You want my trauma book? I'll GIVE YOU my trauma book!

(A sample.)

October 30 2024

ECHO PARK, CA

“When does your trauma book come out?!”

My listeners have asked for years now. 

When the COVID pandemic hit high hell online, I started complaining about all this trauma talk everywhere. There was  something wiggly, murky, unscientific about the way the term flew around the room. I brazenly didn’t like it. I had assigned myself the role of trauma industry whistleblower.

I am not a scientist, but I am good at talking to them. (Honestly, I can talk to anyone.) 

I’m also good at reading studies, connecting ideas, and asking hard – even awkward –questions. I obsessively read psychology literature like the sports page, and I’m driven by the compulsion to physically document every move I make, a  habit drilled into me in journalism school. That drive came in handy for thirteen years, as I cohosted an investigative podcast we started from the floor of my windy, dirty, studio apartment. Our beats were fringe science, spirituality, and the paranormal. To tackle those things, I learned quite a bit of psychology; trauma and memory research were two of my obsessions. I built a library of almost 1,000 books about trauma; a sweeping history of the term. I learned everything available about the faultiness of memory, and the moral panics that arise from collaborative confabulation. Every book I read, I was deeper down the  rabbit hole, looking up a new researcher, a new theory, treatment, case, memoir.

I even had a villain:

Bessel van der Kolk, the King of Trauma. His book, The Body Keeps the Score, has been on the bestseller list since COVID hit the states, with little sign of snoozing. I was obsessed with the book, convinced that it was garbage ruining American minds. For almost four years, I turned my life upside down, following the author across the country, to seminar after seminar, tracking his lies and overstatements. 

I talked about him rigidly on my podcast, giving away little: “Stay tuned for the book!”

Then, abruptly, I stopped talking about all of it. If my cohost asked me a trauma question, I had it removed in post. 

I felt underwater, like I no longer understood something I had once understood completely.

Less than a year later, we canceled the podcast without warning. I didn’t tell our listeners much; only that I had been through “a traumatic event.” It was true, but the traumatic event was more than two years earlier. I had only just recently developed PTSD, and that thought pissed me off. In the past, I assumed that anyone who developed PTSD years after the fact had been talked into it. I had heard hundreds of stories of women who felt pressured by their therapists to reasses some prior, ordinary wrong as trauma. But now, it was happening to me. And it made perfect sense. I had, in fact, denied reality, to my detriment.

With little to go on, our listeners were supportive. Some were impressed, even, that I was taking control like this. But now, they clustered online, asking each other for hints of information:

Is Carrie even OK?

What happened to her?

Should we throw out The Body Keeps the Score? 

What is trauma, anyway?

What can I say? 

What can I tell them? 

Not the truth, obviously.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, 

but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

- James Baldwin

November, 2021

WEST LOS ANGELES, CA

We were still wearing masks, then. 

I had learned to smile with my eyes, thank her with my tone. You don’t realize how much of therapy relies on grins and frowns until half your face is trapped behind a mask.

But Shelley needed me to remove my mask this time. She needed to see my lips as I went into the trance. I might mumble, or get quiet, as I slipped deeper into that watery place. My lips and Shelley would be my only lifelines between my body and mind.

“So we're gonna try some hypnosis today,” said Shelley, leaning forward in her chair. “Do you have any concerns about that?”

Shelley didn’t usually lean forward like that. She was typically seated backward, confident, placed firmly in the bucket of the seat. This time she was arced at me, intently, as if she needed to divine something important from my answer.

“I don’t… think so...” I said, scanning my mind for fear. 

I am pretty fearless, I thought. 

Shelley had said so herself, last session. But this was uncharted territory.

We were here to remember whatever it was I had forgotten.

***

This was our twentieth session. Each was $170, and no insurance coverage. $3,400 already invested into figuring out what on earth was going on with me, and (more importantly, I thought) with the trauma industry. I had assigned myself to the beat because I was in Shelley’s marketing bullseye. She  deals with a lot of people like me:

 

Unexplained

spotty childhood memories, 

wandering attention, 

episodes of dissociation, 

chronic pain, 

anxiety, 

depression. 

Some of Shelley’s clients have reported unusual experiences like fugue states; disembodied voices; and disturbing visions.

You might call Shelley an expert in mystery cases, but she says there’s no mystery: trauma explains people like me, disabled by an orchestra of medium-sized complaints. (I didn’t know then what I know now: that Shelley digs for the most outlandish accounts possible. She would eventually theorize that I had survived a government mind control plot, a la MKULTRA. It was the only thing that could explain my symptoms.)

Shelley had administered the “Dissociative Experiences Scale” (DES). She explained that dissociation (what therapists call it when you can’t – or won’t – Be Right Here, Right Now) is a spectrum, and nearly everyone experiences it sometimes. But, she said, some people dissociate by default. These people live most comfortably in their heads, whether by design, practicality, or avoidance. These people are traumatized.

But isn’t that kinda everyone?, I thought.

An average score on the DES is roughly 10. A score above 30 suggests substantial dissociation.

I scored 56. 

This was a startling result, even for Shelley.

“You are very dissociative,” she told me. 

I couldn’t explain it. It’s not like things were bad for me. I had a loving partner, a successful career.  I was even a little bit famous, thanks to the podcast. Sure, it was a hard job, but I loved the product and the cause it represented. And my unique mind – about which I was here to complain – made me a good journalist, and before that, a good activist and actor. My ability to “dissociate” had its perks. Foremost, it allowed me to stay calm during conflicts that enraged others. It let me get the job done. Without dissociation, how could I confront con artists, or joke with a drunk charlatan to get insider info? How would I endure systemic sexism in a male-dominated field? It seemed Shelley wanted to take away my coping strategies, and for what… so I could blame my parents for my suffering?

I should have been able to stay mad at her, considering.

After all, I had come to this story because I was incensed that trauma therapists were still selling the same bullshit from 40 years ago. Those methods fueled the Satanic Panic and Memory Wars that put innocent people in jail. And worse, women were being trapped – by their therapists, no less – into the role of accuser. Women who first came to Shelley (and therapists like her) because they wanted to calm their migraines, or stop checking the stove 25 times before leaving the house.  The idea of this trauma trap (as I started to call it in my head) lit a fire in the front of my skull. 

So, as usual, I had made myself a guinea pig. 

It’s what I had always done, with cults and weird medical treatments. Why not trauma therapy?

I became obsessed with this one goal: disentangling what was going on in the trauma industry. What was real trauma treatment, and what was bogus? What did scientists agree trauma was and wasn’t?

But Shelley didn’t know about any of that. For all she knew, I was just a client. And, I had committed to telling her just the truth about my life, being vague only about the specifics of my work projects. 

Shelley encouraged me to dig out old photos and journals, hunting for explanations from my past. In a box of photos and playbills,  I found what I was looking for: a diary from my freshman year of college. 

Black, hardcover, spiral binding, unlined. 

Pages thick and textured. 

I remembered, immediately, who I was when last I held that book. 

A broken child awaiting repair. 

At age 19, I tried to kill myself in my dorm room. By the tenth aspirin, I panicked and called a friend, who drove me to the hospital by the cemetery. The E.R. nurse gave me charcoal in a paper cup. She asked me why I did it. 

“A boyfriend,” I said, and she nodded like that was her first guess. 

A couple hours later, the beleaguered night shift doctor stomped in. He asked me if I was done with it, this whole notion of killing myself.  I said yes, and he left. I hadn’t had the gumption to die, or even to come close. What I wanted was out of reach: to disappear. 

Now, years later, here it all was, in diary form. I ached for her, the girl I used to be, even as I sensed I hadn’t been her for a very long time. 

We shared a body, but –  I thought -  that’s it. 

There is an old riddle about a rotting ship:

If you replace every rotting board, is it still the same ship? 

If not, when does the old ship become the new ship? 

For most people, the riddle is unanswerable.  

“Mmm yes,” they say, “when does the old ship become the new ship? Quite right.” 

But this rhetorical question, from day one, has terrorized me. 

There must be an answer, no? 

When the new planks hit 51%, maybe?! 

Surely we can quantify this, no?!

I felt like a new ship. But Shelley assured me that no:

inside, the old ship was there, rotten boards and all. (Then the metaphor fell apart, as all metaphors eventually do.)

I looked for hints of what Shelley mentioned. Some suggestion that my young life had been marked by more than the usual pain, the loneliness of a latchkey kid. 

I found minor things: My handwriting changed.  Here and there, I broke into despondent poetry. Clearly, I was dealing with what you might call artistic angst. Love lost had become art: poetry, paintings, drawings, essays, plays… overwrought analyses of ordinary suffering. (The paintings were particularly trite but wonderfully executed and inexpensive: I used my period blood for red and for brown.) 

But Shelley was most interested in a single poem with no name. I wrote it a few months after the suicide attempt, in late 2003. I had just turned twenty. It was about a girl named Maggie. She had me read it aloud.

There is a girl who lives in my head 

Named Maggie

She is crazy, but knows it

Selfish

So she never hurts, never aches, never loses anything

And friends are attracted to her 

for her self-sufficiency

She has been committed

to a hospital

Where she accepts her plight

but resents the staff

You can see her apathy 

In her unkept red-brown hair

But her energy in her winking brown eyes

She becomes quiet when I think  of discussing her – 

‘You think I’m bad’ she says, matter-of-factly

She will go away if I want

She doesn’t need me

But I want her to stay

She likes me, knows me

And I love her.

She is detached

A city on a hill

Only a part of the world from a distant view

A light in the distance

‘What do you suppose it’s like 

over there?’

I looked up at Shelley, ashamed. That old despair now sounded unaware, cringey, what a teenager thinks is important. Now, twice as old, I didn’t want Shelly to think I still considered myself this relevant. But Shelley was actually impressed. And she thought Maggie was worth investigating:

“This does seem like a part of you, you know. A part that has quite a personality.”

Maggie.

I looked back at my journal. I had written about Maggie again, a week later. A single line: 

I haven't heard from Maggie in a while. 

Maggie.

Whatever these experiences were – whatever had made me write about the girl in my head, or switch penmanship, or suddenly burst out in poem – it stopped half a lifetime ago. I didn’t even remember writing most of it. 

Maggie.

Hardly me at all, really, I thought. Just a depressed, adolescent fantasy.

And anyway, Maggie or no Maggie, Shelley and I agreed on the fundamentals: I “dissociated” more than most, had more physical pain than average, and had been struggling with existential sorrow since roughly the age I learned the alphabet. Even without inner voices and split personalities, I had a tendency to go off somewhere, to escape into my head, to find little wisdom in yogi Ram Dass’ command: “Be here, now.” My philosophy was: Be up here, now.

“Trauma is what makes us dissociative,” Shelley explained. “There's no other thing that makes you dissociative except trauma.” 

But I hadn’t been traumatized, had I? It was now my obligation to find out. 

That is the agreement. 

I am always the guinea pig.

***

That’s it! You’ve gotten to the end of my excerpt.

Thank you for reading these tender pages. The book isn’t finished (unless you consider hundreds of confusing, disorderly pages “finished”), but I could use encouragement to finish it. This project has been the culmination of more than a decade of work, and what is emerging is surprising even me. I hope you enjoy the ride. It’s a thrill; I’ll give it that.

Would you subscribe to my Substack? That would mean the world.