Just before Independence Day weekend, I was once again storm watching, this time a girl named Elsa. This has become a regular occurrence in recent years, earlier and earlier each season. This year was the first on record with five named storms by the first week in July. We ended up watching the intensity models with interest. While most kept Elsa to a sedate high school homecoming dance level (tropical storm to cat 1), one blew her up into full prom queen meltdown mode (cat 3). That outlier had my full and undivided attention. Because I was not ready for a major storm, psychologically not physically.
I knew what needed to be done. We have been through storms and even bad seasons before.
I rode out Hurricane David as a kid, watching as a tree in our back yard fell in slow motion, barely missing a corner of the house, which left us without power for ten days. We watched Andrew make landfall in Miami a few months after we bought this house, the same year one tornado in a local swarm destroyed the last house we lived in while another rolled through the park behind this one. We rode out the year of four hurricane landfalls in Florida (Charley, Frances, Jeanne, Ivan). We got seriously lucky when Charley took a sudden righthand curve after blowing up in intensity over a three-hour span. By the time we got to Ivan, we were in line buying plywood, which we then put up for Jeanne. Followed the next year by monitoring Katrina, Rita and Wilma as they devastated the upper Gulf after passing us by.
Before she retired, my wife studied the impacts of hurricanes on the coastline through her career as a geologist. She has always been fascinated by storms. She flew recon for research after Katrina, after Sandy, after Ivan, after numerous other storms. She witnessed some of the post-landfall carnage firsthand. Some of those images are seared into her memory as well as captured in her pictures. But that only increased our respect for these powerful forces of nature. None of that made us, or at least me, fear them. Even before we replaced the windows with hurricane-rated upgrades, I could still find an inspiration for writing in them.
All that changed with Irma. After 2017, I no longer experience a childlike sense of wonder; I experience a childlike sense of dread.
Here’s where the story gets a little complicated because, like most PTSD triggers, it’s about two peripherally related events that got intertwined.
In late August through early September of 2017, I had a few things going on. Over Labor Day weekend that year, as for several years before, we held our annual Kitten*Con for a small group of friends. All but one of our attendees were local. She flew in from out of state. Because our little mini-con fell in the middle of hurricane season, she sometimes had to rearrange her incoming or outgoing flights to avoid a storm brewing in the basin. It was a running joke that she had become our storm magnet.
That year didn’t disappoint. By the time we convened the Thursday evening before Labor Day, a tropical storm had formed off the Cape Verde islands. Only my wife took much notice as it was small and literally thousands of miles away. It was something to keep an eye on rather than something to pay strict attention to.
So, we didn’t. We played our games, watched our movies, discussed our lectures, ate our con food and drank our wine, generally having a grand old geek time without a care in the world, as always.
That peaceful fantasy shattered for me when someone left a message on our phone either Friday or Saturday. Oddly, the message wasn’t for me but for my sister who has never lived here. The caller, my mother’s landlord, must have confused our numbers somehow. But he directed the message to her so I didn’t call him back but dutifully passed it on, desperately hoping I could ignore it since I had a house full of company for the next several days.
Unfortunately, I had a feeling I knew what it was about. A few weeks earlier I had called my mother to see how things were going. She told me she was having a plumbing issue in the house where I grew up.
A little background here: she had owned the house outright after my parents got divorced, but I’d discovered she’d lost it at some point before 2006, the first time we were over trying to get the house into something resembling habitable shape so she could continue living there after she broke her neck. She never told me she no longer owned the house and only acknowledged that fact after said I no longer saw her name on the deed as I was trying to piece together her finances to see where she stood, not knowing how things might unfold.
I did more digging in 2012, when we were called back over at our anniversary by a friend of hers who informed us that, first, she was in the hospital, and second, that the EMTs who had taken her there were ready to involve the Health Department because the house had gotten so severe as to be a health hazard, a distinct change from what we left in 2006. That’s when we spent two weeks of sixteen-hour days spread over three weekends excavating that hoarder-esque nightmare back to something akin to the more orderly level of decluttered I remember growing up. Which involved nearly a thousand books donated to the public library, several SUV loads of donations to Goodwill, numerous trips to a recycling drop-off to ovefill their dumpsters, an overflowing grocery cart of shredding (after we burned out a retail shredder and threw out anything that was moldy), and so much bagged trash for curbside pickup that the neighbors thought my mother had died. Nope, that was just all the broken, moldy or otherwise unusable, unrecyclable, undonatable junk we cleared out. And that didn’t include the boxes and boxes of unwanted, often duplicate items her friend sold for her on eBay. Even after we finished, my mother still had an entire 2000 sq. ft. home’s worth of contents inside, including enough clothing and shoes to fill four full bedroom closets. In the end, the authorities were satisfied enough for her to continue living there, although she lied to them to stack the deck.
All that happened while my father was slowly dying from cancer some twenty minutes away. As I’ve said before, 2012 was not a good year. In terms of the Machiavelli board game, it was plague and famine, rows and columns. Only maybe topped by this year when we added rebellion to the mix.
On top of that, I caught acerbic criticism for what we’d done in every phone conversation I had with my mother for the next eighteen months. She made it plain that she didn’t want our help and didn’t think she needed it. I swore at that point I would never do it again. Yeah, that experience left a mark.
Circling back to 2017, her landlord, the father of one of her former students when she taught severely multiple handicapped children, was out of town. The only contact number she had was the office of his day job in investing which didn’t know how to reach him (he rented property as a sidelight). The gist of the plumbing problem was that the substandard cast iron pipes in the master bath had finally rotted out and were leaking into my sister’s old bedroom. I told her that I was pretty sure under state law (the Landlord-Tenant Act) that she could get a plumber to stabilize the situation and deduct it from her rent. She had a second bathroom even if the master got shut down for a little while.
Now what I said and what she heard were likely two different things. By the time she talked to me, she was well into a fifth of vodka, her alcohol of choice. Just getting the details of the situation out of her and piecing it together was a bit of linguistic legerdemain. As I have said before, my mother was an alcoholic (verifiable from the Paul Harvey rest of the story of how she broke her neck and how she ended up in the hospital before she died) who was very possibly using alcohol to moderate the symptoms of other mental illnesses (anxiety, depression, OCD, perhaps bipolar disorder). I could never confirm whether those were treated conditions or not, although in 2006 and 2012 I found medication that might be prescribed for each. Just another layer to the onion.
What I put
together long after that Labor Day weekend was that she had drunkenly harassed her
landlord’s workplace every day, then called out a plumber to rip out and
replace all the pipes and sent him a bill for thousands of dollars of work he
didn’t know about until he got home. Needless to say, he was pissed. Enough so
that he was ready to start eviction proceedings right away before my sister
talked him down.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t know all when I heard his phone
message. I assumed something related to the plumbing had slipped incredibly sideways.
Because for the past decade plus, that was the nature of the calls we got from
or about my mother.
Perhaps the most illustrative call, if I haven’t painted enough of a picture, was the one from her dog groomer just before midnight one year. She was in tears telling me the hospital (which I didn’t know my mother was in) was about to street her by putting her in a cab within minutes with no one to take care of her while she was still injured and somewhat delirious. While my mother considered this woman a friend, that relationship was not reciprocal. She clearly thought of herself as just her groomer. It took all my skill picks in Diplomacy, Admin, and Medical to calm her down enough to get her to explain the situation to the head nurse on the floor who could concoct a way for them to keep my mother overnight (they quickly “discovered” a UTI in her bloodwork). That after explaining this was all news to us and we were 3-4 hours away so couldn’t stop anything that was about to happen and couldn’t get there before it did.
Or the time my mother called to say she was going to be streeted from a rehab facility for not agreeing to pay her bill, which burned several hours of my time in intense, sometimes professionally threatening, negotiations with the nurse administrator only to have my mother call back and say, never mind, she had signed the original agreement after all. Or the time she called to say she had a similar dispute with the IRS where I told her not to sign anything and find a lawyer (the IRS is punching about my weight class), only for her to sign a payment agreement when they threatened to appraise the contents of her home to see what they could sell, then try to reneg by claiming she was under duress when she signed it. Which was the same tactic she tried when she revoked the POA she’d given my sister when my mother was in the hospital after a heart attack, an agreement both I and a floor nurse countersigned as witnesses as she calmly signed it over.
Phew, ok, there are many more examples involving other surprise phone calls filled with enough convenient memory and magical thinking to necessitate me taking active defensive countermeasures to avoid any Imperial entanglements, but you get the picture. A phone call from or about my mother was a percentile dice roll on an exotic, chaos-driven encounter table which could be moderately dangerous if said encounter sucked me in, which, somehow, they always seemed to do. Usually at the worst possible time. Like, say, just before, during or after a vacation. Or when I finally duct-taped and superglued enough of my own mental health back together to feel inspired enough to write. More on that in a special note.
Where was I? Right, back at Labor Day weekend. Kitten*Con friends have told me that I came out of the office from listening to that message visibly deflated. Even though the situation wasn’t mine to handle (my sister startlingly opted to paratroop in and take the lead after being MIA for all of 2006-2012), I was subdued for the rest of the weekend. Subdued but undauntedly determined to enjoy our mini geek Mardi Gras knowing what might be coming. And yet still managing to underestimate what those constantly weaving Norns had in store.
The Tuesday morning after Labor Day, we gathered one final time for our post-con hot washup breakfast before we dispersed back to our jobs and lives for another year. That was the moment my wife, who was checking the National Hurricane Center website on her phone, informed us that our little Irma was now all grownup, pre-post-menstrual and whirling a brickbat above her head as she endured her labor pains while raging against the injustice of the patriarchy, which at that point included all of us despite women outnumbering men at the table. While we’d been dancing at our invitation-only party, which we hadn’t realized was the Masque of the Red Death, she had blown up to a full category 5 storm with sustained winds of 175 MPH and was beelining for the Virgin Islands (where one of our number’s parents lived) with Florida sitting atop the bar as a chaser.
I think my exact response was, “Are you fucking kidding me?!”
That set off a mad five-day scramble of preparations the likes of which we had never done before and hopefully will never have to do again. We began compulsively checking every model run and interim positional update, trying to discern whether this beast of storm was headed for us or for the east coast of Florida where many of our friends and my mother still lived.
Of course, when I talked to my mother again, she said she had no intention of evacuating, despite having enough significant medical conditions that being in a special needs shelter with emergency personnel onsite might have been prudent to say the least. But just as she did with Dorian a couple years later, she lied and bluffed her way through by saying she would be fine, had people coming in to help and knew exactly what to do. My sister wasn’t on the ground at that point. I frankly didn’t have time to worry about it as we were in full self-preservation mode. We were busy making multiple runs to top off our hurricane supplies, scrambling around at 10 at night trying to find enough gas to fill our cars and containers, making ice, prepping coolers, checking equipment and supplies.
For a while, the models continued to dance back and forth as to which side of the peninsula Irma might hit, to the point where friends who had been at Kitten*Con and quickly made a reservation to evac to Georgia ended up canceling it because the storm wasn’t playing by the hotel’s timetable. They then decided to ride it out only to pull stakes on Saturday morning. How they got out is still beyond me. They slipped through a narrow window where millions of people were on the move, ending up in the only available hotel room two states away. A wiser choice than ours, perhaps.
Somewhere in there Irma grazed Cuba, dropping back from a cat 5 to a cat 2 but then drifted farther west into the Florida Straight where she reblossomed into a cat 4 and was still deciding whether and/or exactly when to take a northbound exit. By then, our county was firmly in the center of the cone of uncertainty with possible landfall sometime late Sunday or early Monday, a target that was holding fast.
By Saturday morning, we were in full-force prepper mode. We put up plywood over our hurricane-rated windows as a double-strength precaution. We filled gallon after gallon of drinking water for the first time ever. We pulled in everything we could carry from the yard and the porch, wind chimes, bird baths, pots and pedestals, patio furniture. Knowing that cat 4 winds could peel off roof tiles like flipping pancakes, we retrieved the cat carriers from the attic and put them beside the first aid kits in the laundry room which doubled as our internal shelter in case we lost structural integrity.
That’s right, we were afraid some goddamned spinoff Dorothian tornado might Toto the cats like flying fucking monkeys. This was all off-script and well outside our playbook.
Once we finished around noon, we headed over to a different friend, another Kitten*Con attendee who would be sheltering with us, to help him finish his preparations, lifting the final plywood in place over his front windows somewhere around four o’clock. We came back for a cold dinner while he finished up inside, then drilled around our sliding glass window to mount plywood over it using an improvised bracket to hold it in place, again for the first time ever. Exhausted, we finished up as the first squalls rolled in just after dark.
Which led to a long twenty-four hours of waiting. By the next morning, we were staring down a cat 4 storm again and regretting our life decisions. We watched it first strike the Florida Keys, then weaken ever so slightly before slamming into Marco Island, still as a major hurricane.
All day Sunday the winds ramped up as the eye edged closer and squalls increased. By nightfall the track had shifted west again, putting us back in the bullseye. Amazingly, we still had power. We only lost it just before midnight but wouldn’t see it back for another five long, hot, brutal days.
When we finally went dark, the whistling winds seemed to amplify as they echoed down the stove hood vent. We heard creaks and crashes from the trees outside but with the windows completely covered could see nothing. That alone was eerie. Slightly more surreal, at the peak of the storm when the eye was just west of us (not over us, thank the gods), our oldest cat, Mara, who apparently had no fucks left to give, started ringing the bells on the sliding glass door, wanting to go out on the porch. She was quite insistent and demanding. Uh, no little one, not possible right now. Nyala continued hiding under the couch.
All this time Karen was texting with the last of our Kitten*Con attendees remaining in the county, the one whose parents were now out of communication in the Virgin Islands. Just after one in the morning, as we could barely hear the howling winds just begin to slacken here, this friend declared the storm was over so she was going to bed. We didn’t think we were far behind. Then fifteen minutes later, just as we were beginning to relax, thinking we had weathered the worst of it, Karen got a text from this friend saying a major tree had just crashed onto their roof, within feet of where her husband lay watching the television a few minutes before.
Bink. Wide awake again. No rest for the wicked. Thankfully, they were otherwise intact and ok. They didn’t even lose power. But that set off months of wrangling for them to get the damage to their roof and garage repaired. And the image of what could have happened and how close our friend’s husband came was inked into our memories.
Around two, as the winds began to trail more noticeably, we finally gave in and called it a night. When we crawled out of bed at dawn, we popped the seals on our shelter and slunk outside to survey the damage. All our trees remained upright. There were some small to medium pine branches down but nothing on the roof. All our neighbors were intact. Walking the neighborhood, we saw a couple big trees down, one blocking the road, another laying across a different house. But everyone we talked to seemed ok.
We all understood how incredibly lucky we’d been, especially as the pictures started rolling out of the Keys and Marco Island. We then slowly put our lives back together as Maria grabbed the headlines from her one-week older sister.
And that concludes our special presentation tropical excitement, so we now return you to your regularly scheduled family trauma.
Which stood with my mother being slow-roll evicted. With the storms out of the basin, my sister could finally fly in.
Things started out auspiciously enough. My sister seemed content to handle this round without us going over, which she said she was ok with (spoiler alert: she wasn’t). My mother had made it clear she didn’t want us over there at all, never mind my sister. She said she could handle it, which usually meant she would ignore the situation until she no longer could and then call in the cavalry to rescue her.
Still, I provided my sister with all the information I had gleaned over the years on my mother’s situation, from financial to medical to where to find the lease. Information that had taken weeks to dig up and compile so not worth her duplicating the effort. Not that she bothered to read any of it as I later found out. But I helped her out as much as I could, while still trying to keep the boundaries I had set. To the point of reviewing and marking up a sheaf of legal documents from a hotel room on the first weekend getaway we’d taken in several years.
Predictably things devolved from there, first to receiving passive-aggressive messages from my sister’s friends which duly went unanswered, then to icy silence, and finally to outright hostility and recriminations over something my mother (not I) had done nearly a decade before. It came to a final head over the legal documents I’d reviewed. My sister insisted on them; my mother was reluctant to sign them. I used as much influence as I had to get those signatures because I thought they were the best way forward. But just as I finally had my mother convinced, my sister sabotaged the situation by trying to throw me under the bus to get her way, despite my efforts on her behalf. Resulting in the documents going unsigned.
All of which peeled back the layers and layers of familial trauma by dredging up various unpleasant memories. These are scars that never go away, especially when they are constantly reopened.
Without belaboring the details further, this was mostly expected although still more than disappointing. That deflated look my friends had seen at Labor Day? That came from reliving every prior experience that told me this was coming, along with several unrelated traumas that came flooding back, ones I had recognized but no one else would acknowledge. 2006 and 2012 had witnessed the same pattern, the same harsh words, the same phone calls with me being screamed at for an hour and a half before I finally lost my temper. Only this time, the words couldn’t be unsaid. Bells couldn’t be unrung.
But even knowing it was coming had left me with a childhood feeling of being trapped no matter what I did. Even though I had made clear where I stood up front and desperately tried to cling to that position, regardless of how untenable it felt. As though the scales had fallen from my eyes, I finally accepted that nothing would ever change except the actions I took or, more importantly, refused to take. I had served my time with these people and had zero interest in extending my sentence. Selfish? Maybe. By that point, I viewed it as self-preservation. As the afterimages linger, I still do.
Of course, all that went dormant once my mother, with the luck of the damned, was safely ensconced in a new apartment, unscathed, after my sister had bolted home. But the same pattern predictably reestablished itself when my mother died two and half years later with the same predictable results.
My family life boils down to the instructions on a shampoo bottle: Lather, rinse, repeat.
But like waking from a nightmare, it’s hard to convey the emotional distress in words to where people who didn’t experience it can understand. As those who have read other of my essays and poetry about family life know, some of those family experiences contained existential threats.
That was just over a year ago, which brings me back to Elsa. Remember Elsa? This started as an essay about Elsa.
Elsa arrived just about a month after the anniversary of mother’s death, which saw all that lingering familial dread relived. So, when I saw the intensity forecasts bouncing up into a potential cat 3, I felt all the energy I’d recovered after Covid and the election drain, just like listening to that message during Kitten*Con. I felt completely exhausted. Knackered. Like I wanted to curl up and go sleep until it was all over. Wake me up when September ends. The same reaction I often had when I was a kid.
Which made me question why. As I said earlier, this wasn’t my first hurricane. Even after the parade of destruction that was 2004 and 2005, I’d still been able to joke about storms, as I did in Feeling Fay in 2008, or at least write about them as I did more seriously in Operation Skytrain after Dorian in 2019.
Even in 2011, as I stood at the same sliding glass door watching another tornado roll through the park behind the house after a lightning strike not 20 feet from my office window had dropped power and fried almost all my office equipment, I didn’t fold up. At that moment, Nyala and I (she was watching the slashing rain outside beside me) just looked at each other in shared a moment of connection I’ve rarely felt with any other individual, human or otherwise. I’m sure we both bore the same expression that said, “well mate, I think we’re fucked,” before turning back to watch events unfold. The remainder of that morning involved me, the Jeep, a payphone, an emergency call to my wife, and three Duke linemen sheltering in the lee between concrete buildings as they waited for the weather to clear so they could do their jobs staring at me being out in it like I’d lost my fucking mind. And that was after I’d waited for the worst of it to abate. Ah, good times. But I didn’t sit. I didn’t sleep. I seized what control I had and ran with it.
So, I began to question my creeping dread reaction to Elsa.
It took me a little self-reflection to untangle exactly what was going on. As with most PTSD (and I don’t use that term lightly), there were two things going on that in the course of events unfolding had become conflated in my mind. For those of you who have never experienced it, conflating two events is how psychological triggers work.
My mind had tangled up storms with family trauma from my experience with Irma. Because both shared a timeline and both generated a deep, instinctive, memorable, emotional response. You see the human mind isn’t particularly efficient or discriminating in how it processes information. In many ways it’s designed to deal with Darwinian situations of immediate, existential threat. So once an intense emotional response gets set, it becomes associated with anything and everything co-temporal, often focusing on the larger, more stressful event.
In this case, that meant storms had become synonymous with the running train wreck my family life had been in 2017 and again in 2020. Even after those situations were over and somewhat resolved, they still felt like they would never end. And they may not, or at least my reaction to them, as long as I’m alive.
So, Elsa triggered the existential dread of family trauma. Especially falling so close to the anniversary of my mother’s death, which was when very thoughtful and emotionally grounded friends decided that alcohol, albeit good alcohol, was the best solution they could offer other than a sympathetic ear. Because they had more than an inkling of how FUBARed the situation was, and they still haven’t heard the full story. But cognac, like a mother’s kisses, should be a salve for many wounds.
Some of you are probably saying to yourselves, yeah, well, duh. But piecing together that view is less intuitive and straightforward than you might imagine from the bottom of a well. Which is the other way triggers work. They release a set of intense hormones and emotions that by design scream for us to take immediate action without question in order to survive. We tend to get stuck when we question that reaction too closely, or when we feel, right or wrong, there are no good options left. Depression often stems from that damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Which easily leads to a psychological vapor lock until the knot gets untangled. If it ever does.
But a Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral isn’t what I’m here to write about today. In reality, I don’t write about this stuff to help myself at all. I don’t always find it does, except maybe writing poetry. Even typing all this out has left me fearful, shaking, exhausted, and angry. I have been through this too many times before. The paths are well worn, the roadways sunken, the terrain fully mapped. Except maybe the blank spot ominously labeled Here Be Dragons.
No, I write in hopes I can capture something that someone else can relate to, and maybe use to improve their own situation however slightly.
A couple weeks ago, I ran across an article on feeling happier. Which is why I decided to write this essay rather than one of the two I’ve been threatening to get out for a while.
Normally, I don’t fall in with the Bobbie McFerrin don’t worry, be happy crowd (you’re welcome for that tune wedgie in your head). If others can sing Que Sera, Sera through the existential dread of an impending personal apocalypse, more power to them. It is not the way I’m wired. My head is more likely to echo either with Siegfried’s Funeral March or Men of Harlech.
But this was an NPR science article so not to be discounted right away. In it, the author pulled apart her own feeling of being trapped. In her case, much of her mental health decline was driven by the pandemic and its languishing isolation. A situation many of us can relate to.
Interestingly, the current research on reactions versus emotions has changed. Where we once thought that emotions drove reactions as a Darwinian survival mechanism, what we’ve found, counterintuitively, is that reactions actually drive emotions. Basically, your body reacts to certain stimuli instinctively by dumping a bunch of hormones into your system that drive other physical responses (like your eyes dilating, your heartbeat increasing, you sweating, etc.). Then your mind searches its memory database for an analogous situation so it can figure out the best emotional response.
As an example, the author cited that if you see a bear in the woods, you get an adrenaline dump to prepare you for what might come next, which isn’t limited to fight or flight (often bad and worse options with a bear). In reality your mind tries to put what just happened into emotional context. If you are an urban-dwelling hiker whose only experience with bears is hearing stories about people getting mauled, your mind will likely choose the emotion of fear. Whereas if you are hunting bear, your mind might choose excited anticipation.
This odd reversal of cause and effect offers a ray of hope. Because where we used to think something like fear was instinctive, beyond our control and thus almost impossible to fight, we now see it’s a contextual choice, albeit a lightning fast one. So, if you can change your experience database with a given situation, you may be able to change your emotions. Especially in situations where your mind might be conflating the stimuli from two different events, as was the case above.
All of which made intuitive sense to me as I pulled apart my experiences. I have a healthy respect for storms but do not yet fear them in and of themselves. I tend to see them as challenges, something to be survived (which might change with one more tornado interaction).
But interactions with my immediate family, and all their hidden traps and sliding doors, offer almost nothing but pain, so latching onto a set of emotions to keep them at a distance makes perfect sense. Confusing and conflating the two because of temporal coincidence does not. Ultimately changing either set of emotional responses requires changing that experiential database, or at least expanding and weighting the average by immediacy. Or at least separating them into neutral corners. As with bickering children, that is difficult but at least doable.
For me, that has been an ongoing process. Which started with remembering that I don’t have to do it anymore. My father has been dead for nearly a decade. My mother for just over a year. With each passing day, any of her machinations and bad decisions become more and more remote in their ability to affect me. And my sister, well, she’s a couple thousand miles away and running silent. She may be family but I don’t owe her and she doesn’t owe me. That equilibrium has existed since I was at least twenty, and perhaps as young as ten. I don’t see it changing, as for decades of constant updating, the experiential database has barely budged. Trust is a factor there, and trust, once broken, is extremely difficult to regain.
And so that thought of not having to do it anymore brings an immense wave of peace when I focus on it. That isn’t always in the middle of whatever reaction I am having, which just like the conflation of family trauma and storms often involves many sometimes-interlinked factors that need to be understood, acknowledged and pulled apart. Things like duty, responsibility, and my role as a man, a brother, a son, as well as self-preservation, physically (which has been an issue at times), mentally, emotionally and existentially (as in the way I’ve structured and live my life). All overlapped with memories as a child.
When I was in my 30s, I remember reading a set of science fiction novels that had an alien race whose memories were physiologically set in wax, which meant they were unstable and unreadable for a short period of time after an event occurred, as well as able to be erased and written over discretely. That was an interesting concept to me.
All memory of trauma, especially childhood memory, is somewhat unstable and even sketchy by design. The point of such memories is not objective, intellectual accuracy but compelling, actionable emotion. When the adrenaline and other hormones hit your blood, if the memory it triggers is sufficiently negative, especially existentially critical, your mind doesn’t want to dwell on parsing it; it wants you to react right away. Fight, flee, or freeze.
In 99% of the cases from which that trigger mechanism evolved, that is the exact right move for Darwinian survival. Let’s not intellectualize the motives of that predator lurking in the jungle by the river into some sort of empathetic context. “Fucking tiger! Don’t get out of the boat! Never get out of the boat!”
But in the complexities and vagaries of modern human society, that remaining 1% of evolutionary cases has increasingly taken over and now drives more and more of the strains upon our collective mental health. Including PTSD.
The thing about trauma (the T in PTSD) is that your mind gives you very little time to think about it while you are in the midst of it. It is only with time and reflection that any of it begins to make sense, kind of like the memory of the aliens in those books. And that only with the security that comes with enough distance, either physical or temporal, to allow you to feel safe enough to reengage that threat, if only through playing it out as a simulation, often by going over events again and again in your mind as you try to understand what actions, proactive or reactive, might have changed the outcome.
But in situations where you were powerless, or even just where you felt powerless, it is easy to get stuck in that churning reimagining, like a GIF constantly looping on your Facebook feed. Because there were no good options, nothing obvious or even subtle would have changed the outcome. Sometimes there were no real options at all. And sometimes you have to take on faith that just by surviving the encounter, you took the best or only actions you could have taken.
And yet, sometimes, with an investment of time and patience, you can pull apart the event from the trigger by reviewing events with a critical eye to understand them, not relive them. If you are very careful and very clever, you can sometimes defuse the trigger by reprogramming it. For many people, that requires professional guidance or at least advice. Don’t be afraid to use it.
In my case, it required recognition. I still don’t want to go through another Irma again. Next time, my wife and I will likely pack up the cats and leave. Or maybe move to somewhere that gets few storms (but perhaps more balanced seasons). Or maybe both at once. But that doesn’t mean I won’t watch the basin this season to see what impending storm might come up. Just when it does, I will try to treat it for what it is, not what it became associated with.
And by learning that, perhaps I will survive.
© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III
