Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (7 page)

That was about the extent of my professional training on the matter. And that was more than a lot of reporters got—despite some studies showing that journalists exhibit far greater rates of post-traumatic stress than the general population. I did have life experience that I thought should contribute to my adaptability in tough work situations. I’d traveled frequently, long trips to Europe, or Asia, or short ones to Micronesia or the Caribbean, half a year around the South Pacific. I’d been comfortable being uncomfortable. I considered myself highly resilient. Yes, I had cried about the idea of a lynch mob in Louisiana. And yes, I ultimately cried another day there, too, after spending the morning in a helicopter over the oil spill and seeing the sheer, uncontrollable size of it, sucking in vapors from the black clouds where they’d set it on fire to burn it off, then getting home and finding an e-mail that my coworkers in San Francisco were having a “disaster-themed” potluck at the office, dishes named with oil-spill puns encouraged. But toward the end of my time on the Gulf Coast, on top of my other work, I took a side reporting trip to Oklahoma for several days to do a story about the vigilante economy that thrived on Indian territory.

And I’d handled it well, I thought. Under the circumstances.

My central source was an immense guy named Ruben. People paid him to beat up people who’d wronged them in lieu of calling in the lax local justice system. The only cops with jurisdiction over America’s 56 million acres of Indian land were 3,000 Bureau of Indian Affairs officers—and tribes couldn’t prosecute non-Indians, who were responsible for the majority of violent crimes against Indians. Late one night, Ruben took me to meet some of his friends, and then abandoned me to them as he went to flirt with the girl across the street. Since I was busy interviewing the guys, I hadn’t minded at first, though they were drunk, and historically dangerous—scars and cauliflower ears all around, and one of them who was even bigger than Ruben confessed that he, too, had been paid as a punisher, breaking a guy’s arm for $500. I’d known they would likely also be criminals. And I knew the statistics, that violent crime among Native Americans was twice the average national rate, and on some reservations, twenty times higher, and that at least one in three American Indian women was raped in her lifetime. Earlier that very day, a former tribal police chief I interviewed told me that if a woman bothered reporting a rape around here, he “guaranteed” she’d be raped again in retaliation. But I’d walked into that party assuming the best of everyone until I had a reason to do otherwise. Alert, but totally unafraid. Until the conversation turned to how fun it would be to pass me around for sex.

As Ruben had pointed out to me just two days before, when we’d been joking around and I’d told him I wasn’t afraid of him: You don’t have to be afraid of someone to lose the fight.

When one of the guys got handsy, I bolted. When I found Ruben, he refused to leave the girl next door’s house. I had his car keys, because I’d driven us there (his license had been suspended for DUIs—and he was actively drinking on the way over); he told me to just go to sleep in his car with the doors locked. Instead, I stole it. Driving lost around the rural darkness in the middle of the night, black roads, black sky, black Oklahoma nothingness on all sides, my phone’s mapping function useless in an area that apparently wasn’t on a map, I started worrying that I would run out of gas. Gradually, I became scared that I would be stranded, murdered and/or eaten by coyotes, and never found. It wasn’t entirely rational, but rationality didn’t lessen my fear—and also, the whole point of the story I was working on was that tribal and county police agreeing to share jurisdiction over the checkerboard of tribal and non-tribal land I was currently wandering amounted to neither type of police taking much responsibility. And that federal prosecutors, who had to handle serious crimes on reservations, turned down 65 percent of those cases referred to them. One of the men I’d just run away from had had a murder charge fall through the cracks.

“Do you know what time it is?” the clerk at the motel I finally found at dawn sneered when I told her I wanted to check in, as if I were some all-night floozy.

“Yes,” I sneered back. “I do.”

It wasn’t like I’d simply shrugged this whole thing off. The next day, when Ruben was calling and calling my cell to ask where his car was, I finally answered to holler at him for reneging on his promise to watch out for me. He was unmoved. I later appealed to his mother, who had chastised him the moment I arrived about taking care around the parts—and people—we were planning to visit. (“Mom!” he’d yelled at her, protesting like a little kid. “This isn’t the first white person I’ve had around the reservation! And there’s never been any casualties!”) “I didn’t want to turn my back on those guys, much less when asleep,” I said to her, looking for solidarity, when I saw her at his house that next day. “Nooooooo,” she said. “I wouldn’t.” When I found out that some of them, as a group, had once beaten a guy to death with their bare hands at a party just for fun, I kept shaking my head at the potential closeness of the call.

But I didn’t go all crying and crazy. Because of my work with Meredith, I did notice that I’d been affected. Meredith was a somatic practitioner, which meant that she focused on the physical when trying to heal her clients mentally, addressing what was happening with their bodies as well as their emotions. The method was concerned with wholeness. I hadn’t chosen it purposefully at first; I’d simply asked my friend Alex whom she saw that she loved so much, and made an appointment.
Somatics
has the Greek word for “body” as its origin, and a unified body and mind as its defining goal. In my world, which prized thinking above all else, even this stripped-down and sensible-sounding objective smacked of mysticism, and though I went to yoga sometimes, I was from Cleveland, for God’s sake. I rolled my eyes right into my cerebral and practical head the first several times Meredith had talked about how stress and emotional suffering shaped a body into contortions and contractions that could have long-term ramifications if the “energy” wasn’t released. Though this hadn’t necessarily been what I was looking for, I’d stuck with Meredith, seeing her for some time, and ended up learning a lot: that, for example, I hunkered down and carried my stress in my chest. So after I got to the hotel I’d fled to on that warm Oklahoma morning, I was keenly aware that, despite the triple-locked door and the sturdy walls of the room and the exhausting night, I couldn’t coax my body into relaxing. I was tenser in my shoulders and pectorals. More hunched.

But it didn’t last. The next day, I went with Ruben to “church,” a low and tight sweat lodge made of tent and animal furs on a hill in Ponca City. Stripped to a sports bra and sweating buckets, I sat in total darkness close to a handful of old men singing in Sioux around twenty steaming boulders that had been engulfed in flames all day. The leader, the oldest, reminded us that we were there to suffer for a couple of hours, to restore balance to ourselves and the universe, and while Ruben called out under the noise of the songs that he was thankful for the old man, who’d taught him that not all Indians were drunks or fighters, and prayed for his life and that he might do better in it, I lay down and put my mouth to the earth. Sucking air, they called it—trying to pull oxygen from the dirt that was cooler than the air in the tent, which was so hot it singed the inside of your nose and throat as you consumed it. The heat was suffocating, forcing any tension out of my chest just so I could breathe. When church was over, and everyone’s best intentions collectively aspirated into the inferno, I crawled out flush and dripping, reborn and
open
, even as I could hear the coyotes, the ones I’d earlier feared would disperse my carcass, screaming in the surrounding plains.

So I’d been less than invincible on assignments before. But I’d regained my equilibrium. I’d always been human, but rebounding, on my assignments—and in my life—before. Never once had I completely fallen apart, or felt incapable, or stopped functioning.

No, I’d never experienced anything like that.

4.

Dissociation.
Noun. An altered state of consciousness. Characterized by “partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s psychological functioning.” In which cognitive, psychological, neurological, and affective systems interact in a complex process triggered by an event. A common response to trauma, a defensive psychological retreat, a trick of detachment as coping mechanism. An escape from feelings when feelings are too much.

If only that were all it was. “Terror leading to catastrophic dissociation,” as clinical psychologist and NYU professor Ghislaine Boulanger puts it in her book
Wounded by Reality
, “leaves a lasting biological impression with profound psychological reverberations.”

The morning after I got home from Port-au-Prince, I cried while I was checking my e-mail before work. I cried when I got to work and one of my coworkers said, “Hey! How are you doing?” I went to see Meredith—I recognized a crisis, even if I didn’t know what it was—and I cried on my bike on my way there, the Golden Gate Bridge in my blurred periphery, and I cried from the beginning to the end of our session.

This wasn’t like me, I sobbed to her. This wasn’t like any sane person. I told Meredith I had no idea what was happening and no idea what to do. I’d experienced stress and fear for brief periods like anyone else, but now it felt like stress and fear were the only things holding me together. And only tenuously. And remarkably unpleasantly.

Meredith said that I was exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

I said that that was absurd.

My symptoms would need to persist for a couple of more weeks for an official PTSD diagnosis according to the thirty-days rule of the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. But given their severity, it certainly appeared they were going to.

And that they certainly did.

I cried in the shower. I cried through most of a one-and-a-half-hour yoga class. Several times. The crying was at least better than the gagging, which was similarly unpredictable and sent me running into bathrooms and heaving over the garbage can underneath my desk at work. I had flashbacks of things I’d seen in Haiti, so that suddenly I was seeing them again, and they made me want to curl up into a ball and gouge out my eyes. Anything could trigger it. A smell vaguely reminiscent of the raw sewage at the displacement camp where I’d thrown up and swallowed it, or a smell—or a sound or a sight—I hadn’t even registered. Or nothing. Triggers, I was learning, are often senseless, impossible to pin down. I was scared, and I was humiliated. I was joyless, and I couldn’t sleep. Relaxing my body, even a little, shattered my tenuous emotional stability, possessing me of an instant certainty that I would die. When I went to a steam room to try to unwind, I ended up panting out loud to myself, naked in a San Francisco spa where people get $155 facials, “It’s OK. It’s OK. Shhhh, you’re OK.”

On the way to and from work, I walked down the street looking around with a wild-eyed disconnectedness, watching reality unfold like a video game, and not the one I was supposed to be in, and where all the colors were too bright and the noises too loud. Standing in line with my best friend Tana as she got coffee once, I became so confused by what was happening around me that I took to reminding myself quietly, with the pace and nervousness of a tweaker while her drip brew filtered, “This is San Francisco and you live here.
ThisisSanFranciscoandyoulivehere
.”

As the weeks went on, and I didn’t get better, shaky all the time—
all
the time, whatever I was doing, and I didn’t want to get out of my bed or even from under the covers, though staying there afforded me little relief—Meredith kept reminding me in successive sessions that it was all just the normal course of a not ideal but perfectly common response to a terrible thing.

“You have PTSD,” she would say.

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” I would say, though I could match my symptoms to the
DSM
’s criteria plain as day. PTSD was for veterans. For people who had seen a lot of people killed, and who had nearly been killed, or for people to whom other actually terrible things had happened. I kept shaking my head at Meredith. “That just doesn’t seem right.”

*   *   *

Psychological trauma is an experience or witness of threatened or actual death, serious injury, or sexual violence.

Though these scenarios are generally associated with feelings of extreme fear and helplessness, a victim needn’t experience them or even be in danger to become traumatized; emotional disasters, such as the death of a loved one, can also produce traumatization. Further, hearing about any of the above happening to a loved one can be traumatic, as can being consistently exposed to details about any of the above for work.
Post
-traumatic stress disorder is simply a nervous system’s inability to return to its normal baseline after the trauma is over, a body perpetrating or suppressing memories of the incident long after the fact and firing life-or-death stress when those reactions or survival mechanisms are no longer necessary.

It’s actually pretty straightforward. But given trauma’s complicated relationship with the world, and even within psychology, the discipline to which it belongs, perhaps some understanding could be extended to my profession for its lack of openness and regular conversation about it. (One might feel less generous toward the Committee to Protect Journalists handbook at the time for including advice about such extreme scenarios as smearing oneself with mud and leaves to hide from rebel forces—but not a word about sexual harassment and sexual violence on the job.) In a 1992 book that was crucial—to psychology, to humanity—clinical psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman documents how political and controversial the very study of trauma is and always has been. Because, she explains in
Trauma and Recovery
, it can’t be done without naming and confronting the people who perpetrate it and acknowledging its victims’ experience. Without belief in victims’ stories and self-reported symptoms—and an investment in their fate—the study can’t exist. Unfortunately, given the frequent demographics of oppressors and the oppressed, one key to the study’s advancement has been one of the least credible and most dispensable populations of all: women.