The exiled child - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Meera Atkinson
WOMEN AREN'T ALWAYS THE VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE, and men aren't always the perpetrators, and even when they are it's not always as clear-cut as many would like to think. My mother often provoked Arthur. At times it seemed she thrived on the chaos. If this reeks of "blaming the victim", to my child's mind it looked like "asking for it". I could never understand why, just when Arthur seemed to be settling down, she would slam doors, throw objects and revive the drama.
I bristle at the coupling of "women and children" when people speak of domestic violence, as if they were equal in their capacity to confront their circumstances. I hold my mother accountable for failing to seek help. However economically, emotionally, or otherwise trapped an adult may be by their abuser, whatever fears they hold for safety, they have power that a child does not. Perhaps this is what remains of my rage toward my mother: part of me says: "I don't care how much he broke you down, you were the mother and you should have protected me."
According to Judith Herman, the final step in the psychological control of the victim is not completed until they are forced to violate their own moral principles and betray their basic human attachments. The moment Arthur succeeded in forcing my mother to betray me is burned in my mind. He made no secret of the fact that he beat his daughter. He believed that whipping Stacey with a belt was an acceptable form of parental control. My mother had never hit me nor allowed anyone else to do so. But there came a day when Arthur decided that Stacey and I were equally guilty of some childish wrongdoing and that we should both be beaten with "the strap".
Stacey could take the beatings and she rarely cried, but I cowered and pleaded with my mother not to let him hit me. As the strap came down on my flesh, blow after blow, I screamed in anguish. She sat on the sofa and watched, her face twisted into a grimace of pain and guilt. I could see in her eyes that she knew she was violating us both, and my howling as she looked on is my "indelible image" of betrayal to this day.
We later lost many years in estrangement when my incomprehensible wrath was too great to stand being in the same room as her, and we reconciled only shortly before her death. My already troubled relationship with my father was also a casualty. In my child's mind, I reasoned that if he loved me, he would have known and done something about it. My relationship with Stacey, too, was shattered. We were not only no longer sisters; we weren't even on speaking terms. By the end of their stay, Stacey mimicked her father's abuse of my mother by writing barbed slurs on all of our belongings. The literature discusses the business of identification – a child will identify with one or the other of the adults. I identified with my mother, Stacey with her father. She slept through the fights. I rushed out of our bedroom fearing for my mother's life. I had no one with whom to share the terror. She had lived with violence all her life and accepted it as normal, having known no other reality, but to me it felt life-threatening every time.
It ended, finally, not with a bang but the whimper of my exhausted challenge. I told my mother that she had to choose: him or me. She took out an "apprehended violence order" and they left. I thought that was the end of the story, but it was just the beginning of my life as a traumatised person.
LIKE MAY TRAUMA SUFFERERS, I ABUSE SUNSTANCES. I started smoking and experimenting with drugs at thirteen, by fifteen I was drinking heavily and consuming drugs recklessly. I over-ate and was depressive as a teenager; as a young adult I lived on the edge in an addiction to drama that I now know is commonplace. I had a volatile relationship that had its own share of violence, followed by others that kept my stress levels high. I started mainlining speed at twenty, and then turned to heroin. I was never tough and I was never cool – I was a messy addict, and not fussy. I'd take anything in any combination.
Sometimes, traumatised people are suicidal. I remember waking up from yet another heroin overdose and realising with absolute clarity that I was trying to kill myself. This realisation brought with it a sense of eerie comfort. But when I continued to survive overdose after overdose, I decided instead to live. Living in a non-self-destructive way was not something I knew how to do however, and quitting drinking and doing drugs was only the first of a series of necessary major changes.
I lived on mania and cigarettes and after the shock of adjusting to sobriety subsided, the trauma surfaced in dysfunctional and now painfully unanaesthetised relationships and as anxiety, which Judith Herman describes as a "major symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder". I was afraid of flying, tunnels, home invasion, the night and physical attack. I arranged my world so that these fears were rarely confronted and the disorder did not impinge on my life. Over the years, I developed new phobias: I was afraid of storms and became claustrophobic and agoraphobic. I developed an obsessive fear of illness and drug reactions, meeting Judith Herman's observation that chronically traumatised people often "perceive their bodies as having turned against them". The calmer my life, the more anxious I became. My brain was maladapted to "peace time".
Most of my friends considered me delightfully neurotic and eccentric, but my partners struggled to accommodate my relentless array of phobias, distortions, fractures, obsessions, compulsions, internal dislocations, and neediness. Everyone who has loved me has suffered by association. My friends could not have failed to notice my extreme self-absorption, although few had the insight to connect it to anxiety and trauma. Being mistaken for plain self-centred is one of many misreadings. Even if survivors finally see the connection between their past and present symptoms, it doesn't guarantee that others will extend the compassion they crave: if we ignore our past, no one knows; if we discuss it, we risk being seen as malingerers, as people who live in the past – which is, in a sense, exactly what we do, if not consciously.
"Traumatised people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of religion and community." This passage from Herman's book might sound melodramatic, but it perfectly describes the non-trusting, faith-challenged world of the survivor.
Some time ago I found myself in hospital, a mystery "mass" revealed in a scan. The baffled doctors did not think cancer was likely, but I was not reassured. One night I phoned my father and told him how scared I felt, how certain I was that the news of further tests would be bad. He did what many have tried to do: he reasoned with me. He pointed out other possible explanations and counselled me to be patient, not to jump to conclusions. I was not consoled and he grew exasperated. His voice rose as he demanded to know why I was the way I was, why I always assumed the worst. I shocked myself by breaking down and making, for the first time, a direct connection between my traumatised past and my anxious present. I told him what it felt like never feeling safe, never knowing when the end might come. I told him how, in the wake of violence, a child hopes madly that it will not happen again and when it does, time after time, they learn to expect the worst. The worst feels more reliable than any other possibility. My father listened in stunned silence and his voice, when he spoke, was shaken. It stayed that way for weeks.
After the cancer scare passed, he emailed asking why I had never spoken of the violence. If only you'd told me, he said. I tried to explain the cone of silence that descends on violence and abuse. I can't recall whether anyone ever told me explicitly not to tell, but I knew. There was a teacher once who took a special interest in me. She might have suspected, but she never asked. No one did. If my father had asked the right questions, I am certain I would have told – but it's too much to expect a child who is carrying the weight of her own and her mother's misery and shame to confide in those by whom she feels abandoned. Even after many years of therapy, publicly breaking the silence is uncomfortable. As I write, I wrangle with feelings of disloyalty to my mother's memory and fear of being judged a whinger. But my desire to reach even one other traumatised person so that we both might feel a moment of solace is stronger.
THE PSYCOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF TRAUMA DO HAVE AN UPSIDE. Survivors often have a remarkable empathetic capacity and many work in the helping professions. Some days I think I'd trade my freakish antennae and supersensitivity for a non-traumatised childhood and peace of mind in a heartbeat, but we don't get to rewrite the past – only our interpretations of it. When a crisis took me back to therapy a couple of years ago, I focused for the first time on the anxiety and panic disorder and its roots in trauma. Recovery is possible, but it's slow and arduous. Herman describes three stages of recovery: establishing safety and support; remembrance, mourning, reconstructing and telling the trauma story; and reconnection with ordinary life. My therapist thinks I'm in the third stage. Sometimes I think so too, and feel that I'm about to turn a corner into a new life rooted firmly in the present and a solid sense of self. Other days, I'm not so sure.
At the heart of a panic attack is an utterly overwhelmed child, saying: "I can't cope. Help!" Recovery means facing the fact that no one is coming; one must learn to soothe oneself. Medication is sometimes necessary but it is most effective when the survivor makes an active decision to use it as part of a broader recovery process.
Even well into recovery, the chronic trauma survivor remains vulnerable. High levels of stress or fresh trauma can set off a relapse. When my hysterical neighbour was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed in the hall outside my door, my husband did what most people would do: he backed off and watched from a distance, ready to help if called on. Without realising it, the scene triggered a deep cognitive activation in me, and I took my place in the eye of the storm – where I had always been – trying to placate my irrational and frantic mother, begging her to be reasonable and stop "making it worse", imploring her all-powerful assailants who were mismanaging her hysterics to back off and let her go.
When she was dragged off to St Vincent's psychiatric unit for an assessment I called three times to plead her case against committal. And when she was released and taken to the station to be charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, we were outside at two in the morning, in the cold, waiting for her. When she emerged, she said: "I'm broken." She stopped and lit a cigarette with shaking hands before walking off into the night.
I worried frantically about her the next day – ancient neurons were sparking and I was finding it hard to separate my neighbour from my mother and myself. When she knocked on the door and apologised, hiding her face in disgraced tears, I told her I too suffered from panic attacks and that I understood. I suggested she get a letter from a psychiatrist explaining that her behaviour was the result of the fight switch being activated in the "fight or flight response" of a severe panic attack, and told her such a letter might help her defence. I loaned her a book called Power Over Panic by Bronwyn Fox (Prentice Hall, 2001). She said wanted to find a therapist and I mentioned gingerly that the majority of people with panic disorder have experienced trauma or profound neglect, and that if this was the case she should look for a trauma therapist. She immediately disclosed that she had grown up with domestic violence. Me too, I said. And there we stood, two survivors, twenty-two years apart.
POSTSCRIPT: The federal government has committed $1.8 billion in new funds for a five-year plan to include more primary health and clinical services for people with mental illness. This means Medicare will now rebate up to twelve sessions with a registered therapist. Australian researchers in 2000 estimated that 20,000 women seek shelter in women's refuges and take out protection orders each year. Clinical studies in emergency departments and antenatal clinics suggest up to a quarter of women will be subjected to domestic violence in their lifetime. Others argue that these numbers dwarf the reality, because they depend on police reports and domestic violence is often not reported.
I look at my neighbour and know she has a long, hard road ahead of her. And while twelve sessions is unlikely to take trauma survivors through all three stages of recovery, it is my hope that this initiative might nevertheless encourage them to seek the help they need to rebuild their minds and lives. ♦