Of PTSD Flashbacks, and of Screaming to Be Heard

Hello My Dear One,

I've had a rough few weeks at work, and they've left me struggling with how triggering some of my students' meltdowns can be for me.  I understand meltdowns from the inside out, and sometimes my level of empathy is too high in a situation.  I can all too easily find myself feeling the way that I have during my own meltdowns.  I work very hard to combat this, and the more I do my job, and the more therapy I do, the less apt I am to get caught up in my own stressors during an episode. Even so, no matter how objective I can be, the fear of physical danger for myself or others, can still trigger flashbacks from my own past filled with emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical abuse.  And the funny thing about PTSD is that you never know exactly what that trigger might be or what flashback will be triggered.

In the therapeutic work that I continue to do I have recently encountered a memory, a flashback, that was an absolute turning point in my life.  Oddly, after more than two years with my therapist this memory has never been in one of the "memory chains" that I have reprocessed.  Neither one of us is sure why, however I suspect that my own understanding of the event hadn't matured enough to actually deal with it.  I'll never truly know the answer, but I do know that I am at long last ready to face this point, and all of its ramifications from the past 25 years.

The memory is as vivid today as if it had occurred yesterday rather than two and a half decades ago, and this ultimately gives credence to the flashbacks I've been having about it for several months now.

The place, the colors, the smell, the sounds, the emotional distress come rushing in at full force, knocking the wind out of my already deflating lungs.  I am transported back to that moment when the line of before and after is drawn on the invisible timeline of my life.  I am watching myself be changed in an instant, and I have forever marked my time on earth as prior to that moment, and everything that has come since.

I am sitting in the basement of my grandparents' house, noodling with some project or other, the smell of leather and freshly cut pine fills the early autumn air that flows through the ground level windows around me.  I know that my mother has finally decided to confront my father and the tenant who is living in our 2nd floor apartment about the affair that we all know is happening.  I am waiting for her to return to me, to tell me that he has confessed, and that this madness will soon end.  I am waiting to hear the reassurance that I have been right all along, and that this nightmare is real.  I am waiting to know that my mother has put my needs, ahead of my father's wants.

But something else is happening.  My life is being thrown into a radically spinning change and at the eye of the storm is the calmest my mother has ever been in my entire life.  She is sitting near me, to my right, and we are not making eye contact.  She is telling me that the affair is real, that she has confronted them, that they have confessed.  I feel a flood of relief that this wretched time is about to end.  I ask her when, not if, he is leaving.  And the answer to that question will set the course of my life for the next 25 years, although I don't yet know this.  I have asked her when is he leaving, and she replies that he isn't.  She asked him to choose, and he gave some juvenile, puerile, thoughtless response about choosing between chocolate and vanilla ice creams, and that was that.  I am screaming in my head, and I am screaming at her, and I am completely unheard.

She sat there, unwavering.  She sat there, as though no other options had ever existed, or could exist.  She sat there, unmoving and unmoved to choose a life that could be different from this madness.  She sat there.  She simply sat there telling me that my future was forever altered, and that I could do nothing about it.  I was screaming, but unheard.

As I look back now I am struck by the stillness in that space.  I am shocked at the quiet.  I am dumbfounded by my mother's actions, or lack thereof.  Suddenly, this crazy woman with borderline personality disorder is acting the opposite of how I have known her my entire life.  There is a silent void that seems to be expanding, encompassing the rational words that could be spoken.  This created emptiness was as defining as the words that had come before.  And it would take me 25 years to be able to describe that emptiness without the screaming.  

In fact, for the next 25 years I screamed.  Sometimes I screamed at her, at my father, at my friends, at anyone I could.  Sometimes I screamed in my head, or finally cracked and screamed as I threw and broke my things.  Sometimes I heard her screams in the night, the night terrors ravaging her, and awakening me from my own troubled sleep.  Sometimes I even heard the darkness itself closing in around me, a silent scream that was louder than any verbalization I could have made.   

After I married, I screamed at my wife.  Later I screamed at in-laws.  Then I screamed at my children.   I have been blessed by G-d a million times over that they have all stayed true to me and waited for the Beast to stop screaming. 

So even though I've relived this nightmare more times than I can count, I've never been able to ascribe deeper meaning to it than not being worthy enough to have my needs met.  But as I've lived through these students' meltdowns and hears their words, and their fears, and their needs to be heard, I have seen my own memories and meltdowns in a new light.  I have been trying to be heard.  That what I have to say matters, not just what I need, but that my words carry weight and can change outcomes.  That my words can save my life, save my sanity, and stop the madness that swirls around and within me.  

So, for 25 years I have felt unheard.  I have felt that my words, and the meanings behind them, were valueless, and consequently, so was I.  But all that incessant screaming never got me what I truly wanted.  It never made me feel that I had any more value than before I began ranting.  All the screaming ever did was keep others from hearing me, and after awhile, no one wanted to listen to the screaming either.  

Through writing, I've learned that a quiet voice speaks many more volumes than a wild-eyed Beast ever can, even when he's been shouting for hours, days or weeks.  I've also uncovered that so many of my life choices, have been about being heard.  My academic pursuits, my career choices, my professional speaking, my deeper desire for power and authority have all been driven by a need to feel heard.  It is a tough reality to acknowledge, but by naming it, just as I have named my Beast(s), the power of the darkness is diminished.    

Now that I can see parts of this truth, I know that I can begin the process of change, so that I can be heard.  And more importantly, so that I can be heard without screaming.  My life can be my words.  My actions can speak for me.  My ability to communicate rests in my ability to believe that my own words have value first, and then when it is time to speak them, it will not matter if others agree with my words or not. I will know that my words were ones of conscience, morality, integrity, and truth.  And if I can hear that, then I will never believe that I am unheard again.


Thank you for taking the time to listen to my words.

Be well, love your neighbor as you love yourself, and remember to actually love yourself.

-Ari