Talk given to the Pacific Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 4/16/23 PTSD: The Tragedy, the Gift, and the Big Question

Good afternoon fabulous people.  It’s good to be here with you and I feel privileged to be able to speak to you today. 

We know this past year our beloved Reverend Kit was concerned about the trauma we had been through because of COVID, and the political, racial, and economic unrest our country is experiencing.  When Reverend Kit wanted to help people with this trauma, I was right there with her, thinking, “Hey, I know something about trauma!  I can help with this!”  I knew then that I wanted to give a talk about my professional and personal experiences with trauma.  And then came the voices from the pews that maybe discussing trauma was not what others desired.  And I respect that people should not be blasted with traumatic things; God knows just looking at the news gives one enough of that.  I also understand that people have different approaches to their personal trauma and how they want to deal with it and that should be respected as well.  Even though the congregation went away from wanting to deal with trauma as a main topic, I could not help but notice, with a good deal of irony, that much of what is presented to us in our Sunday talks and what we discuss at coffee hour tends to have trauma at its roots.  We are Unitarian Universalists after all and we cannot help but be pulled into social justice and world betterment, so onward I trudged to present a topic I know some are not keen to hear.  As a retired professional social worker, I know that unexamined and untreated personal trauma does not just go away, but it will fester and present itself in negatively impactful ways, in terms of both mental and physical health, and it can hamper one’s potential as a fulfilled and content human. 

My intent was never to take a negative approach and just hammer people with god-awful things and make them feel trampled upon.  It is my personality to look for a silver lining and to figure out how to make things better.  That being said, I must be true to myself and my journey.  If I just glossed over the “bad parts” of my story, I think the full impact of what I wish to share would be minimized and it would be a disservice.  The take away I hope to leave you with today is how my choices, in thoughts and actions, have made my journey a more beautiful one than a treacherous one.

So here is the fair warning that I will talk about unpleasant stuff.  Doug and Cecelia, my heart goes out to you and your granddaughter, especially at this time.  But I hope you can hang in here with me, after all, I lived this.  And people seem to think me a likeable sort and a positive, resilient person, so something okay must be going on inside my mind and soul, and hopefully you will find what I share interesting, and perhaps even useful. 

Some of you may know that I, at this point in my life, consider myself a writer and that I have a website and blog, theabsurdess.com, where I share funny stories about my personal and professional life and how I have at times been beat up, and at other times have danced joyfully with my PTSD, as I try to figure out my partnership with this perplexing disorder.  As a writer, one would think it was easy for me to write this talk and I do LOVE to write, but this has not been easy.  In trying to write this, I have written lots of narrative, bland but factual words strung together, that do indeed tell things about me, but it just wasn’t working.  Then I thought if I approach this more as one of my stories, factual for sure, but with more zest, a twinkle in my eye, while both high-fiving The Universe and giving it the finger, then maybe I could share my story in a more digestible, accessible way.

I think the best, most meaningful tales are where a heroine (that will be me) goes on a journey and encounters all sorts of obstacles to overcome, villains trying to thwart her, and monsters she must battle.  And all good tales should have a soundtrack to help set the mood.  Perhaps in the future I can have a soundtrack accompany my talks, but for now, my words and your imagination will have to suffice.

So let’s begin:  The music is soft and calm and brings to mind an open field, resplendent with newly blossomed wildflowers, an explosion of colors, vibrant butterflies swirling and dancing on the whisp of a pleasant breeze.  Let me tell you some interesting things about me, to kinda warm you up for this journey.  I have had a fantastic and interesting life:  I lived atop Mt. Hamilton, above San Jose, California, the home of Lick Observatory, where I attended a one-room school house.  I lived on a sailboat in the San Francisco Bay area, taking my dinghy out into the sloughs around Redwood City all by myself at age 13.  I have met my goal of attaining a high level of education which includes Associates, Bachelors and Masters degrees, a high school social studies teaching credential, plus further education as a certified nursing assistant, emergency medical technician, and massage practitioner.  I have been a firefighter, a high school history teacher and the manager of a homeless shelter, among many other things.  I am blessed with a chronically curious mind and I am easily entertained by things both simple and complex.  I have a rich, meaningful spiritual life, being Jewish-Pagan with Buddhist leanings and two patron saints.  I love history, books and art—my love of art and knowledge that life is a wondrous, colorful journey is represented in my 33 tattoos. 

Now our journey darkens, the music has a tense, threatening sound, something not good is about to happen to our heroine; snapshots of Bunny, who is but a cute, quiet toddler and then an 8-year-old:  sexual molestation, several times, by family members and other sick, opportunists.  A mother, injured in a car accident and addicted to Valium, who never reconciled her own upbring in a domestic violence, alcoholic household, plunges into depression and chooses, literally, to shut her bedroom door and totally isolate herself from her toddler son and her young, grade-school aged daughter, leaving us to fend for ourselves until my brother’s alcoholic father comes home from work to fix us dinner and then pop open his Oly beers until he passes out in front of the TV.

The music has moments of glee, sounds of sweeping wonder and spikes of wild abandon as I run free across the top of Mt. Hamilton, spectacularly unsupervised, clearly surrounded by my guardian angels (for the millionth time—Thank you angels!).  Entities of goodness do surround me.  Besides my angels, I am blessed with a great teacher, Mrs. B., and wonderful, loving, unconditional grandparents, Bob and Charlotte Clark.  My brother, Larry, tethers me (Thank you, Larry). 

The music returns to foreboding and darkness, sounds that are oppressive and sad.  Bunny, around 8 years old, is taken by her mom to visit her biological father and step-mother, not an uncommon thing.  However, Bunny’s mom fails tell her that she is not coming back to pick Bunny up.  And so begins the deeper knowledge that things in life can be really out of our control, for Bunny would not have chosen to live with an unprotective and conditional father and an emotionally abusive step-mother, but so it was for the next seven years.  Years that included the onset of depression, suicidality to the point of crying every night and praying that I would not wake, and alcohol and drug abuse that started at the tender age of 12.

Whatever that inner spark I carry with me is, it did eventually glow so bright that it pushed out the darkness, depression, suicidality and drug abuse, this just before I turned 17.  Colors were brighter, life seemed vast and expansive.  The music is blasting in its triumph that I still walk the earth, there is sweetness in the notes of the heady score and in the air.  I went through college.  I married my high school sweetheart.

While the marriage did have some high points and I did enjoy accomplishments and many wonderful outdoor activities during that time, including backpacking at high elevations with 45 pounds on my back, the marriage was very unbalanced and feeding my husband’s needs was like trying to fill a bottomless pit with a tea cup.  I began to not feel well, tired all the time, raging night sweats; trips to the doctor resulted in no answers. 

The dark theme is returning in the music, more foreboding, something malicious is in the air.  As I am no longer useful to my husband, he has an affair.  The depression returns in full force, again accompanied by suicidality, that this time brings a loaded gun and places it on my lap.  But I chose divorce over bullets and once again pulled myself up, as I am apparently wont to do.  The antidepressant Zoloft helped and I rode a wave of exaltation and freedom as I explored singlehood and my new life.  The music is tinkly, saucy and wild . . . for a couple of years.

Then suddenly, very suddenly, I am tired and cannot get out of bed.  Slow the music.  Really slow the music, to a sickening, confused crawl, a blur, the soundtrack to the question “Where has my life gone?”  Return to the useless doctors, who look down their noses at me, as clearly I am a weak, whinny woman.  Seven years after the onset of my confusing, life-altering symptoms, I am finally diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  Ironically, I was diagnosed this by a doctor who did not believe in fibromyalgia.  Can I get an eye roll please?  Being undiagnosed for so many years was a wander in the desert and pushed me to the brink, which included a definite plan to shuffle off this mortal coil that was only thwarted by what I absolutely consider a miracle and ended my years-long relationship with entertaining notions of ending my life—It was The Universe and I coming to terms with the need for me to shit or get off the pot on this issue.  I chose life, and living, come what may.

Fibromyalgia has brought with it terrible chronic fatigue and sensory issues.  But, as per my usual, I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and figured out how I was going to live my new, energy depleted, unplanned for life.  I had a good idea—I thought being a school teacher would meet my criteria for doing something socially significant and be the best full-time job for my energy, given that I had to support myself financially and living on social security disability was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

What does music that suggests that one is thinking things are figured out but the audience is clued into the fact that more pitfalls await ahead?  Well cue that music!  Two years and $30,000 to earn my teaching credential to get this great plan started, had me teaching two summers and one year in a new job I loved, but resulted in me being laid off for full year, which was very scary and frustrating, and had me returning to a job that I was trying to avoid at all costs . . . working for child protective services.  I knew what awaited me at child protective services, having served three years as a children’s counselor at a county children’s shelter.   There were many reasons, ethical, and for what it would require of my pitiful energy, that I did not want to return to this venue.  It took me a few years of working again in child welfare, but I accepted that clearly this is what The Universe wanted me to do, and so I did it, for thirteen years and seven months.  Burn out for CPS workers is in two to three years, you do the math.  Be sure I have seen some of the most horrible things that one person can do to another; I can never unknow what I witnessed.

Through my career I was exposed to secondary trauma (also known as vicarious traumatization or compassion fatigue), where hearing the stories or seeing the evidence of direct trauma to another can be impactful, even though we are not the ones being directly abused or neglected.  My curious brain, the unimaginable workload, and my agency’s denial of the secondary trauma I was seeing around me, and even the denial that the children on our caseloads were traumatized, drove me to learn more about trauma.  Because of my education, training, and own research pursuits I consider myself an expert on trauma.

But I guess The Universe felt I needed a deeper level of understanding of trauma.  Okay, let’s cue some fantastically dark, portentous music here, how about the theme to Jaws meets the Imperial Death March, also known as Darth Vader’s theme?  That should work.  So, my secondary trauma exposure in my job as a CPS worker morphed into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.  I was officially diagnosed in 2018 and was placed on administrative leave for three weeks in July of that year.  Looking back, I know the slow creep of my PTSD started in 2009.  It picked up momentum in 2014.  By 2018 it was a long, over-loaded, never maintenanced, completely trashed, heavy, out-of-control freight train with no breaks, fast approaching a sharp corner, with a cliff on one side.   But CPS was so adept at normalizing and denying our trauma exposure and experiences that this insidious, unwelcome, invasive, life-altering, soul-sucking, ever-growing monster came upon me and settled like a fog around me; and I just walked around with it and it moved with me like a shroud as I continued to work every day with PTSD. 

Our heroine, beleaguered, as always figuring out how to be triumphant and make the best of every situation, is trying to once again pick herself up and dust herself off.  Here she is, minding her own business, trying to do good in the world by protecting the children, having narrowly missed the grinding wheels of the sinister CPS bureaucratic machine, she is limping along, but back on track. 

Now in your mind bring up the most danger-impending, tragic music you can think of, make sure it is in very loud surround sound and everyone . . . take a deep breath.  On November 8, 2018, just as I was barely getting my feet under me at work, under a supportive and understanding supervisor, the Paradise Camp Fire came and burnt up 99.9% of my belongings and burnt my house and town to the ground.  Now I had complex PTSD.  Apparently, I was meant to receive a PhD level education in trauma from The Universe.

I bought my new forever home in Sacramento after the fire and to be sure you know I picked myself up, though it was with much difficulty, and dusted myself off, replaced everything I lost in the fire and made that house awesome as part of my healing.  Well, cue that Jaws/Darth Vader music as you say, “Oh no, not again!?”   Yes, really again, as the most horrible drug-abusing, alcoholic, domestic violence neighbors with small children moved next door less than two years after I moved into my new home, triggering my CPS PTSD and making life there untenable, which is how I ended up moving to the PNW.   As I often say, “You cannot make this shit up.”

So that was the tragedy portion of my talk.  Now, thankfully we are on to the Gift portion. 

How incongruent are the words depression, disability, PTSD, and gift, and how often do you hear them in the same sentence?  Probably never?  I will tell you that the gift of PTSD was very unexpected and a long time in coming; I only started becoming aware of such a thing existing last year and this gift is increasing over time.  I am almost four and a half years from the fire and almost two years from being retired as a social worker.

While I feel I have always had a deep appreciation for life, I am very much in awe of it, the gift of having come through these trials and tribulations is that I have a deeper appreciation for life.  The gift that PTSD has given me:  . . . is I now feel, see, smell, hear and taste life on a deeper, more meaningful level.  All that is wonderful about life comes at me in dizzying, blissful, colorful, heady, aromatic, symphonic, delectable, joyous, loving, and beautiful ways.  All of that probably sounds weird, but I have no other way to describe it and I believe it is how my PTSD-damaged brain is rewiring itself and I cannot complain about this.  Another gift is that The Universe has tickled my funny bone with how absurd life really is and it is much better to laugh at and with life, then to allow life to be like a school yard bully who makes you cry all the time.

As well as gifts from the PTSD, there are lessons I have learned from the other parts of my life and they bear mentioning.  There is that saying, “This is not my first rodeo.”  I have looked back over my life and see that I have been in nine rodeos.  And by that I mean events that were not of my choosing that altered the trajectory of my life.  I could easily be crushed by any ONE of the things, these rodeos, that have occurred in my lifetime.  And I was crushed for awhile.  After my divorce and the fibromyalgia struck me down, I thought I was being punished for something and I thought if it happened, then I must deserve it.  I was a late-comer to loving history and started reading people’s stories from history when I was on social security disability and then it dawned on me—that what had happened to me was:   The Human Condition.  No one gets out unscathed and it is not personal or punishment, it is called Life.  And if others, who endured much worse things than I, could figure out how to go on living meaningful, productive lives, then I could too.   Having that thought, often, and embracing that thought, was what put me on the path to recovery after my reoccurrence of depression and the entrance of fibromyalgia.  Most thankfully I mastered this lesson before I was to be gifted with PTSD.

And I have chosen, again and again, to get up and keep on moving.  But just moving is not good enough, I want more, so I choose to be made stronger and more resilient by what has befallen me.  And I choose to look at others with soft eyes and spread compassion and understanding where I can.  I choose to cut myself a lot of slack and give myself a lot of grace.  Even though depression, fibromyalgia and PTSD are disabilities, I don’t consider myself disabled or even “differently-abled.”  Dis-abled implies that I can’t do anything.  I can do things; it is just more difficult for me to do things and I have obstacles and barriers I must face.  I don’t focus on what I can’t do, but I use my tools I have gathered over this lifetime and use work-arounds so I can do things.  And this intentional decision to choose to look at my situation differently is called reframing and I definitely owe my life, several times over, to my ability to do this.

A good example I can give of reframing is that within the past year I stopped thinking of my PTSD and the fire as “problems” and “issues”, but now I refer to them, in all seriousness, as “interesting life experiences,” because they have been interesting experiences; I intentionally shifted from negative connotations and moved toward a more positive outlook and acceptance.

Another gift is that the fire instantly blessed me with no longer being burdened by the small stuff, it really brought things into perspective.  We tend to catastrophize many small things and get ourselves all worked up.  After what I have been through as a firefighter, losing everything to California’s most deadly and destructive fire, the fire with the world’s largest insurance payout, and seeing children abused, really, except for truly catastrophic things, there is not much to get worked up about.  Going through what I have gone through has made it a lot easier to manage my expectations and embrace that there are no guarantees in life.  So I cherish and embrace the moments I get, instead of complaining about, or being bitter or angry about things.  I count my blessings and practice my gratitude every day for I know what can be unappreciated, taken for granted, abused, or lost instantly—I choose to look at what I have and not what I don’t have.

Ultimately what I have been through and witnessed is horrible, but I would not change things, because going through what I have, makes me, me.  And I really like me.  That fantastic and interesting life I mentioned at the top of this talk includes ALL of my experiences.

Now to The Big Question:  This is the life that was given to you, so what are you going to do with it?  This is the question, I have asked myself time and again and this is what makes me know, every day, that I have a choice in how I think about things and how I approach things.  I can be bothered, or serene.  I can think bitter thoughts, or know I am blessed.  I can be angry, or peaceful and good-humored.  I can be broken and defeated, or healed and triumphant.  I can be a victim, or victorious.  I have many tools in my life-management tool box, please ask me about them if you are so inclined, but if I had to pick a tool that has been that one life-saving tool in all that I have been through, knowing that I have a choice in how I think and act, that is the one I would pass on to most people.

And my humor.  My ability to use my sense of humor as a life raft also must be mentioned as an early gift bestowed upon me by The Universe.   I cannot leave this podium without giving my humor its due, my nom-de-plume after all is The Absurdess. 

Cue the calliope music!  When life throws us into our next rodeo, be like this heroine and let’s meet it head-on!   Instead of sitting in the hard, cold stands so long our butts hurt, eating stale, horrible popcorn, being miserable, smelling the bullshit, waiting for the bull to jump the fence and trample us, let’s instead jump into that ring and throw on a clown suit.  Let’s grab Jaws and Darth Vader and put them in clown suits too!  Let’s run with the bulls, laughing and screaming with joy and the thrill of it all.  Let’s give the little kids balloons and look them in the eyes and tell them that it will be alright, even if that is eventually.  Free the bull and offer him a massage, or ask his forgiveness and jump on his back for the ride of your life.  Hear the crowd roar at your triumphs and laugh with life at its folly and absurdness; for life is tragic, but it is also really damn funny.

Rodeo day for Darth

When Jaws asked his friend Darth to the rodeo, this is NOT what he had in mind!

“Did Jaws say ‘no butter’ or ‘extra butter?’ Crap!”