Trauma

Talkin’ ‘Bout Love

~ accidentaltherapistblog ~ 3 Comments

Love, love, love…

All you need is love

All you need is love

All you need is love, love

Love is all you need.

The Beatles

Post Christmas, I had a lovely four-day break in Hobart with my lovely partner, sans our lovely children…first time in over a decade.  Funny thing is, we missed our flight home.  My fault entirely.  I’d never have made such a silly blunder if travelling with the kids on my own, which I’ve done several times (well, without their Dad anyway).  I highlight (literally) every itinerary item obsessively and check and re-check dates and times because I simply can’t trust myself not too.  I’m a tad daffy I’m afraid.  The Virgin check-in person-whatever-his-title-actually-is looked at me bored when I trilled breathlessly, “We’ve missed our plane…I don’t know how…we were waiting around all afternoon just sitting in the sun…la la la la” and responded, dead pan, “Missed it, the plane’s almost landed”!

Freudians, read into my error as you will.  I’ve got a few theories of my own that don’t rely on the scatterbrain excuse.

Hobart is so pretty.  We stayed in the North and it reminds me of Fitzroy (Melbourne), only less pretentious and more friendly, with students lolling about in crumpled clothes and odd socks and lots of trees and broad, open streets.  I’m not here to wax lyrical about Hobart (and trust me I could go on for days about MONA, about how it’s like descending into a Hades underworld…another time).  I do want to talk about love though.  I don’t really even like the above quoted Beatles anthem; I’m not the world’s greatest Beatles admirer, I confess.  I’ve always found the song a bit lollipop, a bit trite, smug even.  After all, it’s easy to croon about the virtue of love when you’re a Beatle.  I suspect there’s not much left to prove after that.

But when I reflect on having seen Lion at the fabulous old deco State Cinema in Elizabeth St., which raises themes I do want to talk about, the song annoyingly starts playing in my head.  Yeah, yeah, nearly everyone’s seen the movie now.  At the time I’d read very little about it, but the confluence of being in Tassie and it being about an actual Tasmanian family seemed fitting.  Don’t want to be a spoiler, but I wish I’d taken a whole box of tissues with me – I didn’t have a single one in my backpack – and confess to sobbing intently throughout most of the film.  Imagine my mascara!  I couldn’t even manage to cry out one eye, like I sometimes do, depending on who’s beside me, but then decided “Never mind”, because whilst gentleman next to me was softly bawling, the woman directly across the aisle just pulled the rip cord and was quavering and snorting, her nose audibly full of snot.

What resonated for me about the movie takes me back to a conversation I had with a dear friend just prior to going away.  We were talking about books over salad bagels and cups of tea and she lent me A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.  It’s a bit bashed about – dog-eared and stained and obviously devoured, if somewhat slowly.  It’s tough going, by all accounts.  It’s also a bloody big book.  We’re both mums.  Novels, the delicious things, don’t get read so fast these days.  I’m yet to read it.  I asked her how the book had impressed her and she answered thoughtfully thus:

Even when one has had terrible tragedy or trauma in one’s life, if one can experience or touch love, then it seems that one is lucky after all or, at least, has lived a worthy life.

Just recently at the uniform shop at my kids’ school, Lion popped into the conversation and one of the Mums recounted how she was touched by the love Saroo, the protagonist, had for both mothers.  I quipped back that it was the love between the brothers, little six-year-old Saroo and Guddo, that killed me.

When your mother works as a labourer moving rocks in a quarry in central India (judging by the way adult Saroo’s college friends baulked at the recollection, his family was of the “Untouchables” caste) and you’ve a little sister to boot, you must depend on an older sibling for very survival.  By necessity, Guddo was”parentified”, a proxy father figure (the father’s absence is conspicuously unexplained) who assumed many of the responsibilities usually reserved for adults in more economically flush countries, including basic tasks like feeding and cleaning and more complex ones like supervision, teaching and discipline.  Not even an adolescent by the looks of it, Guddo’s quest to find some temporary work to relieve his family sets in motion the trail of loss…

What seemed obvious, however, was that the real bond between the brothers was one of love, not survival.  The portrayal of tenderness between them was aching.  The way Saroo looked up to his brother, preferring his company; the way Guddo “held” Saroo, comforting him by stroking his face to sleep, reassuring him with promises of jellies (“jalebi”) and a full tummy, playing with him and looking out for his little shadow like it was never an option not to…because he loved him.  They loved each other.  A capacity bestowed upon them by the love shown to them by their mother.

Back in the 1950s, American psychologist Harry Harlow demonstrated how baby rhesus monkeys, separated from their mothers, preferred to spend time with a terry cloth maternal “surrogate”, rather than a wire surrogate bearing a bottle of milk.  Attesting to the primacy of love in early attachment, the monkeys chose contact comfort over food.  The (infamous) research strikes me still.  It is within the crucible of “secure” mother-infant transactions, or a loving bond with an alternative attachment figure, that one’s capacity for intimacy, and attendant features of self-worth and self-efficacy, are distilled.

We see this in the juxtaposition of Saroo’s story with that of the Brierley family’s second adopted son, Mantosh.  It’s an irony that adult Saroo was ultimately able to bear the loss of his birth family because he was anchored by the love he had known.  Conversely, family therapists often say about an adolescent’s “failure to launch” that “If you don’t belong, you can’t leave”.  Reading between the lines (notably, the fractured relationships Mantosh has with his adoptive parents and Saroo and his inability to be nurtured/comforted by these potentially restorative relationships, not to mention episodes of head banging, drug use and self-imposed exile from the world), Mantosh had experienced an early trauma of a different kind, an unspeakable kind where love does not reside (or resides no longer) and one is rendered atrophied, if not broken.  I can only guess that his trauma minimally involved neglect, but probably outright violence and abuse, with exposure to acts or circumstances that once seen cannot be erased from the mind’s eye.

Similar themes are echoed in The Light Between Oceans, a movie adaptation of the novel by M. L. Stedman.  A fictional and far-fetched tale set in post World War I Australia, a lighthouse keeper and his wife, Tom and Isabel, happen upon a boat carrying an infant girl and her dead father, conveniently right after the couple has lost its second child in utero.  Anyhoo, the couple raises “Lucy” as its own until another serendipitous sequence of events sees the four-year-old girl returned to her mother.  The child has been intensely loved by both families and she transitions, not without difficulty, back into her original family and ties are severed with Tom and Isabel.  However, an adult “Grace”, her birth name, now a mother to a baby son, seeks out Tom to find that, whilst Isabel has recently died, she has been left a letter explaining her “illicit” mother’s  actions and motives.  Lucy-Grace hasn’t just been loved, she knows it well, and gives thanks to Tom for such.  A very touching moment, yes.  Yes, I cried again.

An adult me is not convinced that all you need is love.  I have a practical side.  I know you need a whole host of other factors to get through this life relatively unscathed, maybe battered but not broken.  Hell, I’m the queen of small containers that my children carry off to school each day bearing fruit and yoghurt and other morsels to feed their growing brains.  Feeding one’s kids healthily every day requires a big commitment.  More seriously though, there are the realities of social inequity, greed and human hatred and ignorance to contend with and, where these exist, I’m fairly certain love can get crushed.  Evidence:  poverty, war, social exclusion, global warming and other damage to the planet…Need I go on?  How about the example of little Saroo, still in India, narrowly escaping being conscripted into what appears might be a pedophile ring?

Maybe it is the case that hatred and fear of others is self-hatred projected outwards.  And that love is the ultimate panacea to such.  I also know that we humans have a shadow side that must be accommodated, rather than eradicated, if we are to deal with ourselves and our relationships maturely:  genuine self-love can be a tough gig.

I think that to touch pain is to touch love.  We can all relate to loss – losing something or someone we care about, being lost, feeling lost.  There was something sweet about the shedding of communal tears that sunny day in the cinema in North Hobart.  It was an expression and a release of our shared vulnerability.  Later, as I walked out onto the street blinking in the light, I may have looked tear-stained but I felt more connected and alive.  Hallelujah for books and movies!

Yoga, Achilles and Other Catastrophes

~ accidentaltherapistblog ~ 2 Comments

A cautionary note:  This blog post covers some difficult terrain, including war, specifically the Holocaust, and trauma, which I can only hope to have done with care and sensitivity.

I’ve done yoga for a dozen or more years, on and off, more off since having children, but, I’m happy to say, fairly regularly of late. I’m certainly not very good in any technical sense and can’t get near some of the older ladies in my class in terms of flexibility. Some of them have been practising for dozens more years than me.

One of these ladies I’ll call Liliana*. I’m drawn to her. She has a beautiful face framed by perfectly arched eyebrows and a stylish bob. She always wears a pop of colour on her lips and matching toe polish. Just recently, she looked to be in such a trance doing a very difficult pose that I thought she might levitate. I sense she knows her value. About a year ago whilst doing a twist on the mat, I jolted – visibly I’m sure – upon noticing a tattoo composed of six digits on the inside of Liliana’s left forearm. It had slipped out from beneath her three-quarter sleeve. Sloppily, carelessly scratched into her skin, I was so startled by its existence/appearance that I had to rapidly compose myself by re-focusing on the posture lest I involuntarily blurt out, “Is that what I think it is”? I hasten to add that no-one else seemed to notice, disconcerting in itself. Next, I launched into some mental gymnastics that went something like this: “If she’s in her 70s and WWII ended in 1945, then she must have been a very young child in the concentration camps”. Auschwitz actually, because tattoos weren’t issued by the Nazis in any other camps.

I wanted to talk to Liliana about it after class, but wouldn’t have known how to begin. And how could I presume? Anything at all. About life. About her life. I barely know anything about her apart from the type of car she drives (and that she’s partial to orange lipstick). Some weeks later, I thought about mentioning it to my teacher. About the impact it had on me. About my interest in the Holocaust and the incongruity of the reminder of such human horror here in sunny beachside Melbourne. I mean, I studied German at school; I’ve travelled to Berlin and have a piece of the Wall; I worked in a neighbourhood dappled with synagogues and yarmulkes and had several Jewish clients; an old neighbour’s Polish father lost his 12 brothers in the war – either executed or perished, he was the sole survivor; I have a Polish friend…but never before have I actually set eyes on an “ID tattoo”. I feel decidedly queasy even using that term: It seems euphemistic at best and fails to capture the sadistic intent.

A friend naively asked, “How did you know what you were looking at”? To which I think I thought in response, as opposed to outright saying, “What do you mean how did I know what I was looking at? How could you not know”?

I memorised those six digits and set about doing a bit of research. Prior to tattooing, prisoners of war in the Auschwitz camps were mostly “identified” (dehumanised) via serial numbers, with accompanying shapes, symbols and letters delineating status, nationality or religion, sewn into their uniforms. There were various number series issued, evolving over time, with men and women having separate numerical series. Tattooing was introduced in 1941, with the influx of Soviet POWs. It was initially done using a metal stamp with interchangeable needles attached to it. The stamp was impressed into the left side of the chest and dye rubbed into the bleeding wound. Proving cumbersome, a single-needle device superseded this method, with tattoos being applied on the outer side of the left forearm. Relevantly, prisoners from several transports in 1943 had their numbers tattooed on the inner side of their left upper forearms. Additionally, each new series of numbers introduced at the Auschwitz camps began with the number “1”. Snap.

Despite the fact that the yoga I practice is about non-competitive striving, I almost immediately reverted to a sort of judgemental comparison – called “social comparison” – about the state of my own body and mind:

Lord, I may have had two car crashes already this year (not my fault, although my yoga teacher insists “there are no accidents”!), still can’t work out what I want to do when I grow up, still wondering when I will feel grown up, will agonise for all eternity over which high school to send my son (who, as a tweenie, is probably more emotionally mature than I’m ever likely to be…I’m happy for him!) and am now lame after attempting a string of jetes down the hallway with my bendy pretzel ballerina daughter. Not only that, it took me two separate runs over the floorboards to realise I’d hurt my Achilles, because the first time I just thought “ouch” and then promptly forgot about it, destined to repeat the mistake…

 And I have the audacity to feel sorry for myself, when it seems very likely that Liliana has been to hell, or has glimpsed it through the eyes of another; quite close enough. How can my pain compare? What a feeble and sorry thing I am.

The Holocaust is evidence of Sartre’s dictum that “Hell is other people” (or can be). It is difficult to fully fathom, let alone measure, the extent of the creative cruelty inflicted by a group of human beings upon their own kind (of course, Hitler’s utopian Aryan race was all about the other and a disavowal of our essential sameness) and the generational devastation wreaked. The TV movie The Wave, novelised by Todd Strasser and based on an actual classroom experiment carried out by Ron Jones with high school students in the mid 1960’s in Palo Alto, California (seen/read in my adolescence and to be highly recommended still), goes some way towards capturing the dizzying effects of power bestowed by group belonging combined with cronyism. I recently dusted off Lily Brett’s Too Many Men, which had been sitting on my bookcase for some time, a gem of a find in the local second-hand bookstore at just $1. I couldn’t put it down, all 714 pages of it; a mammoth and oft deeply wrenching, part fictional, part historical treatise on the “transgenerational transmission” of trauma (you’ll probably hear me use that family therapy-coined phrase a lot) bestowed by war and human hatred.

Psychologists have historically concerned themselves with the impact of life events on well-being, rank ordering experiences like death and bereavement, divorce, family relocation, birth of a child, etc., in terms of stress and I think this perspective is still useful and relevant. (I do consider that a cat getting run over by a car, although sad for its family – feline or human – and a horrible way to die, is intrinsically less awful than murder). However, I am also reminded of the existential notion (also a basic premise of CBT) of Victor Frankl, former Austrian psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, that it is one’s interpretation of life events or circumstances, and capacity for grace under fire, that ultimately determine one’s inner experience and outer lot. He says of human suffering:

…a man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.1

I despise the condescending finger pointed at ostensibly lucky others: “What does he/she possibly have to be unhappy/depressed about”? I’ll never forget a friend’s wondrous declaration about another friend and her cheating partner: “I don’t know why she’s so upset about finding out he’s having an affair, when he’s a total creep anyway”! What a gross injustice of imagination and empathy. I’ve never met a person who wasn’t miserable or distressed for a perfectly good reason, when considered from within that person’s own frame of reference.

Conversely, sometimes when we revert to thinking others have life sorted out, whilst we’re bumbling, sometimes quite ungraciously along and often in the dark (a phenomenon referred to as “upward social comparison”, i.e., comparison with others deemed superior to oneself), it pays to remember that everyone has pain. Everyone suffers. Up to 50% of people have thought about suicide at some point in their lives. Up to another 50% have a mental health diagnosis of some sort or another. (This seems less surprising when one also considers that there are a lot of diagnostic categories.) The point is, we don’t always know what the person next to us in yoga, or the vet’s waiting room, or our kids’ school assembly has gone, or is going, through. At times when our own vulnerability presents itself, we might take heart in knowing that someone else, somewhere, has felt this too. And next time we’re in a queue, we might just wonder about the person next to us. It wouldn’t cost one anything to offer a smile, just in case…that person happens to be copping his or her share of the confusion or uncertainty or plain old crappiness that life inevitably throws up.

When I next saw Liliana’s left arm free of ink, I thought briefly that I might be going mad or otherwise had concocted a very elaborate fantasy. But I couldn’t have imagined such a specific sequence of numbers. Surely? I decided not. I now think the numbers were written, not indelibly, on her arm, perhaps in remembrance of her mother or older sister, maybe as an anniversary tribute or ritual. Rabbis disapprove of the practice apparently, but it’s not uncommon, say, for a grandson to get a replica tattoo of his grandmother’s war number. Ultimately, I just don’t know about the meaning of the number I saw on Liliana’s arm, and am never likely to. But in the middle of a group trust exercise with which I was struggling, when she gently persuaded, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you, I’m strong”, I suddenly felt very lucky and in that moment knew her words to be true. They resonate with me still.

The beauty, of yoga, for me, is that it’s a (mostly) wordless space that enables one to just be. It’s a level playing field. One’s background, one’s profession, one’s role as a mother or partner, etc., etc., etc., one’s ego-based “conditioned” identity (or any other imposed ID), ceases to be relevant. We’re in the moment. Right here, right now. No matter one’s age, or the injuries or wounds one is carrying. And when one drifts as one inevitably does, into the past or the future, into plans about preparing dinner or a reverie about some improved version of oneself (“If only I could get my leg higher up the wall”)…the aim is to come back into the room, again and again…back to one’s senses, back to one’s body, with some care and kindness. And we could all extend a little more of that, towards others and ourselves.

In the words of Iggy Pop, and I remind you he’s almost 70 so he’s matured somewhat, “We’re all gonna die, so let’s be nice”!

1.  Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1959, p. 43.

Postscript: *Not her real name. Also, bendy pretzel-ness is by no means unique to my young daughter, but, I’ve observed, a common attribute of most determined six-year-old girls who seem intent on spending their lives upside down in the form of a cartwheel or handstand. Middle-aged women, with no prior dance experience, probably should NOT attempt the jete on floorboards, or any other surface for that matter.