sarah xerta

viperslang:

• The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, at the expense of recognizing the reality of their patients’ experiences… This search for predisposing factors probably had its origins in the need to deny that all people can be stressed beyond endurance, rather than in solid scientific data; until recently such data were simply not available… When the issue of causation becomes a legitimate area of investigation, one is inevitably confronted with issues of man’s inhumanity to man, with carelessness and callousness, with abrogation of responsibility, with manipulation and with failures to protect.

• As the ACE study has shown, child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide. 
  

• Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems. Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered. 
  

• The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. 
  

• The contrast with the scans of the eighteen chronic PTSD patients with severe early-life trauma was startling. There was almost no activation of any of the self-sensing areas of the brain: The MPFC, the anterior cingulate, the parietal cortex, and the insula did not light up at all; the only area that showed a slight activation was the posterior cingulate, which is responsible for basic orientation in space. There could be only one explanation for such results: In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive. 
  

• Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves. 
  

• The more you stay focused on your breathing, the more you will benefit, particularly if you pay attention until the very end of the out breath and then wait a moment before you inhale again. As you continue to breathe and notice the air moving in and out of your lungs you may think about the role that oxygen plays in nourishing your body and bathing your tissues with the energy you need to feel alive and engaged. 

― Bessel A. van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

viperslang:

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens. 

 Over time as most people fail the survivor’s exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. 

 By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child’s personality structure.

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.

Denying the reality of my experience—that was the most harmful. Not being able to trust anyone was the most serious effect… . I know I acted in ways that were despicable. But I wasn’t crazy. Some people go around acting like that because they feel hopeless. Finally I found a few people along the way who have been able to feel OK about me even though I had severe problems. Good therapists were those who really validated my experience.

Repetition is the mute language of the abused child.

Most people have no knowledge or understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh

 
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery

viperslang:

Go back. Do what Walcott recommends - give your heart back to yourself. Do to the darkness what a seed knows best; eat it whole, grow. Mouth what you once wrote : Sticks & stones will hone my bones. Be whittled. Soap scrapped into sculpture by a patient prisoner. The fine art of embroidered bones. Invite the elephant into the room. Teach it how to pronounce copacetic. Look up at the fan again, not to weigh its verdure against the lapses of your own body but to admire the physics that powers it. Look at how it dances with all this enduring invisibility.  Don’t noose the shoelaces, let them stay in the mud-slapped sneakers; let them remind you of how someday you want your fingers this entwined in a transcendent hand and the signature of any detritus won’t define who you belong to & with. Sit and touch the chartreuse giggle of grass peeking from the callused knuckles of this cracked asphalt. Let it teach you how to unbury yourself. Let it whisper the reverse of ya'burnee in the tired conch of your ear. Find the sea again. Ask her to love you again. She has never failed you till now, she has stored all your fleeting afterbirths of all your centuries in the jewelbox of her fist. Stand before her & let her remind you how you are the switchblade of lightning that shivers the silver mirror of water to the ambered dust of sands. Know that suffering beyond pain is powerless, is parasitic. Sprinkle some rock salt on that leech.Take a pair of scissors but this time don’t split your skin; find a long red thread, cut it into half & fling it outside the window  you wanted to catapult from. Stare at a starling murmuration over the skies of Palestine. Stare at it with intent. Let it speak to you with the symmetry of its vignettes. Find the first letter of your name in this tango of bird shapes. Pet a dog. Any dog. Pet a pit bull. Build up the day when you can go to a zoo & ask if you can pet a snake. This is a lesson in tender tension. Memorize that tao of the Audi ad - All conditions are perfect conditions. Decide what is this condition perfect for. Act. Write poems again. Don’t ever let him take that away from you. Don’t be ashamed of the poems you wrote about him. Claim back the alchemy of every word you were arted into. Invoke through poetry. Call upon your sisters, your serpent goddesses, your guardian paladins. Call Calliope, Coatlicue, Athena. Watch the owl nest in the mango tree the next morning. What antediluvian prophesies are sleeping inside you? What will it take to kindle their veins? Seek the books you stashed at the back of those sandalwood shelves. Thumb through the dog-eared pages. Search through the debris of memory to find just a single diamond of logic you can smuggle across to your consciousness. Repeat Ozick - Trust the afterward. Trust what comes next. Trust your survival. Watch those wildlife documentaries. It is always the female of the species that can predict the oncoming natural disasters. This struggle is power. This makes a whole from your halves. This reminds you never to dichotomize your sense of self at the knife of another’s deceit. You know about the monarch butterflies of Yucatan, don’t you? You have come here through generations of women like yourself; women with clayen pitchers & bronzed children on their hips, women like your mother who sat alone in a pregnancy ward, feet heavier than church bells, your grandmother - 15 when married, 18, illiterate with 2 children, 25 -a student of herbal medicine.You have flown through epochs of migratory trance, the ache of wintered wings, their chorus warming your chrysalis. Respect their lives. Respect yours. Pin their photographs on the soft board. Watch them as they watch over you. Bow your head to what is whispering la vida! la vida! in quiet corridors of your mind. Etymologies are a parade of cliche but sometimes we need this ready entourage to rearrange our sadness. Find yours. For example, anger -  from old norse “angr”. Meaning : grief. You want to leave this body? Do so. Leave the anger of this body. Leave its lies. Leave its violent hiss that tells you to distrust your gut. Replace its staccato with symphonies.Maybe Tchaikovsky’s Sixth (‘Pathetique’) or Mahler’s Symphony No 1. Bathe in music. Make it a menage-a-trois with Mos Def & Rakim. Go to the rooftop on a new moon night - Fire up your own Candomblé. Come back. Strip yourself. Let your eye travel the whole country of your body. This is the alphabet of desire. Pick the places you have hidden from yourself. Show them light. Show them grace. All civilizations are cradled in ruins. Bless your blisters, your shanty towns of mute scars. Pull back the tarpaulin off this skid row. These are the places you have best survived in. These are the spots you were strengthened in. These folded, cratered corners are telling you what Rilke knew - how beautiful the terror of enduring; how wild the appetite of angels. Go forward. Touch your past.  Then let it go. It can’t call out. It has no voice, only echoes. Close the door. There is nothing to be scared of. Mark a spot - in a garden, a cathedral, a beach. Dare to meet yourself there. Daily. Ask how you have been. Show yourself at least a quarter of the kindness you lavish on those who wound you without a fear of repercussions. Loss is a weed of language. Find a scythe. Don’t keep your apologies hungry. Don’t let anyone reduce you to the sum of your mistakes. Refrain from bisecting yourself into the martyr/victim binary. You are neither. You are both. You are so much more. Break often - not like porcelain, but like waves. Make multiples out of your singularity. Bind the rains to your tongue. Find that place in your mouth where a storm darkens. Stand still while this hell handles you. Trust me, you have begun to scare the fire out of its throat. Everything good, kind & compassionate is waiting for you. Within you. Order a large pizza. Go back to Walcott.  Sit. Feast on your life.

Scherezade Siobhan