The Continuing Saga of Traumatic Body Memories

I realized, recently, that I hadn't written an article for the MMWI Blog since my return from a one month visit to New Mexico over Christmas, 2017-18. When I was in New Mexico, visiting a wealth of friends and colleagues that I hadn't had a chance to connect with in a very long time (some not for 30+ years), I found out, much to both my surprise and joy, that many of them had been keeping track of me via the MMWI Blog [which they knew about from my posts on Facebook about the blog]. Since almost no one (except a few very close supportive friends) ever posts a 'comment' on the blog, I'm never clear who, if anyone, is actually reading the articles I write. What keeps me going, even in the face of that non-clarity of readership, is both a resonant love of writing and an opportunity to talk about my 'life experience', as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and physical torture, in the hope that it may be of benefit to someone else, either who experienced a similar trauma or who knows someone who has and wants to be an 'enlightened witness' for them. Additionally, as it turns out, many people I've known over the years are 'keeping up with me' via the blog. And that is, frankly, quite satisfying.

I have been wanting, over the past year, to write a blog about 'my Vietnam War years', and have, indeed, begun such an article, but decided that, right now, a more 'immediate' pressing need was to write an article about the continuing 'blowback' from the horrific trauma I experienced as a child due to the abuse of my parents, and the way in which my body memories are continuing to cause very real ongoing trauma in the present.

The Lingering Effects of Trauma

Recently, I finally had access to an updated version of my media databases (after a consultant friend, who specializes in FileMaker databases, returned them to me). And I've been engaging in adding several hundred books, movies and documentaries, and music CDs to those databases.

In the process of adding books (which had been piled in boxes, awaiting cataloguing, and therefore I wasn't quite aware of what was in them) to the database, I came across a book by Alice Miller, who is a favorite author of mine (The Drama of the Gifted Child had been one of my early forays into the study of childhood abuse). The book is entitled The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting. It is a great read, though given the subject matter and my direct personal experience with the trauma she is describing, it is also disturbing.

I have been aware, for several years, that 'memories' are of at least two varieties: mental and somatic. There are memories that we remember in our brain, or that are locked away in our subconscious mind, only slowly revealing their secrets over time (if ever). Those are memories which arise in dreams, or in mental health therapy, or are evoked by a specific further trauma or even by a piece of music. But the other locale of memories is in the body. Deepak Chopra talked about these in a video I saw, and he referred to them as neuropeptides, which are essentially 'brain cells' that live in locations throughout the body and communicate with the brain in our heads. They manifest as 'body memories', as compared to 'mind memories', yet they are all, interestingly, in the same genus of memory. Last year, I had read The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In The Healing Of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk. That book both displayed the ways in which the body 'remembers' trauma, and gave suggestions on how to access those memories.

I've been reading these books, and ones with similar subjects, because I have, for the past 53 years, been having periodic panic attacks, which are often so thoroughly devastating that my nerves feel like they have been 'fried' afterward. And in the midst of the panic attacks, I feel like I'm dying, quite literally. When I first started experiencing them, at the age of 14, when I was living in Tokyo, Japan (my father, who was an U.S. Air Force communications maintenance officer, was stationed there), the 'cause' was quite obvious: I was being quite openly beaten by my father on a regular basis. It wasn't that I was 'misbehaving', nor that I was some kind of delinquent, but rather because my father was psychotic. He beat us (myself and my two brothers) just because he felt anxious about his own life and took out his discomfort on his children. I had episodic panic attacks until I entered college, at which time I turned to substance abuse to 'numb' my consciousness and dull the traumatic pain.

During those years of extensive substance abuse (largely from the age of 17 to 32), I had instances when I took too many psychedelics or narcotics, and my heart raced so fast that it was slamming against my chest. I very nearly died a number of times, but I suspect (looking back) that my large frame allowed the drugs to be somewhat diluted, and so I didn't die. Now, understand, I often thought that I wanted to die. And I had attempted to commit suicide in the freshman year in college, by taking an overdose of the tranquilizers my neurologist had prescribed. I had 'failed' in that attempt (I slept for 36 hours and woke up with an absolutely torturous headache), and was so intensely depressed that I berated myself for many years afterward, with a self-talk that I was "such a profound failure that I couldn't even successfully kill myself". In fact, I continued to often be suicidally depressed until I was in my early 50s. I realized a couple of days ago, after reading more of Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies that it wasn't that I wanted to die -- it was that the pain of living was so profound that I wanted that pain to end. Death is the great unknown and quite frankly we all arrive there eventually, whether with effort or old age; hence, it wasn't that I wanted to fall into the unknown, as that I desperately wanted to depart from the far too well-known, which was the traumatic PTSD outcomes of the childhood incest and torture that I had experienced.

The second period of my life when I experienced a large number of panic attacks was when, at the age of 34, I had a profound nervous breakdown (or 'breakthrough, as my late much beloved therapist, Shoshona Blankman, reframed it for me after I had recovered from the initial bodily devastation). For three months, I had a non-stop panic attack (literally, all day long, with disturbed sleep cycles). The only way I survived at all was due to having access to daily acupuncture treatments, which calmed me enough to minimally function. I continued to have panic attacks two or three times a week for the next two years [until around 1989].

Then, they started up again, in earnest, about 6 years ago. My mental health therapist here in St. Louis has speculated that the 'parts' of my Self [based on Internal Family Systems theory] that represent the 'exiles', that I had for damned good reason not previously accessed in my therapy finally felt 'safe' enough to reemerge and become accessible to my mind and body. As he stated it "they were, all those years, locked away in the salt minds of the lowest depths of your psyche", hidden away because, until I was healthy enough for them to reemerge, they were the most traumatic elements of my childhood rape and torture [which had, I now know, begun when I was an infant]. As an example of those subsumed parts, I have almost no conscious memory of my childhood between the age of 6 and 12. My therapist refers to that period as 'traumatic amnesia'. In other words, the level of abuse was so intense that my mind blanked out the vast majority of those memories. The traumatic incidences that I do remember, quite clearly, from the age of 12 onward, I often feel I would just as well wish to forget. But since they are accessible to me, I can work with and on them, for better or worse.

The Manifestation of Those Traumatic Body Memories

Six years ago [2012], I began having 'burning scalp' [neuropathy] sensations. No matter what shampoo I used, my scalp literally felt like it was 'on fire'. I ended up, for several years, only washing my hair about once a week, since each time I washed my head, it burned intensely. Eventually, this past year, I found a shampoo at Trader Joe's [the only one they sell] that allows me to wash my head every two days without significant discomfort.

Then, starting around 2014, I began to have problems with mattresses. The mattress that I had had for many years wore out and, not realizing that mattress materials had profoundly changed since my 1999 purchase of the previous model, I bought a memory foam mattress [pretty much the only material available by then]. I had a severe allergic reaction to the material. I tried 'cool gel' mattresses, and others as well [I've addressed this issue in previous blogs]. The long and short was that one of the mattresses evoked neuropathy in my ankles, which I've had ever since [my ankles 'burn' almost all the time]. Eventually I found a mattress at IKEA with minimal foam in it. That mattress sort of solved the dilemma, but frankly I don't really obtain much of a solid sleep on it. It doesn't make me sick, but I can't sleep for more than 5 1/2 hours each night on it. Last year, Linda [my intimate partner for the past decade] and I stayed at a B&B in Taylorville, Illinois, and slept on a mattress which was 'tolerable'. We removed the sheets to see the manufacturing label. They are made in Springfield, IL, so I hope, in the next couple of months, to drive to their factory and see if I can purchase one and have it delivered to St. Louis [or find out if a local supplier has them in stock].

Around the same time I began having difficulties with mattresses, I began having even more intense reactions to a host of other materials, namely shoes, clothing, belts, etc. that I had worn for many years. Over a period of about a year those materials became allergic to me. And when I would put them on, I was having an intense allergic reaction -- major headaches, intense GI tract distress, and rapidly increasing feelings of overt TERROR. What I now realize, when I was reading Alice Miller's book last week, was that what I've been experiencing for the past six years is a 'version' of the panic attacks that I had in the past.

When I was younger, given the intense nature of the mental health work that I was engaging in, I often said that "I ate risk for breakfast". It was a quite conscious challenge to the trauma, knowing that I had to 'move though the pain in order to get beyond it'. For the past four years, as I have worked to overcome the pernicious effects of the 'materials hypersensitivity' reactions, I have periodically, in a clearly planned approach, 'challenged' my potential reactions to materials, knowing that I would potentially have a negative reaction [often I would meditate either before wearing the material or after first putting it on], but being willing to 'try to challenge the reaction'. It has never been 'easy' and I often end up having a more or less controlled panic attack. In those situations, I know exactly what to do if the reaction becomes too intense: take off the offending clothing or shoes, quite quickly, and often wash that area of my body with soap to remove, as best I can, any chemicals that are causing the body memory to be evoked.

Part of the 'problem' is that there are few 'mental images' associated with the body memory reactions. Occasionally I've had, the first time I tried a material, images of being raped as an infant, or beaten severely as a youth, but more often than not, the only sensation [I say 'only' not to minimize the pain but to note the singular 'known' reaction] that I feel is SHEAR TERROR. My throat feels like it is closing off, my lungs feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest, my intercostal muscles, on either side of my chest, feel like I'm having heart attack [which I learned, years ago, was not a heart attack, but a muscle spasm], my GI tract goes into a hyper-spasmodic cramp, my legs freeze up and I know I need to, as quickly as possible, remove the offending garment and do whatever I can to calm my nerves. Those are all the bodily sensations of an overt panic attack. 

But what is even worse is that, periodically, as best I know I've done all the things I need to do to make a material 'safe' for me to wear it [including, as I've learned, to wash new clothing at least 6 times before wearing them, to minimize any chemicals that will evoke this terror] and 'out of the blue' I have a major panic attack. In this situation, I'm not consciously trying to challenge the material or the reactions I suspect it will provoke; quite to the contrary, as best I know I've taken care of removing offending allergic chemicals and yet I am SLAMMED, full force, with a panic attack of formidable proportions.

The trouble is that this happens at least several times each month, and has been occurring with that frequency for four years now. The other issue that evokes a panic attack is food. Sometimes I'll eat a food which either contains some sort of preservative or ingredient that I'm sensitive to, that I'm unaware it contains, and 'out of the blue' I'm hit with a profoundly intense panic attack. The 'totally random nature' of such an attack reminds me [maybe subconsciously it's the trigger] of the manner in which my father would 'out of the blue' turn and beat me with his fists for no apparent reason. Or torture me in some other manner just because his psychosis evoked such a reaction at that particular moment.

Yet, Progress HAS Been Accomplished

As I say, I have finally found a shampoo that only 'burns' my scalp at an acceptable level (a complete lack of pain is no longer a probable outcome when neuropathy is present). I have a mattress that doesn't make me sick, but also doesn't allow a good night's sleep (luckily, though, I sleep most evenings at Linda's house, and her mattress is tolerable to me). And I know where I can purchase a mattress that I can likely tolerate and get a solid night's sleep again at my own house.

Since the overt crisis of the autumn of 2016, when I reached a point of total depression, believing that I had almost no clothes to wear that didn't make me intensely ill [compounded shortly thereafter with a 4th blood clot in my left leg], I have had the benefits of yoga therapy, offered by a close female friend who is quite knowledgeable in that modality, and have slowly dragged myself out of what seemed at the time to be a bottomless pit of anguish and hopelessness. I now know I can wear jeans without a significant negative reaction, and I can wear shirts and socks which I can tolerate after I've washed them for 6 - 10 times to remove offensive chemicals.

I am still having MAJOR problems with shoes, though. The white New Balance cross-trainer shoes that I've worn for the past 4 years, which are by this point almost dilapidated [I joke that they look like 3rd-world retreads] have been continuously glued together and I've had them resoled several times. It's not that I can't 'afford' other shoes [I have probably 20 pairs of shoes I used to be able to wear in my closet], but foam material has become something to which I have a serious allergy and which, upon trying to wear, I have an overt panic attack after wearing for more than an hour. I'm researching other materials [some newer shoes are now made with a cloth-like materials other than leather or foam which might be tolerable] -- Xero or Nike Epic React or Skechers are a possibility which I plan to try soon.

I'm still having bad reactions to leather belts. A couple of years ago I found a Nautilus brand belt that was made with man-made materials that wasn't allergic to my body, but it wore out and I've found no other one since. I've searched online for another one, but thus far haven't found what I was looking for. So I wear jeans which are tight around the waist and need no belt to be held up.

Each time I accidentally wear an offending material or eat an offending food and have a significant panic attack, I feel as though my nerve endings have been fried. And my emotional reaction is to not attempt to challenge any materials for several more weeks, so thoroughly devastating are the attacks. Last week, for instance, I wore a pair of cargo pants that I hadn't tried to wear for the past four years and, apparently, the pants had last been washed when I was going through my 'compression socks chemical pollution' period [I had to discard a large number of clothes after that, since the chemical in the compression socks is intensely sickening to me -- washing them with my other clothes had been a major inadvertent mistake]. After about two hours of wearing them, I clearly determined I was having a panic attack not as a result of anxiety, but due to a chemical allergy. I took off the pants, washed my skin, and put on a pair of jeans, but it still took 6 - 8 hours to fully recover from the panic attack. I have to 'schedule' times when I'm going to 'challenge' a material, to make sure that for at least several hours afterward [in case I have a negative outcome] I can recover from the allergic reaction without having to be anywhere for a meeting or scheduled appointment.

Everytime I wash any of my clothing, I always run them through an additional rinse cycle, to clear out the maximum soap residual. I use Seventh Generation 'free and clear' laundry detergent, to minimize allergic reactions in the first place. Though I bought a used dryer last year, I've not made use of it since because of an overt fear of being 'polluted' with fabric softener chemicals, since I had such a crisis with a previous used dryer. I know it's paranoia, but since I have the option of drying my clothes are an indoor clothesline, I've been able to avoid my fear without a major alternate problem.

When I was in New Mexico over Christmas, my schizophrenic nephew, unbeknownst to me until I had returned from a visit to Santa Fe, had discarded four white compression socks that I had left behind at the casita that I was staying in at my brother and sister-in-law's property. That provoked a major crisis for me, since getting used to new compression socks is its own significant physically traumatic problem. I have to wash new compression socks 15-20 times [at a commercial laundromat, so as not to pollute my own washing machine with chemicals I can't tolerate] to make them 'tolerable' to me, and even after that, I wear them over ankle-high socks, so that the compression sock material doesn't come in direct contact with my skin. For six months after returning to St. Louis, I had only two tattered compression socks to alternate on a daily basis, which felt both emotionally and traumatically constricting. Finally, about 3 months ago, I finally gathered enough courage to try to wear some older black compression socks, that I hadn't used in several years, to see if they were 'tolerable' to my body. Lo and behold, to my joyous surprise, they did not cause an allergic reaction! Hence, I now have access to 20 compression socks that are in generally good condition, which with proper care should last for several more years [before I have to face the fear getting used to the chemical reactions of new compression socks].

In Summation

I guess I'd say, in concluding this article, that it's particularly depressing to continue, at the age of 67, to be subjected to intense body memory reactions to the rape and torture that I experienced as a child. I was terrified of my father right up until his death in 2011, so on a chronological level, it hasn't been that long since the 'terror provoking perpetrator' was in my world [even though I hadn't been around my father much at all since 1990]. As my therapist often says "you come by it honestly", which while reassuring that I'm not insane, is still quite bothersome.

Anyone who thinks that a person who experienced significant PTSD can 'just get over it' quickly is living in a fog of denial. Trauma of the kind and duration that I experienced simply does not 'clear out' quickly. I've been engaged in the most difficult work of mental health therapy for 40 years, with quite excellent mental health and bodywork/yoga therapists, and yet I continue to be plagued by profound emotionally and physically traumatic memories of that abuse.

It is important to remember that "you don't have to do it all alone". I have had the intimate love and respect of Linda, my significant partner of 10 years, who has been a wonderful support in my healing, the friendship and great working relationships I've developed in my Unitarian Universalist congregation, the emotional support of my New Mexico men's wellness community [even at a distance, here in St. Louis], and my own intense devotion to my personal recovery.

I know that I have to 'go through it to get beyond it' and I know that may continue until my dying day, but it doesn't make it any easier to know that. Recovery is no easy or simple journey.