Trauma

Something happened this week, in the midst of all this angst, that has given me a little bit of hope. Not a lot of hope, it must be said. More like sitting in a very dark room and seeing a little pinprick of light. It might go out, it might turn out to be nothing, but even seeing it is better than just sitting in the dark.

I filled in a survey a few months ago for "wives" of Vietnam veterans, which was all about levels of psychological distress and coping methods. And now I have found a sort of summary of that report, which shows that approximately one-quarter of us have extremely severe levels of depression, anxiety and stress. The study attributes this to secondary trauma, resulting from living with a traumatised person. It is apparently more likely to happen with "wives" who have also had traumas of their own that aren't related to their partners.

My Big Dude has Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome from his time in Vietnam and he has it pretty badly. It was the first problem that was ever diagnosed. He copes so well with it most of the time that most people wouldn't see that in him. He doesn't have those stereotypical behaviours like getting aggressive, go crazy in shopping centres, etc, but living at close quarters with him, it's obvious.

But what reading this summary paper is making me think is that I tend to view his PTSD as something he deals with. I haven't generally recognised how many of our issues as a couple may be caused or impacted by PTSD. This paper here is really making me think, because I see a lot of the issues it talks about in veteran marriages in our relationship. Issues around emotional numbing and disengagement, sexual problems made worse by his anxiety about it all, my own issues around caring for him - its all there. Not the violence, thank God. My Big Dude, after seeing all that killing in Vietnam, is now so gentle that he can't even bring himself to go fishing.

But even more, it's this paper that is striking me. It talks about the long-term effects of trauma as not just a collection of symptoms and behaviours, but as being about trust:

Trauma destroys the trust relationship of the victim with themselves and the world. This creates an inordinate amount of stress on the mental, emotional and physical capacities of the victim whose coping behaviours and belief structures have been shattered by trauma. The victim no longer knows how to act or what to expect from the world in order to survive. The victim develops characteristic symptoms described as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Apparently people who know the traumatised person and have frequent exposure to them often also end up with many of the symptoms of PTSD, in a kind of secondary trauma. A lot of the studies that are done are actually about the effects on therapists, but I think this is also really true of partners:

The experience of vicarious symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder may challenge the caregiver's basic faith, heighten a sense of personal vulnerability, distrust and cynicism about the human condition. The therapist may experience profound grief and feel as though he or she were in mourning with the victim.

That first quote, about the shattering of trust between the traumatised person and the world, well, that's exactly how I feel. Perhaps I don't have a "faith problem", so much as a trust problem. I seem to have lost that trust that the world is somehow good, that God is somehow good despite all the suffering, that terrible things won't just go on and on. I feel like something within me has been shattered and broken. I am starting to feel like those poor little dogs you see in psychological experiments who are given electric shocks to make them leap over a barrier. The first few times, they leap fine. After a while, with too many shocks, they stop. They just sit there, getting shocked over and over again, and they go completely passive and lie there whimpering. They no longer believe that they can stop the shocks coming, and they just can't make themselves keep jumping over the barrier.

I am wondering if the fact that I feel so inexplicably bad, so untrusting, so helpless, so kind of fundamentally flawed and broken, is because I am experiencing some kind of secondary trauma.

And I am wondering if I am experiencing this now because the Big Dude's general coping with his PTSD has been particularly bad this year. He has functioned great as a dad, our relationship has actually improved, but he isn't doing well. This is the first year that he has actually described himself as depressed, booked himself in to see a psychiatrist and been willing to take anti-depressants. He hates all sickness related labels, hates seeing doctors or specialists of any kind, hates talking about his feelings or dwelling on anything bad, and hates taking drugs, so the fact that he is doing all these things suggests to me that he must be feeling absolutely desperate.

The Big Dude and I, despite our issues, have always been close. What affects him, affects me. It's not just the way he behaves that affects me. It's the way he feels. We have this strong, empathic link. When his father died, I was on the other side of the country, I didn't know it had happened, but that day I was overcome by a feeling of grief and sadness and I didn't know why. When he told me what had happened, it was a confirmation rather than a surprise.

I know there is no magic bullet for issues like human suffering, spiritual angst, etc, but there are treatments for trauma, including secondary trauma, and there are some coping methods that work better than others.

So I am also wondering if I should see a counsellor at the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service - for myself.

Because I swear, I seem to be going under, I feel like I am drowning and it's not like me. I like the tag line on this page: "Honour the dead but fight like hell for the living". I, too, am still among the living and maybe I need to start fighting like hell for myself.