“Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain

manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about,

but also our very capacity to think. We have discovered that helping victims of

trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly

meaningful, but usually it is not enough. The act of telling the story doesn’t

necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that

remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time. For real

change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to

live in the reality of the present. Our search to understand trauma has led us to

think differently not only about the structure of the mind but also about the

processes by which it heals.” The Body Keeps the Score

A skeptic somewhere will say I am digging up excuses for my bad behavior.

A crueler person will say my life never happened.

A kind optimist will be happy for me and marvel at so much knowledge that can help people suffering from severe trauma.

I say it is bittersweet after a lifetime of believing I was “damaged goods” and labeling myself “inherent evil.” That said, I am overjoyed at the wonders of the brain and how many people will benefit. Now people need to set aside the stigma of seeking mental health. The mind can go awry just as the body.

There is no weakness in seeking help. I denied myself help, thought I should be strong enough, smart enough, and brave enough to tackle my disorder on my own. It was a mistake I shall regret till I die. I hurt a lot of people while denying my fragility, trying to “tough it out.”

It is never too late to turn a corner, choose a better path, and though I sometimes allow myself moments of self pity, look back and wonder what could have been for my children and I, there is no value in self pity. Self pity, or even the pity of others can only harm my progress, just as surely as denial.

I would suggest there are many disorders which benefit from Dialectical Behavioral Training. But I can only speak for myself.

No one and nothing can change the past. It is done. Accept. See it for what it is. Examine it for errors in perception, context, and lingering effects in the aftermath. Learn from it. Change what can be changed. Let it go.

Denial gets us nowhere but stuck. We must know who we are for any progress to be achieved. Do not let people tell you it is easy to let go. Pay no attention when someone says you can just put it behind and be happy. The inability to accomplish that simple sounding advice will feel like weakness and stupidity, just another broken part of us.

And never let someone else deny your reality. When people deny your memories it will likely be because your memory reflects badly on them and they are afraid of what your memories will reveal. Or perhaps their own cloak of denial is pulled back and they cannot face it.

It takes courage to face reality. It sometimes takes more than all the courage you think you can muster, but from some place deep inside courage and hope and determination come.

For every one person on a journey to recovery, I sometimes think there must be ten people who will shoot you down. Perhaps that is my perception after the experience with my family of origin as they are many in denial.

Learn. Be teachable. Life is one long series of lessons. Embrace them. Move forward.

Pain is mandatory, suffering is optional. One of my favorite quotes from my years in AA meetings is “There is pain in change and there is pain in staying the same. Choose the one that moves you forward.” I have tried always to move forward, I did not understand what things were blocking my progress.

I am 66 years old. It does not matter. I learn and improve every day that I try. Seems unfair to be having to work at fixing me so late in life, but this is what early and severe trauma does. It changes the mind. I have to live with that. Now I am creating a life I can be at peace with and even enjoy.

This would have been written about 1982.

“In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I
thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so
sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different
ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and
family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of
being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of
psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States,
occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only
about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how
forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the
basement of the hospital.
Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of
father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology.” My
patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent
psychopathology”—they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often
engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with
razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that
“such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and
allows for a better adjustment to the external world.”9 In fact, as it turned out,
incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being.
In many ways these patients were not so different from the veterans I had
just left behind at the VA. They also had nightmares and flashbacks. They also
alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being
emotionally shut down. Most of them had great difficulty getting along with
other people and had trouble maintaining meaningful relationships.” The Body Keeps the Score

I underlined the passage which struck me as shocking. Long before 1982 I could have told them there were more incidents of incest perpetrated on my one body. But incest was only slowly becoming public knowledge. I did not say the words until 1988 after which came years of on-again, off-again therapy as the anguish was devastating and breaks were unavoidable.

The silence was deafening back then, as well as self-defeating.

“The limbic system is shaped in response to experience, in partnership with
the infant’s own genetic makeup and inborn temperament. (As all parents of
more than one child quickly notice, babies differ from birth in the intensity and
nature of their reactions to similar events.) Whatever happens to a baby
contributes to the emotional and perceptual map of the world that its developing
brain creates. As my colleague Bruce Perry explains it, the brain is formed in a
”5
“use-dependent manner.”5 This is another way of describing neuroplasticity, the
relatively recent discovery that neurons that “fire together, wire together.” When
a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become a default setting—the response most
likely to occur. If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in
exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it
specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.” The Body Keeps the Score

In my quest for answers to explain my overreactions, compulsions, and poor choices, even to myself, The Body Keeps the Score is igniting my brain with possibility. How many years have I questioned my own behaviors and choices unable to figure me out? Could it be as simple as early childhood trauma did the wiring? Probably not. But it seems a good starting place.

Of course, lots of people have painted my life as idyllic, free of any calamity except poverty. They would rather believe me cruel, callous, and indifferent to all human suffering but my own. But they did not live my life, I did.

Trauma is a relative term with as many different levels as there are victims. No one can compare whose was worse, it is individualized like custom made stationary and the lessons trauma prints on the brain.

At times my search for answers feels revolutionary after believing for so long in my own weakness to change behaviors which continually ravaged my world and that of those around me. Other times I am engulfed in the bittersweet that life is prone to offer. Sometimes I am free, other times I feel a great weight upon my shoulders. I get mentally tired trying to put 2 + 2 together to create a picture I can understand.

I plod on. There is no easy answer. But I feel certain there is one, so I read on.

“As we now know, war is not the only calamity that leaves human lives in ruins. While about a quarter of the soldiers who serve in war zones are expected to develop serious posttraumatic problems,10 the majority of Americans experience a violent crime at some time during their lives, and more accurate reporting has revealed that twelve million women in the United States have been victims of rape. More than half of all rapes occur in girls below age fifteen.11 For many people the war begins at home: Each year about three million children in the United States are reported as victims of child abuse and neglect. One million of these cases are serious and credible enough to force local child protective services or the courts to take action.12 In other words, for every soldier who serves in a war zone abroad, there are ten children who are endangered in their own homes. This is particularly tragic, since it is very difficult for growing children to recover when the source of terror and pain is not enemy combatants but their own caretakers.” The Body Keeps the Score Published 2014

We would all like to believe all children in this country come from loving homes. They do not. Children are so easy to break and so difficult to piece together again. I know, I have been broken and I have in turn broken as each unhealed generation unwittingly does.

“For every soldier who serves in a war zone abroad, there are ten children who are endangered in their own homes.” Perhaps in this hyper-partisan era it will be viewed as unpatriotic to say those ten children deserve our care as much as one war veteran. I tend to resent memes about veterans and abused puppies not because they should not matter, but because they are everywhere. The memes, that is. When will such a spotlight be shown on all the broken children?

Instead we say things like “children are resilient” or “it’s none of my business” or we say nothing at all.

I have often thought of myself as growing up in a war zone. There was the silent war between my parents that lasted much of my childhood only to finally erupt on one traumatic afternoon when I was 16.

There were violent beatings.

My sister having my brothers baby.

A hit-and-run accident meant to kill.

A hole dug along a path meant for my sister.

A letter when I was 11 telling me that terrible things would happen to me, but we DeGoliers were survivors.

There was incest from an early age.

And there was rage and stone cold silence and suffering and fear. And just like in war, I became hyper-vigilant against the danger.

Perhaps I resent all the attention given to veterans of war and PTSD when my own PTSD spent decades destroying me and everything I touched. (I do not resent veterans, only the attention.)

Imagine how many children, already destroyed, going to war. Trauma on top of trauma. I too stepped from the frying pan into a different fire, adult life I had no tools to cope with, babies I had no idea how to raise while I continued to struggle with my own childhood traumas in the same old silence I was taught. And never ending abandonment by a husband who could neither stay or stay away.

Mental health needs a wider stage. There are so many players and little direction. But more importantly, health care should include the damage to minds the same as it includes setting a broken arm. The damage is just as real.

“When the brain’s alarm system is turned on, it automatically triggers

preprogrammed physical escape plans in the oldest parts of the brain. As in other

animals, the nerves and chemicals that make up our basic brain structure have a

direct connection with our body. When the old brain takes over, it partially shuts

down the higher brain, our conscious mind, and propels the body to run, hide,

fight, or, on occasion, freeze. By the time we are fully aware of our situation, our

body may already be on the move. If the fight/flight/freeze response is

successful and we escape the danger, we recover our internal equilibrium and

gradually “regain our senses.”” The Body Keeps the Score

This paragraph explains so much to me. I spent much of my life in flight or fight mode, mostly flight. Every time I entered a psych ward I was fleeing to relative safety from perceived threats of unendurable pain or rejection, other people’s rage, yelling, loud noises. There were many triggers linked to the childhood trauma and the life I tried to “bury” “leave behind” “get over” that made life turbulent at best.

I thought myself weak, stupid, cruel, callous and yes, at times my actions tried to convince me I was “crazy.” The word “why” haunted me. Why must I always escape? Why must I clench the steering wheel till my knuckles were white all the way to Florida and the comforting shroud of humidity laden air each time I left North Carolina? Why must I run back to therapy at what others might think was the slightest incident? Why could I not have a “normal” life?

Because I lived two lives. The one inside was filled with pain, secrets, darkness, shame, and the never ending fear of being “found out.” On the outside I tried desperately to be good, a good wife, a good mother, a good cook and cleaner, a good everything so maybe people would love me and not leave me.

But I had married a man I did not love and who did not love me, a marriage of convenience for us both; I married him to escape my father and two of my brothers and I kept on running.

In a moment of fairness, I would have been difficult to live with, I could barely live with myself.

Over the years I have tried to throw out my “running shoes,” tried to not need them any more. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy may mean the end to running and a new beginning. For the first time I am finding evidence to explain my past behaviors as well as viable hope that I can have a greater measure of control in the future.

Billions of children are abused. It is time people recognize the great need for better and more affordable mental health services. It is time to heal.

“traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their
growth because they can’t integrate new experiences into their lives. I was very
moved when the veterans of Patton’s army gave me a World War II army-issue
watch for Christmas, but it was a sad memento of the year their lives had
effectively stopped: 1944. Being traumatized means continuing to organize your
life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every
new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.”

“Psychological problems occur when our internal signals don’t work, when our
maps don’t lead us where we need to go, when we are too paralyzed to move,
when our actions do not correspond to our needs, or when our relationships
break down. Every brain structure that I discuss has a role to play in these
essential functions, and as we will see, trauma can interfere with every one of
them.”

from “The Body Keeps The Score”

Whether one believes or not my childhood traumas, the fact is that my life, as I knew it, stopped the day my brother led me to his bedroom. Every activity, every relationship, every experience from that day on was tainted by that trauma. The fact that the abuse was ongoing and I knew no power to end it meant ongoing contamination of my life.

But I won’t dwell on those facts. I want to talk about the generational passing down of the effects of that trauma or any trauma that stops you in your tracks.

We cannot stop the trauma’s effects by “burying it” “moving on” or otherwise ignoring it. We must deal with it. The generations, including mine, of suffering in silence have done the world no favor.

My trauma lived inside me through all my years of grade and high school, directing all activity, propelled me headlong into a disastrous marriage, and then through my children’s lives and my grandchildren’s lifetimes.

It does little to relieve my conscience to know that I was not just a “crazy” or weak, or immoral, cruel and callous, or just plain selfish. There are explanations I am discovering, but not excuses. I remain responsible.

But the challenge stretches far beyond me just feeling better about myself or learning the life skills I lacked. There is a horde of people, throughout my life, affected by my life journey, in fact every person.

Let me put it this way. My mother was a tyrant. Verbally and physically she abused her 20 children. Those 20 screwed up children collectively brought 67 children into the world. If they supplied another 2 per household we have another 134.

I have heard from some of the grandchildren about their relationships with their DeGolier parent. I can list the siblings whose children hate them, do not speak to them, or just treat them very bad.

I do not know for certain what made my mother who she was to us, but whatever it was, it took me near a lifetime to find any compassion for her.

Honesty, education, and the end of silent suffering could go a long way to heal and prepare our children to deal with trauma. Trauma comes to most people in one form or another. We must end the stigma of seeking help for our tired and disrupted brains just as we seek help for physical ills.

I continue my journey.

Someone dear to me asked how I could still smile. I could not answer. It was not clear if the question referred to all the bad I have done or the trauma done to me. I did not ask. I felt a pang of guilt and betrayal that I could still smile. And I was confused. I could not answer.

A friend in AA told me once that happiness is a choice. I hated her for those words. How could I possibly make a choice to be happy?

Those were dark years. No alcohol and reality slapping me upside the head like a restless tide crashing the shore. Newly addressing the fact that my children were then gone five years and not coming back and the beginning of facing my childhood and my life for what it was, trauma after trauma.

I have learned a lot, and suffered a lot in the thirty years since. All that is lost to me can never be regained. I refer to people, not things. If I do not choose to smile and be happy with what is, there is no point in moving forward. If there is naught but suffering, what is my reason for being?

I also learned in AA that pain is mandatory while suffering is optional. I had a hard time with that concept. Everything hurt so much.

A person once told me that a religious nut told her about me, “Some people are just born to suffer.” I resented that. Here was a person who knew nothing about me but lies told to her, and she dismissed me with a few cutting words and perhaps the wave of her hand. And of course further proof god hated me, or at best was a callous moron.

There will always be pain and just like the rain comes after the sun, there will be joy. My pain never goes away. But when suffering tries to settle in I turn my back to it and walk away.

Have most people suffered so little that they must wring every ounce of suffering they can from life? Is it wrong to smile through the pain? Is it strength to be able to set aside pain, perhaps in a locked box on the shelf and feel life’s warm breezes and sunshine?

How can I still smile? How can I not? I have survived much to get to this place in me. besides it is the best I can offer the rest of the world around me when I go out my door. I smile, they smile, we all feel better for it. Smiling is right up there with laughter as the best medicine.

Hate is a simple answer to complex people and things in general. In ignorance (the lack of understanding, lack of knowledge or experience), I hated my mother from early childhood. She was the source and the cause of all things evil in my life. She was Ma, after all, and Ma is another word for comforter, healer, and unconditional love and all that. She wasn’t just any woman, she was Ma. She should live up to her title. She never did.

By the age of 37 I had had enough of Ma. I had enough of not being good enough, smart enough, skinny enough, successful enough, not to mention the tapes in my head that played in my head whenever she appeared like women are bad, sluts, and pretty much always to blame for everything.

In the early 90’s I was lucky enough to get a 5-6 week visit from her every spring. I would put on my fake smile of pleasure and leap tall buildings to please her but within days I was half out of my mind with grief and hate for her punishing voice in my ear every day.

I prayed. I believed in God then, enough to pray for him to take her away before she could do me any more harm. She was old. She’d lived long enough, caused untold anguish, I deemed it time for her to go. It never occurred to me that I could kill her, never once, but if God took her, well, that would be okay.

But God apparently was not listening, did not care, or just was not there. Just like when I was a child and really did believe all the hype about him, I was alone.

What changed was the ever growing piles of shame I heaped upon my head, another dark secret to carry to my grave.

Then in 1995 I purposely invited my mother to stay a few weeks in the spring. I had this absurd but noble idea that if I searched I could find some long buried bond between us. I wrote some about it in my first book. I have pages and pages of journals I wrote trying to keep my sanity. But again, within a week I was starting to imagine I would find her dead when I reached home from work instead of seeing her little innocent smile peering out the living-room curtain.

It was during that visit Ma told me she had known I was telling the truth when I was sixteen about Dad. ‘Then why didn’t you help me?” I was incredulous.

“I just couldn’t” was her only answer as she went on to describe her remembrance of Dad’s pacing and pacing all night long and not then knowing why.

I went to pieces. She and Dad and Sheila treated me so despicably at the time, silencing me to my silent anguished future, and all the time she knew I was telling the truth. That day was the only time I felt myself “split into two people, the adult and the child, the child chastising herself and the adult comforting the child. A policeman took me to the hospital. Mother left. My mind left for many months, a few years in fact, until after her death in March of 2000. It is all in my journals from that time period.

I no longer feel guilt for hating my mother. On her death bed she made one fleeting and feeble attempt at apology. I got this second hand, as I was not present. “If I have hurt any of my children, I am sorry.” It was her pride I suppose that kept her from ever admitting she did anything wrong. But most of twenty children hated her to a degree, some to this day.

I said that ignorance was the cause of my hate. Ignorance is the underlying cause of most hate. My hate kept me from trying to understand my mother. My inexperience and inability to understand myself caused me to seek out the simple solution, though hate is far more complex as was Mother.

I do not miss Ma. I doubt I ever will, except for the odd moments when I wish I knew more about her malady. So much I do not understand. But I am getting to understand myself. Every answer I find for my own behaviors brings me closer to my mother whom, sadly, I became very much like.

I have found many of my actions to be contemptible over the years. Those actions neither reflected my inner self nor any reasonableness that I could fathom. They were certainly not actions of love. I could not explain them even to myself let alone my children.

In the autumn of 1987 with the familiar crunch of fallen leaves beneath my feet I reveled in what seemed to be a successful transition from an abusive relationship in Florida to North Carolina where I was just minutes from my children, had money in the bank and my freedom. A new beginning.

Then everything changed. I began stopping at the convenience store for cheap wine to soothe whatever insanity was rumbling in my gut. I called a hot line and followed that up with begging for an appointment with a counselor. “I can’t wait two weeks!” I cried. “By then I will be back in Florida with Bob and I don’t want to go.”

It seems like it ought to be a simple decision. But it was not a decision. It was compulsion. I could no more stop it than I could stop the dead leaves from falling to the ground. One evening I called Bob. Even as I did I hated me for being weak. Before two weeks passed I was in Florida with Bob in the throws of severe depression and remorse. And the inexplicable knowledge that I had “chosen” this man I did not like or love over my children who I longed for with every breath.

A self loathing set in and I continued to slide downhill ever faster until in September of 88 I landed in AA with the surety that suicide was my only way out.

The book which seems to answer some of my many questions, and ease my mind a bit, “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk MD speaks of early childhood trauma’s effect on brain development. I have much to learn about what happened to me and how I got where I am today, but one thing is sure, though I alone am responsible for my actions, there were extenuating circumstances. Of course that does not alleviate the suffering of those in my path. It does not provide an excuse, only a reason. It will never exonerate me.

But I deserve some peace from the hunting images of the destruction I left behind. Yes, I said that. I am neither weak nor coward, stupid or hate filled.

I am a survivor who is going beyond the bounds of mere survival. Don’t let the bastards win, especially when they live inside you.