Living With Trauma 1

What does it mean to live with trauma? What would it be like not living with trauma? I think one of the most effective steps I needed to take towards recovery from PTSD was in knowing that I was not alone. In my social and professional explorations I came to know many trauma survivors besides myself. I had lived with trauma almost all my life, ever since the first blows from my mother, father and brother and my first experiences of childhood bullying. That said, I wasn't really that unusual. I did tend to overreact to things, as I sometimes do now and I seem to have always been prone to anxious worry. On the other hand, I haven't had a lot of drug experience, except for some gratuitous pot-smoking at fourteen and nineteen augmented with three acid trips and an adventure on mescaline alone in Toronto. I was never one for alcohol, I drank only occasionally and socially, have never been an alcoholic, and actually haven't even touched the stuff in any form in years. What I mean to say, Gentle Reader, is that I have never in my life been sufficiently numbed to not having to feel the pain that most people try to drink or smoke out of existence. We live in a culture of addiction. I have said this to some of my clients who live both with addictions and with intense trauma. Alcohol is the official drug of Western Civilization. Be it wine, craft beer, Gran Marnier, or Scotch, Gin and Rye or vodka coolers or whatever, I would challenge most of you, Gentle Reader, to calculate how much of your discretionary spending is invested in alcoholic beverages, write down the number and go seek professional help. I sometimes phone the two local weekday CBC Radio One programs, especially that deplorable On The Coast, to protest their shameful and relentless promotion of alcohol abuse in the form of wine and craft beer. No day is complete without alcohol. There is something horribly sick and dysfunctional about this socially sanctioned need to numb pain, fear and anxiety with alcohol. This is no worse than snorting Colombian White or injecting into your veins the latest shipment from the Golden Triangle. It's just that some of this stuff is illegal. But not all of it. This is not an endorsement, by the way, for prohibition and everyone knows about the sweeping success of the War On Drugs. One hundred thousand dead Mexicans can't be wrong. I had to cope with more than my lion's share of stress and anxiety, not only because of the fallout from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but because I was consciously refusing to drug my pain out of existence. I was determined to face my pain and suffering with my judgment unclouded and all my nerve endings naked and ready. I discovered that I wasn't necessarily any sicker mentally or emotionally than the successful high rollers and high performers who can't live without their daily drinky-poo while celebrating their achievements as being exemplary and sweeping professional, social and financial successes. I am not denying that I have ever been ill from trauma. I am also saying here that so is everyone else, just that some of us have had better luck lying about it than others. On top of not having addictions I have also needed to live with relative poverty and a very low ranking on the social hierarchy, two sure aggravators of accelerated trauma. We are all extremely sick people, living in a sick world, made all the sicker by our collective sickness, making one another and ourselves all the sicker through our lies and denial of how totally and absolutely sick we all are. The capitalist, neo-feudalist system we are living in simply aggravates and accelerates this sickness, sheltering those high on the hierarchy against having to face and live with the consequences, while creating the social and environmental toxic fallout that ensures the ill health and rapid deterioration of quality of life for people stranded on low incomes, people who are members of despised minorities, and on the global environment. For healers we have equally sick doctors already half-incapacitated from trauma and addictions from the stress of their thankless professions. I ask again, Gentle Reader, who isn't sick with trauma?