Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (18 page)

Not that all of the e-mails I was getting came from fellow sexual deviants. Plenty of the writers didn’t talk about sex at all, but still related to my symptoms. Some of them had been in a bad car accident. Some of them didn’t say how they’d been traumatized, because they didn’t feel like it, or because they never did (“My reasons are the kind I can’t really talk to anyone about”). Some were women; some were men. Some didn’t have PTSD but had loved ones who did (“I’m a journalist whose partner has severe complex PTSD following a lifetime of trauma.… I know the blank stares and dismissals you often receive when the subject is brought up”). But they all shared one thing: their sense of isolation.

It made me sad that we didn’t all know that our symptoms were so commonplace. So commonplace they were practically boring. But here we were flipping out that we were raving and rare and gross. There were only a few people I heard from who knew that their symptoms were business-as-usual PTSD. Those people also knew better than to admit their symptoms to the non-traumatized public.

“Yeahhhhh,” Brannan Vines, a thirty-one-year-old from Alabama drawled to me over the phone. “We don’t really tell normal people
how
crazy we are.”

Brannan was the founder and CEO of Family of a Vet, a nonprofit dedicated to helping military veterans’ families cope with PTSD. Brannan was also a PTSD-veteran’s wife whose life with her traumatized husband was so difficult that she herself had developed PTSD.

I’d got in touch with her first, before the essay came out. I found her in the same way that a lot of people would find me now, by Googling symptoms and sex and stumbling on something she’d written on her organization’s site. I’d gone on that research quest (adding
veterans
to the search terms) for work more than personal reasons. I would have to pitch new story ideas soon, and it had occurred to me that if sexual dysfunction weren’t limited to myself and other clients of Meredith’s who had PTSD, some veterans would be experiencing it, too. Ten years after the invasion of Afghanistan, people were tired of reading about soldiers period, much less combined with the impossibly unsexy topic of mental illness. I was pretty proud of myself for thinking of an angle that might make an important topic compelling: their postwar sex lives.

I’d interviewed Brannan while I was in Ohio, gathering information for the potential pitch. After my personal essay came out, she became one of many allies from a corner that I never would have anticipated support or validation, had I anticipated support from strangers at all: the military.

“Fuck what everybody else has to say that’s negative about you!” a marine named Chris wrote to me. He told me he’d had PTSD since his first tour in Iraq. He seemed sympathetic to the fact that the constant crying was freaking me out, even if he couldn’t relate to it. “I CANNOT cry,” he said. I obviously didn’t have any such problem, and his trying to help me while he was having so much trouble himself moved me to tears—the good kind of tears, which had become unfamiliar to me.

So, at home in San Francisco, broken down and raw, I had, for the first time, a spontaneously assembled community trying to help me hold my pieces together. They bore some of the weight of my shame. And Nico still loved me, he assured me, despite having followed (and translated) the debate about my character, all the while unsuccessfully trying to teach me the French art of unlimited
blasé
.

“It’s not important what other people say,” he kept saying, looking at me over Skype like I was crazy for not getting this.

“You might be upset if you opened
Le Monde
and it said you were a whore and didn’t care if you destroyed people’s lives for your own fame,” I said, quavering as always. “And if your grandma saw that.”

And he would shrug.

He had been right, what he’d said when I tried to break up with him. I was incapable of severing contact. I couldn’t imagine my future without him. Even when I’d still been closed up in Ohio, in my work and reality-TV bubble, I thought about him constantly.

When I’d stopped not having feelings about everything, I’d stopped not having feelings about Nico. My need for him intensified, and I missed him unbearably, though again, I’d never had him next to me long enough to get used to. It piled on top of my other physically painful emotions.

“I need you,” I kept telling him, despite that not being a thing that I traditionally said to anyone.

He couldn’t come.

He couldn’t have helped me anyway.

Having feelings had its price. PTSD gets worse, all the way worse, before it gets better. “Healing does not always mean that we will feel better,” world-renowned wellness guru Donald Epstein says in his book
Healing Myths, Healing Magic
. “We cannot heal what we cannot feel, and healing often requires us to feel things we don’t like feeling.”

I didn’t have any assignments planned; the Haiti feature had long been published, the Congo piece was turned in, and the reporting was done for the Uganda and Ohio stories. All I had to do was write them. For the first time in fourteen months, I prepared to sit still. I hadn’t seen Meredith since before the Hague-and-Africa assignment, three months earlier. I had collapsed into a mess, and away from drinking and the constant moving and traveling, even with my impromptu band of supportive e-mail strangers, I stayed a mess. The vise was back around my rib cage, and my awareness of it was at an all-time high.

One night, I went to a yoga class in my neighborhood in an attempt to undo the suffocation. I hadn’t breathed, it seemed, in months. Halfway through, on a mat on the polished wood floor, I dropped into a forward fold, and a thought that I had never, ever even come close to having before suddenly presented itself. The moment it arrived, it rang and resonated through my whole body.

I didn’t want to be alive anymore.

PART TWO

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

—
M
ARY
O
LIVER

9.

Denise Benson, MFT, Master Somatic Coach, California Institute of Integrative Studies instructor, and prominent Bay Area psychotherapist, came highly recommended. Sometimes she was hired to run leadership seminars for executives of large organizations, but during her normal days, she saw clients one-on-one. And for that, her expertise was in trauma. Meredith spoke of her as if she was some kind of legend; she was seasoned but progressive, and supposedly very intense. With Meredith on maternity leave and my mental health what it was, I called her up when I returned from Ohio. A few days later, I arrived at her office in downtown San Francisco.

“How did it go with Denise?” Tana asked me after our highly anticipated session.

“OK,” I responded. I added, to her and to anyone else who asked me how I was doing: “She says I’m dead inside.”

She hadn’t said that. Not exactly, in so many words. But that was how I’d interpreted what she’d not only told me, but shown me.

Denise’s sessions weren’t your standard sit-in-a-chair-and-talk appointments. As a somatic therapist, she, like Meredith, approached mental health issues not from the mind, but through the body. “[E]very person is a composite functioning of two simultaneous processes: the mental and the physical,” it says in the foreword to
The Anatomy of Change
, a book by Richard Strozzi-Heckler, a pioneer of somatics who founded an institute in California and, as it happens, trained Denise. His clients have included everyone from the Special Forces to professional athletes. I’d lucked into somatics when I got the recommendation to see Meredith years ago, but now, I chose a somatic therapist deliberately. There was no denying that my bodily symptoms were real, even if they didn’t make sense. My symptoms were in my body; my fears were for my body; somatic therapy seemed smarter than ever. I’d had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to rationalize my way out of this. Believe me. I’d tried.

However West Coast it sounded, the body had feelings—emotion was intricately tangled with physical feelings. Whether people liked it or not. As the sensations couldn’t and shouldn’t be avoided, the theory of somatics went, they were a source of guidance and information. Learning to use that source led to wholeness, and I needed wholeness to take on something as serious as PTSD. Plenty of animals living happier lives than I had survived without rationality for millennia, I supposed, and to get through this, I had to give up my total faith in it, too.

The Establishment wasn’t ready to do that. Accordingly, somatic therapy was far from the norm. Though it was plentiful and easily accessible where I lived, for a long time, it had been marginalized in a field built upon talking. In 1997, Peter Levine helped bring attention to it with his best seller
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
, an explanation of his Somatic Experiencing therapy, which focused on invoking and fully experiencing uncomfortable bodily reactions. And before that, Bessel van der Kolk, who was the director of the Trauma Center of the Justice Resource Institute in Massachusetts (which he remains) and a principal investigator of the
DSM IV
’s field trials for PTSD, came to the conclusion that somatics was an effective treatment for trauma when he met a woman who’d developed debilitating PTSD after a car accident. Van der Kolk’s training was old-school, but he discovered that the woman responded to EMDR, a then relatively new modality. Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy involves keeping traumatic events in mind while receiving visual, tactile, and auditory stimuli. These help the brain process and file the memories so that they won’t pop up as if they were real anymore. Parts of the brain, Van der Kolk realized, went off-line when people remembered traumatic events normally. This would shape the rest of his career, and was his gateway to realizing that in order for him to help traumatized patients to process their distress, he first had to bypass the verbal system and get their body to feel safe. Trauma couldn’t be resolved just by talking about it. It was practically blasphemy. But he started training legions of practitioners to treat traumatic stress through the body.

Denise practiced “direct experience” somatics. “If we know that what’s locked up in the body is a deep contraction that came from fear, it’s unethical to not touch” was her philosophy. So if there was a way she could help her clients release and feel safe by touching or manipulating their bodies like an acupuncturist or massage therapist, she did.

You wouldn’t necessarily guess she was the type. She didn’t seem touchy-feely; a tough, compact dyke in her sixties with short dark hair and ageless olive skin, she wore no-nonsense button-downs, as no-nonsense as the desk and couple pieces of furniture in her office. She was sharp and serious. She smiled, but not gratuitously, and looked like she didn’t take any shit. I wasn’t planning on giving her any, but felt nervous around her just the same.

That first session, we sat in chairs across from each other while I (crying) gave her some background, like at any other intake. We talked about somatics some. One simple way to demonstrate how impacted and involved the body was in everything, she said, was just to say “No! No! No!,” and feel how the body contracted; feel the difference between saying that and saying “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Soon—after she was sure I felt safe in the environment she created, and safe with her—she had me do something a typical therapist wouldn’t: lie on a massage table.

I would end up like this for most of our sessions. Lying faceup, breathing. Answering her questions about what I noticed. How I felt. She would stand next to the table, near me, while we talked. During our first table session, she at some point happened to pass her hand near my face. And she realized something.

She stopped, and put her hand in front of my face again. Then she drew it back and thrust it toward my face, stopping just shy of hitting me. She repeated that several times.

“You don’t flinch, or even blink, when I put my hand in your face,” she said.

I thought about this for a second. “Maybe it’s because you’re my therapist and I trust you,” I ventured.

“Um…” she said, trying to let me down easy. “It’s a reflex. It should work no matter what.”

She wouldn’t tell me another thing she noticed until later, because she didn’t want to freak me out, but when she picked up my hands, they felt lifeless and empty.

Like a corpse’s. But with less substance.

I didn’t think it was fair that I could be barely inhabiting my stupid body but doing so much crying and suffering anyhow. I didn’t understand that. But I did understand that there really was no place I less wanted to be than inside my own skin. My body was unpredictable. It was agonizingly painful. And when my symptoms took over, it was terrifying.

“Trust your gut,” people say, in a demonstration of the small collective understanding we do have of body knowledge. (Ditto “My shoulders are so tight because I’m so stressed out!”) But my guts were misfiring.

Say I was sitting in bed watching TV, since I still used mass amounts of it to try to numb myself. Having run out of every episode of
Grey’s Anatomy
ever made, I took on the six-season catalogue of
Criminal Minds
and two of the three
CSI
franchises. Or say I was watching
The Daily Show
, and suddenly fear exploded in my stomach. It said: I’m going to be attacked.

This feeling, however untrue, wouldn’t go away just because I recognized it as untrue.
I’m going to be attacked I’m going to be attacked I’m going to be attacked
, everything in my body said.
No you aren’t
, something else in me tried to tell it, but to no avail; I became so tightly wound against the attack that my whole system boiled. Generally at this point I would take out a bottle of Ativan, which my alarmed GP had recently prescribed for emergencies, and clutch it hard or stare at it, pacing my apartment, trying to stomp the crazy out through my feet, prepared to medicate if I couldn’t calm down soon because sometimes, the stress and exhaustion of the terror would lead me to the thought that I couldn’t stand to be alive anymore.