Trauma healing

Hard to believe, but this was the first time in my career that I saw a client whose Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was “in your face”: so presently and chronically symptomatic that it constituted a seamless crisis. All the other PTSD clients I’ve worked with named their various symptoms, symptoms they were not experiencing in session but which would occur on occasion – cues, memories, flashbacks, hypervigilance, hyperarousal, avoidance of places. This man’s brain was a tsunami in his skull, roiling and overpowering his composure and nearly his sanity every second. He wanted, he requested an immediate remedy which I could not provide. We brainstormed. Ketamine therapy through the V.A. Consider psilocybin. EMDR in town. Rage room. Psychiatric medication referral posthaste. The recourse of a safety hospitalization.

 

He knew, on his own and through therapy, that the extremity of his trauma pain was his war experience fused to years of child abuse. He didn’t know why the trauma would have resurged now when everything in his life was going very well – career, great partner, kids, money, home. I took a minute to offer a provisional explanation: Many trauma victims manage to maintain self-control, self-inhibition, when under siege. For example, when they are in a potentially dangerous environment, such as domestic violence victims. It is only later when they are safe – in a good relationship, when their defenses no longer need to cover their truth, that suppressed pain and rage will be released.

 

I did suggest a process that might help him. Actually, that would help heal him to the depth of his psyche if it could be used. I recalled that a client from years ago, the most ripped up and demolished man I have ever known, never lost his berserker-level rage over three years of therapy. I had failed, and I knew why. He had never grieved as deeply as possible, had never reached his most awful tears of the raped and crazy-made child. The bawling he did in session after session was always polluted and held suspended in air by his rage and the chemistry of his adult personality. It could never reach the core. He would have had to regress, to be a child, to be my child. But I didn’t hold this tough guy. I didn’t let him weep in my arms. This wasn’t a holding back owing to the ethical mandates of therapy, but from my own fear of his tragic power. He would have been a hurricane of pain and sadness, and I was not that strong.

 

My client, now, was asked to cry in his wife’s arms, to unload everything he could feel. Having learned my lesson, I was ready to be that restorative parent for him, but he was too much the soldier to accept it. His wife could contain everything that hurt in him. That would be the way. Can he be brave enough to do that?