The champagne glass
What I found after looking into PTSD.
Reader discretion is advised.
It was my dear cousin Katie’s* bridal shower. Me and the other guests were enjoying a very elegant brunch at a very elegant hotel, and in between conversations, I heard a woman across the table say, “Oh my gosh, Katie, I didn’t know we went to high school together!”
And then it hit me. This woman was actually one of the girls who had bullied Katie in high school, after which Katie tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol.
I almost threw my champagne glass across the room.
I won’t go into how I discerned the woman’s identity, or how she had been invited to such an intimate event. Quite frankly, some of it continues to be beyond my understanding. But what I will share is that in that moment, I was very close to physically assaulting someone at a relative’s bridal shower.
I managed to lower the champagne glass, and decided instead to get some air. I got up as discretely as I could and went for a walk around the property. My fists began to clench as hate took over my body, and I began crying and convulsing once I found a private place to sit. I shook my head in disgust at the bully’s behavior, thinking, “How dare she?! She needs to leave NOW.” For it was one thing to bully someone when you’re younger; I know—I bullied people for years.1 But it’s another thing to pretend you don’t recognize the person you bullied, feign friendship to the point of attending her bridal shower, and then deny any knowledge of the situation to her face in front of many guests, all of whom who had known what had happened to Katie.
I dried my face and returned to the party. I shared what had happened with another guest, who encouraged me to calm down and let what happened be in the past. “She [the bully] has likely changed, Miriam,” she said. But I couldn’t let it go in that moment, nor did I want to in the future. It was as if Katie’s suicide attempt was happening all over again, and I had the chance, in the present, to protect Katie in the way that I wish I could have when we were younger.
It was a moment in time. I had just broken up with my long-time therapist and psychiatrist the year before after a blow-up over whether or not they were actually “working” for me. I thought no, especially considering the tens of thousands of dollars I had invested into their services, not to mention the books I read, seminars I attended and all the difficult conversations I had had over the years. They of course thought yes, but I was tired of feeling still so scared and overwhelmed with my life, no matter what I did.
I told a Psy.D. friend of mine about what happened at the shower, and she suggested I read a book called The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. I had never considered myself as having experienced trauma, but I was curious enough to take a look. Suffice it to say, I consumed the book like wildfire, and became pretty convinced that what happened with the champagne glass was possibly a symptom of PTSD.
To summarize briefly: The human body has four responses to any difficult event: To flee, to fight, to freeze or faun. In the example above, my body was ready to fight the bully when I was confronted with the pain of remembering Katie’s suicide attempt. Makes sense. However rewind ten years to when I first found out about Katie’s attempt, and my body had a completely different response—it froze. And it stayed frozen to the point of me being unable to respond to anyone or anything for a very long time. It was like I had fallen into the ocean, unwilling to kick to the surface even though I could. I sank lower and lower, slowly freezing to death as I hit the ocean floor.
Underneath my response was of course a lot of things—shock, fear, anger, frustration and sadness (to name a few), but what presented was a sort of “giving up” and even acceptance of the sorts of things that by that time had become habitual in Katie’s family.
For example, Katie’s older sister, Joy, had also been bullied, but in elementary school. Joy’s bullies formed an “I Hate Joy” club, complete with signs and flyers to pass out to other kids in their grade. This continued on and off for a few years, and when Joy’s dad got a call from the school about it, he simply laughed and got off of the phone. I don’t believe her mother ever knew about it.
A few year later, Joy was physically assaulted by her high school boyfriend. He even came to her house and tried to fight her dad, but he simply told him to go away and closed the door. The same boyfriend stalked Joy into college, but she was eventually able to free herself of him. All of this happened again without much notice from her parents, though I do remember her mother installing a much more secure front gate to the house. “If they are coming for Joy like this, then they’re really coming for Katie,” she told me.
From very early on, I tried to fight Joy’s bullies and abusers any way that I could. I remember being thrown at a fence when confronting one such character in elementary school, or being briefly held against my will in high school. I even got into a screaming match with a young gentleman on the streets of Brooklyn during graduate school. I was hopeless.
But when I saw the cycle beginning to repeat in Katie’s life, years later, my body had had enough of the fighting. It had never won its past battles either against the bully myself, or the bully against Joy. I needed to find a different way to deal to the pain.
And that is what I, as a para-professional, understand to be the physiological result of complex (from math) trauma. One’s body has experienced so much pain but its survival instincts (such as fight or flight) have shut down due to the failure of those responses to produce a more favorable result. We freeze in order to survive. The tragedy is when we have had so many freeze responses that it becomes our default response to all of life’s experiences, good or bad.
Thus one of the keys to healing from trauma is to help the body learn to safely unfreeze itself, and reconnect with its natural protective mechanisms such as fight or flight. Once that basic instinct is seen and heard (also known as the “reptilian” brain), it allows the rest of the brain to come into play as we grow and mature.2 Hence my ability at the shower to notice my alarm, put the champagne glass down, go for a walk, and talk to a trusted friend after the initial shock. (I guess the therapy and meds *were* working after all.)
I started to seek out bodywork to lean into my new understanding of trauma. Yoga was wonderful, but I always ended up crying after class, which I didn’t love; I think it was almost too much of a release for me at the time. Acupuncture was great as well, but ultimately unsustainable due to the high cost. My practitioner was however able to get rid of a lump that had been bothering me in my left shoulder for quite some time. I realized afterward that it was likely due to how much stress and pressure I brought to playing the violin growing up.
Learning mindfulness and meditation became the most therapeutic to me over time. I had been in group mindfulness classes when I was in outpatient therapy, but then a friend passed “Bhante G.’s” Mindfulness in Plain English to me and I experienced such calm reading through it that I began to practice meditation regularly in the morning, evening, and before I went into any sort of stressful situation.
How does meditation work? I wondered this for many years. So they say that meditation helps train your mind and body to stay in the absolute present moment by focusing on your breath. Why the breath? Because the breath is actually one of the only things in our entire beings that go just two ways—in and out. If you think about it, our blood is circulating in all different directions (hopefully), our cells are constantly multiplying, our thoughts take us many directions; even our nose is in constant growth. But the breath is just back and forth, back and forth, over and over again.
And what’s so great about the present? Something I struggled with for years, as my problems still seemed to be there waiting for me after I did all that focusing on the present. But in the context of mental health, depression is often something that takes us to the past, with thoughts such as, “Why did this have to happen to me?” “Why did my parents treat me that way?” Anxiety is similar, but it takes us into the future. “What will happen if I don’t get this raise? What if I can’t find another job? We’ll have to move, we’ll end up without the things we need,” ad nauseam. Depression and anxiety actually proliferate in our mind’s refusal of the present moment.
Thus if one can learn to interrupt these “trips” to the past and future and choose to stay in the present, one can actually learn to interrupt depression and anxiety before the cycle gets out of hand. You thereby learn to focus in on that which you can actually control, which has always ever been in the absolute present.
I decided to take a class with a man named Rik Center at SF’s Mindfulness Care Center called “Unwinding the body of trauma.” Rik is a Somatic Experiencing Therapist (“soma” = “body” in ancient Greek), which means that he helps people learn to trust their body’s natural mechanisms to free themselves of trauma that may be stored within. The discipline was founded by a man named Peter Levine, a medical biophysicist and psychologist in Berkeley.
As Dr. Levine recounts in his book, Waking the Tiger, a client had suffered a panic attack that was so severe that he himself was drawn into her experience, all within the confines of their session. As she cried out, Dr. Levine saw a tiger appear in the room, ready to attack both of him and his client. He then screamed to his client to run away as fast as she could before the tiger could attack, and she responded by pumping her arms and legs as if she was running at full speed but yet still in the room with Dr. Levine.
What resulted from the activity was a memory from the client’s tonsillectomy as a young child. Apparently the client’s anesthesia began to wear off after a while, and she felt as if she was being strangled to death by her surgeon. Though she felt like screaming, she was unable to because of the anesthesia that was still in her system.
Dr. Levine then formed the theory that our bodies may actually hold on to unreleased energy after experiencing difficult events, regardless of the amount of time that has passed since the original event. Child abuse illustrates this theory quite simply. When a child is repeatedly abused by a much stronger adult—physically, sexually and/or emotionally, he or she wants to escape the abuse, but is unable to because of the adult’s power. Over time, his survival mechanisms will likely adjust from trying to fight or flee his abuser to freezing during the abuse, simply to endure it with the least amount of pain possible. But his body is still stuck with the energy of wanting to change his situation, and this trapped energy then converts into any and all kinds of behaviors, most often those that are maladaptive in nature.
In Dr. Levine’s client’s case, her trapped energy turned into panic attacks with varying levels of consciousness. Her body had not yet made the connection in her conscious mind about the root causes of her panic. She had to slowly “awaken the tiger” and flee to freedom with the help of someone she trusted to make the connection in truth.
Dr. Levine has built a practice of helping people gently release their trauma (“arousal”) through the body’s inherent release mechanisms (“discharge”), based on his experiences from this time. The term “window of tolerance” also comes from this theory, in which a patient slowly opens and then expands their ability to tolerate distress in general, and most importantly the distress that has been triggered by their traumatic past.
I saw many classmates experience this sort of release in class with Rik, and experienced it myself during our private sessions. I even brought one of my kids to meet Rik as what he does is so basic, even a child could feel at ease and trust his lead. And the truth is that children experience everything more purely than us adults, so they’re actually the real experts at all of this.
I feel comfortable sharing one of my class experiences here. So Rik began the class by asking us students to please refrain from judgment during our six weeks together, in a bid to focus our minds on what our bodies were experiencing in the present. A very tall order for all of us, and after the first class a young woman shared that she was struggling with this and it would likely be impossible for her. She was considering quitting the class. Rik then engaged her in a number of dialogues with both him and herself, and slowly drew out what turned out to be the woman’s intense self-hatred and antipathy toward life in general. It was very difficult to hear her embody such loathing, especially since she was sitting so kindly with all of us! But after confessing her thoughts with Rik aloud, her voice changed and she found a much gentler tone of voice not just with Rik but with herself. At the end of the session, Rik then asked the woman to put her hand on her own heart, and to tell her heart that she loved it, and that she would protect it from now on. She did so, and Rik then asked,
“Would you repeat that again, and this time in your native tongue?”
“Ya rouhi, sa’uhmika, ana uhibuka,” she said.3
Though I ultimately returned to my long-term therapist and psychiatrist, I kept up my mindfulness practice and continue to meditate today. It took me a long time for me to understand the *why* of meditation; all I could do was trust my teachers and keep accepting my thoughts interrupting me and breathe. But over time something else happened—I began to notice that the present moment, once so fleeting, became suddenly so abundant and full of life. It was and is so much more appealing than any fix or fantasy that my depression or anxiety could produce, and I trust it completely.
As for the champagne glass, I had come a long way in simply putting it down that morning. But I realized through my curiosity about trauma that I was still carrying the heavy burden of trying to protect all of my loved ones from harm. Hence the “Mama Bear” that had formed in me over the years that still comes out today, such as when I put my arm in front of my 22-year old son should I stop the car too abruptly, or when I see others dismiss those who might be more vulnerable than they are. I of course know in my mind that my arm is not really going to save my son should we get into an accident, and that I can’t punish and protect everybody. But I think I’m OK with trying. It’s worth it.
*Names have been changed.
Thank you for visiting.
In addition to writing, I am also a Certified Professional Life Coach with the International Coaching Federation.
I’ll write about being a bully very soon.
This is one of the reasons why it is so important to let your child experience his/her emotions to the fullest, from infancy on. His brain is first developing its lizard brain, then mammal brain and then finally human brain, and it cannot develop past any of the three phrases without the previous one being fully formed. Another reason why it is not a good idea to force your child to share his toys in toddlerhood or even at preschool age. Sharing is an advanced social skill that requires a human to know what is truly theirs first before even considering that it could be someone else’s.
This is GoogleTranslate’s version of it at least. I can’t remember the exact phrasing as I don’t speak Arabic. Yet!
I think I need to read the book The Body Keeps Score.