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19: Donuts
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Connie came into my life at nine. He was a school system psychologist in Bradenton, Florida, and responsible for setting up testing and therapy for me while I was in elementary school. Rosharch ink blots, speech therapy, California Achievement Tests, math trials. My mother told him secrets about me. He took my mother to dinner. He came to our tiny trailer and left doughnuts for us before he drove my mother away in a white Continental. He was the first man I knew who wore suits, ties and wingtips to work. He said he was going to fix me. He said he was going to protect all of us. I remember my two sisters and me sitting on a battered couch in a cheap trailer living room covered with a vinyl floor, and him, kneeling with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts in his hands, making promises.
What I did not know then, but learned some twenty-odd years later, was that my stepfather came into my life after what might have been my first post-traumatic break. It must have happened after my great-grandfather died, in 1975, when I was 9. When my father came to visit us and tell us what happened. I had not seen my father for over three years, and the last time I had seen him, he had been driving away in a taxi, forced to leave after trying to take me from my mother’s home. My father remembers the day he visited me as a pleasant homecoming, with me staring lovingly into his eyes begging him to take me away from there. I don’t really remember what happened that day, even now; when I found my father many years later, I asked him when I could see my grandfather, and he had to tell me again that he was dead.
Whatever reaction I had, I believe it started the time in my life that is a series of fuzzy events. I remember eye surgery, trying to sleep all alone in the hospital and failing, terrified in the dark alone with the instruments, and vomiting all over the bed, forcing a midnight bedclothes change because a nurse fed me ginger ale while I was still on a drip. I remember a young woman teaching me to look up phonetic spellings in the dictionary, and trying to get me to stop reading when I encountered new words, which I never did, because I would manage to puzzle out the meanings, yet not later be able to explain how I did it. Today I can still puzzle meanings out of new words from context, a talent for words that has always been with me. An old friend that sometimes seemed my only friend. And I remember numerous discussions about me when I wasn’t supposed to be listening; about fixing me. About my problem and about what happened and about what to do about it and about it’s getting worse. I remember many nights of not sleeping, because I was afraid of the nightmares, and trying numerous tricks to stay awake. I remember my mother’s father giving me an am/fm radio with a headphone jack, and listening to FM rock all night long, trying to keep the nightmares at bay, staring at the starred sky through my tiny, screened-in trailer window.
Two years later Connie took my mother away for a week, and then my mother came back with a green station wagon and boxes. We moved to St. Petersburg. They had decided I was not going to skip any more grades because I needed social development, even though some experts had suggested I get bussed to a special arts high school in Sarasota. My mother had gotten married, like some kind of secret she was ashamed of; a second marriage by a divorcee was somehow something children didn’t attend, as if we didn’t belong, or it had nothing to do with us, a separation between him and us that caused huge problems right from the very beginning. Connie had a family with her, and she had a family with us. His relations with us were far from familial, and to this day I cannot forget for a moment how much damage he caused with his lies and his behavior. And I don’t think I have gotten any closer to forgiveness. I have just managed distance and time. I ran away from him after all, but that may have been all that I have ever really accomplished.
Photo by Byron Solomon of Lakeland, FL, courtesy stock.xchng
tags: ptsd, child abuse, verbal abuse, stepfather, stepdaughter
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18: Just one more little monster
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I can handle sticks and stones.
But those words still break my bones.
Dr. Raines (my psychiatrist) and I have begun to talk about my stepfather. Yes folks, I didn’t just get one abusive father, I got two! I won the bad dad lottery! Ahem.
My stepfather (man, I got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do here) was basically a very smart, cowardly drunk. It is the special, sick joy of the bright failure to rain doom on the young bright potential I think. Sexual abuse damages the nerves by twisting them out of true; verbal abuse damages the mind by planting weeds in the psyche that won’t die, won’t be stamped out, and won’t be silent.
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One more reason to like the Kid
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Good on Ken Griffey, Jr.: 600 homers and no ‘roids! But I found out today that Ken and I have something else in common: we both survived <a target=”_blank” href=”suicide“>suicide, although Ken’s attempt happened when he was much younger than I.
Read the whole story at Furious Seasons.
<a target=”_blank” href=”Ken Griffey, Jr.“>Learn more about Ken Griffey, Jr. at Brittanica Online.
Photo: Willard Lee, Associated Press, from the Seattle Times.
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This Ain’t Hollywood
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U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant T-Bo Twiggs was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder related to combat, entered into a treatment of therapy and medications, and was sent back into combat.
That’s what we do with Marines - we patch them up and send them back.
T-Bo went back four more times, doing a total of four tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, earning a combat action ribbon and a trip to the White House.
He never adjusted to a course of treatment, however, taking up to twelve different medications, which he mixed with alcohol. The Marine Corps did not teach T-Bo how to live with his PTSD. The only time he felt free of his symptoms was when he went back to combat.
Where his stress reactions were actually helping him stay alive. God, we’ll never learn.
Yesterday in Grand Canyon National Park, T-Bo, 36, and his older brother, Will, 38, faced down a cadre of Tohono O’odham tribal police and U.S. Border agents after they ran through a canyon checkpoint with a stolen car. T-Bo had wrecked his own car trying to drive it into the canyon, a la Thelma and Louise. But this ain’t Hollywood.
According to Arthur H. Rotstein of the Washington Post:
As tribal police and Border Patrol agents closed in, Twiggs, 36, apparently fatally shot his 38-year-old brother, Willard J. “Will” Twiggs, then killed himself.
Pinal County Sheriff’s spokesman Mike Minter said no motive has been established. But Kellee Twiggs said the decorated Marine would still be alive if the military had given him enough help.
“All this violent behavior, him killing his brother, that was not my husband. If the PTSD would have been handled in a correct manner, none of this would have happened,” she said in a telephone interview from Stafford, Va.
No motive has been established. I bet T-Bo had an answer for that. Too late to hear it now.
Grand Canyon photo by Bill Silvermintz via Stock.xchng
tags: war veterans, Iraq war, ptsd, war wounded, suicide, grand canyon
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“You learn to just stand there and take it.”
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The N&O profiled 20-year-old Iraqi war veteran Michael Beck on Sunday, a young man literally shredded by war. He went to Iraq as a guardsman - a guardsman! - and came back in pieces:
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Kimberly Dozier’s take on surviving trauma
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CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier was on CNN today talking about her new book, Breathing the Fire. In two interviews I watched with her today on that channel, she spoke about how constantly speaking about her experience, and writing her feelings, memories and experiences helped her deal with the trauma.
She was asked by both CNN interviewers if she experiences flashbacks and continued trauma over her experience. She said she occasionally does, but not to the extent of some others she has met; she attributes her success to her ability to continually communicating her experiences.
Guilt, pain, trauma - they succeed in crippling us because we don’t talk about them. Sexual abuse and incest - these things have continued power in our lives because of our silence. This is why I am writing this blog and trying to talk more and more about my experiences of abuse, my memories, and my experiences with recovery and my daily life as a survivor.
Because those evil things can’t lose their power unless they are exposed to the light and burned away.
From the excerpts available on her website, the book in unflinching in its exposure of her thoughts and feelings:
. . . whenever I wasn’t doing physiotherapy, I was ambushed by all the other things I’d been able to silence until then or at least muffle in my psyche.
Now I had nothing but time to think about the bombing, Paul and James, and their families. Images of them repeatedly hit me, and each time my mind said no. I didn’t see their bodies at the bomb scene. I hadn’t seen their funerals. For me they remained frozen in time, doing a Memorial Day shoot.
And I saw every memory through the fisheye of narcotics, intensely magnified and leavened by the multiple nerve depressants that were meant to control my physical pain. From hour to hour my emotions roller-coastered, mostly crashing down.
Bravo, Kimberly!
ColorFall by Asif Akbar of India courtesy of Stock.xchng.
tags: kimberly dozier, breathing the fire, war wounds, ptsd, asif akbar, commonsenseindia
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US government drugging deportees
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Imagine a country where if your were found to be living illegally, you would get thrown out on your ear. You would be a piece of trash, or worse - an animal without a soul, something to be abused and tossed into a crate. If you protested, or flinched, you could be labeled a “problem,” leaving your handlers license to calm you with any means necessary. Knocking you out with a billy club, or simply doing it the easy way: shooting you up with psychotropic drugs. Like the ones I take, but about a thousand times stronger. Drugs like Haldol and Ativan, drugs they give to violent psychotics who have tried to slit their wrists or broken the bones of medical professionals.
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Las Vegas sucks, musically speaking
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Last week my husband and I were in Vegas, and a lot of the time, I was miserable. Why? Well, I’ll tell ya. Nothing kills my mood faster than an overdose of unfeeling, commercially processed tunes, and Vegas blares them from every corner, ledge, window, side speaker, slot machine, corridor, and bathroom speaker. You cannot, cannot, can not escape the aural Velveeta, and in some places, you will drown into it if you step into the wrong hall. Such as the hall off the monorail stop at Harrah’s, which forces you to walk past a restaurant dedicated to the hits of Toby Keith.
Who I failed to realize had any hits at all. Lord, save us. I had the misfortune to walk by, stuck behind some rather large folks that made it impossible to pass, and got to hear him doing this. There are no shortage of ear violations in this world, apparently.
The only time I heard music I liked, the entire week we were there, was in the Wynn, the only mega-casino we were in that did not play an ASCAP-friendly sound track (for God’s sake, in the Hilton while we were hanging out gambling before we hit the Star Trek experience, and were treated to hear a round of pseudo-R&B hits that rotated through the mountain highs of Alicia Keys and Janet Jackson to the valley lows of Britney Spears). In the casino, I heard some kind of nu-jazz trip-hop that actually made me . . . dare I say it? . . . happy for the brief shining moments before we went in to Spamalot. Where the songs made me very, very happy. So much so, I had to pull out my inhaler no less than five times, and made Erica Ash lose her concentration during one particular loud outburst (sorry, Guinevere, I couldn’t help it).
When I would get back to our room I would crank up real music as much as I could, like the funky-fresh LeggoBeast, one of the albums I can’t seem to stop playing lately. Next time you head to Vegas - bring your music with you.
Leggo Beast Tales From the Crib-Exponentially Yours
tags: las vegas, spamalot, monty python, erica ash, music
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Trying out PlayTagger
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