It’s been four months since our last post. We’re sorry. If you’ve read the first nine chapters, you may understand why we felt the need for a break. Our goal is to restart our work on 72 Hour Hold and complete the story. We also have some other projects to announce in conjunction with our work on 72 Hour Hold so stay tuned! Thank you for all the notes of support and for sticking with us as we navigate PTSD and trauma. Thank you for sharing your stories with us.
Let’s start with good news: we are doing better. My trauma therapists, Milena and Joshua, use the metaphor of a cruise ship to describe recovery from trauma. When you’re on the ship you can’t feel the ship turning. Instead you realize all at once that the ship has turned.
Our ship has turned. We still live with trauma, but we know what it is now. We have tools. We are in trauma recovery. I say “we” because my experience with trauma has traumatized Linda. She has secondary trauma. It’s difficult to say this, but it is the truth. And it’s important to say because that’s what trauma does: begets more trauma (for more on this see “Why PTSD is Contagious” in The Atlantic).
The concept of secondary trauma is not discussed enough. That’s why Linda’s story is so important. She’s documenting what it’s like to have secondary trauma from living with someone who has primary trauma. She’s documenting how to recover from it. I’m grateful for her honesty.
The first nine chapters of 72 Hour Hold outline in honest detail some really dark material. The guiding principle we used while writing these entries was radical disclosure. It’s not always comfortable, but it is only by sharing EVERYTHING that we begin to paint a realistic picture of trauma and its long-lasting effects.
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War. O’Brien is obsessed with telling the same war story over and over from as many different perspectives as possible. Why does he do this? It’s obvious when you read the book that O’Brien is keenly aware that his book can’t replicate his war experiences for the reader. At best, the book is an approximation of that experience. Furthermore, a lot of “war stories” attempt to make meaning of war. And to O’Brien, this is a pitfall he wants to avoid. Note this passage from “How to Tell a True War Story.”
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
Writing about childhood sexual abuse has similar challenges to writing about war. It is ugly and uncomfortable. You don’t want to hear, and I don’t want to tell you, that my first sexual experience was at 4-years-old with the neighborhood guy who raped me in his garage. You don’t want to hear how 41 years after that event, my trauma raged out of me and in one year, I broke 4 phones. I don’t want to tell you any of this. “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you,” O’Brien writes later in the same passage. And yet, if we don’t tell our stories, they will kill us. You can tell a true childhood sexual abuse story “by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
There’s more to the story, however. There is hope and light. There is recovery. And we’re going to tell that story too. Because that’s where we’re living now. The first part of our story was a journey into the obscenity and evil legacy of childhood sexual abuse and the PTSD that follows. The next part of our story is how we tell that legacy to fuck off as we move into the sunlight of the spirit.
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