If I could misinterpret a furrowed brow, what else could I misinterpret? I must possess a million subconscious triggers, so how much of the world, exactly, is my brain incorrectly afraid of?
My eyes scanned my living room. Gelly Roll pens? I used those a lot when I was a preteen. Halogen lamps? We had those. We had a big poster of emperor penguins in our living room, where I was beaten frequently. Are fucking penguins a subconscious trigger now? I google “emperor penguins” and look at pictures of them, waddling around the Antarctic stoically. They’re fat and cute. But I guess I feel anxious? So are they a trigger, or am I already triggered and anxious from reading the stressful trauma books? What is real?
This line of questioning illuminates the nuanced difference between healing from traditional PTSD and complex PTSD.
If I had traditional PTSD…if, let’s say, getting hit by a car was the one foundational traumatic moment of my life, I could learn to isolate and resolve the triggers from it, potentially through exposure therapy: walking past the Krispy Kreme every day, crossing that intersection with a safe protector.
But unfortunately, I do not have one foundational trauma. I have thousands. So my anxious freak-outs are not, as the books say, “temporal.” They don’t only occur when I see an angry face or someone pulls a driver out of their golf bag. My freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being.
Ah. The dread.
That infinite plethora of triggers makes complex PTSD more difficult to heal from than traditional PTSD. And the way the books seem to think about it, our fixed state of being also makes us more problematic.
* * *
—
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is a kind of bible for C-PTSD sufferers. Though I have real reservations about van der Kolk’s work because he is an alleged abuser himself,[2] the book was a crucial first text in helping me understand the basics of C-PTSD. In it, van der Kolk writes about a study in which he analyzed three groups of people: adult victims of childhood abuse, adult victims of recent domestic violence, and adult victims of a recent natural disaster.[3] All the groups displayed some symptoms of PTSD. But survivors of natural disasters (generally sufferers of a singular traumatic event) had distinctly different symptoms from survivors of childhood abuse (generally sufferers of complex trauma). “The adults who had been abused as children often had trouble concentrating, complained of always being on edge, and were filled with self-loathing. They had enormous trouble negotiating intimate relationships,” van der Kolk writes. “They also had large gaps in their memories, often engaged in self-destructive behaviors, and had a host of medical problems. These symptoms were relatively rare in the survivors of natural disasters.”
In other words, complex trauma created a consistent set of defensive traits—of personality quirks—within its victims. And these were uniquely terrible even within the PTSD community. It seemed to suggest we had our own culture. Americans are individualist. Chinese people are oriented toward the good of the collective. The French are romantic and love cheese. And people with C-PTSD are drama queen self-saboteurs who are impossible to love.
I questioned whether this dark reading of the material was simply my “self-loathing” brain placing a dark lens across these scientific studies. But then again, there was that one book that described victims of early childhood trauma as “a burden to themselves and others” and “a minefield many would prefer to avoid.”
How could I read these words about myself and not be pounded by shame? How could I not want to protect everyone from the burden of these noxious traits?
This was the most disorienting and upsetting idea that emerged from my reading: the idea that C-PTSD was baked into my personality, that I didn’t know where my PTSD stopped and I began. If C-PTSD was a series of personality traits, then was everything about my personality toxic? Was everything about my history toxic? And would I have to throw it all away? My diagnosis called into question everything I loved—from ginseng abalone soup to talking a whole lot at parties to doodling during meetings. I couldn’t tell which parts were pathologically problematic and which were fine as they were.
I had already tried to wipe away everything my mother gave me. Her specialty was biscotti, which I refuse to eat now. I pluck yellow roses out of my bouquets because they were her favorite flower. I removed her sayings from my vocabulary. But then I’d come across a picture of her and see that I have her hands. Her shoulders. Erasing C-PTSD from myself seemed as impossible as swapping out my collarbones. In order to heal, would I really have to throw away everything that made me who I was?
I searched the books for an answer to these questions. The books were full of how to not be a person with trauma. They listed in great detail all of our faults and failings. But to my question of how to be a person…solutions were relegated to a mere ten, maybe thirty pages in the back of the book. There’d be one happy story about an abused, underdeveloped child getting the right kind of treatment, developing resiliency, and eventually performing at the same level as his peers. It was so often a kid. Kids’ brains are more flexible and recover more quickly, the books insisted. Adults—not so much. Maybe try yoga, the books said. Some of them, like The Body Keeps the Score, suggested a number of mysterious and expensive therapies, such as EMDR and neurofeedback, but even then, van der Kolk cautioned that they were effective only a small percentage of the time.
I came to these books in search of hope. But they provided so little. There were days when the only hope I could see was that I needn’t worry about the pain lasting too long. At least I was going to die soon.
CHAPTER 13
Between 1995 and 1997 the California-based healthcare network Kaiser Permanente gave more than 17,000 patients a questionnaire to assess the level of trauma in their childhoods. Questions included whether the patients’ parents had been mentally or physically abusive or neglectful and whether their parents were divorced or had abused substances. This was called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study.[1] After taking the questionnaire, patients were given an ACE score on a scale of 0 to 10. The higher the score, the more trauma a person had experienced in childhood.