I blame Donald Bellisario.

suzych posted recently on pain, and how the reality is much different from the fiction.  

And it got me thinking, I sort of wish the media (and writers) would stop mythologizing post-traumatic stress. It doesn't annoy me quite as much as characters enduring enormous trauma without visible after-effects, but in the past thirty years or so, there's been an increasing trend towards treating the survival of violence as an interesting character flaw, and it makes me tired. Tired people don't finish the books they are reading.

It's not the acknowledgment of psychological damage due to trauma that bugs me: I want to see more of it. What bugs me is lack of research and understanding, or treating psychological damage as sexy.

First of all, not everybody who is exposed to a major trauma or a series thereof suffers clinical PTSD. In fact, the majority will not. Incidence increases with severity, duration, and repetition of the trauma. On the other hand, sometimes all it takes is once.

The thing that many people seem to miss is that post-traumatic stress is an injury. It's not an interesting character flaw. It doesn't make your protagonist less of a Mary Sue to hand them some PTSD. It also doesn't define them: "traumatized" is not a character trait. It can lead to character traits, because suffering generally affects who we are, but all by itself it's not a character.*

(It's been interesting for me, writing Todd in Shadow Unit, because while he's certainly got some internalized adaptations to violence, I've never thought of him as a PTSD sufferer. And yet, there are fans for whom it's hard to image him without that label. People see what they expect to see, and PTSD is trendy like a trendy thing these days. Magnum: PI, this is all your fault.)

There's also a lack of understanding of what post-traumatic adaptation is, and how it manifests. It is, in fact, an adaptation. It is your body's way of protecting itself from similarly awful situations in the future. Don't do that. Defend yourself. This is dangerous.

(Post-traumatic adaptation can be exploited, by the way, by unscupulous persons who manipulate that adaptation: this is how brainwashing works. You put somebody in an untenable position, don't allow them time to think or police their boundaries, inculcate guilt and self-hatred, force them to repudiate deeply held beliefs, and they will latch onto the ideology you offer them with unbelievable fervor, because it's an ego-defense against the reality of the self-betrayal you have pressed upon them. In even more interesting neurology, Stockholm syndrome works in similar ways to domestication. If you make somebody dependent on you, they will come to love you. Because they need you so badly, it's adaptive to feel a bond.)

But it's really not sexy. Trauma cannot be smoothed away by the love of a good woman. Or hot, sweaty manlove, for that matter. (Manlove. It's what's for dinner.) Certainly, human contact and friendships comfort the afflicted, but it doesn't make the adaptations go away. A feeling of safety can back them down (if we are safe, we don't need to be ready for the apocalypse!) but since so many people who have suffered some kind of trauma are hypervigilant, that feeling of safety can be hard to find.

Another issue I see in fictional trauma survivors is that their crazy is kind of random, and it doesn't really work like that. The walking wounded are actually kind of predictable. They're called trigger issues for a reason, and those of us who have them will pretty much reliably always react in the same way to certain kinds of stimulus--either with anxiety, confrontation, or both. The really lovely part of that is that we're sensitized, so our brains will pick out the slightest trace of whatever it is that sets us off in an otherwise innocuous conversation, and *bang,* zero to panic attack in no seconds and we're all up in your face with the pre-emptive strike.

Part of recovery is learning your trigger issues, and how to manage them. Part of managing them is making other people aware of them, but also taking responsibility for them yourself. And realizing that if you have trigger issues, sometimes you will feel yourself triggering in situations where that response is not adaptive. I hate unsolicited advice, and everybody who has hung out here for a while probably knows all about that. It's a trigger issue, and it dates from the years I spent being told that whatever I was doing, I was doing it wrong.

On the other paw, I have had to come to accept as an adult that I have friends whose relational style is based on giving advice, because for them advice is comforting and nurturing. For me, it's an assault on my personal boundaries and an indicator that an attack! is! imminent!, and it sends me to red alert. You try to learn to compromise. You also try to learn to ask for what you need. So, using me as an example, because I'm here, I will tend to see condescension and scorn and attempts to control me in even the best-intentioned advice, and I know I can be violent in defending my boundaries.

On the third paw, I have the right to ask people not to put me in a situation where I feel uncomfortable and stressed and triggery and angry and anxious. Fist, face, right to swing ends at my, etc.

This is really too enormous a topic to cover in a reasonably-sized blog entry, but suffice it to say, generally speaking, people who have suffered trauma will have boundary issues. Either they'll have no boundaries at all, or their boundaries will have no give. (When I ask for a certain kind of space, I suspect by now my friends know that to cross that line is to trigger a targeted explosion. There is no play in those lines. In interacting with people I don't know, I try to set my boundaries further out than they really are, so there is some play in them, because I try to take personal responsibility for managing my damage.)

But the thing that really gets missed in literature, I think, is how boring trauma survival is. Boring and painful. This is not the sharp, interesting pain of a broken heart or a broken leg. It's the stultifying, crabby-making pain of fucking physical therapy every day for the rest of your life if you don't want to allow the trauma to make you a cripple. Pain is dull. Unless you glamorize it, which I think is ethically questionable.

(This is the treason of the artist, wrote Ursula K. Le Guin. The refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.)

So if pain is boring, what's interesting?

Adaptation, I think. And the indomitable human spirit. And really cute cats.

---

But I Digress:

*You know, not to totally derail the conversation with irrelevancies, but I'm going to. Possibly because I have been reading all this FFWM (fat fantasy with maps) lately, I'm also thinking of the idea that anybody with dramatic coloring (especially red hair or black hair and bright blue or green eyes, or very fair or very dark skin) must be a Mary Sue.

I kind of have some dramatic coloring of my own--including, yes, Jewel-Toned Eyes (random people in bookstores comment on them)--although these days I'm much more a brunette than a redhead or a blond (I've had phases of both). But I come from a family of redheads on the Swedish/Irish side, and it seems to me like there has to be a way to have redheaded people in my fiction without it being an instant marker of how much I suck and how stuck I am on genre tropes.  

Well, yeah.

Pardon me, but What a fucking twit. (via oursin)

I would like to force this asshole to live with the contents of my skull--or the contents of the skulls of anybody else I know with bipolar disorder or OCD--for one (1) calendar year, without benefit of cognitive strategies. His article reveals a basic ignorance of the causes of mental illness and the relevance of neural plasticity to treatment of same. The benefit of cognitive therapy is that it physically alters the structure of a malfunctioning brain to make it work better--as physical therapy can physically alter a damaged body to make it stronger and healthier.

I have neurochemical issues that are the result of genetics and neurochemical issues that are the result of trauma (bipolar, PTSD, various less trendy neuroses). and you know, I understand the roots of those issues with a fine and nuanced understanding. And you know what? Understanding the cause of the damage, while comforting, is not really useful at all to being a happier and more productive person. It's like understanding that you were in a car accident that severed your arm. While it's essential to treatment to understand the cause of the trauma, talking about the damned car accident doesn't help you learn to operate a prosthesis.

What is useful is having strategies to deal with it when my brain chemicals are going haywire, and other strategies with which to reprogram the thought processes and in turn modify the underlying hardware to make both healthier.

Cognitive strategies work. They have an empirically measurable effect on the brain. They make people's lives better.

If this interferes with Mr. Leader's entrancement with Teh Romance And Tragedy of mental illness, well, I invite him to enjoy his Romance And Tragedy. Hopefully without screwing up anybody else's chances for recovery.

I bet he's a Freudian. I just bet.

Well, duh.

---

Okay, let me unpack that a little.

As a torture survivor (and if you don't think child abuse is a form of torture, come here. I'd like to show you a few things.) I am here to tell you that torture works just fine--if what you are after is to get the person you are torturing to tell you whatever the hell they think you want to hear to make the hurting stop.

If you actually want to know something useful, not so much.

Also, it's an evil act.

Remember evil? We used to have evil.

We were against it.

This is what domestic abuse is like.

It's like this.

And this is why you don't leave.

I worked as a counselor at a domestic violence shelter back in the 90's. Until you have talked to somebody who has lived through it, please don't assume you know what it's like. And if you are living through it now?

There are ways to get help. Please, please. Find help.

Your life is worth more than your abuser's ego.

For my next life, I have a very few requests.

1) I would like to be neurochemically normal, or at least passably so. (I know, I know, it's the disad trade for the weird-wired brain, and you can't have one without the other. Still, I had like four glorious weeks of neurochemical balance last fall, and wow, it has made me greedy.)
2) I would like not to be a trauma survivor. Or you know, I realize that everybody is a trauma survivor of one sort or another, but do you think you could maybe pick one or two things, rather than the 17 movies showing multiplex of fucked-up I got?
3) I would rather not be a prickly self-centered overdefended asshole.

Or if all three of those is too big a request for one incarnation, if I could just get it cut back to one or two?

Thanks,

much love,

Bear.

---

Functionally, what I think is going on right now is that I'm moving out of the anger phase of my grief over my PTSD, and into the despair phase.

And I know this is progress, on a geologic scale, and hey, denial lasted a good fifteen years. ("I'm fine." And everybody who knew me when I was twenty probably just wet themselves laughing.) So I should be pleased with myself that we're getting through all this faster now.

But you know what?

I fucking liked anger better.

---

I'm leaving comments active on this post, but I may not answer many. That's not about you, okay?

Here. I don't need to blog today. yuki_onna said much better things than I ever would.

You could go read them.

This strikes me really deeply. A lot of my programming tells me that the most dangerous thing I can do is want things, and that admitting to wanting them is tantamount to asking somebody to take them away from me.

So I've learned to not get attached.

It's a survival skill and a coping mechanism, and it works very well. I can navigate with very little loss of competence through exigencies that wreck a lot of other people. I'm good in a disaster. 

But you know? There's a cost for that.

Oh, look, first banned commenter in a long time.

http://matociquala.livejournal.com/1211934.html?thread=21402398#t21402398

http://matociquala.livejournal.com/1211934.html?thread=21427742#t21427742

Kids, don't do that. It's rude.

And if you piss me off enough, I will make a public example of you. I'm a Yankee; a lot of us wouldn't see our way amiss to re-instituting the stocks.

---

By the way? If you perceive somebody as potentially weak, or having fragile boundaries, and you want to make a pass at taking control of them?

The whole flattery-coupled-with-advice thing will work on the unsavvy/seriously damaged, and it's one of the reasons why people who later turn out to be abusive to their partners and/or friends can seem so very charming at first.

However, if you look at that second link, you'll get an idea of what they get like if you start to set boundaries. Of course it's worse if they've been nice long enough that you are already living with them and have quit your job.

Also, those of you who don't know what women are making fun of when we mock the fragile and overinflated male ego? That's it in action.

Don't worry; most of you actually aren't like that.

---

Also, just so you know: no point in kicking him. I've frozen the threads.

On the hike today we saw a tree that had rooted up a talus slope, right at the base of the cliff, at the top of the scramble. It was maybe a thirty-foot tree, two feet thick at the base, with a couple of subsidiary trunks. The roots, some as thick as my thigh or waist, spidered across exposed rock some twenty feet or more in places, to the earth below. They were gnarled, knotty. The tree itself was twisted up from an enormous knot at the bottom where it had grown around the rocks that bordered whatever tiny crack it had rooted in when it was sapling.

It looked like a rock-trained bonsai that somebody had hit with an enlarging ray. It was deformed and twisted and stubborn, and quite strong. It was the loveliest tree we saw on the walk.

The moral is left as an exercise to the class.

This is not news.

Why do we have to keep relearning it?

I think you all, everybody who commented or emailed or posted something of their own, are pretty fucking mighty.

Oddly enough, for me, writing all that down made it a hell of a lot smaller. It's amazing how the shadows shrink when you nail them to the wall.

Oh, yeah? And that is why I'm teaching myself algebra.

And guitar, too.

And now, back to this &^%*&(^()*&^ review test....

'Not even to see fair Lothlórien?' said Haldir. 'The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though it all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

'Some there are among us who sing that the Shadow will draw back, and peace shall come again. Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime.'

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

---

Of course one of the things that influences Tolkien's writing here is the shadow of the Great War. What he's describing is the universal reaction to trauma. The human reaction to trauma.

But the great Lie of American literature is the epiphantic healing, the moment of crisis and catharsis that leaves us shaken but again whole. And of course that never happens in real life--a broken sword, perhaps, can be forged anew (and given a new name) but a broken life cannot.

Those scars are with you always, and it is a cruelty and a lie to pretend otherwise. Amputated limbs do not spontaneously regrow themselves, and learned trauma responses do not vanish in the morning light or the light of a new love. No one can save you but yourself.

Once you have been broken that severely--by war, by fire, by abuse, by loss--you will never be whole again.

This is not a message of hopelessness.

This is a message of hope.

Because the idea that you can be healed by the touch of an angel, by the passing moment of grace, and then you will be all better like Mommy stuck a Batman bandaid on the cut after giving it a spritz of neosporin--that is the real message of despair. If you can't bounce back from your trauma, then you must be weak. If you can't be healed by a healthy serving of The Love Of A Good Woman or The Love Of A Good Man (or just Manly But Emo Bonding, if you happen to be living in a hurt/comfort fic) then you are a failure.

You should be able to get up after a crushing experience like a TV character who spent last episode submerged in a leaky coffin with nothing but a cell phone*, and carry on. If you can't, you should be ashamed, because you are weak.

There's a scene in one of my books, The Sea thy Mistress (if it's still there when I revise and the thing sees print in 2010 or thereabouts) that I found revealing in the reactions it got. The short form is that the protagonist has just hit bottom. And he says to an old enemy--who has come to help him--"I don't break."

Some of my first readers said, "What do you mean? He's broken; he's in pieces all over the floor!" And others said, "Wooo! You gonna make it, son!"

The ones in the first category saw the pit he was in, and saw that he'd given up in despair, and didn't see how he could climb out of it. The ones in the second category knew a harder truth: that survival begins when you start to fight, and dropping the load once doesn't mean you will drop it twice.

The only broken that matters is when you lie down and don't get get back up again.

Everything else is just a bend.

But there's that expectation, as cpolk says, of the butt-chinned hero enduring everything with a quip and scarce a wrinkling of his manly brow. And that's so unfair. People who have been traumatized are different, afterwards. They have learned something horrible, and often they have learned something horrible about themselves--that they cannot live up to that fictional ideal.

Because nobody can.

They have suffered the emotional equivalent of an amputated limb. It is unfair to expect them to soldier on as if nothing had happened, to have an epiphantic flash of healing and be over their grief like that.

Post-traumatic stress is compounded by grief. In a very real way, it is grief. We grieve for the person we were. We grieve for what we have lost. We grieve for the ways we will never quite be whole.

And of course you can't live there. You can't dwell in your grief. (Well, of course you can, and this is the great Lie of Victorian literature--that dwelling in your grief is somehow noble and shows trueness of purpose and heart.) If you try to live in your grief, then all your life shall be as ashes. And that, while poetical, is a sucky way to get through the day.

But here's the thing, and the way these two poisonous Lies collide. Because the first Lie tells us that if we cannot bounce back into an epiphantic healing after a couple of therapy sessions, then we are Broken. And the second Lie tells us that if we are Broken, there's nothing to do but sit by the fire with Miss Havisham and her cake full of spiders, waiting for a poignant Auctor Ex Machina to set us alight and free us from our lingering.

And you know, that sucks.

Whereas the truth is this: life is about adapting to trauma. Life is about finding work-arounds. Life is also about using that trauma, because the thing about broken edges is they cut.

And knives are tools as much as weapons.

And I think it would be nice if more literature did not reflect one Lie or the other, because I find, personally, that people are not disposable.

And my best teapot is the one with the glued-together lid.

---

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

--Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"

---

*What carrier is that, anyway? Because I want to switch.

So it's Vienna Teng instead: These are the scars that silence carved on me.

I am full of grief right now. Every time I look up, I see someone else remembering Mike Ford, usually in his own words, and my eyes fill up again. People who were so much closer to him, and I do not want to appropriate that grief. But oh, it hurts, and the grief of my friends hurts, and my helplessness to do anything about it hurts.

And it hurts that Mike would have known what to say.

---

I wrote a letter today that I may never send. And in the process of writing that letter, I had a conversation with truepenny, who is not just my writing partner but a very good friend.

It was a letter than involved a kind of stark appraisal of things that I don't usually talk about. Or even think about, frankly, until they're thrust into my attention again. I'm an adult survivor of child abuse. I think of it, usually, in very abstract terms. Words. I am an adult survivor of child abuse.

What I wrote today required me to to think about what that meant to me, and how I became that person. And sum it up in a couple of paragraphs. And sometimes you look back and think, hey, man. That was harder than I remember it being.

You do forget. It's self-protective.

I'm happy now; I'm strong. I don't believe in dwelling on old wounds once one is past the point of recovery where one must pick at the scabs and let the pus run out. (There's some pained fannish Farscape metaphor here about squeezing the wound until the blood runs clear. I will trust you to provide it on your own.)

But I also don't believe in being shamed.

This is by way of introduction to Sarah's post about our conversation and the difficulty in talking about abuse without seeming to seek pity or attention (from which she kindly elided me).

But I am not a victim, and I am not a martyr, and I am not in denial.

I am here.

---

You live, is how you learn that you can cope.

--John M. Ford