What We Carry
The biggest digital camera I own, an Olympus E-M1X, is on my desk (it even has a flash attached) because I didn’t put away last night after downloading the memory card. I had brought the camera to my son’s place in the afternoon, when my husband and I went to help him and his wife with a toddler who wasn’t feeling great. My 14-month-old grandson loves my cameras, and he lit up when he saw it yesterday. He even got a pretty good shot of his mom and dad, but he’s been taking pictures with my cameras for months.
A few weeks ago, I suggested spending a Saturday afternoon on the Maine coast. I checked in with Luke about his plans, and it turned out that he and his wife and son would be heading that way later in the day, after he played a golf tournament. We agreed to meet in Camden, but Dennis and I and our three youngest kids went to Belfast first. When the time was right, we headed down to Camden, got through the downtown on Route 1, and saw Luke, Isabel, and Julien’s car coming the other way. They found a parking space on the street, Dennis turned our car around, and parked it about a dozen spaces behind theirs. The five of us got what we needed from Dennis’s wagon, including the E-M1X for me, and headed down the sidewalk to “meet our party.” When we got close enough for Julien to see the camera around my neck, he sat down on the sidewalk. I don’t know if anyone else knew what he was doing, but I did. I hurried to him, took the camera from my neck and handed it over, pressing the shutter button whenever he pressed one of the buttons on the back.
Yesterday’s interaction with the camera was different. Julien didn’t sit down first. He now knows that he’s strong enough to hold it by himself while standing up, but he didn’t get there alone. He had me to put the camera in his hands, me to take it when it was too heavy, me to tell him that he’s doing a great job and that he’s free to explore the instrument, even when that means that he puts his fingers all over the lens.
In Journey Through Trauma, Gretchen Smelzer explains what goes one between my grandson and me:
Integration is not unique to healing from trauma. It defines the process of development and growth. The developmental psychologists Robert Kegan and Jean Piaget both describe a constant shift of moving from one state of knowing—undoing it—to a new state of knowing. As Kegan writes, “growth always involves a process of differentiation”—of moving from “what I have been” to “who I am now.” Kegan continues, “Piaget calls this ‘decentration,’ the loss of an old center, to ‘recentration,’ the recovery of a new center.” The shift from a coherent self to a more fragmented and incoherent self and then back to coherence is the normative developmental route. And this process requires support. During our growth we need someone to hold both the me that I was and the me I am becoming now. Good parents hold both aspects of growth and allow their children the ability to grow. Support allows you to make the leap—to risk letting go of the old parts of yourself enough to let the new parts of yourself emerge.
Shortly after Dennis and I got engaged, I quit my job as Assistant Business Operations Officer for the Denver office of a small asset management company based in Sacramento. I had gotten the job nearly two years before by impressing the boss after being sent to her company by a temporary agency. I remember dithering back and forth over the phone with Dennis (who was living in Massachusetts at the time) about whether or not I should take the job permanently, and he (with his pragmatically focused, German-heritage mindset) convinced me that I should. I had never loved the job, but I liked the people I worked with and was certainly capable of handling the responsibilities.
Back in September of 1992, though, I had had enough. The thought of going to the office for even one more day depressed the hell out of me and I knew it was time to leave. Interestingly, my parents came to Denver to visit right after I quit. My mother went on and on about how foolish I was to quit a good job and to not have another lined up. My father didn’t say much, but one day, when he and I were in my truck headed to Home Depot or somewhere, I asked him, “What do you think about me quitting my job?” He took a moment and then replied, “I’m not worried about you, Cheryl. You always come out just fine.” I appreciated the vote of confidence and knew that if I ever needed financial help while looking for a new job, Dad would gladly give it. He could be very good at giving me the support I needed to make a leap, but it certainly wasn’t the default. It was a little different with my mother: far more often, her fears got in the way of her supporting my growth.
In the last two years I have come to truly understand what was at play with both of my parents. Some would say that my mother lived a traumatic life, some might say my father did, and some might even say that I have. Most wouldn’t, though. And that’s the problem with “trauma” and other words we use all the time: they are too facile. They let us accept or dismiss things without thinking about them.
An example: how often we talk about sunrises and sunsets? But does the sun truly rise out of some lower place into a higher one: a dark sea of cosmos somehow differentiated from one above it? Does the sun set down into a place that is physically lower than the one in which it spends its “days”?
Just one page back from the where I found the above excerpt, Smelzer talks about problems caused by meanings attached to certain words. In a paragraph about the work of Hungarian analyst Michael Balint, she writes:
He called this work regression, but it wasn’t about going backward. That’s where our lexicon and our mythical belief about healing can get in the way of understanding. Healing isn’t just about going back into the past, to what did happen. Healing is also about looking at what needs to be learned or strengthened—it is also about what didn’t happen. Healing required a new experience of something. Healing requires that you experience new emotions and feelings. It requires that you risk speaking up and speaking differently, and that you practice new behaviors that you either never learned or couldn’t practice while the trauma was occurring.
And here we are again, with the word “trauma.” Smelzer’s book is one of the best I’ve read—and I recommend that any and every literate person read it. But each time I pick it up, I am struck by the irony of its wrong title. Journey through Trauma is too facile. It lets potential readers off the hook. They can easily dismiss the book: “That doesn’t apply to me. I grew up in a nice family. No trauma there.”
And that is a shame.
Does the book truly not apply to you? What if we replaced the word “trauma” with “emotional baggage”? Would it then apply?
Has any of this ever happened to you?
- Do you get off the phone with a brother or sister and rant to your spouse for an hour about how obtuse he or she is—maybe even feeling angry with yourself for falling into the same old patterns with this person?
- Do you tell your parents that you love them but try and find any excuse to avoid a visit?
- Do you dread family gatherings because it means a long drive for some mediocre food and boring conversations that never get any deeper than the weather or sports because everyone is too afraid of offending someone, being ridiculed, or causing a scene?
- Do you feel relieved when the invitation you felt it was your duty to extend gets turned down?
If you answered yes to any of these, you’re probably thinking, “Well, that’s just the way it is in all families,” and you’re probably right. Alice Miller, by the way, made that clear in all of her books, which is why she is so different from most people who write about “trauma.” It is why she is so often ignored by those in the mental health arena, and it is why her work is so very important.
The real question is not “Why should I think I’m any different from everyone else?” The real question is “How did we create a world in which misunderstanding and alienation from the people we are supposed to be closest to become the norm?”
About the photo by Julien: it’s his Uncle Sam, taken on a golf outing back in September
