“There is no cure for trauma. Once it enters the body, it stays there forever” [View all]

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/01/there_is_no_cure_for_trauma_once_it_enters_the_body_it_stays_there_forever/



Survivors say the day of their trauma marks the end of a chapter in their lives. The IED attack in Iraq was mine

“There is no cure for trauma. Once it enters the body, it stays there forever”
David J. Morris
Sunday, Feb 1, 2015 09:00 AM EST

Excerpted from "The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder"

We are born in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness, the coming annihilation not only of the body and the mind but also, seemingly, of the world. Trauma is the savagery of the universe made manifest within us, and it destroys not only the integrity of consciousness, the myth of self-mastery, and the experience of time but also our ability to live peacefully with others, almost as if it were a virus, a pathogen content to do nothing besides replicate itself in the world, over and over, until only it remains. Trauma is the glimpse of truth that tells us a lie: the lie that love is impossible, that peace is an illusion. Therapy and medication can ease the pain but neither can suck the venom from the blood, make the survivor unsee the darkness and unknow the secret that lies beneath the surface of life. Despite the quixotic claims of modern neuroscience, there is no cure for trauma. Once it enters the body, it stays there forever, initiating a complex chemical chain of events that changes not only the physiology of the victims but also the physiology of their offspring. One cannot, as war correspondent Michael Herr testifies in “Dispatches,” simply “run the film backwards out of consciousness.” Trauma is our special legacy as sentient beings, creatures burdened with the knowledge of our own impermanence; our symbolic experience with it is one of the things that separates us from the animal kingdom. As long as we exist, the universe will be scheming to wipe us out. The best we can do is work to contain the pain, draw a line around it, name it, domesticate it, and try to transform what lies on the other side of the line into a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the mechanics of loss that might be put to use for future generations.

* * *

Major traumas are both a death and a rebirth, the end of one kind of consciousness and the beginning of another. As practically any survivor will tell you, the day of their rape or “their” IED serves not merely as the end of a chapter in their lives, such as the end of puberty or bachelorhood, but the actual disappearance of their previous identity and the emergence of something altogether new and unknown. After trauma, your mind works differently, and your body has been altered to the extent that an entire new understanding of it must be negotiated. In time, as people enter therapy or simply reflect back upon the course of their lives, on the turning points in the stories of their time on earth, such days grow in power and take on a totemic quality, seeming to contain not only some portion of the mystery of their new being but also some key to the structure of the universe. Cormac McCarthy, describing one such haunted survivor in his classic novel “The Crossing,” wrote that men spared their lives in great disasters often feel in their deliverance the workings of fate. The hand of Providence. This man saw in himself again what he’d perhaps forgot. That long ago he’d been elected out of the common lot of men. For what he was asked now to reckon with was that he’d been called forth twice out of ashes, out of dust and rubble. For what? You must not suppose such elections to be happy ones for they are not. In his sparing he found himself severed from both antecedents and posterity alike. He was but some brevity of a being. His claims to the common life of men became tenuous, insubstantial. He was a trunk without root or branch.

Trauma exists in time even as it destroys it; the numerals of such dates can become like curses, and because they recur, both in the mind and on the calendar, they take on a timeless quality, as in 9/11 or 7/7, the date of the terrorist attacks in London in 2005. The language that Western survivors use in these instances is so consistent as to constitute a law of some kind, and it reveals, to a surprising degree, how religious images of rebirth and resurrection still govern the imagination. World War I veteran Max Plowman, describing his feelings when taken off the front lines, said, “It is marvelous to be out of the trenches: it is like being born again.” Reunited with his family at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, Hanoi Hilton survivor Dick Tangeman was moved by the “warmth and sincerity of all the wonderful people who welcomed us home and witnessed our rebirth.” Alice Sebold, writing of her return to her parents’ home after being raped, seems to echo a verse from First Corinthians: “My life was over; my life had just begun.” (Interestingly, this theme of rebirth takes on a slightly different tone when observed in non-Westerners. One Hindu survivor of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka spoke of her joy in the aftermath of the disaster, for it surely meant that she would be rewarded in her next life.)

In the increasingly interconnected PTSD community, it is common to hear such days referred to as “Alive Days” or “second-birthdays.” On March 25, 2010, professional mountaineer Steve House was climbing Mount Temple, an 11,600-foot peak in Western Canada, when he fell eighty feet and broke his pelvis and six ribs, an event he would later describe to me as a “rebirth.” To this day, House and his wife Eva observe this day as a special event in their lives. House, who still climbs widely and is by temperament keenly attuned to the physical world, finds himself uniquely sensitive to the environment every March 25, as if he were being observed by the universe in some special way. On what he described as the “third anniversary of his second birthday,” he wrote on his blog, “On my way to Canada to celebrate my third year of life since my accident in the best way I know how: to climb and share experiences with the Alpine Mentors crew. (House founded a climbing training organization shortly after his fall.) The weather forecast seems to be a good omen that we’re doing the right thing.”