Healing From Trauma and 'Normalizing' The Location Where It Occurred

Earlier this month, I attended the 45th Reunion of my high school in Derby, Kansas. Generally, attendance at a high school reunion is a relatively low-key event, especially one that I had attended over half a lifetime ago. And indeed, in that I knew very few people at this reunion (I had attended the school for only a year and a half), it was a rather mild, though pleasant, occasion.

However, for me this visit represented a significant 'watershed' event. In 2009, I had attended the 40th Reunion, which was the first one I had ever attended. Like many military dependents, where I went to school was a rather 'chance' event. I had gone to 2 kindergartens, 2 grade schools, 2 junior high schools, and 3 high schools (in the Azores, California, Illinois, Japan, New Mexico, and Kansas). This was not at all an unusual number of schools, in various locations in the United States and around the world, for a child of a military officer. Years ago, when I was in a book club in Albuquerque, I met a fellow who's father had been in the Air Force real estate business [I hadn't known till then that the military even had a real estate arm!], who had attended 20 schools in his 12 years of secondary school education. His father would be stationed at a location and then the family would move 3 months later; talk about attachment problems!! So, my having attended 9 different schools was only moderate by comparison, and quite common for a military dependent.

But it wasn't the lack of a particular devotion to that particular high school in Kansas that had precluded my attendance at the reunions for 40 years. Rather, as I discussed in the 'Journal' on the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website, it was due to Wichita, Kansas being the home of McConnell AFB, where we lived in military housing, and that location being where my father had gone from being a severe disciplinarian to be a sadistic tormentor. The last year of my high school attendance, which happened to have occurred in Wichita, was a time of extreme pain and trauma, and the ripple effects of his behavior toward me had had profoundly negative results for quite a number of years thereafter.

I note 'occurred in Wichita' in italics because, as I discovered when I finally returned Wichita for the 40th Reunion in 2009, it wasn't the place which was the problem, but rather the time [developmentally in my life and chronologically in American society], personality of my father (and mother, who participated indirectly in the torture), and events that occurred in that place that 'got in the way' of my feeling safe to attend the high school reunions for four decades. My intimate partner had lovingly agreed to attend the reunion with me, because I was simply far to frightened to go on my own.

Now, it's not as though I'm unable, in the present, to 'defend myself' from attack; I am after all a 6'8", 220 lb. man, and am reasonably competent physically. Rather, it was the 'terrorized Inner Child', who had had to experience all those years of sexual and physical trauma at the hands of my parents. who was feeling the fear. It was one of those "that was then, this is now" issues. Except that, due to the PTSD nature of the trauma, the 'inner child' had never successfully grown beyond that horrific fear, in spite of many years of very careful mental health therapy; in other words, I often had a difficult time differentiating between 'then and now', in that many of the ragged edges of past trauma kept reappearing, on a regular basis, in my present life, and continued to disrupt my emotional life.

On the other hand, the adult 'part of Self' had done a lot of healing in the intervening years, and felt prepared to face that place and time, and give myself the chance to 'revision' the city. And revision it I did, quite successfully so. As a result, when I and my intimate partner returned this time, in 2014, I did so with the intent to 'normalize' the experience, to instill in my emotional heart that Wichita and Derby were 'safe spaces', and to take pleasure in the visit, rather than the high state of anxiety I had experienced five years previously. I wanted to 'have the experience' of those cities as 'just regular places to visit' and to take pleasure in that excursion. Which I did. Wichita is a pleasant enough city, with some interesting places to visit (we returned to see Botanica, the Wichita Botanical Gardens, which we had seen on the previous visit, and to visit the Mid-American Indian Center). And the Reunion, itself, was an equally pleasurable event.

My point in writing about this visit is to stress that what was an otherwise 'regular', everyday kind of visit was, for me, a significant chance to 'normalize' the experience and clear away a mountain of traumatic emotional debris that had blocked my desire to go to the place all those years before 2009. That it was 'normal' and maybe even a bit mundane was a triumph and a resounding victory, given the association I had previously had with the place.

As to the actual reunion itself, there were very few members of the Class of 1969 (my graduation year); most of the attendees were from the Class of 1968. More may have attended the Saturday night 'formal dinner', but I could only attend the Friday night BBQ, since I and my partner wanted to drive back, via Kansas City, on our return trip, to minimize and break-up the exhaustion caused by the 7 hour drive from St. Louis.

Though I only knew one or two people at the event, whom I had reconnected with at the 40th Reunion, I made use of two 'skills' I'd learned over the years, to meet many more people. The first is that, as a military dependent, one learned to 'make friends fast', since moving to a new location was something that often occurred every year or two. If one was to have any friends, they had been 'connected with' fairly quickly. The second skill, definitely influenced by the first, was that from many years of electoral campaigning (at this point in my life, I've worked on over 65 Democratic Party electoral campaigns, at all levels of political office) I've 'learned how to know people', how to 'connect quickly', since, on the campaign trail, one often makes contacts who are important at the time, but whom you're unlikely to ever see again. Hence, with those 'skill sets' in hand, I simply approached people I didn't know, but who appeared to be interesting to talk to, and 'met' them. And engaged in heart-to-heart conversations about our mutual lives.

One of the factors that impinges upon 'growing older', especially at such events marking a stage much earlier in one's life, is that, on the walls lining the event location, were pictures and obituaries of fellow students who had passed away in the intervening years, several as recent as 2013 or 2014. I only remembered one of them, a fellow who had been on the tennis team with me, who had died in 2007 of brain cancer (whom I had been unable to connect with before his passing, since 2009 had been my first attendance at the reunions). I thought as I looked at those pictures that I was glad to have attended this time around, since it was likely [it's increasingly likely at this stage of life] that some of the people at this reunion would not be alive at the next one in 2019 [potentially, of course, that could include myself, but then if I did pass away, I wouldn't see any of these people again anyway!]. Additionally, though, I've been a 'people person' for a long time, which was one reason why I enjoyed community organizing and electoral campaigning. I enjoy talking to people at more than a superficial level, 'getting to know them' and the patterns of their lives.

I distributed a wealth of my MMWI business cards, told people about my work with men's wellness, and hoped they would access the website and blog, as well as, potentially, keeping online contact with me. That last hope is probably less likely, but just letting people know about my unusual profession [well, my nonprofit, no wage profession] was enjoyable enough.

Now I can 'put that behind me', having revisioned that location, and 'knowing in my heart' that I can move beyond the trauma which is associated in my personal history with Wichita and Derby. I'm not saying that the 'ripple effects of those months of torture' in 1968-69 in Kansas will ever be completely healed, but at least that I can 'close that chapter' and have more confidence about moving forward emotionally. And that's saying a lot, given the level of trauma I've had to cope with throughout my life. Being a trauma and sexual abuse survivor is a triumph, but a difficult one of which to be proud [being a member of a club that one would rather have preferred to never have been forced to join]. But I'm here, still alive at 62, still healing and growing and transforming. There are still many more mountains to cross, many more levels of trauma to uncover, but at least that one has been laid to rest.