Courage Part Two (Maybe in homage to George Lucas, I'll write Part One later)
When I was about 3 years old, my dad wrote and illustrated a book for me. It was called "Yip: The Story of a Puppy Dog Who Couldn't Bark." In the story, this little puppy dog could only sound a small and frail 'yip yip,' so he was named Yip. A wise wizard, Merlin, told Yip that one day he would find the courage to bark. And that is what happened - Yip befriended a brave knight, Lancelot and traveled the kingdom with him. One day Lancelot, in trying to save a lady in distress, got cornered by a fire-breathing dragon. Yip, to save his friend and the lady, began to bellow a "Bark Bark" and a "Woof Woof" and it scared the dragon off. Yip found his courage and the dragon was never seen again.
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Aside from private practice, I've had two jobs as a social worker. 1) Counseling abused and homeless kids at Youth In Need and 2) Home hospice social worker.
From the first day I started working in hospice, everyone I encountered, said to me, "That must be so hard," with a very sad expression on their faces. Yet, it took me hardly anytime to learn something about myself and respond this way - "Not nearly as hard as working with abused kids." And that is my truth to this day.
I'm not saying that death isn't sad or terrifying. Death, both facing our own, and witnessing the decline and illness of someone we love is frightening and takes immense courage. But it is a courage, that knows in its soul, that it is based in love - love of life and many times love of another person.
And, while I have a lot of thoughts about courage, in general and I want to write about the courage it takes to face illness, over come anxieties, and be resilient in more usual ways, I have had a great deal of trouble writing this blogpost, because I just don't think I can write about courage without first writing for and about people who have had to face the ugliest of human nature. I want to write about their courage and what I think it takes to heal after your life has been touched by hatred, terror, abuse or evil.
A couple of weeks ago I saw the new Sofia Coppola movie, The Beguiled and found myself pondering a line from Nicole Kidman's character. She is the headmistress of a largely abandoned girls' boarding school in Virginia during the Civil War. She says, "Courage is simply doing what needs to be done at the time." And the movie continues to unfold with her 'doing what needs to be done' to keep herself and the young girls and women she is in charge of safe from a man who terrorizes them.
Perhaps you are reading this and you are a rape survivor, perhaps you are reading this and finally escaped an abusive situation - whether it was physical, emotional, or sexual; perhaps you are reading this and have been the victim of a hate crime or another violent crime. You are reading this now because you did what needed to be done at the time. You put one foot in front of the other. Some survivors I know deny this is courage. Whatever got you here, I can tell you that it is, indeed, courage.
When hate has touched your life, you change. A couple things I see happen...sometimes you get used to existing in chaos and turmoil and don't know what 'normal' feels like, sometimes you don't know who to trust and who not to trust, sometimes you become depressed, sometimes you feel enraged. But, what it distills to for me, regardless of how it looks on the outside, is that you develop a sadness in your soul. If you have had to muster the courage to get away from hate and violence, I think you know what I mean.
At the training I went to in Portland this past Spring, I went to a session on healing from trauma and they showed this clip from Captain Phillips, a movie about the surviving a hostage situation at sea. And I just want to say that if you are a trauma survivor, this might be sad and hard to watch, though it is a clip about his rescue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJMDdT24_98
There are so many things that touch me about this clip, but what I most want to suggest is that the gentleness that the medic uses with Tom Hanks after the violence he has endured, is what I think we need in the aftermath of the courage we must use to escape cruelty. If we have escaped abuse, violence, or hatred, we have been treated with the opposite of gentleness by another human being. The antonyms of gentle in the dictionary include 'cruelty' and 'merciless.' If you have survived such treatment, especially if you endured it over a long period of time, you may have gotten acclimated to being treated this way and this is the damage that must be healed.
About 8 years ago or so, I heard a program on NPR...I could have sworn it was This American Life, but I've tried to find it and can't...it was about a woman who had either been the victim of a crime or had been coping with some mental illness. She talked about her need for 'hush' and the peace she finds just sitting at the kitchen table, doing nothing. Appreciating the 'hush.' I would love to hear this piece again and if you happen to be reading this and know the source, please let me know.
Being a writer, I want to tell stories of finding courage. But, being a therapist, I also want to offer thoughts on healing. I wanted to say that our culture has become too harsh, cruel and merciless in many ways. But when I say "our culture", this depersonalizes something that feels highly personal, if you have had to survive such treatment. A person treats another person with cruelty. A group of people can be merciless with other people.
To heal, I believe we need gentleness. We need to treat ourselves gently, we need to treat others gently. We need to find our version of hush. This might be small things at first. It might seem inconsequential, but it's not. Maybe it starts with listening to classical music instead of rock music. Maybe it's sitting on your porch for a few minutes each day and listening to the birds. It might be watching Modern Family instead of CSI. The gentleness will get bigger and broader from there. The gentleness will not only be with these 'little' things that we fill our time with, it will be with our hearts and souls. The world may hold cruelty, but we can choose gentleness.
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It's been a long, challenging process to write this blogpost. I'm given pause to wonder why, when I was only a toddler, my dad chose to write a book for me about courage. Really, Yip: The Puppy Dog Who Couldn't Bark, is a story about speaking up when something is wrong. Finding your courage to speak, even when you are afraid. I think it's about doing what needs to be done at the time, and I'm going to keep doing it.
Showing posts with label PTSD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PTSD. Show all posts
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Thursday, August 21, 2014
A Community Grieves and a Therapist Wonders What Justice Means
I thought I was going to come out of my 'blogger' hidey hole after more than a year with some kind of big statement about myself, but the truth is, the thing that motivated me to write again, in prose and in public, is my community - St. Louis, which has been all over the news in the past two weeks. It's surreal to me that the name Ferguson became a household word and that the intricacies of St. Louis civics are being given a national and international forum. These type of stories always seem to happen 'somewhere else' and feel so sensationalized that I stop paying attention. But this is my city and it's important to me.
In most ways, I'm reluctant to add my voice to the cacophony - what good would it do? Do I really have something unique to say that isn't already said or could be said by someone who says it better? I don't know. I'm taking the chance. I'm a believer that every little voice that speaks for truth and love also works for justice. Justice is a concept I have many ideas about - with all my experience being with grieving people and in my own personal experience of grief, I don't believe justice can ever be done, in a literal sense. Justice cannot be done because the person who died cannot be brought back. The wrong-doing cannot be undone. The circumstances and variables that came together to create a real tragedy cannot be un-created. We have got to change our thinking about justice.
So here I go, jumping in with a few ideas that I hope will be helpful to whoever reads this. I am using an idea called systems theory (check it out - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory). My interpretation is that a person is a system and a person interacts as part of many systems - family, neighborhood, work, etc.) All systems are influenced by every little part of the system. Each cell in your body makes a difference, each person in your neighborhood makes a difference. In such a way of thinking - there are no little things. Or little things can also be big things.
Ferguson is what grief looks like when it's played out in a community system - the stages of grief that an individual goes through: shock/denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance - these are the same things a community experiences. It's grief writ large. I've said to some of my grief clients, that if I were to have the chutzpah to mess with Elizabeth Kubler- Ross's stages of grief, I'd add PROTEST. Protest may be a bit like bargaining and anger mixed together. Not everyone experiences this - but a fair number of people that I see, especially if that tend to have what we call 'strong personalities' (and I say that as someone who has one), almost carry a placard in their grief "I DON'T WANT THIS TO HAVE HAPPENED. IT"S NOT FAIR." And some unconscious part of them hopes/believes, "Maybe through the sheer force of my will I can undo this." We are seeing protest in Ferguson.
I also see what happens when a secret gets revealed. In family therapy, secrets are a big deal. If a family has a secret (Dad's an alcoholic, little brother was sexually abused, etc.), the secret holds much power and shapes the family in very unhealthy ways -mostly by creating shame. The way I see it, there is still racism in our community of St. Louis. I don't mean that literally everyone is a racist, but our communities aren't integrated for the most part and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think racism has been a 'secret' - we are impacted by the shame of it. This is a very complex issue and I don't think it's my area of expertise - only that I want to bring to light anything that's in the dark. I want to live in a world where there isn't shame and there aren't secrets.
Finally, I work with a lot of people who have survived trauma. For whatever criticism or support there may be of our police officers, I know that many of them experience trauma repeatedly (as do all our first responders). I just want to point out that trauma, without intervention and emotional support, rewires our brains. Even neutral stimulus can produce a flight or fight response for someone who has PTSD. Again, I don't claim to be an expert in anything about the system of the police force, but I am guessing that they don't have adequate access to education and support as they experience repeated trauma.
And now back to justice. It's such a confusing philosophical concept for me. But here's a real laymen's take on it from my experience - real justice is a fair society in which each and every person has the ability and access to choose freely what and how they live their lives. But in the real life we live in, I can't honestly say we have a just society. In real life, I think we understand justice to mean, 'you hurt me, you get punished.' Maybe that is the best we can come up with. But what I find is that more victims seem to get created. Anger seems to perpetuate, rather than diminish. Here's what feels more just to me:
Ask yourself, how can I help Michael Brown's family heal and support them and the community through grief? Ask yourself, how can I help Ferguson, St. Louis, and other communities to honestly look at covert and overt racism and promote better relationships in our communities? Ask yourself, how can I support police officers, firefighters, EMS? Justice is served when we focus less on the 'wrong-doer' and more on supporting and loving the survivors of the wrong-doing. Each of us can do something. In systems, small things may very well turn out to be big things.
In most ways, I'm reluctant to add my voice to the cacophony - what good would it do? Do I really have something unique to say that isn't already said or could be said by someone who says it better? I don't know. I'm taking the chance. I'm a believer that every little voice that speaks for truth and love also works for justice. Justice is a concept I have many ideas about - with all my experience being with grieving people and in my own personal experience of grief, I don't believe justice can ever be done, in a literal sense. Justice cannot be done because the person who died cannot be brought back. The wrong-doing cannot be undone. The circumstances and variables that came together to create a real tragedy cannot be un-created. We have got to change our thinking about justice.
So here I go, jumping in with a few ideas that I hope will be helpful to whoever reads this. I am using an idea called systems theory (check it out - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory). My interpretation is that a person is a system and a person interacts as part of many systems - family, neighborhood, work, etc.) All systems are influenced by every little part of the system. Each cell in your body makes a difference, each person in your neighborhood makes a difference. In such a way of thinking - there are no little things. Or little things can also be big things.
Ferguson is what grief looks like when it's played out in a community system - the stages of grief that an individual goes through: shock/denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance - these are the same things a community experiences. It's grief writ large. I've said to some of my grief clients, that if I were to have the chutzpah to mess with Elizabeth Kubler- Ross's stages of grief, I'd add PROTEST. Protest may be a bit like bargaining and anger mixed together. Not everyone experiences this - but a fair number of people that I see, especially if that tend to have what we call 'strong personalities' (and I say that as someone who has one), almost carry a placard in their grief "I DON'T WANT THIS TO HAVE HAPPENED. IT"S NOT FAIR." And some unconscious part of them hopes/believes, "Maybe through the sheer force of my will I can undo this." We are seeing protest in Ferguson.
I also see what happens when a secret gets revealed. In family therapy, secrets are a big deal. If a family has a secret (Dad's an alcoholic, little brother was sexually abused, etc.), the secret holds much power and shapes the family in very unhealthy ways -mostly by creating shame. The way I see it, there is still racism in our community of St. Louis. I don't mean that literally everyone is a racist, but our communities aren't integrated for the most part and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think racism has been a 'secret' - we are impacted by the shame of it. This is a very complex issue and I don't think it's my area of expertise - only that I want to bring to light anything that's in the dark. I want to live in a world where there isn't shame and there aren't secrets.
Finally, I work with a lot of people who have survived trauma. For whatever criticism or support there may be of our police officers, I know that many of them experience trauma repeatedly (as do all our first responders). I just want to point out that trauma, without intervention and emotional support, rewires our brains. Even neutral stimulus can produce a flight or fight response for someone who has PTSD. Again, I don't claim to be an expert in anything about the system of the police force, but I am guessing that they don't have adequate access to education and support as they experience repeated trauma.
And now back to justice. It's such a confusing philosophical concept for me. But here's a real laymen's take on it from my experience - real justice is a fair society in which each and every person has the ability and access to choose freely what and how they live their lives. But in the real life we live in, I can't honestly say we have a just society. In real life, I think we understand justice to mean, 'you hurt me, you get punished.' Maybe that is the best we can come up with. But what I find is that more victims seem to get created. Anger seems to perpetuate, rather than diminish. Here's what feels more just to me:
Ask yourself, how can I help Michael Brown's family heal and support them and the community through grief? Ask yourself, how can I help Ferguson, St. Louis, and other communities to honestly look at covert and overt racism and promote better relationships in our communities? Ask yourself, how can I support police officers, firefighters, EMS? Justice is served when we focus less on the 'wrong-doer' and more on supporting and loving the survivors of the wrong-doing. Each of us can do something. In systems, small things may very well turn out to be big things.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
request for input, courage, etc.
I don't want to spend overly much time reflecting on myself and this blog, but after "blogging" for about a month, I first wanted to thank the people who have been reading. It's been fun to run into or hear from friends who have been following. It's taken me a while in life to think of myself as a writer (and I feel more comfortable as a poet than as a prose writer), but I am having fun with this and I feel good hearing that others enjoy it.
One aspect of what I envisioned for this blog was a bit more interactivity with readers. If you are reading my posts and thinking, "I read an article, I bet Katy'd find it interesting" or "I'd like to see X topic addressed", please feel free to let me know. I can't guarantee that I will be able to use everything, and I might even ask you to make a 'guest appearance' yourself, but the interactive component makes me even more energized - creativity needs solitude, but in my experience, it also needs input.
To that end...my husband emailed me an NPR story: First Responders, Rescuers Come Forward With PTSD
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/30/132476507/first-responders-rescuers-face-ptsd-struggles?sc=emaf . First, I just think it's a compelling story. It also made me think about all my colleagues from hospice - nurses, social workers, massage therapists, art therapists, doctors, who similarly face ravages to the human body in the 'line of duty.' Cancer, cancer treatment, and the end of a disease process, can be strangely unnatural to witness and even shocking. We don't live in a time when the average person encounters dying and death with much frequency, so perhaps the vision of a very sick person is even more unsettling. Also, medicine has elongated the dying process - people used to die faster and now we tend to make choices where we languish in illness. Anyway. This is just to say that I was only rarely aware of being shocked by the sight of one of my patients, but I was nearly always deeply saddened by their physical changes and suffering. I was often amazed to see pictures a patients from a time they were healthy. It seemed like that must be a different person.
Since leaving my work in hospice, I've had two upsetting dreams which brought me to an awareness that I must have been more impacted by the 'trauma' of what I witnessed than I let myself be aware: in both dreams someone died. I knew someone died, and I said aloud in the dream, "I can't see another dead body." It felt powerful in the dream and I've thought since about how time changes our perspective. If I were still working in hospice, I don't think I would have had those dreams. I think I would just be 'doing the work.' I imagine this is what Michael Ferrara from the NPR story did for a long time too.
There are two sides to this coin: many of us do difficult things 'in the line of duty' - for our work, for our families - we do them. We show up. We give it our all. This both is and isn't courageous. Many of us take the point of view, "you just do what you have to do." Sometimes we might give ourselves a little pat on the back. But, we don't measure the difficulty of our situation, because maybe then we couldn't show up every day. I don't know what to say about this. Ultimately, in the flip side of the coin, I think healthy people need to do a little reflection. Michael Ferrara eventually went to therapy. Of course, I think therapy can be a good, helpful tool to enable people to live fuller, more contented lives. I think religion can do this. I think art can do it. I think meaningful relationships with healthy people can do it.
So before wrapping up today, I also feel like I should emphasize that like any diagnosable condition, to have PTSD, a person must meet several criteria outlined in the DSM (a diagnostic encyclopedia, of sorts, for mental health professionals.) PTSD is a serious difficulty, for which there are several very effective treatments.
As with this post, or any other, if you feel so compelled, let me know what you think.
One aspect of what I envisioned for this blog was a bit more interactivity with readers. If you are reading my posts and thinking, "I read an article, I bet Katy'd find it interesting" or "I'd like to see X topic addressed", please feel free to let me know. I can't guarantee that I will be able to use everything, and I might even ask you to make a 'guest appearance' yourself, but the interactive component makes me even more energized - creativity needs solitude, but in my experience, it also needs input.
To that end...my husband emailed me an NPR story: First Responders, Rescuers Come Forward With PTSD
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/30/132476507/first-responders-rescuers-face-ptsd-struggles?sc=emaf . First, I just think it's a compelling story. It also made me think about all my colleagues from hospice - nurses, social workers, massage therapists, art therapists, doctors, who similarly face ravages to the human body in the 'line of duty.' Cancer, cancer treatment, and the end of a disease process, can be strangely unnatural to witness and even shocking. We don't live in a time when the average person encounters dying and death with much frequency, so perhaps the vision of a very sick person is even more unsettling. Also, medicine has elongated the dying process - people used to die faster and now we tend to make choices where we languish in illness. Anyway. This is just to say that I was only rarely aware of being shocked by the sight of one of my patients, but I was nearly always deeply saddened by their physical changes and suffering. I was often amazed to see pictures a patients from a time they were healthy. It seemed like that must be a different person.
Since leaving my work in hospice, I've had two upsetting dreams which brought me to an awareness that I must have been more impacted by the 'trauma' of what I witnessed than I let myself be aware: in both dreams someone died. I knew someone died, and I said aloud in the dream, "I can't see another dead body." It felt powerful in the dream and I've thought since about how time changes our perspective. If I were still working in hospice, I don't think I would have had those dreams. I think I would just be 'doing the work.' I imagine this is what Michael Ferrara from the NPR story did for a long time too.
There are two sides to this coin: many of us do difficult things 'in the line of duty' - for our work, for our families - we do them. We show up. We give it our all. This both is and isn't courageous. Many of us take the point of view, "you just do what you have to do." Sometimes we might give ourselves a little pat on the back. But, we don't measure the difficulty of our situation, because maybe then we couldn't show up every day. I don't know what to say about this. Ultimately, in the flip side of the coin, I think healthy people need to do a little reflection. Michael Ferrara eventually went to therapy. Of course, I think therapy can be a good, helpful tool to enable people to live fuller, more contented lives. I think religion can do this. I think art can do it. I think meaningful relationships with healthy people can do it.
So before wrapping up today, I also feel like I should emphasize that like any diagnosable condition, to have PTSD, a person must meet several criteria outlined in the DSM (a diagnostic encyclopedia, of sorts, for mental health professionals.) PTSD is a serious difficulty, for which there are several very effective treatments.
As with this post, or any other, if you feel so compelled, let me know what you think.
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