CULTURE + PSYCHOLOGY
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Why writers and writing are important in the study of human psychology
I recently wrote an article based on Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s seminal New York Times bestseller “The Body Keeps The Score”. It is based on a body of work I’ve kept in the basement of my mind since 2006 — the year by chance more than by plan I got involved in the work of trauma assisting two Malaysian researchers in clinical psychology with UNICEF.
I am not sure if it was (bad) luck or serendipity, but the experience with tsunami victims led me to another research in trauma among children involving sexual abuse. That research experience ripped me apart.
Based on a nationwide study throughout Malaysia, the findings showed eight out of ten children below the age of twelve had been molested in their household by people they know, not strangers (uncles, grandfathers and step-fathers, in that order). In fact, most rape cases occur among people children recognize while incest is more rampant than we like to discuss. To this day, the white papers are withheld by the government.
The work took me off-site and I was in isolation pouring my energy on others but negating to have my own self regulated by strong emotional/ psychiatric support. I didn’t realized then that I myself had developed trauma.
The fact that I often kept my work away from my parents and family made it worse. My intention was to not make them worry about the depth and distance I had to get myself into. I failed to realize that by doing so, I also threw away my lifeline.
Often, in the middle of nowhere, looking out into an open distance, although the sky is beautifully lit with stars and I felt safe surrounded by a professional team, I was often alone.
I recall one time, I was looking out into a breathtaking setting sun observing the aggressive waves of the South China Sea in Karambunai, Sabah (Borneo) as they roared into an emerging darkness, I felt alone.
Not sad, miserable lonely, but alone, realizing all that I was doing and dealing with I had no one with the right mental frequency to share and discuss with.
I was a guest at a “hidden” convention with leading experts in pharmaceutical research. The location was prime and service was posh, but my work was confidential. I realized then as I still do now, on occasions, my mental engagement, interests and projects were something that would either bore or disturb, namely others outside of my professional circle. Ironically, the more I kept to myself the better I was at my work because I didn’t have to worry about what others thought and keeping them “happy”.
This eventually took a toll on me.
In the very same year, my grandmother died. It was the death knell to my confidence. She was the closest I had and trusted with my stories without fear of judgement and abandonment. When she left permanently of cancer, I became a mess.
Being at the cancer ward, the smell, the treatment, the other patients, the doctor’s office, the second, third, forth opinions, the fucking disinfectant smell that refuses to leave my nostrils even after I had showered and scrubbed myself clean, ate into me.
Seeing her deteriorate was one thing, seeing other patients deteriorate in the same ward, same floor, watching them in agony, helpless, desperate, surrendered, and their family in misery and sadness gnawed deeper into me like cancer cells.
After I buried my grandmother I became obsessed with cancer. I kept thinking that was how I was going to die too. I read into it, became paranoid that every lump or bruise was going to lead me to cancer. I’d take long showers in a steamed room with my head resting against the tiled wall while the water ran down my body.
Sometimes I would cry quietly, whimpering, sometimes a little louder. But there would be me and no one else. In those moments, I felt lost and I felt I needed so much. But what did I need exactly? How do I ask for it? All my life I was taught to give, not to ask.
Flashes of my grandmother was interspersed with images of the remote sites, faces of children, victims I’ve interviewed and held. Survivors of the dead. Now I was a survivor of a dead — my grandmother.
In a month, I would see my doctor up to three times thinking I felt a lump that needed to be examined. The doctor would check to appease me and nothing came up.
I was not at ease. I had recurring visions of the intensive care unit during the daytime. At night I clung to my husband as if my life depended on it. At my lowest, I’d tell him with soaked eyes, “Please do not ever leave me. Promise me. Promise me that no matter how hard it gets, you stay by me.”
Night time offered no relief.
At first my former husband would hold me close, caress and kiss me on my forehead. “I love you, I will never leave you.” It was what I needed to hear. And that allowed me to fall asleep, a hand never leaving touching his body. I needed to feel his skin against mine. There were many nights I’d wake up in a cold sweat, palpitating and struggling to breathe, with nightmares he was gone. He had left, he had been taken, he was missing.
I remember holding him tight and praying gratitude it was all a dream.
One time in the shower, during one of those long head against the wall sessions, I accidentally grazed the side of my breast with the solid gemstone on my ring and causing a slight bleeding. I panicked and started crying hysterically. I struggled to breathe. On the floor naked, I screamed for my husband. He rushed into the bathroom, holding me, checking my breast, panicking himself seeing my condition like that. It was then I had a total meltdown screaming I was going to die of breast cancer, and that one day, he was going to leave me. I don’t know how that came to me, or why I said it.
My husband took me to the hospital and my doctor seeing me for the upteempth time in a short span did a full check including tumor markers. He sat me down, explained how I had suffered a panic attack. He added, I needed counselling to grasp both, my grandmother’s death and my work stress. “It’s piling up,” he said. “It’s taking a toll on you again. Take a break. Go for a long vacation.”
I was a strong soldier, until my grandmother’s death became the trigger to what was dormant inside me, festering all the while, keeping quiet while I tried to dismiss the signs, facts and truths.
One evening, my husband sat me down, he held both my hands stroking lovingly, looking into my eyes and made a confession: “I don’t know how to handle this. I don’t know who you are and what you’ve become when you go into these episodes. You scare me, you make me feel uncomfortable. I’m used to seeing you strong. I don’t know how to deal with this side of you. I need you to be strong, for me and for us.”
In retrospect, he spoke the truth and his feelings were valid. He was, after all, human. But at the time, my heart didn’t know that. It was not what it wanted to hear.
Yes, I was lost and undergoing an traumatic sequence of experiences, but I was still in love. Madly in love with my husband. Yet, July 2006 marked the starting point of the disintegration of my marriage. My beautiful marriage began to slip through the cracks. Cracks in the tiles where I rested my head, cracks that were not there before.
“You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneously with yours … What you are is an expression of History.” — Robert Penn Warren, “World Enough And Time”
We decided to leave for the United States thinking the distance from family would offer us space to rebuild and for me to heal. “Let’s focus on us,” said my husband. And for a while it helped. But the demons were always there like a backsplash in the kitchen, mocking me. The mocking were images of my grandmother on her deathbed, children at the sexual abused shelters. They still followed me across the planet to the remotes of Minnesota buried under inches of snow.
I am not at war, but I remain at a battlefield.
“It is a strange thing all the memories have these two striking qualities. They are always full of quietness, that is the most striking thing about them; and even when things weren’t like that in reality, they still seem to have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speak to me by looks and gestures, wordless and silent — and their silence is precisely what disturbs me.” — Erich Maria Remarque, “All Quiet on the Western Front”
Trauma before dawn saw the next 14 years of my life testing me to my limit. I have written fragments of them on Medium, slowly piecing them as per doctor’s orders as therapy, to overcome shame, self-loathing and feelings of failure. We are in constant state of healing. We never fully recover, but we can choose to remain in remission.
Van Der Kolk describes: “In order to regain control over yourself, you need to revisit the trauma. Sooner or later you need to confront what has happened to you, but only after you feel safe and will not be retraumatized by it. The first order of business is to find ways to cope with feeling overwhelmed by the sensations and emotions associated with the past.”
Writers often talk about the need to be authentic, to write about honesty, to be truth-tellers. Yet, using the mindset of social media, they hide behind the beautiful, the composed and the carefully crafted, embellished and stylized narratives. Thanks to stories of ugly truths (like our traumas) and its discomforts we are able to fathom the enormity of life, and why it acts unfairly in the light of fairness.
Several years ago my friend, a doctor, during a consultation, saw a need in me to “unpack”. At first I was taken aback by her comment. It was unexpected. I resisted. I even disagreed. She said “it was written all over me” that I needed to learn to “let go of control and let things flow”. I had a reservoir of pent-up anger mired in guilt, shame and disappointment. “You’re nice to everyone but not to yourself. You’re still self-punishing.”
Seeing writing as a strength I used to possess, she suggested I shared my life stories. This isn’t the first time I’m hearing this advice. “Who cares?” I responded. To me it’s a train wreck in certain departments I’m not that proud of.
While it is not to sell a bestseller, she insisted it was more to find the words to reconcile with the years, to face my demons. “Make a Shakespearean play out of them?” I joked. “To allow others to live through you, for them to find their strength through yours. Narratives are the very essence of how psychiatry was built.” My friend explained.
Without testimonies and writings from our traumas, experts won’t have access to our human existence. Authors, novels and poetry provide documentation to how humans express what’s inside them encompassing time, space, and location. Writers have a superpower through writing. The kind of superpower that enabled Sigmund Freud to publish his dream journals as valid evidence for understanding human consciousness. Without it, we wouldn’t have psychoanalysis.
I died what felt like a hundred deaths, lost everything that I feared of losing, including my husband, who despite what he became, was once a patient, gentle, and loving man. Once my anchor, he left me drifting alone, lost at sea. Life was cruel, the nights were frosty beside an empty space, and God to me, was dead. All of that I wrote and I painted through a series of journals and sketchbooks diligently for three years.
Surprisingly, it helped despite the fact I had lost so much in what became an expensive and soul-crushing divorce.
But, just like the movie “The Whale”, where Julian Singleton writes in his review essay “director (Darren) Aronofsky recognizes how agonizing grief and guilt may be, the rewards of redemption are worth far more than any possible retribution,” losing it all was part of the healing.
It forced me to redesign and rebuild my life. This time standing on a pedestal of better — not greater — independence. This meant allowing people into my life rather than shutting them out. Part of the healing includes learning to love others with the maturity to know how to also let them go. To not suffocate them out of fear, to give them the space to love, breathe and evolve as a person of their own. In the words of Siddharta Gautama Buddha, “No one belongs to us, and we belong to no one.”
Universities do not teach you any of these, only the school of hard knocks.
“I don’t go to therapy to find out if I’m a freak I go and I find the one and only answer every week And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink But, oh how I loved everybody else When I finally got to talk so much about myself.” — Dar Williams, “What Do You Hear In These Sounds”
Williams was teasing about falling in love with your shrink, of course. The main idea is to learn to inhabit your body by prioritizing your self above others. The fear of losing yourself should be paramount to losing someone else, or those around you.
People come, and people go. That is life.
I now piece myself together working as an architect and a builder on a daily basis not trying to create an outstanding structure, but to be grateful for the safe interior that comes with experience, lucidity, and sobriety. The foundation and its structural beams are the most important.
Like any building, it doesn’t get planned and executed overnight. Maintenance is the goal. How you do that is the gold.
“This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor … Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.” — Rumi
Writing and painting saved me. They helped me to find the words and repaint the trauma that once took control over me with positive imagery. Putting oneself together is a lifelong process. I continue to write and paint, learning new words and forming new sentences to describe my journey.
I witnessed and studied trauma in others thinking it was about them, it only happens to others, not me. I only understood the true meaning of a deserving life when I became part of the equation. So to those struggling, don’t think you are alone versus the world. Tell your stories and don’t be ashamed by them. You are the beacons of the real world versus the idealized.
I dedicate this essay to Lisa Beth Wright who wrote in The Dangers of Online Writing how she feels guilty for penning her struggles with her long-standing trauma and battle with CPTSD (often to the lack of sensitivity by others).
You are right Lisa, no one should tell you what to do or advice you how to feel. Your stories are as valid as they are important to someone out there needing a lifeline. People may choose to paint a beautiful picture of their lives. Lives where they are in control, happy and contented, until they no longer are. For what it’s worth, I stand beside you, through our peaks and valleys, one step forward at a time, one inhale to an exhale, sharing our vulnerabilities with the world.
“Some people’s lives seems to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot… It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.” — Jessica Stern, “Denial: A Memoir of Terror”
May this find someone in need: