Incident 4: No Danger of Succeeding?

Behind Heavy Doors, by Kate Rose, PhD

Introduction:?

I’d done everything I could to escape. Now, the cruelly burlesque comedy of my prep school expulsion has locked me back into the dangers of home. And I have to find a new escape path. I’m 15.?

Part 1 (narrative):

For a while I am shocked. Catatonic. People, even teachers, talk and I do not respond. I have fallen from great heights, not only in terms of academics and opportunities, but I am once again unsafe.?

And then once again, I come up with an escape plan.?

This time, I squirrel away my babysitting money. I find a book about gap years that mentions different programs (long before internet). There is one in Belgium, and they will pay you a stipend and give you a place to live. I am a minor, so I need permission, but like the boarding school, it would look suspicious of them to try to stop me. And they care very much about maintaining appearances. And they have already groomed me to fail and fall from whatever heights I reach. I am, in their minds, in “no danger of succeeding.”

A few things happen in high school. One started at boarding school. The summer before and the summer before that, I spent in Greece with distant relatives. For those summers, I lived with people who treated me decently. This was a first, and I blossomed. This was paradise. I was assigned to take care of a difficult seven-year old who was adopted and had many behavioral problems, but I was a hard-core babysitter and used to dealing with much more challenging things than a totally different culture and language and a boy who was lashing out and wantonly destroying things and disturbing people.?

And in Greece, I heard music! I heard and saw people playing live music for the first time except for those African musicians who briefly visited and made such a lasting impression in fourth grade that I can still hear their songs in my mind. In Greece, it was a man with a bouzouki, and he would sing with his wife at night in an open-air bar by the sea. I would tiptoe out of the hotel and sit by the shore and listen. It was then I know what I wanted to do with my life. It seemed there could be nothing finer than singing and playing music.?

I had a few lessons at the boarding school, but it really started after I was expelled. B and R found a pedophile to teach me, and staged it so I would feel guilty and scared, being away just long enough for the incident to happen but then coming back at the end with accusatory glances at me. This was part of their medicine, especially hers. This was her treatment for whatever she had been through. This way, she didn’t have to be a victim again. I could suffer in her place and she’d gain the same brain-made chemical fix.?

This man, who is still around and playing, respected in the New England contradance scene, he raped me. I call it rape because I was underage; I appeared consensual in allowing a married man older than my parents with a daughter in college to penetrate my still-growing teenage body. I thought I was in love with him. Really he was my drug. That is the intimacy of the victim-perpetrator dynamic, rooted in neurology. By being a victim, I gained the chemical release I needed to survive. And we invent myths around this, notably of love. So though he did give me some introduction to music, he did not give me much, since most of the lessons were him abusing me. Still, with those tiny scraps, I started to make a musical life that would be forever.?

I often fantasize what would have happened if I’d had a music teacher who became a mentor and nourished me as a musician. But mostly I’m grateful for what I have musically and that I had the willpower and talent to teach myself. Next time, I will tell you how much that has helped and continues to help me.?

Part 2 (themes and theories):?

The previous incident hinted at me acting out, a cry for help, when in the relative safety of boarding school. Victims often fare worse when they are suddenly out of danger’s way than when they are actively being harmed. When harm and danger are constant, they are anesthetized. This fact is often neglected, and the consequences are dire. For example, it can be thought they were actually happier with their abusers. They might think so themselves.?

They return to abuse in order to gain the chemical fix that has kept them alive, holding off the unfathomable suffering. During the original trauma, to avoid it killing them, they shut down. If not, the adrenaline and cortisol may have given them a heart attack. So it is literally what the body does to survive. It cuts off the alarm (amygdala) from the narrative part of the brain (hippocampus). But then the narrative part can’t process the event and tell the alarm it can shut off now. The only way for it to shut off is through a short-circuit, like electrical system that shuts itself down to prevent an appliance from burning up. But the power is off. The victim is not really fully present in the body. Moreover, morphine-like substances offered by the brain produce a haze of calm.?

All these hard drugs the brain produces are highly addictive. When the dissociative drugs wear off and reality sets in, the victim only knows one way to get these again: repeating the trauma. When the calming drugs run out, for example when relative safety returns, or when the dose is no longer sufficient, the alarm is heard to ring full-force again, with the adrenaline. It is like reliving the original trauma. They may do extreme sports, take actual drugs, have risky sex, and so on to get even more of it, an even higher high, because they know of the calm that comes after; this cycle is pure survival. It is how any normal person responds to the abnormal circumstances of torture, sexual violence, or combat.?

Part 3 (implications):

What could have been done? How could we as a society better protect children and all vulnerable people??

Understanding certain behaviors as symptomatic of abuse and trauma is a huge step. We need to stop individualizing these behaviors. I know this is controversial, but it is well-substantiated in Salmona’s research and the sources she cites: the dominant notion that brain chemistry is responsible may be true, but not in the way it is usually conceived of. It is not innate brain chemistry that causes people to have a variety of mental health and neurodivergent conditions.?

Salmona ironizes about how differently psychological harm is treated from physical harm: If someone comes in with an open wound, doctors will look for the cause of the wound. Was there a knife? Is it still there? How did it happen? They don’t think the open gash is part of the person’s innate personality. They stitch it up. When someone comes in with physiological trauma—a wound to their psyche that might have just happened or reopened after festering untreated—they are not given treatments that actually fix them. It’s as if instead of stitching up the wound, the doctors give them medication to mask the pain. The wound is still open and bleeding.?

Salmona first noticed as a teenager how unjust it was that holocaust survivors were just expected to get on with life. If someone is hit by a car and injured by the roadside, there will be a tremendous deployment of resources to get that person safe and fixed up. There will be a lot of empathy, and the victim will not be blamed for having been hit by a car.?

With trauma, victims are blamed for what happened and also for their resulting behaviors. Yet these are as consistent as bleeding from a knife wound. They may appear inconsistent, however, if the mechanisms of trauma aren’t fully grasped; and they rarely are.?

The first step to effective protection and prevention—at which society is filing miserably right now–is to adequately identify the behavioral symptoms of ongoing abuse and traumatic memory. As important is doing away with myths that parents love their children and ultimately want what’s best for them or that children are better off with abusive biological families. This would take a huge shift in mentalities and in the therapeutic approach even in trauma-informed care. This awareness requires us to “look for the knife” when someone comes to us bleeding.?

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