Trauma and Its Lasting Effects

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of not Wellness Wednesday, because I skipped this Wednesday and last Wednesday, but Thoughts for a Thursday. I noticed myself feeling just kind of drained and doing a lot, and so I pulled back these last few weeks just to energize and recharge. And the book that I've been reading is probably the most impactful book I've ever written— I've ever read in my life, and I was just so moved to make a video about it. It's called Know My Name by Chanel Miller. And if you remember in 2015, a Stanford student swimmer sexually assaulted someone. I'm like, I'm like very emotional. And she was known as Emily Doe for a long time. And the swimmer got 6 months in jail, county jail, and served 3 months and was released. And Chanel Her victim impact statement, which she read during the court proceedings to Brock Turner, went viral, and she was still known as Emily Doe for like years, and then recently came out with her memoir called Know My Name. Highly recommend reading it. Trigger warning though. So anyway, I want to read the victim impact statement. I also want to talk a little bit about trauma, and I'm skipping most of the victim impact statement because it's really graphic, and depending on your experience with any level of sexual assault, abuse, trauma, um, period. I mean, even without it, it may be triggering, and so I'm going to skip that. If you want to read it, just Google Chanel Miller, um, victim impact statement, and you can read the whole thing. And again, I really encourage anyone that's watching this to read her book Know My Name. But I just wanted to talk about trauma and some of the things that we think about trauma that are false. So there are some things that I talk about often in my videos, one of them being that time heals all wounds. It doesn't. Time does not heal all wounds. Time does not heal trauma at all. Trauma is not something that we can just not talk about and push aside and it's going to heal on itself, on its own. It just— that doesn't happen. Another thing is that, you know, especially with any level of trauma, and let me just talk a little bit about what trauma is. Trauma is not an objective thing. Trauma is so subjective, which means it depends on the person. It depends how your brain and body receive whatever the experience is. There's vicarious trauma, You know, I can experience a ton of vicarious trauma when I'm listening to my clients tell me about their trauma. And so I have to practice emotional boundaries, go to my own therapy, do my own self-care work. So vicarious trauma, you can witness abuse of any kind, and that is traumatizing— domestic abuse, etc. There's emotional abuse. There's just so many different levels of abuse and so many different levels of trauma. And I think often we tell ourselves like, well, I wasn't raped, so 'those, so it's not that bad,' or, you know, 'My parents didn't hit me, so it wasn't that bad.' But Pia Melody can describe trauma as anything less than nurturing. You know, you can have an identical twin and your parents get divorced, and one twin may internalize it as a traumatizing experience and one twin may not. And there's so many different factors involved. But I guess the main thing I want to say is that you don't have to be sexually assaulted to have experienced trauma. You don't have had to be beaten or raped or go to war in Iraq, right? Like, trauma is more common than we know, and not talking about it, not addressing it, not getting professional help, like, it doesn't go anywhere. And so we can have attachment trauma, right? If we have one or both parents or primary caregivers who are inconsistently present or who pass away or who are home but not emotionally present, right? Like, there's just so many levels of trauma. Um, anyway, Chanel Miller is writing about her sexual trauma. She was unconscious, and Brock Turner sexually assaulted her. And, um, I'm just gonna read the, the towards the end of her victim impact statement because I think it also really illuminates what some of the longer-term effects of trauma can be. And I think sometimes we can expect people to just get over it. Maybe we wouldn't say it like that, but I work with so many people who have this internal narrative of, well, this happened X amount of years ago, I should be fine. Like, why do I still think about it?. And so I wanted to read this. So again, you can Google, um, Chanel Miller victim impact statement, and this is from the BuzzFeed article that was published around that time. So again, this is the very end of it, but she says, my independence, natural joy, gentleness, and steady lifestyle I had been enjoying became distorted beyond recognition. I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty. The isolation at times was unbearable. You cannot— she's talking to Brock Turner— you cannot give me back the life I had before that night either. While you worry about your shattered reputation, I refrigerated spoons every night so when I woke up, my eyes were still puffy from crying. I would hold the spoons to my eyes to lessen the swelling so that I could see. I showed up an hour late to work every morning, excused myself to cry in the stairwells. I can tell you all the best places in that building to cry where no one can hear you. The pain became so bad that I had to explain the private details to my boss to let her know I was leaving. I needed time because continuing day to day was not possible. I used my savings to go as far away as I could possibly be. I did not return to work full-time as I knew I'd have to take weeks off in the future for the hearing and the trial that were constantly being rescheduled. My life was put on hold for over a year. My structure had collapsed. And she's talking about the year plus that she was essentially taking Brock to court, and that process was incredibly traumatizing in and of itself. And oftentimes we'll ask victims, we'll ask survivors, like, well, why did they take this long? I think again with this MeToo movement, a lot of times we're victim shaming and saying like, well, why did they wait until this person was in power? Why did they wait 20 years? And it's like, read this book and put yourself in those shoes. I also feel like a really intense rage at like so many things from this book and that have probably been there all along. And so I'm like trying to just hold it together because we expect the victim to like, "Why didn't you say no? Why didn't you tell anyone? Why didn't you go to the police? Why didn't you fight back?" And it's like trauma responses are real. We freeze. There's just so much there. Okay. "I can't sleep alone at night without having a light on." like a 5-year-old because I have nightmares of being touched where I cannot wake up. I did this thing where I waited until the sun came up and I felt safe enough to sleep. For 3 months, I went to bed at 6 o'clock in the morning. I used to pride myself on my independence. Now I'm afraid to go on walks in the evening, to attend social events with drinking among friends where I should be comfortable being. I've become a little barnacle, always needing to be at someone's side, to have my boyfriend standing next to me, sleeping beside me, protecting me. It is embarrassing how feeble I feel, how timidly I move through life, always guarded, ready to defend myself, ready to be angry. And that's called hypervigilance. Again, you don't have had to— you don't have had to have experienced sexual trauma to experience hypervigilance, that feeling of always being on edge, of reading the room, of figuring out how other people feel. And these are all trauma responses. The need to be busy all of the time, to be distracted all of the time, is often a trauma response as well. Well, you have no idea how hard I've worked to rebuild the parts of me that are still weak. It took me 8 months to even talk about what happened. I could no longer connect with friends, with everyone around me. I would scream at my boyfriend, my own family whenever they brought this up. You never let me forget what happened to me. At the end of the hearing, the trial, I was too tired to speak. I would leave drained and silent. I would go home, turn off my phone, and for days I would not speak. You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself. Every time a new article comes out, I lived with the paranoia that my entire hometown would find out and know me as the girl who got assaulted. I didn't want anyone's pity, and I'm still learning to accept a victim as part of my identity. You made my own hometown an uncomfortable place to be. You cannot give me back my sleepless nights, the way I have broken down sobbing uncontrollably if I'm watching a movie and a woman is harmed, to say it lightly. This experience has expanded my empathy for other victims. I have lost weight from stress. When people would comment, I told them I'd been running a lot lately. There are times I did not want to be touched. I have to relearn that I am not fragile. I am capable. I am wholesome, not just livid and weak. When I see my younger sister hurting, when she is unable to keep up in school, when she is deprived of joy, when she is not sleeping, when she is crying so hard on the phone that she is barely breathing, telling me over and over again that she is sorry for leaving me alone at that party. Sorry, sorry, sorry. When she feels more guilt than you. Then I do not forgive you. That night I had called her to try and find her, but you found me first. Your attorney's closing statement began, her sister said she was fine, and who knows her better than her sister? You tried to use my own sister against me? Your points of attack were so weak, so low, it was almost embarrassing. You do not get to touch her. You should have never done this to me. Secondly, you should have never made me fight so long to tell you. You should have never done this to me. But here we are. The damage is done. No one can undo it. And now we both have a choice. We can let this destroy us. I can remain angry and hurt and you can be in denial, or we can face it head on. I accept the pain, you accept the punishment, and we move on. Um, and then she talks a lot about, um, the sentence, which was incredibly lenient, and how basically, like, in the trial and the proceedings, it was like, well, it was her fault because she drank too much and blacked out. Um, leniency, probation. To conclude, I want to say thank you. Thank you to the intern who made me oatmeal when I woke up at the hospital that morning, to the deputy who waited beside me, the nurses who calmed me, to the detective who listened to me and never judged me, to my advocates who stood unwaveringly beside me, to my therapist who taught me to find courage and vulnerability, to my boss for being kind and understanding. And she goes through all of these different people, and I think that's an important paragraph as well because we have no idea how much help that we can be to someone who's struggling, just to listen and provide empathy and not shame them and say, well, why didn't you XYZ? And most importantly, thank you to the two men who saved me. These two Swedes were on bicycles and they saw Brock assaulting her because she was unconscious and they chased him down, who I have yet to meet. I sleep with two bicycles that I drew taped above my bed to remind me that there are heroes in this story, that we are looking out for one another. To have known all of these people and to have felt their protection and love is something I will never forget. And finally, to girls everywhere, I am with you. And men can also be sexually assaulted. It's important to know that. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought every day for you, so never stop fighting. I believe you. As the author Anne Lamott once wrote, "Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining." Although I can't save every boat, I hope that by speaking today you absorbed a small amount of light. A small knowing that you, that you can't be silenced. A small satisfaction that justice was served. A small assurance that we are getting somewhere. And a big, big knowing that you are important. Unquestionably. You are untouchable. You are beautiful. You are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day. You are powerful and nobody can take that from you. To girls everywhere, I am with you. Thank you. And so she read that to Brock Turner at the trial. And again, he had like a very lenient sentence.. And then, um, and then it blew up and it went viral. And her own therapist who didn't know that she was Emily Doe was like, have you read this? You should read this. Hillary Clinton quoted it in her book. Um, and then she talks too about like, you know, the last 4 years and sexual assault being glorified and it just being locker room talk and all of this stuff. And it's just, the book is phenomenal. Again, to me it's incredibly impactful. So whether you have been victim of any kind of abuse, whether you've experienced any amount of trauma, I just hope that hearing this can illuminate like it's okay to not be okay. And this expectation to be okay with any level of trauma, and sometimes the human experience itself is traumatic. And what we've all gone through in the past year plus with COVID is traumatic, and Black Lives Matter, and watching person after person get shot and killed, um, watching Asian hate, watching people not value Black lives, you know, watching this trial with Derek Chauvin this week and like the impact that it might have had on you and this moment of relief met with, but what is truly changing? All of it is valid and you are valid. And as drained as I have been personally, again, reading this book is just having such a profound impact on me. And in case you've never heard of it, and in case you've never heard it, and in case you found this video by Googling trauma into YouTube or Google, know that you are not alone and there are people that will advocate for you and fight for you and all of your feelings are valid. Okay, thanks.