In her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation, Janine Fisher writes:
“When attachment figures are abusive, the child’s only source of safety and protection becomes simultaneously the source of immediate danger leaving the child caught between two conflicting sets of instincts.” (p. 24)
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Seeing as an Uncertain Experience:
I love this beautiful passage from Katherine May’s book Wintering.
“At that moment, I realised that every image of the [northern] lights I had ever seen had been misleading. I had been poring over photographs of neon displays as lurid as disco lights, and watching YouTube videos of lights that strike out against the night sky, bold and distinct. These are invariably sped up, the luminous greens and pinks enhanced by long exposures. Look closely, and you will see the stars shining through the aurora in every picture; they are not even bright enough to eclipse tiny pinpoints of light from trillions of miles away. They move slowly, like drifting clouds. Seeing them is an uncertain experience, almost an act of faith. You have to get your eye in, and I honestly don’t think I would ever have spotted them at all had I not been told they were there.
There is nothing showy about the northern lights, nothing obvious or demanding. They hide from you at first, then they whisper to you. We would squint into the sky, and say, ‘is that them, there? Do you think? Over there? Yes. Yes! Maybe. I don’t know….’ But then, eventually at a pace set entirely by the firmament, we were given the gift of seeing them, as if in reward for our faith and patience. Then, we seemed to see them everywhere.” (p. 162)
As a young girl, the first thing I remember wanted to be was an astronaut, so I’ve always had a fascination with space. Now as a therapist, I totally geek out over the amazing metaphors for healing found in the exploration of our universe. As we wrap up laying the foundation for upcoming content around childhood trauma, I present you with two amazing analogies to keep in mind in the coming months.
Supernovas vs. Black Holes:
The first recorded observation of a supernova was by Chinese astronomers in 185 A.D. The explosion of light that took place in the final stages of death of the supermassive star (later named SN 1054) was easily visible with the naked eye—the telescope won’t be invented until the early 17th century. In 1054 A.D. another supernova was so exceptionally bright—four times brighter than Venus—that it was visible in the daytime for 23 days and in the night sky for over a year. Supernovas, like “headline harm” in our stories, are dramatic, eventful, easily visible if we are looking for them and are accompanied by searing white hot heat.
In contrast, it wasn’t until April of 2019, after two years of combining and analyzing data, that global astronomers constructed the first ever image of a black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope Team (named after the term for the edge of a black hole that is the gravitational place of no escape) brought together eight radio telescopes stationed at different points across the planet and synced by powerful atomic clocks.
As I learned more about this miraculous event, I was struck by the similarities between a black hole and the subtle, almost impossible to name, darkness that inhabits many people’s stories.
I grew up in a good Christian home.
My parents were never divorced.
I always had everything I needed.
There wasn’t any abuse in my family.
My siblings and I loved each other.
These statements can all be true even as an adult struggles deeply with issues that make them feel crazy. We all have unnamed places of darkness in our lives, and I believe speaking our untold stories in community requires a great cloud of witnesses (maybe even eight!) to see the way well-disguised harm has robbed our lives of light.
Evil by its very nature is invisible. The more subtle evil is, the harder it is to capture on film. The most important photos of our lives are ones where there is no light. But how do we take a picture of something that doesn’t emit light? How do we see a void?
As you watch the video below, you can imagine how difficult it is to capture the voids of protection, care, comfort and nurturance in our stories.
The Gemini Space Program:
I’m in the middle of Jeffrey Kluger’s book Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story which explores the US space program of the 1960’s that bridged the Mercury missions that first propelled an American into space and the Apollo missions that took a man to the moon. Standing in my local bookstore, I was captured by the back cover’s synopsis:
It was no easy jump from manned missions in low-Earth orbit to a successful moon landing, and the ten-flight, twenty-month celestial story of the Gemini program is an extraordinary one. There was unavoidable darkness in the program—the deaths and near-deaths that defined it, and the blood feud with the Soviet Union that animated it. But there were undeniable and previously inconceivable successes. Against all odds, the remarkable scientists and astronauts behind the project persevered, and their efforts paid off. Later, with the knowledge gained from the Gemini flights, NASA would launch the legendary Apollo program.
Kluger could just as easily be talking about our journeys of healing. The middle grueling years between realizing historic pain is limiting our emotional lives and the alleviation of shame that allows us to come home to ourselves in way we’ve never known is an arduous journey.
The Gemini Program was designed to test equipment and mission procedures in Earth’s orbit and to train astronauts and ground crews for future Apollo missions. The two-man Gemini spacecraft was larger and more sophisticated than its Mercury predecessor. The progress was slow, but its key victories were establishing endurance for a 14-day mission, mastering orbital rendezvous and docking, executing the first U.S. spacewalks and demonstrating precise reentry and landing control.
These are some of the same elements I am wanting to help us build through my upcoming publications:
Larger and more sophisticated thinking about our stories
Building our endurance for sustained living on our journeys toward healing
Experiences of rendezvousing and docking with other survivors for encouragement and sharing wisdom
Learning how to enter and return from the hard work of grieving that often feels like a G force launch into a thin atmosphere and the “controlled plunge” back into the gravitational pull of our lives
Unfortunately, the Gemini program did not eliminate all danger, but it did prepare NASA for the 238,900-mile journey from earth’s orbit to the surface of the moon.
On Jan 27, 1967, three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 launch pad disaster. Among them was “Gus” Grissom who uttered this famous quote before perishing. “If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” The next Apollo mission would be named Apollo 4, skipping the identifiers of Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 to honor the three lives lost.
The healing journey we are on does not always feel safe and often comes at a high cost, and yet is a worthy risk if we will continue to choose courageous self-care and self-compassion.
Reflection Questions:
When in your story did you feel the gravitational pull of darkness? How did the light of who you are disappear into it for a time?Who is in your Event Horizon Team that helps you bring together these elusively invisible images to see the reality of what was missing for you growing up?
When you think about the “Gemini years” of your own healing journey, what support and resources do you most need to continue? What do you sense you are learning even in the grueling and costly stage of naming the harm you have survived?
In the coming months, I’m going to tackle four extremely intense, yet crucial, arenas of trauma that need to be understood by those who grew up with emotionally unwell caregivers:
How children survive feeling both afraid of and attached to those who raise them
The sexualization of the parent child relationships when rage is unleashed
The tyrannical nature of the patriarchal family model
Unwell mothers and the violation that happens when they need their children to provide for them.
All these topics will require a high level of courage in unmasking and naming harm. I will assert some uncomfortable theories, not because I’m right about everything but because more strength is needed in exposing covert forms of abuse if every childhood trauma survivor is going to find a path forward towards healing.
And before I do all of that I must, must, must be clear…
Humans are never the source of evil. Abuse occurs because a person is surviving the oppression they are experiencing by betraying another person. It’s not necessarily conscious or intentional, but survival is often accomplished by violently ruling over those with less power in exchange for relief under a larger oppressive presence. There are stories of those who consciously and willingly inflict pain because they have become conduits of evil, but I do not believe that is where their story began. When a human experiences pleasure in the suffering of others we are in the realm of psychosis and not merely survival. These stories often began as a person seeking power in powerlessness, and the amount of darkness their personhood embodies decades later places them among those historic figures we consider inhumane.
Theologian Parker Palmer says it this way: “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”
In his book The Inner World of Trauma, Donald Kalsched explains the concept under our word diabolical. The Greek word dia means across while the root word ballein means to throw. When something is diabolical it means “to throw across or apart.” Harm’s greatest tactic is to target one entity and tempt it to survive by turning on its own kind. Creation is literally thrown apart. The clearest historical example is from World War 2 concentration camps.
Kapos (also spelled Capos) were WW2 concentration camp prisoners (mostly Jewish) appointed by the SS guards to oversee their fellow prisoners. In exchange for terrorizing subordinate Jews, they were often given warm clothing, enough to eat and lived in sections removed from the prison barracks. Their role, as the face of the SS’s power, was to supervise housing units, oversee work gangs, transport victims to the ovens, clean the chambers of human excrement and blood and shave the heads of those going to be gassed. They received special privileges for their willingness to be an instrument of humiliation in the camp regime. All of this was to ultimately guard against revolution among prisoners.
This brilliant, insidious tactic to maintain power through violence is neither new nor rare. In the past several years since learning about Kapos, it’s been sobering to see this theme of using “insiders to betray their own” manifested in many trauma contexts.
During the Roman Empire, Jewish tax collectors were the most hated among their countrymen. In exchange for being spared the cruelty of punishment for unpaid taxes, these men carried out the demands of the emperor, often profiting greatly themselves.
The most haunting scene of the movie Twelve Years a Slave is when the main character, Solomon Northrup, is ordered to whip Patsey, a fellow slave and sexual interest of their Master. She comes back later than expected from an errand to get soap for bathing and is falsely accused by her irate Master of being “unfaithful” to him. While she is being tied to a post, Solomon is handed a heavy whip. Disoriented by the Master yelling commands to beat the girl and Patsey begging him to do it (knowing he will be more merciful than the Master) he begins the whipping. In his book on which the movie is based, Northrup wrote of that moment: “Nowhere that day, on the face of the whole earth, I venture to say, was there such a demonic exhibition witnessed as then ensued.” Using slave against slave meant two were punished rather than merely one. One is physically scarred, and one emotionally scarred by the anguish of participating in harm against his own kind.
Today, in sex trafficking, the term is bottom bitch. A bottom bitch is a female prostitute who sits atop the hierarchy of prostitutes working for a particular pimp. She is usually the girl who has been working for him the longest and makes him the most money. As her “reward” she is given the job of overseeing the younger girls. She recruits them, trains them and collects the money. She has a sadistic dual role of playing surrogate mother one moment as she cooks and cleans for them and the next a dispenser of violence to keep them in line.
The concept of employing “insiders” of any system to betray “their own” is a brilliant strategy on the part of Evil to multiple harm and amplify pain. Choosing a substitutionary executor of abuse distracts the victims from focusing their righteous anger on the true source of harm. For those under a Kapos, tax collector, another slave or a bottom bitch, the face of cruelty is one that is literary like their own face. This makes it infinitely harder to separate themselves as victims rather than participants in a system. The line between “us” and “them” is blurred. For those fellow prisoners given a measure of control over others as a relief from their own pain, the shame of wielding power crushes their ability to see themselves as prisoners as well. They are beyond the guilt of participants; they are now coerced into the role of perpetrator.
The scenes of your life are likely not as dramatic as those of a concentration camp, cotton plantation or brothel, but this tactic of darkness is often more alive in our stories than we realize. This dynamic is the seed for sibling rivalry in dysfunctional families, alliances in fractured communities, children who find worth through ruthless and competitive perfectionism, women sacrificing other women to hold power in male dominated spaces, and the persecution of people based on race, class and sexuality.
Naming the reality of “betrayal from within” offers all of us freedom from the shame of how we survive trauma. It also anchors us in the reality of our human condition as we focus on caregiver harm within families. I tell my clients often that my heart in narrative therapy is to boldly name the past harm they have experienced while never demonizing another person in their story. We are all born into the second act of a three act play where our ancestors, families and parents have been emotionally surviving in a fallen world for decades and the pain they pass on is because they haven’t yet known to do with their own suffering.
Reflection Questions:
When you think about the meaning of the word diabolical, who is someone you have felt “thrown apart from”? What harm outside of your relationship has compromised your closeness with this person?
How has Darkness worn someone else’s face in order to hide itself from your righteous anger? Who is someone who has harmed you? What would it mean to also see them as a prisoner struggling to survive?
What role did you play as a prisoner in your story? Did you survive by finding power at someone’s expense? Have you bought into the lie that you are a participant or perpetrator rather also a fellow survivor?