Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (30 page)

“How many times do I have to do this before I can always feel like this?” I asked.

“Three thousand.”

“
What
?”

There was a study Strozzi-Heckler cited in his writings and trainings that he said he’d seen while working with Special Operations Command and marines. An officer had shown him some research about combat readiness that concluded 3,000 repetitions were required for a person to nail down an action. The study was apparently impossible to cite specifically or verify. But I still preferred it over the better-documented theory that a person needs thousands of hours of very deliberate and goal-directed practice to gain mastery of an activity—an average of 10,000 hours for some domains. In any case, the point was that changing and mastering motor patterns were quite hard.

“That … is terrible news,” I told Denise.

“The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it,” she said. “Think how easy it is for you to put on a shirt. Think about how much more complicated that was when you were little.”

I did all the homework she gave me. When I went for walks with Alex, I walked from my center, leading with the spot an inch or two below my navel. When I found myself leading with my head forward, the way I’d always walked and that almost everyone else in the city walked, I corrected myself. Alex slowed her pace and practiced the posture with me in solidarity. To make myself remember to do grounding exercises, I tied them to daily habits, practicing every time I made tea or took a shower. At a minimum, that equaled two times a day, but they had to be
good
times, successful times—it wasn’t about just quantity but quality—and I nailed it and actually achieved grounding only about a third of the times I tried, so I tried not to think about how it could be twelve years before it became second nature. The only thing Denise suggested to me that I didn’t do was go on full-time medication.

When I got back from France, at that point, in that condition, she had to agree with Dr. Shere that it might be time for me to think about serious pharmaceutical intervention. I hadn’t been surprised to hear a doctor like Dr. Shere recommend that, but avoiding doctors like that was why I’d gone to someone like Denise, who would approach healing holistically and thoroughly and wouldn’t automatically try to put chemical Band-Aids over things. She broke my heart when she told me. “You’re a somatic therapist,” I whimpered, crying at the implications immediately. My situation must have seemed pretty dire for her to say that. “I thought you’d recommend we use healing crystals before you’d say I needed Prozac.”

“I know,” Denise said. “But we can’t ignore at least the consideration when you’re suffering this much. It could help you feel better while you work on getting better.” Pills were not her go-to move. But they might help alleviate my symptoms while I was addressing the cause in therapy. “You don’t have to take them forever; you could just take them for three months and see how it goes. Sometimes it resets something for people. It could lessen your suffering in the meantime.”

I didn’t want to do that. Whether it was the right move or not, I just wasn’t ready to do that. Nobody was positive what the long-term or permanent ramifications of antidepressants were, if any, and I was already terrified about the future of my brain without adding in more variables. I kept prescription drugs on hand for emergencies, but wanted to keep that the extent of it; as it was, I almost never resorted to them. I wanted to try all the alternatives, try harder, before going the fully medicated route.

We upped my therapy sessions from once to twice a week. And so that I would be doing something proactive all five weekdays, any day I didn’t go to therapy, I went to yoga.

I’d gone to yoga semi-regularly, maybe a couple times a month, on and off for years. I’d noticed after I got back from Haiti Part I that though I didn’t necessarily feel better afterward, I always felt different. It was good to exercise in any circumstances, obviously, but the stretching and opening and breathing that make up a yoga class were more transformative than your average aerobics. The effects were tandem to some of my therapy goals of uncontracting, processing, moving things through. I’d noticed how much moving-through yoga facilitated when I’d started going more regularly after I got back from Ohio—one of the issues it let surface being, as mentioned, that I’d lost my will to live.

Now, pulling myself to a yoga studio every other day, emotions continued to arise. In the middle of some sun salutations, something inside me would break down, and there I’d be, crying in yoga again. Denise pointed me in the direction of some studies conducted by Bessel Van der Kolk, the somatics-loving pioneering neuroscientist, who also teaches psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. He got funding from the National Institutes of Health to study trauma and yoga. The trouble with trauma, according to Van der Kolk, was that it damaged sensory-processing and self-care parts of your brain. There was increasing evidence for the brain damage that trauma caused: The EEGs of Australian soldiers who’d been scanned after each deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan showed increasing hyperarousal, that coked-up inability for calm, as well as memory and attention-processing problems. Post-trauma, my limbic system, the part of the brain that regulated motivation, memory, and conditioned fear, overreacted in situations where it didn’t need to—watching TV, having sex—a chemical and hormonal hangover. Learning to accept my nervous system’s hyper-reactivity and help it calm down was one of my main goals. It would calm not only the fear I was unnecessarily producing, but the additional fear that accompanied not being able to control my own body. In the stillness of yoga poses, one could learn to connect to whatever sensations in the body came up and to invite them (never try to force them; they couldn’t be forced) to relax. Breathing, for example, to regulate heart-rate variability. Even the Army eventually started giving out millions in grants for this kind of “alternative” research.

The very short of it was that Van der Kolk had designed studies where traumatized people did yoga that focused on these skills, and then he looked at their PTSD symptoms. After yoga, test subjects experienced more controlled heart rates, fewer intrusive memories, and less hyperarousal. Patients regained enhanced control over their arousal systems. One small neuroimaging study with his patients suggested that yoga might be able to affect the parts of the brain that trauma damaged.

Van der Kolk launched a neuroscience-based clinical practice and methodology, working with a yoga instructor to direct a yoga program that offers several classes for trauma patients every week. Ultimately he did another, groundbreaking study that showed how much yoga could help a group of people with some of the most difficult symptoms to treat: chronically abused women. More than half of the women who did trauma-sensitive yoga for ten weeks improved so much that they no longer qualified as PTSD-positive. It was the first study of its kind to show that yoga could be used as a clinical intervention. Van der Kolk’s clinic’s yoga staff currently runs programs at rape centers, domestic violence centers, and traumatized youth centers, and trains other yoga instructors around the nation to treat trauma.

I wanted Van der Kolk’s results. So I kept going. As I kept running through poses, I didn’t always get to a better place after whatever episode happened to kick in. Sometimes I did. Often I left raw or depleted or anxious or more of whatever unpleasant sensation had been lurking all day. But if I had to go through that to get through this, at least I was contributing to the process. And occasionally, at the end of class, I found that peace. Occasionally I lay on the ground during savasana—corpse pose—and felt solid. A thing on the ground, but also part of the ground, and the sky. Integrated within myself, integrated with the world.

My nightmares continued. A pack of coyotes ate my head while I was still alive. A huge man chased me around a college campus. A schoolboy slashed several of his classmates to death, then pushed their blood-splashing bodies into a pile in a bathroom stall I was hiding in.

“You’re doing really good,” Alex encouraged me.

I managed to leave the house every day. I told myself I had to if I was going to hang on to my one remaining, sappy source of joy. I had the opportunity to experience the greatest love I believed could exist. Nico loved fearlessly, the way he spoke English and did backflips into hotel pools in Haiti; he had so much love to give and no qualms about giving it, even though, frankly, he knew better. That was what I wanted, a life like that. Around that kind of person. I wanted to feel myself in the world so I could feel the best thing the world had to offer, and that was Nico’s love.

*   *   *

“You
wanted
him,” Denise would say years later, remarking on how hard I fought. “You really
wanted
him.”

But that was later.

Now it was just a month after I left France, and I was working my therapeutic practices to their limit. Then after a month, any gains I made on healing, if there were any, were annihilated when that one thing I wanted arrived in my apartment.

“Two steps forward,” Denise was always reminding me about trauma recovery. “And one step back.”

I was elated to have Nico in the United States. I cleaned the house spotless, washing the walls even, and bought so many bourgeois food products to stock the fridge that the checkout gal at my grocery store asked me if I was having “a special party.” We would have six months together. We weren’t sure what would happen after that, but it was three times more time than we’d spent in person put together yet. After eighteen months of e-mails, and Skype chats, and ultra-long-distance multi-country dates, and all the pining, and aching, and misery that went with it, his face appearing in the arrivals hall outside of customs at San Francisco International was not just exciting—it was a complete relief.

However. We had overestimated two things.

The first was my ability to deal with the change of dealing with another human twenty-four hours a day.

It was always an adjustment, getting used to him and his touch and feel and smell after so long apart; most rendezvous, the first time we had sex involved a lot of stopping and starting as my body kept yelling,
Who the fuck is this guy?
I was often, as I was then, still wearing my emotional armor. So it wasn’t totally shocking when we started making out that first day and my core turned to ice, and my hands disappeared.

Nico wrapped his hands around my fingers, pressing his warm fingers into my palms to try to connect them to reality. I tried to verbally coax the rest of my body into reality, too. “OK,” I said out loud. “I’m in a bed. I’m in a bed,” and it worked that time, actually, but the thing about reality was that it was a harrowing place to be for me. Reality was not sexy. The reality was that I was very sad inside, so when I rejoined reality I started crying. Nico was lovely, and strong, and his chest felt like home. I relaxed into him, into the space he was holding in the room, and some of the tightness strangling my throat thawed. It poured out of my mouth forming the syllables “Nobody’s gonna die.”

That was sort of a weird thing to say once during sex. But I wasn’t finished.

“Nobody’s gonna die. Nobody’s gonna die. Nobody’s gonna die.”

Nico was taken aback a bit. Literally, he backed his head and chest away from me. “What?” he asked, because as often as this sort of thing happened, it was still a surprise every time, apparently, when your girlfriend went from sexy talk to talking about dying in an instant.

“To get personal, I don’t even like sex anymore,” my marine pen pal Chris had written to me after my PTSD-and-sex essay, when he’d been trying to support me by telling me how terrible he felt, too. “I can’t get that personal with anyone. I guess I’m scared to lose anyone else that I get close to.” You never knew what kind of excitement you might encounter when you got naked with me, and it dawned on me now that we were going to be having sex not just on vacation stints, but full time.

Wheeeeee!

A few days later, we were at home again and I was sitting on the couch. But then I jumped up, and stomped around, my nerves on fire, blood running venomous and agitated, storming into the bathroom and throwing my clothes on the ground, getting in the shower and trying my tools. The stall in my bathroom was two feet by two feet, and I rocked my weight from one foot to the next in it, my little containment tank. Breathing? No. Too shallow. I couldn’t even get the breaths into a chest this tight. Grounding, envisioning, mantra-chanting, whatever, whatever, I couldn’t calm down and couldn’t stop pacing and rocking my weight back and forth so I pictured what I really wanted: a gigantic knife.

“The knife is huge and sort of curved,” I explained to Denise, “like you would put in the hand of an Arab if you were making a racist movie.”

“You know I’m Lebanese, right?” she said.

“Yeah. I said a
racist
movie. But you knew exactly what I was talking about.”

Anyway I used both hands, in my mind, to place the tip square in the middle of my sternum, just between my breasts, before plunging it through my skin and bones and muscles to the hilt. That did provide some relief, let some pressure out, and I felt weak from it so held myself up against the wall. Ultimately I got down on the shower floor, and sobbed there for about half an hour with the water running.

“That’s standard trauma, never knowing what the little thing is that’s going to get you and set you off,” Denise said when we talked about this. “Do you remember what it was?”

I thought about it for a second, what I’d been doing on the couch. And I did remember. We both laughed a little, that sad, snorting laugh, when I told her what it was.

“My Internet went out.”

Before Nico had moved in, I had conducted all of my craziness alone, where no one else could see me, but for its very, very, very unfortunate emergence on our trips together. Living with him, I was mortified that my behavior was always on display for another person. I told the most about it to Tana and Alex, who listened and supported as best they could, but I still told them very little, trying to spare them from the monotony of chronic illness. For them to be able to get the whole picture of what was going on, I’d have had to be calling them every day to disclose truthfully, “Hi it’s me. I
still
hate being alive. Yeah, I am still not coping with any of this.” If I spoke about my disorder in direct proportion to its significance to my life, we would speak of nothing else. So I tried to have mostly normal conversations or just talk about it for a couple minutes before moving on, while I let it run always privately in the background and, to keep from bringing it up again—again, again, AGAIN—when I got desperate to go on about it for hours I sometimes called someone from grad school or even high school who I hadn’t talked to in years and when they asked me how I was doing, just dropped it on them.