There is such a thing as human frailty and need | Survivor Saturday

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For awhile, I was on a roll, planning and pre-writing a bunch of blog posts about how some of the things people criticize as a sign of weakness are really nothing of the sort. Perhaps I will still write those posts. But today I can’t help remembering that there is such a thing as human frailty. We get sick. We struggle. We fall down. We fail. Sometimes life has a way of beating us up and leaving us feeling broken and bleeding. Sometimes we literally are broken and bleeding.

Sometimes we need help.

My first child was born by c-section. He was, to put it mildly, not a good sleeper. For the first three months of his life, I never slept more than an hour and a half at a stretch, and rarely more than an hour. I was so sleep-deprived that I could barely function, and it was overwhelming just to take care of the baby, do laundry, and put dinner on the table every night. Not only was I exhausted, but I had what no one recognized until later as quite a serious case of postpartum depression. (At the time, I had no idea you could be head over heels with joyful love over your baby and depressed at the same time…until the fog lifted.) In addition, something had gone wrong during the spinal, and I had alarming bouts of pain and strange electrical shock like sensations going up and down my spine for over a year. My abdominal muscles had been so damaged that the surgeon had afterwards gone into near hysterics, insisting, “I didn’t cut your stomach muscles! I didn’t cut them! You need to know that I didn’t sever any muscles!” Since my spinal hadn’t even worn off yet at the time he repeatedly made his frantic claim, it seemed a bizarre and out of the blue thing for him to get so upset and almost hyperventilate over. In fact, it took months for me to discover that my abdominal weakness and pain was not normal. On top of all that, and while minor compared to everything else, my external scar was uncomfortable and never healed properly.

Physically and emotionally, I felt like a wreck. But life had left me with a dangerous motto of “Show no weakness!” During those early weeks, I entertained and even cooked for a steady stream of guests, supervised a major data entry project for my husband’s business, traveled out of town with the baby for a weekend while sick with two separate infections, did all the housework except for the mopping and vacuuming which the doctor had strictly forbidden, kept up with all the laundry including cloth diapers, and — after the first week or so — cooked all the dinners. It was insane. As a result, my healing and recovery from surgery took longer than it should have, and my immune system took a beating, which only made things worse for me.

My unwillingness to allow others to see my weakness was, in itself, a form of weakness.

We were not designed to carry every burden all by ourselves, nor to soldier on all alone until we drop. We were designed to live and function in community. We were designed to give and receive help — and it is not weakness to recognize we need help, and to seek out someone willing and able to help us.

It took a wonderful and wise group of mothers to convince me that I did no one any favors, least of all my baby, by pretending to be The Heroic Supermom Who Stands Alone Against All Odds. It took a near collapse on my part that left me sobbing in the arms of a woman I’d just met moments before to admit that things were too much for me. That didn’t make me weak — it meant the burden was overwhelmingly heavy. No wonder I struggled.

Years later, I watched two very strong men carry our heavy oak bookcases up our stairs. Neither of them attempted to carry a bookcase all by himself. No one thought them weak because they couldn’t carry their load unaided. Some things are more than one person can carry, and we all knew the oak bookcases were heavy. Later, when a terrible illness debilitated one of the men, no one would have expected him to carry anything in his weakened state.

My husband had never had major abdominal surgery. I was not much of a complainer, which left him thinking it must not be a big deal. Because I shielded him from much of the reality of life with a sleepless newborn — he woke almost every morning fully rested and slept in late on Saturdays — and because his life before and after baby was kept as unchanged as possible, he had no idea of the enormity of my burden. He hadn’t even tried to lift it to feel how heavy it was, because I had given him no reason or encouragement to do so. Consequently, we both began seeing me as weak, and as a failure for not being able to function as if my life had not been profoundly and wonderfully altered. After all, hadn’t I once foolishly pronounced, in my ignorance, that I would never allow a cute little baby to throw our lives into chaotic disarray?

I was not so foolish with subsequent babies, but I did not apply the lessons learned to the rest of my life. For years, I struggled alone and unaided under the load of sexual trauma. It was an invisible burden to everyone else. Finally two major family crises got piled on top of all that, and I could no longer carry my burdens. I almost collapsed under the weight.

Those who had never seen my burdens, never felt them, never tried to help carry them, those who had no idea of the extent of my wounds — because I operated under the principle of “show no weakness” — those who didn’t know better saw only my sudden inability to no longer function as if all were well in my life, as if I weren’t being crushed under a load far too heavy for anyone to carry. No wonder I was perceived as weak and fragile.

My therapist treats children as well as adults, and sometimes he will pass on the wisdom they share with him. One described therapy as the process of crawling out from under a giant backpack that was filled with rocks, opening the backpack in order to sort out what shouldn’t be in there, and remaking the backpack so that it was human-sized and appropriate to carry. Needing help carrying an oversized backpack full of rocks doesn’t make you weak — it just means you’re human, and the load is too heavy.

I was thankful to find my “tribe”, which consists of some of the strongest people I know. We have gone from wounded birds afraid to show weakness to eagles locking our wings and flying above the storms. That doesn’t mean we are a superhuman bunch (although we joke that one of us is) and it doesn’t mean that we haven’t stumbled, floundered, fallen, or been crushed. The thing is — we know the weight of those invisible burdens. We know the pain of the struggle. When someone is collapsing under the enormity of it all, we don’t say, “Look how weak she is. What’s wrong with her?” We say, “That burden is too heavy. Let me help. Here, lean on me.”

The same God who designed us to live and heal in community, to bear one another’s burdens, also sent His Son to lift those burdens we were never meant to carry.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (‭Matthew‬ ‭11‬:‭28-30‬ ESV)

Having and expressing human emotions is not weakness | Survivor Saturday

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We aren’t being “emotionally fragile” when we feel human emotions in response to trauma.

Survivors are often labeled, by ourselves or others, as being “weak” or “fragile”. I previously wrote about that here. Since then, I’ve been giving some more thought to the whole idea of emotions…feeling them…accepting them…expressing them….

Some of us are, by nature, more “feeling” type people, and may be more expressive and communicative as well. Some may see this as a weakness, but why not argue that it is a strength? We need to affirm qualities like, She is so connected to her emotions, or She is so expressive and full of life, or even, Wow, she’s so emotionally gifted! Aren’t emotions part of our very human nature? Where did we get the idea that it’s wrong to feel some of them, or that they need to be suppressed and ignored?

Some families, more than others, stifle this part of their humanity. They might have unwritten “family rules” about emotions, such as:

  • Only men and boys are allowed to get angry.
  • Only girls are allowed to cry.
  • Women and girls need to act “happy” and “nice”.
  • Certain emotions are unacceptable.
  • Only positive emotions are allowed.
  • You are not supposed to talk about feelings.
  • It’s important to act stoic all the time.
  • Emotions should not be expressed — not even happy ones — except in a subdued, quiet manner.
  • Emotions are dangerous. Don’t listen to them.
  • Emotions are scary. Try not to feel them.
  • Emotional people are inferior. Don’t be like them.
  • Emotions are divided into good ones or bad ones, and the bad ones are sinful. Don’t feel them.
  • Getting in touch with your emotions is for California hippy types or wimps. Don’t be like them.
  • It’s OK to blame others for your emotions.
  • It’s the role of women and girls to make sure men and boys are happy.
  • Mothers are responsible for all the emotions in the home.
  • You should be happy — or it will make everyone around you unhappy.

Any of those sound familiar?

Some of us were told, growing up, that we were wrong to feel a certain way — or even that we were wrong about how we were feeling: “No, you can’t possibly be angry at your father! You are really happy for him.” We may have been told we were overly sensitive, or that we needed to tone ourselves down. We may have learned to suppress our own emotions, lest we anger or upset our parents. It’s a wonder more children don’t grow up wondering if they are the only ones in their families with any emotions at all!

People raised in emotionally inhibited (that’s nicer than saying “emotionally stunted”) families tend to take this discomfort with emotions out into the world with them. After all, if our parents were kind, decent, loving people, it’s rare that we scrutinize our upbringing for flaws, or spend time and energy analyzing the nuances of our family culture. Unless we have a good reason to change our minds, we tend to think the way emotions were handled in our home is pretty much the right way, even if it was fairly stifling.

Let’s imagine that two such people marry, and that the wife is a trauma survivor. If she has been raised to believe she must “keep your chin up no matter what”, she will find the vast chaotic swirl of trauma-induced emotions to be a sign that there is something wrong with her — rather than that her emotions are a natural response to the fact that something wrong was done to her. Painful emotions are painful no matter what, but the less emotionally savvy we are, the more tempted we are to numb or escape them. Like us, our hypothetical wife will most likely tend to follow her family’s lead in numbing, escaping, and/or suppressing.

Her husband will be quite content with an emotionally numb wife, if that is familiar to him because of what he grew up with. In fact, if she isn’t “good enough” at suppressing all her “negative” emotions, he will no doubt encourage her to keep her emotional range within his comfort level. If she fails, he will see this as her being weak, overly emotional, hysterical, etc.

The irony is that when his wife begins a deeper process of healing, when her emotions become unbound, when she becomes more fully alive, when she faces the truth of what was done to her and allows herself to feel all her emotions in response to such evil — when she is finally strong enough to do that — that is when her husband, instead of applauding her courage, is most apt to tell her that she is weak and fragile.

It is all too easy to accept that assessment. We think, yet again, that there is something seriously wrong with us. I remember crying in my therapist’s office, “Why does this hurt so much more now than it did back then?”

“Because,” he said gently, “back then, just in order to survive, you had to try to pretend it away. There was no safe place for you to feel, to grieve, to get angry at the cruel injustice of it all. You had to hold it all together. It was too scary to face the truth.”

It’s still too scary! I wanted to scream. In fact, I probably did…or, more likely, whispered it in a frightened gasp. Therapy session after therapy session, I bemoaned “ever opening up this can of worms”. Why not just keep on holding it together? Even if it wasn’t better for me, wouldn’t it be better for everyone else if I just went on pretending I was mostly fine? My therapist, God bless him, kept giving me assuring, encouraging, hopeful words — even when I accused him of lying or just mouthing therapeutic bullshit. But he was right. My sister-survivors and brother-survivors — my tribe — kept telling me the journey of healing was worth it, that I was not being selfish, that it was the right thing to do…and I grew to believe them more and more as I watched them walk it out.

Healing is messy. If we are human, experiencing trauma, betrayal, violence, humiliation, hatred, and dehumanizing acts will wound us deeply. We aren’t just recovering from those events, but from the years in their aftermath when we did not adequately heal. It takes courage and strength to face all that head-on…to stare down our worst memories…to allow the most extensive surgery to be performed on our most painfully wounded parts.

Emotionally healthy people actually feel and express their emotions. We may be a bit messy while learning to do so. We have been through a cataclysmic event; naturally there be some cataclysmic emotions…and, if we have held in many or most of them for years, they will seem overwhelming, like a dam bursting. It takes a lot of strength and courage not to avoid or numb that.

It takes even more strength to go against a lifetime of conditioning, to become more alive instead of less, and to pursue healing when it is so painful. But when the people who are supposed to care for us the most keep tearing us down rather than building us up, discouraging us rather than encouraging us — when they offer us words of weakness and failure rather than strength and hope — then it takes even more strength and determination on our part.

“Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness.”
— Amos Bronson Alcott

So…my words of advice to any potential allies out there, anyone who wants to walk alongside a sexual trauma survivor on her healing journey: Don’t tear her down. Don’t demean her. Don’t add to her negative self-talk. If all you see is weakness and fragility, you don’t know her well enough to be her ally. If you have no words of encouragement and hope, if you cannot see her strength and worth clearly enough to remind her of it, keep your mouth shut — except to encourage her to find real allies.

And this is for those of us who are survivors, no matter what it might be that we have survived:

“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt in You Learn By Living

“Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use.”
— Ruth Gordon

“The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.

You are able to say to yourself, `I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’

The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line, it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

Note to my fellow and sister survivors: Although I am somewhat of a loner by nature, I believe very strongly in the value of finding a “tribe”. We heal best in community. If your current “community” — be it family, friends, or church — is not truly encouraging and supportive, in a healthy way, of your healing, this doesn’t mean you have to dump them. It just means you have to look elsewhere for your “healing community”. Don’t give up.

I’d love to hear from you about your healing journey. If you found a tribe, how and where did you find them? If you grew up in an emotionally open and expressive family, how did that help you in the healing process? If not, how are you overcoming that?

We are not fragile or weak | Trauma Tuesday

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If you are like me, you may have been labeled fragile and weak. You may have even applied those labels to yourself.

It is time to face the truth.

Definition of fragile, when used to describe a person:

• not strong or sturdy; delicate and vulnerable.
synonyms: weak, delicate, frail, debilitated.

Definitions of weak:

• lacking the power to perform physically demanding tasks; lacking physical strength and energy: “she was recovering from the flu and was very weak”
synonyms: frail, feeble, delicate, fragile.
• liable to break or give way under pressure; easily damaged: “the salamander’s tail may be broken off at a weak spot near the base”
• lacking the force of character to hold to one’s own decisions, beliefs, or principles; irresolute.
synonyms: spineless, craven, cowardly, pusillanimous, timid
antonyms: strong, resolute

If we were fragile, we would have crumbled. We would have been crushed and destroyed. If we were weak — no trauma survivor would want to write this article nor read it. We would still be trying to escape into denial, and hide from the truth of what happened to us. We would lack the strength and courage to deal with it.

As trauma survivors, it is sometimes difficult to see beyond our own sense of brokenness. Cultural messages, as well as our family and friends, are often not much help. The enormity of rape and sexual abuse is often downplayed, treated as “no big deal”, or as “regrettable sex”, and we are impatiently urged to “get over it”, to “move on”. One husband said to his wife, “The fact that you were raped before we met was never a big deal to me, so I don’t understand why you can’t let it go and just forget about it.” Parents asked their daughter, “We got over what happened to you; why can’t you?”

While some minimize what was done to us, others try to define us by it. They expect us to be utterly and completely shattered, unable to ever recover, broken beyond compare. One husband blamed almost everything on his wife’s rape: if she was tired, if she wasn’t always eager for sex, if her hormones affected her mood, if she was sad, he assumed it was because she was damaged by rape — he redefined normal, human behaviors and feelings as pathology in her case, and as evidence of how “weak” and “fragile” she was. Sometimes people will label us as irrevocably broken simply because we react in any way to trauma, or do not remain unaffected by tragedy and suffering.

Many non-survivors who consider themselves strong, and us weak, are merely untested. Because of this, they recognize neither true strength nor true weakness.

Often we label ourselves as weak, convinced that a strong, resolute person would not have given way to the pressures of our rapists and abusers, and would have resisted effectively. It took therapy to help me sort out the differences between trust, vulnerability, and weakness of character and will. It also took the work of therapy to make me realize that, while I may have been weak in some ways at the age of 23, I had also shown strength and determination — and I had certainly become stronger since then.

Sometimes PTSD can make us seem, act, and even feel timid. In addition, I was — until very recently — a fearful person in general. I used to joke that I was world’s biggest chicken, and that I was scared of everything. I saw this as a major weakness until someone pointed out, “It takes a lot of strength and a lot of guts to face down your fears and proceed despite them.” Not everyone sees it like that. While some people thought — not knowing of my many fears — that I was sometimes brave to the point of near foolhardiness, another person often considered me overly timid and fragile — because he knew of my fearfulness. Apparently to him, strength would have meant an absence of fear.

It is, for many of us, a long and difficult — often painful and harrowing — journey from victim to survivor. We have to face the worst demons of our past head-on. The healing process has been likened to the most awful sort of surgery, to scraping out horribly infected wounds, to pulling thorns and daggers out of our flesh, to slaying dragons, and to a host of other painful and frightening ordeals. Courage did not drive me forward; desperation did. Perhaps that makes me weak and fragile in the eyes of some. They have not walked where I have walked, where we have walked. They have no idea.

Living a relatively sheltered life, never being the victim of a violent crime, never being abused and betrayed, never having to do battle with evil — these things do not make you strong. All it means is that you have been spared the harsher cruelties of life so far. You are untested.

But when you have known suffering and cruelty, when you fight against the demons of your past, when you rise above the evil perpetuated against you, when you refuse to let your abusers go on winning, when you do not allow trauma to define you, when you pursue the difficult task of healing — wherever you are in your healing journey — that makes you strong. And when you can finally stand and declare, “I AM AN OVERCOMER!” — that really makes you strong.

We can’t help the blindness of others. But it is important that we open our eyes to who we truly are. We are survivors. We are the ones who cling to hope. We are the ones who bend, but never truly break. We are the ones who put back together the pieces of our lives that are broken, and emerge even better than before. We are not fragile, or we could not endure. We are not weak, or we could not do the hard work of healing. We are survivors. We are overcomers. We are strong.

I weigh in about vaccines

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Back in 1985, I was somewhat more educated about vaccines than the typical parent, having taken a college course on the history of virus diseases — a fascinating and hugely informative course taught by an amazing man whose many accomplishments in the field of medicine included being the head of the CDC’s virology division. So, while I was unquestioningly pro-vaccine to the point that it never dawned on me not to vaccinate, I knew there were things about virus diseases that were yet mysterious and unexplainable. For instance, the two brilliant doctors and researchers who taught my course, experts in the fields of virology and epidemiology, could not entirely explain why certain diseases had obviously been on the decline before vaccines against them were introduced, or why the polio rates in an unvaccinated populace outside the U.S. dropped at the same time and almost the same rate as the newly vaccinated U.S. population.

None of that, for a moment, caused me to question the wisdom of full vaccination against any and all diseases. In all my reading and study, nothing had made me think that vaccines were anything but entirely safe.

Then my infant son experienced syncope following his routine vaccination. I recall holding his limp, seemingly lifeless body in my arms, his breathing so shallow that I could not detect it, and screaming for the doctor, the nurse — anyone — to help. I thought my son was dead.

You don’t get over that quickly.

My son was not dead. The nurse, impatient with my state of shock, and unfamiliar with information like this, told me my son was obviously “shutting down from overstimulation” — even though he was long past the newborn stage and never reacted like that to anything else. She refused to summon the doctor and insisted that I leave immediately.

Still in shock, and not knowing what else to do, I left.

To make a long story short, my infant son — who usually slept very little during the day — remained in what I can only describe as a coma-like state for over 8 hours. I could not rouse him. Repeated calls to the doctor’s office finally resulted in my being told by the nurses that I was an overwrought new mother and should enjoy the “break from my son” for as long as it lasted, and to stop calling them. It was that day that I discovered we had a family history of “bad reactions” to the pertussis vaccine, which prompted me — once my son seemed back to normal — to head off to the UCLA Biomed Library to try to find out what on earth had happened to him.

This was before The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and my son’s frightening reaction was not reported to VAERS. The CDC admits this database is incomplete, even today. How incomplete is anyone’s guess.

In the next two to three years, I read everything I could lay my hands on about vaccines. I questioned medical professionals. I attended seminars. I did all the study and research that I could.

What I discovered during my research was that my son’s reaction, while sounding trivial — oh, he just slept deeply all day — was actually considered serious because it is usually accompanied by neurological damage. Two years later, another pediatrician told me emphatically, “I cannot in good conscience give any member of your family the pertussis vaccine.”

“You might not be so lucky next time,” more than one doctor told me.

I decided to take their medical advice. Unfortunately, I foolishly mentioned this to some other mothers — and that’s when I discovered just how angry, hysterical, and irrationally selfish the radical fringe of the most extremely pro-vaccine parents can get. I discovered that the ones urging me the most vociferously to “Do some research!” had never actually done any of their own, and were totally unfamiliar with what I considered the most basic knowledge about vaccines. When one distraught woman went so far as to scream in my face that she didn’t care if all my children died from vaccines just as long as hers weren’t exposed to whooping cough, I decided this topic was too emotionally loaded to discuss rationally with some people, and it was probably best to keep my mouth shut in the future.

The current hysteria reminds me of those days, only now it seems so much more widespread and virulent. I would recommend parents, and all those concerned about measles, to read this information from the CDC. If you are going to lambaste people for their medical decisions, or clamor for the government to take draconian measures against non-vaccinators, at the very least you should acquire some basic knowledge and make sure your own vaccinations are up to date.

If you think every person who decides to forego a particular vaccine is a dangerously ignorant wacko anti-vaxxer, I would like you to know:

  • Some of us felt very much like you until something scary happened to one of our children
  • Some of us are not at all “anti-vaccine”, but carefully consider the merits of each one, weighing the risks and benefits
  • Some of us have done a lot of research and study in order to make the difficult decisions we have made
  • Some of us are following medical advice
  • Some of us will forego a particular vaccine for reasons that have nothing to do with autism
  • Some of us are so concerned about people with compromised immune systems that we do our best to prevent their exposure to people who are not only possibly ill, but might have recently received a live vaccine (and, contrary to what you may have been told, the measles vaccine in the U.S. is a live vaccine)
  • Some of us understand that no vaccine is 100% effective, which is why we might get argumentative when you insist your fully vaccinated — but obviously sick — child could not possibly have an illness he was vaccinated against, even if his symptoms seem glaringly obvious to everyone else. When we point this out, we aren’t on an anti-vax tear; we just don’t want your kid infecting other kids, vaccinated or not. Besides, if you’re right that the cough that sounds so alarmingly whooping-like isn’t pertussis, or that what your child is covered with is some entirely different pox, then I really don’t want to be exposed to whatever it is your kid has — so please keep him/her home, OK?
  • Some of us understand that not all diseases have a vaccine. We also understand that what might be a “simple cold” or “I hope it’s not the flu, haha” to one person might be quite serious to someone else. That’s why some of us might seem a bit “paranoid” about germs, or overly concerned with maintaining healthy immune systems.
  • We have a wide variety of reasons for choosing against one vaccine, several vaccines, or all vaccines. Don’t assume you know those reasons, or that we are all misguided, ignorant zealouts out to infect your children…after all, I try not to assume all stridently vocal pro-vaccinators are misguided, ignorant zealouts who — because they can’t be bothered to make informed decisions for their children and themselves — want to take away my right to do so.

Note: Since my youngest is almost 18, I no longer have a dog in this fight. And, frankly, that’s a relief.

Depression

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I posted this on Facebook this morning:

When I was in the worst grips of depression, this verse seemed an unrealistic platitude, or a promise given to those Christians far more deserving than I. “Where is my power, love, and sound mind?” I would ask desperately.

If I could have “snapped out of it”, believe me, I would have. If people quoting verses at me would have fixed me, my problems would have vanished instantly. Unless you have ever suffered true depression, you have no idea how tight and insidious its grip can be.

God’s answers for me are often neither easy nor quick. Some I may never receive in this lifetime. But I did come to realize that my bleak depression was never from Him, and that He had in fact given me those good things promised in this verse — but they were buried and hidden under the dark fog of despair.

My road to healing was not easy. But it has been so worth it. I am so thankful that God always kept a spark of hope alive in my heart, that He never let go of me, and that He finally brought me out of the darkness.