isolating. Victims are looked at from afar but the voyeurs fear to get close. If you’ve never been through it, it’s easy to turn your nose up at these watchers. Get angry on behalf of the bereaved. If you have been through it, then you know exactly why they shouldn’t be blamed. This kind of loss strips away society and leaves only vulnerable people. Death doesn’t care what’s proper, or nice, or comfortable nor does a naked soul reeling from the blow. It’s a lot. It really is. Grief counsellors will train for years and still have a hard time facing an individual in the throes of it. So don’t blame the voyeurs. The reminder that they and their loved ones will also die someday is enough. I didn’t understand any of this at the time though so all I saw was the world shutting its doors on us when we needed help. I would have retreated entirely had it not been for a select few individuals that defied this newly perceived reality. And a counsellor I got through work.

    ~

    One of the perks of my job, which I got only because I was “filling in for her while she got better”, was access to an Employee Assistance Program. The program connects you with counsellors who can help with everything ranging from poor mental health and difficult work relationships. I was connected with someone who specialises in grief. I had 4 sessions with her. One per week for a month. The first one was helpful solely because she was the first to tell me the extremely important fact that

    Grief is not a mental illness.

    The next two sessions were her playing tour guide for Melbourne. “Have you been to the museum?” “Down the river trail there’s a bridge where all the bats live.” “There’s lots of venues that do live music, have you tried that.” While I agree that getting out of the house can be helpful, I was so struck by the absurdity of her singular focus that I fell backwards onto the answer. Holy shit. Nobody knows what to do. Not really. There’s plenty of good advice on what can help, but there’s no single answer that fits everyone. In fact, a helpful tip given to someone one day may prove unhelpful a day later. Nobody knows what to do. This meant it was ok that I didn’t either. It meant people weren’t being deliberately awkward around me, they just didn’t know what to do. There’s no rulebook for this so the best thing I could do was simply my best. One day, one moment, one mood at a time.

    I didn’t go to my fourth session. I still haven’t seen that bridge where all the bats live.

  • Pride

    I was raised in Nashville. It was there that I was taught to romanticise the ideals of modern stoicism, to replace my inner needs with alignment to Christian values, and to firmly affix my personal value to my ability to hold to my beliefs. To waver under hardship was weakness. To admit to negative emotions was to admit to faithlessness. To claim victory over these things was my constant goal and I took a lot of pride in my ability to stand above, be anxious for nothing, be strong and courageous, and completely bury how I was actually feeling. The mere suggestion that I might be feeling a bit anxious or stressed about something was an insult to the point where I would regularly make statements like:

    “I don’t feel anxiety, why would I?”“I’m always happy for there’s always a reason to be.”

    Grief is notably insensitive to all of this. Trauma doesn’t give a single shit.

    One year after the loss, my mother returned to the US to deal with trauma in her own way. This left me alone in the apartment where everything happened. It was left to me to move everything I wanted to keep, and give away whatever was left over. I spent a lot of time crying on the floor of that now-too-big apartment, which horrified me. The emotions were spilling past the cracking ceramic door of my ideals.

    Sleeping was the hardest. I love a good night’s sleep. I’m a wreck without one. But there was nothing good about my sleep. I would spend hours locked in flashbacks of what happened, overwhelmed by her screams filling my mind. Always screaming. Eventually the routine settled into:

    • Avoid/dread going to bed.
    • Finally give into exhaustion.
    • Have a panic attack.
    • Fall into a restless sleep filled with nightmares.

    But of course, this didn’t fit my narrative. I couldn’t admit to myself that this was all happening because that would also admit I had failed myself and God. I avoided doing anything different because I was so sure that eventually my faith would conquer the grief and I would go back to normal. For two years I lived like this, too prideful to be honest.

    Eventually, I couldn’t handle the lack of restful sleep sleep anymore. I made an appointment with my GP (General Practitioner AKA doctor) with the intention of asking him about sleep aids. He listened, expressed understanding, and asked me to fill in a questionnaire to see whether or not sleep aids would be the best solution for me. Well, shocker, the test had nothing to do with sleep aids but was, in fact, a mental health assessment test. I scored quite high! A+ for Josh.

    That GP saved my life that day. He made it clear, without words, that he understood the mindset I was coming from. And so he talked to me without judgement. He told me that what I was going through was common and not something to be ashamed of.

    I wasn’t a failure for needing help with something too big to handle on my own. That just meant I was human.

    He helped me make an appointment with my first clinical psychologist. I would spend the next three years having an appointment every week.

  • Anxiety

    Looking back on my life, even into my childhood, Anxiety had been a constant companion of mine. I was a nervous, shy, quiet child. I was afraid to ask for anything or make complaints to my parents (despite never being punished for doing so). I got really good and closing doors silently. Lots of little indicators that social media psych majors would cheerfully point at and say “here’s the top 10 signs you might have…”

    I also took an hour to fall asleep then had vivid, stressful dreams nearly every night. I had a very hard time engaging with the world for any more than a day and would often disappear into a book or a video game (I still struggle with that actually). The nervous, quiet child grew into a flighty, antisocial adult.

    And the masks. Oh the masks. The only time I was ever truly myself was when I was alone or with my older sister. All other times, I was pretending to be someone else. I had a mask for every occasion. I would constantly think of mundane conversations that I might have someday just so I could practice them in my head. I was a character performing his lines. Which was great! You can hate a character all you want; that doesn’t mean that actor is a horrible person. The problem with masks is that they’re heavy, exhausting to carry around, even worse to keep on. This left me constantly tired, which lowered my resilience, which kept me afraid. And so, the masks.

    Now here’s the kicker. I was terrified of people thinking I was terrible and yet “knew” deep down that they would be right. I hated myself. Truly. And yet, I couldn’t just ostracize myself because it was my job to remain to help those dear to me. If anyone had a problem, I was to Fix It. The solution? Move every couple of years. Stay just long enough for people to grow to love me but not long enough to get to know me then leave while I was ahead. Start again and ride the high of novelty until the cycle repeats itself.

    And, of course, I denied all of it. It couldn’t be true because it didn’t fit my carefully crafted narrative. Yet I knew exactly what to do to avoid facing these problems head on.

    God. So many contradictions.

    It needs to be said that if you sympathise with any of this, I urge you to talk to a doctor or a clinical psychologist about your experiences. I'm absolutely not an authority on mental health diagnoses. Only a qualified medical professional can say for certain whether or not you have Anxiety. I definitely did though, so if any of my words made your heart jump or poked part of your brain, talk to someone. It's 100% worth it.

  • Unresolved

    I underwent a year of treatment to get a better understanding of Anxiety. How it affected my life, how to wrest control back, how to ground myself and focus on what was actually happening. My mind had spent so long fixating on imagined futures that the present moment was almost foreign. I felt vulnerable. A large part of my anxiety centred around being prepared for anything that might happen, especially things that I couldn’t anticipate. Stay constantly alert, vigilant, ready to act because when this impossible-to-predict awful thing happens, I’d be the one best positioned to react and keep myself or my loved ones safe. I had to learn to base my worries on my experience not my imagination. This didn’t stop me from worrying, it didn’t remove my lizard brain survival instincts, but that was never the goal. It merely allowed me to control the fear tap more and reduce the flow. Even turn it off for the first time in my adult life.

    There was only one problem with all of this. Basing myself in my experiences meant facing my experiences. I didn’t fancy doing that. Despite my therapist being aware that I had lost Jas to cancer, the topic of trauma was never properly brought up. I was happy to leave it and thought my work on Anxiety was enough. I did feel much better. The nightly panic attacks were mostly gone, I wasn’t tense 100% of the time I was in public, and my relationship with myself graduated from vitriolic hatred to “he’s alright I guess”.

    And then my therapist left the practice, and I was forced to look for support from someone else. Cool.

    In my mind, finding another therapist was purely about finding someone to check in with. I thought I had completed my journey but having a regular therapist would be just as important as having a GP (I still hold to this actually). So, I googled nearby psychologists and found Lance. He was local to me at the time, came recommended, and had a free slot for new patients. Perfect. I attended my first appointment, let him know what I was after, and gave him a brief summary of my journey so far. He asked me a bit more about what happened with Jas and I offered a few more details. He sat quiet for a moment then hit me with

    “I think you might have some unresolved trauma around the loss of your sister. Have you ever talked to anyone about PTSD?”

    My heart and my stomach switched places. This man had the audacity to pull to the light this secret that my mind had worked so diligently to hide from me. The secret that I was absolutely, unequivocally, still not ok.

    Lance told me he would very much like to help me deal with this and he had a lot of tools we could use to make the process as easy as possible (see: super fuckin’ difficult). So I accepted. If there truly were unresolved issues, I was keen to work on them. A week later I was tasked with writing down what had happened and it was then that I realised that I hadn’t ever truly thought about it, not actively. It took me several days to finish my account. I presented it at the following appointment, shaken to my core by reliving the worst day of my entire life yet proud of what I had accomplished. He agreed. He was impressed by how I had thrown myself headlong into it, despite the horror I had to face. Then he made me write it again.

    “This time, add in the details you left out.”

    My dear reader, please know that I’m not exaggerating when I say that I had never be so afraid. Because he was right. I had left the worst parts out. I hadn’t even meant to. Lance described trauma as a cupboard stuffed with glass then hastily closed. As soon as you even nudge the cupboard door, it will all come spilling out and shatter on the floor. So, you avoid it. You may even forget about it. Sure, you can function just fine without it but it’s a big cupboard and you have other precious things stored inside. The lost space and missing items will eventually have to be addressed. Life will get better if you open the cupboard. But man. It’s scary.

    It took me weeks to finally do it. When I did, I wept for hours. The pages of my journal are warped from it. Ink is smeared. But I did it. The account you can read at the start of this page is that same one. Only with this in hand could my treatment begin, for hidden within it were the anchors of my disorder.

  • Fear

    It took me 510 days to write this next instillation of this story.

    The thing about PTSD is that it never fully goes away. In a sense, it’s in the name. From the first moment after It happens, your life will be post trauma. The impact of that Trauma, the reaching, twisted fingers that scratch and twist your experiences, can be bound but the scars it leaves behind are permanent. And, like skin, scars, when flexed, will forever be stressed – better with time and never the same. And so, it follows that the expected order of life will be disrupted in uncountable ways, large and small. It’s unfair. It’s maddening. It’s terrifying. Without any guidance, regaining control of life is insurmountable. Ezra Koenig put it best, “I don’t want to live like this but I don’t want to die.”

    In the common discussion of wrestling with one’s life, an often used phrase is “it will [BLANK] if you let it.” Your job will wear you down if you let it. The stress will pull you under if you let it. Your dream will carry you away if you let it. PTSD doesn’t need your permission or cooperation. You don’t let it take over your whole life, because the source of trauma isn’t something you had power over in the first place. It isn’t something you did, something you were responsible for, something you let happen. It simply, rudely fucked everything up and left you hurt. To get control back of your life you have to fight for it. Wrest, rage, weed.

    Alright. Cool. Thanks. How do I do this impossible thing then?

    PTSD can happen when a traumatic event twists the way you perceive the world and/or yourself. Things you may have taken for granted before are suddenly in question. A person will go their whole life feeling confident when walking out and about but a random act of violence or a mugging can cut that perspective and leave a scar that whispers “I’m no longer safe in public.” This is called a Stuck Point.

    After writing my trauma account, Lance helped me identify three stuck points that the trauma had left me with.

    1. I didn’t do enough to help Jas
    2. I have no inherent value and my only purpose is to avoid causing anyone strife
    3. I’m a weak person for not wanting to have dirty hands.

    Once identified, the goal is to peel back the layers of each stuck point to get at the heart of them. The negative emotions that stuck points inflict have positive traits behind them. In a sense, they’re as if the volume of the positive traits is turned up too high so that they become distorted and overwhelming.

    To use one of mine as an example: a person whom I cherished more than nearly all others died young and horribly while I watched. I couldn’t help her feel better or even peaceful in her final moments, something I had been able to do up until that point. And even afterwards, I could do nothing to ease the pain of my family. The only thing I could think to do was, at the very least, make sure I didn’t cause any further sadness. The second scar meant “I care about those I love” became “I prioritise others before myself” became “other people’s needs must always come before mine” became “I have no inherent value and my only purpose is to avoid causing anyone strife.”

    This left me in a constant state of fear. Not for myself, but for the impact the loss of me might have on my family. Sickness terrified me. I felt unsafe in public. I distanced myself from everyone. I was not allowed to come to harm, not because I cared if my body was healthy, but because my family had already dealt with enough grief.

    And, of course, in harmony to this was the guilt of wanting to feel better. I cared so much and the loss hurt so badly that the idea of wanting to have improved mental health felt like a betrayal. Shouldn’t this loss affect me as harshly as possible? If I allowed it to lessen, would that mean I never truly cared about Jas?

    The answer is no.

    Working on stuck points did not mean I was letting go of all of my feelings about Jas. I still love her, miss her, regret some of the choices I’ve made, appreciate the time I had, cherish her memory, etc. Those are all positive emotions that were hidden behind the deafening noise of trauma. My goal was to reduce the distortion of high volume and be left with peaceful sorrow for the loss of my sister and best friend. In that, I could better live my life. The way Jas would want me to. It took me a long, long, time to come to terms with this and even longer to uncover the first two stuck points. I thought I was being sensible in working on them in order of hardest point to “easiest.”

    I was incorrect. The problem of my hands was so so much bigger than I realised. But that’s for next time.

    –

    If you sympathise with any of this, I urge you to talk to a doctor or a clinical psychologist about your experiences. I'm absolutely not an authority on mental health diagnoses. There are many different types of treatment for PTSD and what worked for me may not be the best approach for you. Only a qualified medical professional can say for certain whether or not you have PTSD and what the best path forward may be.