Scars, a fairy tale

The Sangha that Debbie introduced me to typically does a "Dharma reading" along with the meditation ... some book relevant to the practice that people read aloud to each other for half an hour and then discuss.  Lately the book has been Tara Brach's True Refuge.  And a couple nights ago they were reading a chapter about PTSD.  I found it really interesting -- especially the explanation that someone suffering from PTSD often feels ashamed or guilty or broken, and that when they react to stimuli as if they were still in the middle of the traumatic event it can make them feel all the more broken.  In other words, they may not be able to do anything about the recurrent flashbacks -- but they can be self-aware enough to know that their reactions are not "normal" and the knowledge just makes them feel even worse.  It just digs the hole even deeper.

So I started wondering if this could be true of Wife ... if maybe this is part of why she just can't get over reacting to the people around her the way she learned to react to her family as a child?  And is it possible that she really does see how bizarre her behavior is, but is just powerless to stop it?  It's an interesting thought.  So after a while I sketched it out in a little fairy-tale, as follows.

I showed this to Debbie and she liked it.  I have not showed it to Wife.  Maybe I never will.  But I do kind of wonder what she would say ...? 

I had better clarify that while I have the external events pretty well right (if simplified), I can't vouch for my representation of her inner states.  That part is just guesswork.
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Once upon a time, long ago in a kingdom far, far away, a little Girl grew up under terrible conditions.  Many of her family were cruel or indifferent to her.  Her father had two personalities, one of whom tried to kill her when she was young.  Her mother would act protective, coach her, and shield her in crises, only to betray the Girl’s trust by turning unpredictably violent … and, far more insidiously, by cutting her deeply with words calculated to wound the Girl, stabbing deeply into her most vulnerable places, playing relentlessly on her weaknesses and fears.  Indeed, the mother did this with all her children, and also set them regularly at odds with one another, subtly encouraging each child to hate, fear, and resent the others and then loudly (and publicly) bemoaning it when they didn’t get along.  But this story is about the Girl and not her mother.

The Girl lived under these terrible conditions for many years until she grew to adulthood and finally left home.  By the time she left home these conditions had left deep scars on her.  In the most harmless circumstances she would find herself reliving the emotional intensity of her childhood; friends would say the most innocuous things to her and – occasionally, but unpredictably – she would respond as if she were still under hostile fire at home.  At the same time, she could not rid herself of deep feelings of guilt and shame, feelings she could not root out even when she knew they were wrong … even when she knew they were based on lies.  She could also see her own reactions when the memories came back to grip her, see the dark confusion on the faces of her friends when her emotional triggers made her react in ways that they didn’t understand.  She tried to explain, but nobody could get it who hadn’t lived there too.  Since she was determined to seek out safer places to live, this meant that nobody around her had been through the same kind of trauma; and so nobody around her could understand.  And when she saw herself react in ways that left her friends baffled – when she saw how the memories gripped her like iron, and how she was helpless to react in any other way – it just made her guilt and shame all the deeper.  So every day she lived out, in her memory and her emotions, the nightmares she longed to escape.

Nowadays we know that her experience has a name: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  And we have learned something about its treatment.  But back then nobody in this faraway kingdom had heard of PTSD, or at any rate nobody thought to wonder whether it might be what the Girl was suffering from.  Even the people who had heard of it usually thought of it as something that afflicted soldiers, and the Girl was not a soldier.

In time the Girl met a Boy, and they fell in love.  The Boy had a lot of compassion but no common sense, and he believed that if only he could love the Girl hard enough she would be healed.  Of course he was wrong: no matter what sentimental popular songs will tell you, love by itself isn’t enough.  You have to know what you are doing and you have to know something about the ailment before you can heal anybody of anything.  Think of pneumonia: no amount of love is going to cure the patient, unless the love is helped along by antibiotics.  And likewise with PTSD.  So in the end the Boy failed, fell out of love again, and left the Girl.  But this story is about the Girl and not the Boy.

The really interesting fact about the girl’s experience is that over the years she saw a lot of therapists … and yet none of that therapy desensitized her emotional triggers or made the memories in her head stop screaming at her.  But we know there are some kinds of therapy that truly can make a difference with patients suffering from PTSD: maybe they don’t all get completely better, but many of them can get somewhat better.  Only not the Girl.  Why not?

One possibility is that nobody ever diagnosed her explicitly with PTSD.  Doubtless this was part of it.  And yet, it is a known fact that some of the therapies which she did undergo included elements which would also have been used for patients suffering from PTSD, and yet they never worked on the Girl.  Even without a formal diagnosis, you’d think that using the right therapy would help, but it didn’t.  So again, why not?

Nobody knows for sure, but remember that for any therapy to work the patient has to trust the therapist.  If the patient feels hostility or antagonism towards the therapist, nothing is going to change.  And the Girl had learned a profound lesson in childhood – at her mother’s knee, so to speak – that when you trust people and let them get close to you, when you make yourself vulnerable to them, they betray you with malice and sadistic cruelty.  Certainly she felt that way about the Boy.  In some ways she let him get closer to her than almost anybody, and yet all the while she was sure that he was about to betray her for the sheer cruelty of watching her suffer.  For years she expected it as something imminent, something that he would do tomorrow.  Sometimes she even thought that he had done it, while he scratched his head with puzzlement and tried to figure out what was going on.  So maybe it makes a kind of sense that she came to think badly of most therapists, that she condemned most therapies as stupid and their practitioners as charlatans.  Maybe there was never any way she could feel safe trusting a therapist with something so fragile and vulnerable as healing.

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I don't know ... just for whatever it is worth ....