A second kind of isolation: trauma therapy in the year of chaos
For the last ten months, I’ve been a bit distracted.
Like so many others, I’ve watched the world burn for the last three hundred days, on my couch, from behind the quarantined safety of my TV screen. Like so many others, I watched grievous fallout after grievous fallout of an absence of leadership by the American government as leaders stood by and watched the nation collapse. A Southerner by birth, I was privy to conversations with friends-and-family-turned-conspiracy-theorists of all sorts, one foot in two distinct American realities.
In all of this, though, my mind turned inward — not by choice, but necessity. I’d come to regard my anxiety and latent trauma as a sort of tag-a-long passenger, something that had always been there and would always be there. I had known it so long like a frog knows a copper pot, not realizing I was already boiling. While I wasn’t familiar yet with terms like “narcissistic abuse” and “complex PTSD”, I had already been swimming in their effects. Barely in my thirties, I chalked up so much of the decades of trauma that had festered to the point of bursting as stressors of working an IT job in Hollywood. I had to make a choice: no matter how much I wanted to engage with a world going through a reckoning with its acceptance of racism, ignorance of class warfare, and dedication to rape culture, I could barely carry my own weight.
In February, I reached out to a therapist — something I’d been trying to do for almost four months. We started meeting regarding some issues I’d been having as a highly sensitive person — I was afraid of everything, and that fear and anxiety would derail me for days at a time. From the smallest provocations, I would implode or my senses would explode, and it was beginning to affect my personal and professional lives. As we peeled back layer after layer, we exposed some trauma I had refused to acknowledge, and my therapist recommended I meet in tandem with a colleague who specialized in EMDR: eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy.
EMDR is a bit of a mind-bending process, and the five months I’ve been doing it have been life-changing. Each week, I grab hold of two vibrating doohickeys (we call them “tappers”) and ride an emotional roller coaster. We target some sort of debilitating belief (“I am disgusting”, “I am not worthy of love”, “I am hurting my loved ones by expressing myself’’) or memory (this could be a moment of near-drowning in a rip tide, or the domestic violence levied upon one parent by another). Then, I focus on the memory or belief, utilizing the bilateral stimulation of the “tappers” to hone in on specific details as we go over the same memory again and again, with me sharing my reactions and reflections with the specialist. These moments in themselves are both wonderfully therapeutic and astonishingly painful: as part of re-processing is still processing, the hope is that by repeatedly revisiting and reliving the moment of trauma, I can unlearn these false truths about myself. With tangled knots of grief cut loose, I can examine the past and present with a new graciousness.
Some of the new truths about myself are as hard to swallow as the false beliefs I used to have: “I am not disgusting because I didn’t meet unfair expectations of beauty as a young boy.” “Just because the people I needed to love me unconditionally the first time around didn’t do so doesn’t mean that the people I love me today aren’t capable of doing so.” “It’s not wrong of me to express my true self just because my closed-minded community rejected it when I was a child.” When you’ve spent so long hating parts of yourself, it’s hard to suddenly find beauty. It gets easier, though.
This process, in tandem with the talk therapy on Wednesdays, is exhausting. Even as I feel more hopeful about my future and see the world more clearly, I am often tired. With buried traumatic moments in constant excavation, I find it easier to make connections between modern feelings and childhood moments. I start bawling watching sitcoms with my partner, to whom I owe the majority of my sanity. I felt myself drifting into panic during one conversation about saying the blessing over a silent supper as a kid, because my mind jumped to all the explosions around those dinners. Still, with the pain fresh, it’s easier to confront it and resolve it with learned skills from therapy. It’s easier to salve a wound than a scar.
Some of the hardest parts of the work I was doing with my therapists lived inside the isolation of the COVID-19 quarantine protocols in California. Because I often spend a lot of time at the office alone, fiddling with a busted laptop or rigging up machines on extended power in a server room to fight rolling blackouts, I have a tendency to ruminate. I think back to moments we worked on in therapy, struggling with the veracity of them. I found that as I reviewed traumatic moments in EMDR sessions, they felt uncanny when I remembered them later. I would reflect on a memory and didn’t recognize myself in it. Re-experiencing the memories had been hard enough — losing them felt even worse. It was as if a timeline had been severed. The past was no longer separated by a distance of time, but also now what seemed to be an alternate reality.
Still, the function of labor within quarantine wasn’t entirely denigrated by the isolation. I wonder if I could have accomplished this much work if I wasn’t free of so few interpersonal distractions. While I do often communicate with others who need assistance at work, it’s all through instant messaging. I am not subject to confusing things like body language or eye contact. There are no social micro-niceties to uphold, no emotional collapses to hide. I can steal back the time and energy that I used to loan to necessary moments of extroversion and dedicate it to pulling myself back together after a good old-fashioned cry between Zoom calls. The few in-person friendships I have maintained during quarantine, then, were strengthened — I now think of our reception staff as I would family. We take turns acting as lighthouses in the storm, guiding each other back when we feel all is lost.
I often tell my therapists, my Castor and Pollux (I like to imagine they are very close friends), “the work is hard, but the work is good.” Sometimes I tack on, “and often the work is strange.” I wonder if the reason trauma work is so soul-crushing for so many of us is that outside of quarantine, we have to continue living in the real world while also living in the past. With the greater human community huddled in our own homes, away from each other, fostering our introvert skills, we have a wonderful and essential space to reflect on our own traumas in our own ways — be it talk therapy, windowsill gardening, Netflix-binging, or home-fermentation of sourdough starter.
The problems of the world — racial injustice, political corruption, worldwide death and pestilence — which suck the breath from my chest are still here, of course. But they are so much bigger than me, as I am often reminded. I cannot fix the racism, poverty, and class warfare that plagues society all by myself. I can only fix myself and be part of the change. I could do better at that, too. Still, as Castor and Pollux often remind me, self-healing, self-parenting, doing trauma work — those are activism, too.
Still, I think a lot about others in the same position, as acknowledging my trauma has helped me find my place in a greater community. While my loneliness tells me that few can really understand what I’m dealing with, there are millions of people with PTSD from childhood trauma, and I feel close to them without ever seeing or speaking to them.. For many, the isolation is a prison, and while I was very lucky to afford two therapists, not everyone is on the same path. If you find yourself in that position, I encourage you to keep going, to reach out to those around you. We are all suffering, and in having the courage to both show and ask for kindness, we can raise a tide that lifts all boats.
