In 2004, at ten in the morning, I was lying on the bench connected to our dining table. It was November in Connecticut, and it was cold. My two sons, Gareth (5), and Eliot (3), were leaning over me. Worried. I still remember Gareth saying, “What’s wrong, Daddy?”
I was so drunk I couldn’t sit up without the room spinning.
*
The weirdest thing about trauma is the way it can lay dormant for so long and then burst forth one day. I started having severe PTSD symptoms 41 years after the event. And I am not alone.
I attend a Male Survivors Support Group, led by Milena and Joshua, and the other men in the group talk about the same thing. There we were, living our lives, surviving the best way we knew how, falling apart beat by beat.
One guy remarked how you think it will get better, the further you get from the traumatic event. You feel like if you can just hold out long enough it will go away. But the opposite happens. The more time that elapses, the worse it gets.
Trauma, left untreated, grows and infects everything around it.
The real tragedy of trauma is time. A lot of people like to frame it through a positive lens: think of all that you’ve learned through your hardships. Bullshit like that. I get it. I have learned a lot and met a lot of incredible people. I’ve also torched a lot of relationships, been a tornado in the lives of others. There’s nothing redemptive about trauma. You make the best of it.
I refuse to be bullied into looking at my trauma positively. A fact has integrity because it does not depend on emotion. A fact just is.
And the fact is: trauma robbed me of time.
*
In 7th grade, these two assholes started bullying me. They’d have older kids call me on the weekend and threaten to kill me if I showed up at school. Naturally I was terrified. I didn’t want to fight back. I didn’t want any of it.
The bullies got bolder.
One day, after Pre-Algebra, Asshole #2 became too bold. He was taunting me, literally getting in my face, when something inside me snapped. And I beat the shit out of him. The other kids had to pull me off of him as I banged his head against the yellow lockers.
*
Last night in Male Survivors Support Group, we were discussing the phases of recovery. We listed them on the dry erase board:
These five stages are an amalgamation of a few different models, Judith Herman being one of them. As we listed each stage, we went around the room and shared our experiences. The thing to understand about these stages, Joshua noted, is that they are not chronological. They are not isolated experiences. More often than not, a survivor experiences several stages at once.
As we shared our experiences, the common thread for every guy in that room was how long it took for each of us to get help. In most cases, at least four decades.
Imagine that. Living with an untreated illness for over forty years. I’ve thought about this before, but last night, in the collective experience, the reality of time lost hit me so hard I’ve been up all night. (I played a video game for several hours and then decided to start writing at 2AM.)
Right now, at this very moment, I want to suppress, deny, bury that shit. I think: well, it wasn’t that bad…others have had much worse. The anger waits on deck for a trigger. I know how that one works now.
But mostly, I’m sad. A penetrating, deep sadness that has lived in my body for years. When I look back at my life now, I see trauma everywhere. In my drinking. My drug use. My inability to sit still. My relationships. My inability to be close to other people. My self-esteem. The fact that I choked in high school basketball. My poor free-throw percentage. The reason I was bullied. My poor money habits. The slice in my golf swing. My poor sleeping. Depression. Anxiety. Alcoholism. On and on. Trauma runs through it all.
*
I haven’t told anyone this one yet. During my sophomore year, at least once a week, I went to Albertson’s before school and purchased a family size of Robitussin DM. I would drink half the bottle at a time. The high was powerful. And lasted for hours. After, I felt tired and guilty. So I would do it again. Anything to disappear.
*
What I’m also experiencing now is integration and acceptance. I’ve accepted what happened to me. I’m in the process of accepting how it’s impacted my life. This is integration. Everything is better. And I’m grateful. (Just don’t ask me to be grateful for my trauma.)
The biggest resistance I have to writing these blog entries is that I don’t want to be known as “trauma boy.” I don’t want sympathy. I want to be able to state a fact, tell a story.
And so it goes…
The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as power as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. –Trauma & Recovery, Judith Herman
Your childhood innocence was murdered. I’m wondering how your parents responded to your molestation. I remember you saying your mother came charging into that garage .What happened after that with them? What about your dad? Again, so crucial to shine a light on trauma when the ability to face it presents.
Thanks for keeping it real Aaron! Love ya brother!