What were you hoping that I would get out of reading this book? 

Some hope that you are not alone in your way of being or doomed to this state of existence forever.  You say physical contact often feels either like nothing or is uncomfortable or painful in some indescribable way.  This book was full of anecdotes like this, and this sort of separation from one’s body is not only commonplace, but it is in fact a hallmark of surviving the sort of traumatic event that one couldn’t escape from as it happened.  So as I was reading the book, at first I was wowed by how many people sounded like you, with the problems I’d thought were unique to your own situation.  And then I thought, “Okay, how did this happen to Adam?”  I knew you’d had a pretty bad child­hood overall, but which events could have permanently altered how you experience physical sensation?  What could have convinced your mind that your body wasn’t a safe place to be?  And then I remembered when you told me about the time your father performed a dental proce­dure on you without proper anesthetic, and you were forced to endure mind-bending pain with no escape.  That seemed to me like the same exact type of scenario many people in this book had endured.  And if things like EMDR and neurofeedback can work for them, then you’ve got a shot at a better quality of life someday, too.  I wanted you to read these people’s stories and be spurred towards some sort of positive life-affirming direction, rather than going along resigned to your fate.

Did you end up getting anything out of the book?

Probably less than you had hoped.  Reading the chapters about the effects of trauma, I wasn’t sitting there like “That is brand new information!” because I’d already read a lot of the same points in The Deepest Well by Nadine Burke Harris, which I’d had to read for my teacher creden­tialing program.  That one really did make a few exclama­tion points appear above my head.  It was no shock to me that high ACE scores were correlated with poor behavior and performance in school, but I was surprised to learn how well they predicted various sorts of medical calamity.  That’s what I wound up writing my final paper in that class about⁠—I had once met a 14‑year‑old who looked like a 7‑year‑old, whose parents said that after the family had narrowly escaped from a house fire she had just stopped growing, which struck me as an unlikely explanation until I read about a similar case in The Deepest Well.  Burke Harris also writes about how she and her siblings had grown up in a chaotic household and her brother dropped dead of a stroke at age 43, which I could not help but con­nect to my brother dropping dead of an aneurysm at age 36.  Obviously as I relate these accounts they just sound like coincidences, but the book has hard evidence to back up the physiologically deleterious effects of a hard child­hood.  Also not new to me in this book were the treat­ments, since I’d already heard about them from you, from one of my colleagues at my old teaching job, from the therapist I saw in the mid-2010s, and from various other sources.  And the sleep class I audited in 2019 covered a lot of the neurological mechanisms involved in the way REM strips away a lot of the emotional content of our experi­ences and encodes them as memories⁠—as things that had once happened to us and are part of our life stories.  We even talked about how trauma interferes with the brain’s ability to do this work, which is why Vietnam veterans have recurring nightmares for decades on end.

That leads me to what I think is probably the main thing I hadn’t had articulated to me in quite this way before I read this book.  Of course I had heard ad nauseam about “triggers”, but van der Kolk makes it clear that triggers do not just summon up vivid memories of traumatic experi­ences.  What makes trauma so destructive, he says, is that traumatic experiences are encoded in the brain without being woven into a narrative or any sense of the progres­sion of linear time.  People whose traumatic memories are triggered really do relive those experiences⁠—the brain does not understand that they are not happening right now.

Yeah, this explanation made it clear to me that it really has become egregious the way the word is misused on the internet and elsewhere.  Like, there are many things that I find problematic, or which make me deeply uncomfortable because they remind me of bad things.  But, like, remember the time we tried watching Cape Fear and I freaked the fuck out and was inconsolable for an hour?  That is what actually being “triggered” looks like for me.  I wasn’t sim­ply uncomfy or upset; I was having a complete adrenaline malfunction because my body thought I was about to die.

And that is actually one reason that I am skeptical that this book really speaks to my situation, because I don’t think I have any non-narrative encoding of experience hanging around in my brain fuckin’ things up.  Like, you mentioned my father extracting three of my teeth without anesthetic⁠—I do remember that, but it is stored as a nor­mal memory, something that happened a long time ago from which I have achieved emotional distance.

Seems like I read this book and went, “Oh my gosh, the magic fix! Adam’ll be all better once he gets his hands on this!”  And then you read it and were like, “What?”  I guess the inner machinations of your mind really are an enigma.  Though, I don’t know⁠—I would say that there are probably some therapists out there who would interpret your total nonchalance about possible childhood trauma as a sign that it is still affecting you.

What did you get out of this book for yourself?

An idea of where I can start improving myself when I have the resources to begin this work.  I have never found any sort of talk therapy or psychiatric medication to be parti­cularly helpful.  At the time when my various traumas were still happening to me, CBT came across as insulting gaslighting; I wasn’t experiencing thought distortions, because my patterns of thought and behavior made com­plete rational sense at the time.  The particular ways in which I am fucked up are the ways I grew up learning to survive.  One specific example: I grew up in an abusive household, but was spared the brunt of the terror on account of my supposed intellectual and moral superiority, and so constantly comparing myself to my siblings was the way I learned to survive.  I watched my brother have a loaded gun thrown at him by my father, so I learned that I shouldn’t stand up for myself if I wanted to avoid that sort of thing.  I saw my sister forced to stand in the corner with a bar of soap in her mouth at least once a week for telling fibs, so I knew I had to avoid getting in any sort of trouble at all costs.  My dad punched holes in the walls and kicked (or killed!) my pets when he was angry, so I became finely attuned to the emotions of others and became fearful of setting other people off, lest I be the next subject of vio­lence.  And my need to be “good enough” wasn’t just some­thing I extrapolated from the data available to me; it was explicitly taught to me as well.  I was straight up told that the only reason I wasn’t constantly being punished was because I was doing a good job, but that if I ever slipped up then I’d be treated the same way as my brother and sisters.  Knowing that that’s why I have comparison issues and body image problems as an adult doesn’t automatical­ly undo the underlying belief system, because every cell in my body wants to be worthy no matter what.  Worthiness equals survival.  It doesn’t matter that I now know that it was largely arbitrary who was chosen to be spared, and that this is a common dynamic mirrored in many other dysfunctional families; my nervous system tells me that I have to constantly be guilty about things and concerned with self-improvement, because being subject to any sort of criticism equals potential violence. 

Drugs haven’t helped me because the problem is not a chemical imbalance in my brain.  The problem was not initially in my brain, it was my environment.  It was the fact that trauma was still happening.  Years later, the problem is now in my brain because my environment has changed, but tweaking my levels of serotonin is not going to be able to rewrite narratives, fix my overactive amyg­dala, etc.  I need a process that will allow me to thank my maladaptive trauma responses for their part in keeping me alive, and then aid me in discarding them now that they are no longer necessary.

Yeah, it seems like a telling data point that the college friend of mine who went through all the steps involved in getting certified as a talk therapist and establishing a successful practice ended up giving up that career, having grown convinced that talk therapy just didn’t actually work.  And as far back as high school, I remember talking with friends about the pointlessness of talk therapy for anyone who already had any degree of introspection.  As someone on the debate team put it, Freudian-style psycho­analysis is based on the notion that you don’t know what bad patterns you’ve fallen into, and once they’re pointed out to you, bang, the problem is solved.  “See how in your string of bad marriages you’re just re-creating your rela­tionship with your mother?”  But, one, you probably do already see that, and two, having it pointed out to you doesn’t actually give you a way to stop.  Not too many people keep on smoking because they’ve never had it explained to them that it causes lung cancer.  Intellectually understanding a compulsion does not actually make it less compelling.

I think it was validating to read about why talk therapy has been ineffective for me, when for most of my peers it seems to be this miraculous, healing journey.  Like, I’ve made enough progress with my mental health that I can now slow down when I am triggered by something and realize why I am leaning towards a particular reaction.  But knowing why I react the way I do does not actually do anything to end the underlying feelings of “GOTTA HURT MYSELF BECUZ I AM BAD!!!”  I like hearing an expert say that I can’t simply talk my way out of trauma, because it’s been something I’ve tried to do my whole life.  Knowing that this stress response is physically wired within me makes me feel less broken, and it also gives me hope that these pathways can thus be rewired in the future.  All I need is to find someone who can do the eyeball thing.

Which may be easier now that you are taking a break from teaching preschool and are starting a job that offers health insurance.  And that brings me to my last observation for the moment: one thing that did vex me about The Body Keeps the Score is that van der Kolk mentions that the teachers he works with often say, “If I’d wanted to be a social worker, I would have gone to social work school. I came here to be a teacher.”  And his response is basically, “Too bad! So long as we live in a society full of develop­mental trauma, then sorry, but that’s the profession!”  And, like, no.  Fuck that sideways.  We need to rework the educational system so that teachers do one job⁠—teach⁠—not half a dozen including counselor, prison guard, caterer, and many more.

I agree.  Especially in pandemic times.  Even at preschool age, the kids raised on iPads without seeing other human faces are having problems I can’t solve.  I guess there’s a reason Bessel van der Kolk is a mental health professional and not an educator.  Maybe he’d change his tune if he followed Teacher Misery and realized that teachers are already coping with mass-scale trauma as it is and cannot be counted upon to be the one remaining social safety net in our country.  We need more eyeball therapists.