TRAUMA WORK: WHEN ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Professionals, trained professionals, do trauma work.

They do the work with traumatized people.

The work starts when someone thinks they need help, or they’re told they need help.

It sounds like this: “You need help, so get help.”

Sounds simple enough?

I met a doctor who told me I was good to go. A heart doc. He said my heart was fine.

Didn’t see anything to obsess over.

Then he gave me a book. That was a first from any doctor I’ve been seen by.

The book was about healing PTSD, Port Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This link to the Department of Veterans Affairs tells how common PTSD is.

I took the book from the heart doctor and finished up.

Trauma Work 1

Last November my extended family had a memorial for my step-dad. He’d died a year earlier. Things were postponed because of the covid pandemic.

Two days later I was back home in the ICU at the local hospital for observation.

The people who know about these things said I’d come down with ‘Broken Heart Syndrome.’

I wrote about it here.

Broken heart sounds traumatic. Am I right?

I don’t consider myself a trauma guy, but my heart disagreed. Once.

My new PTSD book used yoga to work through problems.

Yoga is our friend, but not when you’re the new guy trying things everyone else does with ease.

Then it’s more of a wrestling match of You vs You with no clear winner.

I think it’s a useful book, but like the next competitive jerk, I wanted something better.

I found something better in an essay by Aubrey Hirsch, “Over and Over Again” on Substack.

Read it, then tell me if she’s using Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory of Writing, where most of the meaning is below the surface. She used a great structure telling her story.

It’s the structure that sets it apart from other tellings of similar stories, especially since her’s isn’t a story often told. For example:

Sometimes it feels like I’m stuck in this ever-lasting loop of other people’s trauma triggering flashbacks to my own trauma. America mass-produces victims of gun violence; there are more and more of us every year. No one comes out of a gun crime without wounds that bleed forever.

And,

My story didn’t make the news. You didn’t read about it online. There was no discussion, no commentary, no calls to action. This kind of thing just happens every day.

Trauma Work 2

My heart tightened my shoulder blades together in my hometown.

After agreeing with the good intentions of people I love, I made a promise to be an even better listener.

The effort was heart breaking, as it turned out.

Since it was a new feeling, I ignored it. Besides, if I went to the local hospital and died I’d have to die in Coos Bay.

It’s hard to imagine a crueler fate for a North Bend Bulldog.

What struck me on that November evening on the Oregon coast, tried to strike me down, was how insignificant I felt. I was headed toward the statistical blur of age-related health problems researched by actuaries predicting the future.

Instead of acting in a responsible way, I drove the long way home, stopped for a plate of oysters, then again for baked goodies.

The first stop the next morning was the emergency room.

Trauma Couch Validation

My joke after I got cleared, and tagged with PTSD, was, “I told you guys I had feelings. Mr. Sensitive wants the velvet gloves.”

Funny stuff? Yeah, no else thought so either.

Trauma is not the stuff of comedy. Disaster, yes. Trauma, no.

When things go sideways and you get stuck in the middle, then make your way out, the event doesn’t go away like it never happened.

Trauma work means keeping track of yourself. Call it self-care if you’re not too manly to admit you need such a thing.

If you know what works, do it; if you don’t know what works, find out.

Trauma Work 3

Last November I made a promise to help heal a few rifts. I kept my end of the promise.

That it landed me in the ICU is beside the point. The promise made is a promise kept.

I made a generational promise that I wouldn’t be the roadblock, the hurdle, the ditch that everyone falls in. It was a shocking realization that I was semi-fragile.

Knowledge is always a good thing, as I told my sons, and we know what happens if I listen too hard.

It’s risky, but worth it after coming across Aubrey Hirsch and her gun violence essay.

I can’t say, “please read it,” loud enough.

My brain thought the impact from my fall was the impact of the bullet I’d been bracing for during the entire robbery. And in some ways it was. It was the bullet that took out my sense of safety, destroyed the feeling of invincibility I’d taken for granted all those years.

It tore through so many hours of sleep I couldn’t even count them.

It shattered the part of me that used to feel in control of my own life and my own choices. The part that didn’t take shit from anyone. The part that didn’t lie down.

Do the trauma work so you at least understand the possible outcome of having a stranger threaten your life.

Aubrey Hirsch builds her story block by block, moment by hypnotizing moment that makes time slow down in the reading, as if it’s you on the floor, not her.

Hold on tight.