I started therapy when I was in college. My therapist gave me an insurance form and told me I'd get coverage if I put in "generalized anxiety disorder."
I did not. I put the names of the three people who had abused me growing up and handed the form back.
"You can't put that," she said.
"But that's why I'm here," I said.
"Generalized anxiety disorder," she explained would get me coverage.
"But there's nothing general about my anxiety," I said and went with PTSD because at least it was showed the cause of my anxiety - trauma.
The problem for me as a feisty young twenty something is the same problem for me today as a feisty forty something.
The label doesn't address the problem.
The abuse or the abuser or the fact that abuse and neglect can be criminal acts as well as hard and difficult.
I was like, "Why do I have to get a label for coming to therapy. I should get a badge and have it paid for. Aren't I improving society by breaking the cycle of violence? Why do I have to get a label and we sit around and talk about my issues."
My perps were not in therapy, treatment and didn't worry about how a label would impact their chances of getting a job or being able to adopt a child. They didn't worry that a diagnosis and the symptoms of the diagnosis would impact their ability to parent a child or hold a job. And the therapeutic model made money off me talking about my pain but it's not like it involved law enforcement or made any change in my family or for my family. It encouraged me to make distance from my family and to come to therapy more.
I'm not saying therapy is bad but I'm saying that a system which does not address cause and instead treats symptoms doesn't do enough.
The label, which goes to the survivor, doesn't do anything to treat the abusers or to prevent them from being abusive again. It might make more resilient, boundaried or integrated survivors - but.... it doesn't prevent more abuse.
I wish someone had said to me, "YOU aren't the problem. You aren't a problem. You're a victim of crime."
That sort of empowered clarity might have strengthened me rather than me spending an hour a week focusing on how I developed issues in response to trauma. It was important work, but it's incomplete work, in my mind.
And then, to top it off, experts often speak for trauma survivors as though we can't speak for ourselves. It always puzzles and surprises me.
If we only treat those hit by drunk drivers and don't stop drunk drivers we aren't going to make a safer highway. Yet, in our families, we spend a lot of time talking about how to grow a stronger and more resilient survivor and not how to prevent someone from needing to recover in the first place.
Of course we all need hope, support and resources.
But isn't prevention the best resilience creator?
Prevention would make a lot of us super resilient because with effective prevention we would be carrying a lot less baggage in our hearts, cells, bodies and psyches.
I don't know how not to sound grouchy or angry when I bring up these topics. It's not easy to find the right words. A friend and I were going to start a group for the high-functioning fucked up or passing for normal but with a lot of freakin effort club. What do we call ourselves? How do we think of ourselves? How can we find and support one another?
Few of us want to identify as damaged. Few even want to identify as having been traumatized. Cultural shame and secrecy are pervasive.
I write for Elephant Journal. When I write something with trauma in the title, it's not all that popular. When I write something with a self-denigrating title such as: How Can Anyone Love Me with All My Issues? it gets read by tens of thousands. The content is often similar. It's pretty much all trauma all the time when I write. But I've learned that people don't want to come at trauma directly. Not most people anyhow.
I'm working with a healthcare provider to do a training on expressive writing as an alternative treatment for trauma survivors. I'm pitching it as a portable, affordable skill which does not require a therapist. I say one need not be an athlete to benefit from exercise and one need not be a published writer to write. Writing can relieve physical symptoms of post-traumatic stress for many. Sharing writing in a safe peer-circle is even more beneficial. EVERYONE has a story or twenty-nine.
However, no one wants to have trauma in the title of a class taught at a yoga studio, health clinic or even at a wellness day. But if I go with Writing for Wellness or Writing for Health or Feel Better Writing - that's better. If I say, I quite specifically am not a therapist and am sharing as a writer who has had adverse childhood experiences, that helps people relax.
Go figure. I don't claim to get it. It's not like I don't talk and write about how writing helps relieve traumatic stress carried in the body. It's not like I don't cover the ACE study, test and allow for scoring. But people don't want to come in the room for a talk, class or workshop if the word trauma or therapy or therapeutic is used.
I don't know if it's shame, being pain averse or not wanting to think our own issues are actually trauma. Many of us feel others had it worse.
One thing the ACE stats have shown me is that many have had it better. I mean I literally had no idea that there are people on this planet with only 2 or 3 ACE's and some even have 0. Some find the ACE stats high. I thought they were remarkably low. We all know what we know and if we have high scores of 7 or 8 or 9 chances are our siblings, cousins, parents, lovers and maybe even friends have them as well.
For me, learning about the ACE test helped me understand why all people don't know how hard and difficult trauma recovery is. I just assumed we were all dealing and coping with similar stuff and I must be really lame or sensitive because I couldn't just "get over it" already even when I found, created and "worked" on safety and attachment and good-enough relationships.
I hadn't realized how many people were not carrying adversity from childhood into adult life. I know everyone has a story and many who had wonderful childhoods deal with trauma and loss in adult life. I just hadn't realized that some had NO trauma until adult hood. I didn't know that was true and I'm not sure I'd have believed it before seeing data. In my world, most people have seen a lot of what is called an ACE but we would have called it life not trauma or neglect.
So, this isn't a blog post with an argument or a position but just to add my thoughts and feelings about talks about resilience. For many of us who did not have the mitigating resilience factors, the talk of resilience can be painful. And of course, some of us with high ACE scores have been resilient with and without some of the protective factors. There's not the dose response curve either showing the resilience stats lower impact of high ACE scores so it's a little less "meaty" in terms or research as far as I've read.
But it's also that the talk of resilience still puts a lot of pressure on the survivor to cope and do better and to imply that a different or better approach to recovery is all that's needed. I know it's not meant to minimize but it can feel that way. I admit that because I wasn't believed when I first shared about my trauma I might be carrying my own sensitivity into this particular issue but I can sense others feel it too.
It's not that anyone is against resiliency. I mean I'm all about finding hope, sharing skills and tools and ways to ease post-traumatic stress. The things I've learned about that help most are:
- breathing
- yoga
- joy
- good health
- EMDR
- hypnosis
- guided imagery
- self-love which includes recovering from active self-hate first
- community
- education about how others live
- changing body postures
- all things Rick Hanson, mindfulness, reframing and building a more positive and warm default setting
Perhaps, as Robert said, there's a need for high ACE scorers to talk/share/dialogue right here. Maybe we can create a position paper about what we want, need and do already have, know and provide for ourselves and others that help us live with post-traumatic stress, developmental neglect and the physical toll of unrelenting chronic stress. That could be a shared document.
This isn't super coherent and like I am in real life - a little all over the place.
Thanks for letting me add my two cents into these ongoing topics.
Cissy
Warmly,
Cissy
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