CW/TW: Suicide
I hesitated for the longest time to identify my experiences as traumatic. I hesitated to even consider that I could have PTSD. (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), much less to admit that I thought I did to anyone else. After all, wasn’t that just for people who endured war and lived through combat zones with all the blood and guts and dead bodies laying around? Wasn’t that the term reserved for those who had experienced genocides, witnessing their family members butchered?
After many months in therapy and reading on trauma, this is what I think, where I have arrived:
Indeed, the term is overused in day to day contexts, minimized or cheapened when we talk about any unpleasant event as being traumatic. But trauma is also based on something that an individual person experiences and the effects that they feel in their body. Trauma happens when there is an event stressful enough that you can’t simply process it and move on. Instead, you carry that within your body. You may later experience flash backs and bodily, visceral responses where you feel like you are back in that situation. You may have thoughts or physical reactions that feel out of your control, when something happens to trigger you, that plops put you right back there where you were when the trauma first happened. Against your will.
You’re left reeling. Perhaps feeling desperate to get back to the present moment, where you feel more in control of your thoughts and body.
I now understand I had trauma after my father’s death, and the aftermath, that went untreated for several years. It wasn’t until my brother’s death, through the help of therapy, that I addressed that trauma.
After my father passed away on October 29, 2015, at home, the house that I was raised in. He sat on the couch, took a hunting rifle and shot himself in the head.
As horrific as this is, it is also statistically common: white males are more likely to die by self-inflicted gunshot wounds; this is their preferred method of suicide.
Though it makes one hell of a mess.
Before I arrived home, there had been efforts to clear up, to sanitize, to dispose of the couch, but a hunting rifle is not meant to be shot in such close quarters, though if you are meaning to end yourself, it certainly will do the trick.
Therefore, for days afterward my mother and I found tufts of hair, pieces of scalp and brain fragments, that we referred to as “matter” (as in the gray brain matter).
To come face to face with that, to face, to see your father’s brains, has haunted me for years. After something like this happens, you start to notice how often on tv and in movies people die of gun shot wounds to the head. And even often suicide, self-inflicted gun shot wounds to the head; they are certainly depicted much more often than I ever realized…
I guess similar to never noticing how often others drive your vehicle until you get that, your new one…Until you have an experience with a gun-related suicide, only then you start to notice how often this scenario occurs.
For me, EMDR helped. It is often used as a trauma-healing therapy and it helped me with reprocessing and healing (or, learning how to survive and move on) from this trauma. (I’ll write about that experience in another post.) It freed me from the imprisonment of my thoughts and associations with seeing my parent’s brains.
But, what I have learned from my experiences is this—
No one really has a right to say that what you have endured and experienced was not traumatic or is not trauma-inducing. We do not know what it is like to be in anyone else’s body, in their head.
They have done brain scans on individuals with PTSD. They look vastly different than those who do not have PTSD. These changes are physiological. They do take place in the body. They alter it.
(See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181836/ and https://psychcentral.com/ptsd/the-science-behind-ptsd-symptoms-how-trauma-changes-the-brain#how-to-heal)
For me, I know that after my brother’s death, I felt a rush. It felt like a caffeine and adrenaline high. I felt on edge. It disrupted my sleep. My thoughts raced. I was alert, like a deer in headlights. I couldn’t relax, I didn’t feel safe. Though I knew my body wasn’t in immediate danger, as much as I willed myself to calm down, I really struggled to do so.
I now know that I had a surge of cortisol, the stress hormone, and probably norepinephrine flooding my system. Evolutionarily, our bodies have created these chemical responses to help protect us, to trigger responses in us to try and save us from danger. These chemicals are tied to our fight or flight responses. When our bodies (or our minds, which tell our bodies) to perceive danger, then our bodies respond.
It can take a good deal of time to return to a state of equilibrium afterwards. And to learn/unlearn how to deal with these hijacks to your body’s state.
I don’t think that enough people understand that traumatic events alter your brain chemistry. They are not isolated events that you can move on from when your body altered itself, convinced this is helping, aiding your survival.
What constitutes a traumatic event may look different from person to person. But we don’t all respond to events the same way. Some may process the events and not have elevated responses, future triggers, flashbacks and physical responses. Some may not have PTSD or consider it trauma. Others may.
Believe people.
We can’t get out of our bodies to glimpse another’s reality and their experiences and how their brains and bodies responded and continue to respond to these events. We also have no right to issue judgment or declarations on what constitutes something bad enough to warrant the label of/diagnosis of PTSD. Especially without brain scans and tests to check for elevated hormones.
I firmly believe that holding another’s painful experiences—whether they label them as trauma or not—is key to compassion, empathetic living and a more humane world. We should be less interested in one-up-man-ship (sic) (ie “but my trauma was worse than yours”) and more willing to listen to another’s story, to hear and hold space for others’ pain, to try to understand how this experience was for them. On their own terms.
Though not uniquely tied to trauma, depression, and suicide, if we can do this…STFU and just be with someone, listening to one another’s story, and holding space for that….then, again, borrowing from Brene Brown, we may serve as “stewards of one another’s stories.” And be more decent human beings.