Me? Traumatized?

How had I not realized I was traumatized? In my professional life, I had a talent for identifying the source of problems. Yet, in my personal life, I couldn’t recognize that I often had self-defeating responses to the world and that they derived from a past that was clearly traumatizing.

My parents neglecting and undermining me? That, I told myself, was “unfortunate.” My husband refusing to help me when I got stuck in quicksand? This, I told myself, was his “quirkiness.” As for his throwing furniture when he was angry, his kidnapping our daughters, my own nearly fatal health emergency . . . these I walled off from myself and never thought about.

A Stroke of Luck

Raised to believe I was a no-account, I agreed to marry a secretive, controlling man and move to Japan with him because I saw no way out. In Tokyo, I unexpectedly got a job at Mattel Toys Southeast Asia and realized—for the first time—that I had some talents. As my confidence grew, my husband became so abusive that when we returned to the US, I had to grab our two toddlers and escape from him in a police chase. Only a last-minute stroke of luck kept me out of jail. 

While building a successful career, raising my girls, and fending off their vengeful father, I was constantly on guard, sensing him out there, ready to attack at any moment.


Let Me Count the Ways


I married again, and this marriage was wonderful—until memories my second husband buried in childhood revealed themselves: he’d been terribly abused by both his parents. When he had flashbacks, he became aggressive. When he shared with me what had been done to him, his traumatic memories became mine as well. His PTSD shattered our marriage and me. Traumatized? Let me count the ways.


After my second divorce, I started writing personal essays. One of those pieces got me accepted into a writing group led by the author Joyce Johnson. By then, I’d decided I wanted to publish my essays as a collection, but Joyce felt strongly that I should instead turn my work into a memoir. I argued strenuously, but fortunately she persisted, and finally I agreed. The theme seemed obvious: my evolution from insecure to self-assured, resulting from two broken marriages.

A Tangle of Interconnected Themes

As I worked on my memoir, The Wrong Calamity, many of my essays landed on the cutting room floor. A two-pager about a hat became a few lines. A short piece about my losing eighty pounds became a full chapter. An 800-word piece about quicksand became a few paragraphs—with all the humor removed because I now understood that the incident wasn’t funny at all but was an example of the bullying I’d let myself endure.

My book grew, and I discovered connections between what I’d thought were unrelated pieces. I couldn’t include the hat without connecting it to grief. Writing about my first marriage made me grapple with the issue of self-esteem. Far from being just about the impact of two broken marriages, my story was a tangle of interconnected themes that included neglect, eating disorders, single-parenthood, domestic violence, vicarious PTSD, triumph, and the sources of my resilience.

“Now I have hope.”

About six years ago, I did a reading of an excerpt from my still in-process memoir. Afterward, a woman in the audience approached me. “All the details were different,” she said, “but you were telling my story. Now I have hope that I’ll make it through okay.”

Hearing someone say my words inspired her made me feel morally obligated to be more open. I realized I’d made my own story look too easy. I’d omitted some things that reflected badly on myself, and I hadn’t been clear about how incapacitating my trauma had been and how long I’d lived with its profound effects. What followed was more than a year of hard thinking and rewriting. During that time, I came to see ways I’d undermined myself. 

Blaming Myself

I’d accepted my parents’ gospel that I was someone who couldn’t handle things, someone who was always wrong. When I messed up, I felt that was the real me. When I did something well, I told myself it was the exception that proved the rule.

Instead of focusing on my own dysfunctional behavior, I spent years blaming my young self for things I didn’t like about myself. I was obese, I told myself, because “she’d” eaten uncontrollably. I married an abusive man in my first marriage because “she’d” said yes when he proposed. When my second husband recovered his terrible childhood memories, I went too far in protecting his privacy and consigned myself to a secretive life. 

Finding myself

Finding and trusting my strong self took about twenty-five years. At the heart of this evolution was overcoming the demoralizing, debilitating, and exhausting effects of low self-esteem. Ending my binge eating and losing eighty pounds coincided with my growing sure-footedness. Thought my eating disorder isn’t gone, it’s usually in remission. I still overeat in especially difficult times but I get on top of it pretty quickly. Now I realize it’s a sign that something’s triggering me, and I focus on figuring out what that is.

Though my parents neglected me, to my great fortune others supported me. My grandmothers were most significant, but there were also teachers, friends, employers, a doctor, a lawyer, and others who saw more in me than I did. They helped keep me moving forward. One gift of writing The Wrong Calamity is that it spurred me to reach out to those people and let them know how much they’d mattered.

Baby Steps

As I developed self-esteem, I was empowered by the realization that even if I couldn’t change others’ behavior, I could change my own. I could do more than just wait for the next bad thing. I realized I could leave my abusive husband. It would be frightening and hard, but staying with him would be worse. This insight came in baby steps, at first venturing one tiny experiment and gradually moving on to bigger ones. Even the tiny ones were daunting, but the discovery that I often prevailed kept me motivated.

 In The Wrong Calamity I describe one of the early tiny experiments, when my first husband wanted me to cut off relationships with friends he disapproved of. 

“‘I told you . . . ’ Peter started, but I cut him off. ‘She’s my friend,’ I said quietly. ‘And I am having lunch with her. We can talk more about this at home, but not here. If you make a fuss, I won’t be a part of it.’ He stormed out onto the street, a tornado of a man. ‘Men!’ I said, back with my friend. ‘Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without ’em.’ But my hands were trembling on the table.”

A Word about Writing and Therapy

When my book came out, many people asked if writing it had been “cathartic.” Even more said some version of, “Writing’s like therapy, only cheaper.” I disagree. I’ve done writing. I’ve done therapy. They’re not equivalent. Writing my book helped me get my story straight. It made me remember incidents I’d walled off and helped me realize their importance.

 I’d previously been in and out of therapy, but it hadn’t been effective and I’d given up on it. Once I had a clearer sense of my story and more awareness that many of my self-defeating actions were connected to my past, I started again, this time successfully. I don’t know if I would have gone back to therapy if I hadn’t written my memoir, but I do know that writing it gave me important insights and opened me to new ones, even very difficult ones. In short, it made me want to keep growing.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on November 05, 2024 12:46
No comments have been added yet.