** Long post warning - this one is a doozy. I've been avoiding writing about trauma like the doomsday preppers have attempted to outrun coronavirus. All the hand sanitizer in the world is not going to help me though, because it's time for me to face this one head-on. I'm drinking a vat of coffee and eating a large chocolate bar as I type this - maybe it will help.
So, trauma. Psychological trauma is a concept that has existed since the mid 1800's, referring to a person's cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses to an extreme stressor. In the past, a "traumatic event" was considered one that had an impact on a large number of people, such as a natural disaster, war, or epidemic illness (Reyes, Elhai, & Ford, 2008). More recently, psychologists and researchers have come to agree that trauma occurs on both a broader and more individual scale, meaning that psychological trauma is evident across cultures and can also occur in response to events affecting a single individual (Wilson, 2007). In fact, psychological trauma is experienced by "tens of millions... [of] people who suffer ‘private disasters’ due to deaths, devastating injuries, or threats to them and their loved ones’ lives and safety” (Reyes, Elhai, & Ford, 2008, p. 17). Trauma is more pervasive that we might think.
There is a long list of potential indicators, or symptoms of, psychological trauma in adults (Anxiety Canada, 2019; Gillihan, 2016), including:
Flashbacks
Fear, sadness, anger, and anxiety
Guilt
Feeling numb; avoiding thinking about the event
Self blame
Feeling constantly on guard
Problems sleeping
Panic
Compromised memory
Self destructive or reckless behavior
As this list might suggest, trauma includes three distinct elements: the event itself, a person's experience of that event, and the quality of the distress that follows the event (Reyes et al., 2008). While psychological trauma is indicated by a list of symptoms, it looks a little different for everyone who experiences it.
I have only recently acknowledged that trauma may play a role in my life, especially with my difficulty determining how to move forward with a sense of significance. I have always thought that I ought to be strong, resilient, and otherwise immune to the effects of big stressors. When I talk about how I'm feeling with puzzlement in my voice, people will often note that I should go easy on myself because I've been through a lot. For the longest time I honestly didn't know what that meant. I figured that I hadn't been through any more or less than the average Joe; what do I have to be anxious about? A few months ago I finally decided that I owed it to myself to be honest about trauma and how it has influenced me.
On that note, I thought it might be helpful for me to cast my mind back in time a bit to interrogate my experiences and what might actually be considered traumatic. We'll start in 2014 (I think this was the beginning of the big stuff. Maybe I'm wrong, but we'll go with this timeline for now). In the summer of 2014 I moved my family a province over (Saskatchewan to Alberta) so that I could start my new academic job. Having just finished a PhD, it was a best-case scenario for employment: a good job at a great university, in a town where we had lots of family. After several months involving epic amounts of travel, we put our house in Saskatchewan up for sale in a depressed real estate market and attempted to buy a house in Alberta's white-hot-aggressive market. We wound up selling for less than we wanted, and buying for more money than we had. A fortuitous beginning, compounded by a massive hailstorm a week after we moved that caused $25,000 of damage to our new house.
Initial obstacles aside, I didn't think the move would be hard. I reasoned that the two provinces were very similar, in addition to being pretty close together. But, we found it very difficult to navigate the social, economic, cultural, educational, and political differences that we experienced in our new home; we had lots of learning to do about how to find a fit. This was exacerbated by the difficulty that my daughter, who was then 10 years old, experienced transitioning to a new city and school. To put it mildly, she hated it. She was so steadfast in her anger that it took her a year and half to meet new friends. We despaired as our pre-teen disappeared into her room and into herself.
The move might have ended up okay had it been left at that. But it wasn't. In February 2015, Michele Sereda (my mother-in-law, friend, and mentor) was killed in a horrific car accident. She was 49 years old. Danny's dad Moe had passed away a few years earlier, and Michele had become the foundation of Danny's family, our rock. She maintained all of our beautiful holiday traditions, developed unique and close relationships with our kids, and continually inspired us with her dedication to make a difference in the world through her art. There's a lot about the first few weeks following Michele's death that I don't remember. I can only recall feeling a gaping hole where Michele should be. My brain simply could not reconcile her departure. And, given her prolific career as an international artist, news of her accident was everywhere (even at the kids' schools, which felt like an assault). Everyone wanted to talk about it, while I just wanted to crawl into a hole and forget.
A few months later, in the summer of 2015, we noticed that my daughter Amara had one hip that was slightly higher than the other. Shortly after that, Amara was diagnosed with severe scoliosis. The curvature in her spine was enough to warrant surgery, but the surgeon decided to try an intervention first. Amara was prescribed a rigid, full-torso back brace, which she had to wear for 23 hours a day. This sent her into a tailspin of anxiety and (in hindsight) depression. She started hoarding food and binge eating. She withdrew even further into her metaphorical shell. She requested an entirely new wardrobe so that no one could tell she wore a brace, like it was a horrible secret that no one should know.
Following this, in the fall of 2015, my mom and dad sold the farm where I had grown up. They rightfully wanted to retire properly and join the rest of the family in Alberta. I didn't admit it to them at the time (maybe they already knew), but saying goodbye to the farm seemed unfathomable to me; it was a loss that made my heart literally ache. The farm was my place. It was my refuge and sanctuary, where I felt most at home, where I could be the best version of myself. I had harbored a secret wish to buy the farm and live there myself (a self-sustaining fantasy). I knew that maintaining the farm was an unmanageable burden to my parents, and I felt a profound relief having them closer to me, but I just couldn't imagine not being able to go back there. At around the same time, Danny and I also had to clean out Michele's house, which had been sold without our knowledge. We were tasked with salvaging what we could from the house at the last minute; this was an exercise in true pain. Within the span of a few weeks, we had very few remaining ties to the places we had called home for our entire lives.
Things were quiet for a short time after this, ramping up again in spring 2016. This was the point in my academic career where I was applying for "renewal," the milestone prior to a tenure application. In this process you provide a massive dossier with tons of evidence to support your awesomeness, including documentation of pretty much everything from conference presentations to consultations with colleagues. It just so happened that this was around the time of the legendary University of Calgary malware attack. The attack occurred on a weekend when I was on campus helping to coordinate a conference. All my stuff was on--computer, tablet, every file was open. As a consequence I lost everything, including my hard drive and all of my email since the beginning of time. Since this happened at pretty much the exact moment I was preparing for my renewal application, I was essentially screwed. I melted down, knowing that my life for the next several months was going to consist of nothing but conducting dozens, if not hundreds, of fishing expeditions to re-collect all the evidence that I needed to include in my application. I felt sick.
I was sick. This high-stress event exacerbated my inflammatory bowel issues, and I became more and more ill as the summer of 2016 went on. By Christmas I could barely function; I'd get through a week of work and then collapse and sleep all weekend. I started seeing half a dozen specialists and was subjected to more medical tests than I thought possible. I used to joke during this time that there was more of my blood floating around the Alberta medical system than there actually was in my body. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. I started to think that maybe it was all psychosomatic and I was just losing my mind. This carried on for what seemed like forever.
My medical assessments were still ongoing at the end of 2017, when, just before Christmas, my husband Danny had a stroke. We were in our bedroom on a Sunday evening preparing for our Monday morning when Danny keeled over. He landed with a thud, face smushed into the carpet. For a moment I thought he was joking, but when I shook him he didn't respond. It took about a minute for me to get him awake and talking again. He had been having dizzy spells so I thought that maybe he had just fainted, but I bullied him out the door to go to urgent care anyway. It wasn't until half way to urgent care that something clicked in my brain, and I asked Danny how his body was feeling. He reported that his face felt funny, and he was starting to slur his words. By the time we got to urgent care he was having trouble walking because his left leg wasn't functioning properly. By the time the urgent care nurses put him in the ambulance for the hospital, he didn't know his last name, his birth date, or where he was. My memories of this process are dream-like, almost as if I were looking down on it happening to someone else.
To add insult to injury, Danny picked up a bad viral flu while he was in the stroke ward, and then passed it along to me. I was more sick than I can ever remember being, so sick that I couldn't get out of bed on my own. There I was - with my husband who had just had a stroke lifting me out of bed so I could get to the bathroom. There was something simultaneously comic and tragic about the whole situation.
When we both began to recover, I became incredibly sensitive to the fragility of life. I recognized that Danny's stroke and our subsequent illness was what had enlarged my stress and anxiety to a point where it was no longer manageable. I constantly felt paranoid that something else was going to happen, with a consistent hum of fear niggling at my consciousness. I also felt a simmering anger that I was finding increasingly difficult to suppress; I found myself yelling way too frequently at Danny and the kids (the lyrics from Pink's Beautiful Trauma speak to this, and consequently became the title for this post). I drank more than I should have, and I ate more than I should have. Any physical activity that I had maintained came to an abrupt halt. I didn't see any friends, and holed myself up in the house under the guise of recovery. The upside to this time was that, in February 2018, I was finally diagnosed with Crohn's Disease, which helped me to put a name to my physical struggles. This was one of the first things I was able to grab onto to help myself feel better.
So, the stroke was a culminating trauma that led us to where we are now, having moved our family again but with a completely different intent. Cognitively, I know that just because we're in a new place doesn't mean that my need to deal with the cumulative trauma of the last several years has disappeared. I still dream about the farm regularly, at least once a week. I still have moments of gut-wrenching sadness when I realize yet again that Michele isn't here any more. I still struggle to acknowledge that it is likely that my husband would have suffered far greater negative outcomes from his stroke had I not been right beside him when it happened. I am still riddled with guilt about not having noticed Amara's scoliosis earlier, when it would have been easier to treat. I have only just started to address these things, and I have so much further to go. Now that I've named it, maybe the next step is to invite other people in to tackle it with me.
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