The ghosts have returned to my dreams.  I am travelling in a car and the driver is revealed to be my dad, so I feel safe although I don’t know where I am going or why;  another time, midway through a complicated series of events, I find the dog in a dusty basement, old and frail but – as ever with dogs – no knowledge of this in herself, so she is happy to see me and keen to chase a ball, and I scoop up her warm, living, silky dog-smell body and take her with me once more.  My waking self rejoices in these reunions.  They generate comfortable feelings of gratitude, not only because of the loved ones they recall but, more importantly, they return my past to me.

I have, as is blindingly obvious from these blogs, been going through a stage in my life which I can – in the context of hindsight and some more objective knowledge – call traumatic.  Trauma is a Greek word, for wound, and its original meaning is still used for severe, sudden physical injury.   It’s more often used, nowadays, to refer to emotional hurt and that was my experience.  It’s also likely that the word is over-used these days, as an intensifier in everyday speech:  ‘traumatic’ sits alongside ‘starving’ and ‘exhausted’, since hyperbole is such a useful tool when we are trying to convey feelings and, particularly, express how overwhelming they are in the present moment. I return to the dictionary, as always, and read “severe and lasting emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience”.  I recognise in this definition, without any ambiguity, my experience of the last 22 months.  So (deep breath), trauma it was.

One of the first things I said ‘right at the start’ was that I felt my past had been taken away from me.  I felt crazy saying it – it felt like a senseless statement – but those were the only words which came anywhere near to feeling right.  I sensed a blur of acute emotional pain, but it was more than that: I felt disassociated from my own history.  Photographs were not just distressing, they simply felt unreal.  Logically, I knew these images to be showing my own lived experience, but I no longer recognised it. I felt unbound, fragmented, scattered.  I had been blasted into little pieces, strewn I knew not where.   I lived in a present moment which had an unknown, unknowable future and past. 

The only way I can express this for myself is in metaphor.  Mentally, I was surrounded by darkness, a faint lessening of its density just in front of me into which I could stretch a hand.  Each time, someone responded and helped me take a step.  And slowly, breath by breath and day by day, time started up again. Beat by heartbeat.  For a long time I lived by a new calendar, the sequence of days only counting forward, having reset themselves to zero at a date I still cannot write here.  But, eventually, like making progress with a jigsaw, once the corners and the sides and the – you now realise – easier bits are done, you come to the difficult bits.  They really are bloomin’ difficult and it takes what feels like a disproportionately long time but, within the framework you’ve now built, it’s doable.  With patience and persistence, you find a way to fit pieces together.   The past is joined back in.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk maps the trauma sufferers’ experience on to their (our) growing knowledge of the brain and how it works as a physical organ. He offers a rational framing – an explanation – for the profoundly irrational, disturbing and frankly bat-shit crazy ways one feels and behaves. Once I reached a stage of recovery when I was able to read it, I found it an immensely helpful book.

One of its key points is that trauma causes the brain to be disconnected within itself.  The right-hand side – intuitive, visual, spatial, tactile – loses the interchange with the linguistic, sequential analytical left-hand side. And the amygdala, which senses emotional intensity, is no longer in partnership with the medial prefrontal cortex which integrates this signal with – well, everything else, really: puts emotional signals in context.  It allows us to create some sort of proportion and awareness of what we are feeling and why. Amidst all this loss of brain function, we can lose a sense of time and chronology. What is in the past, and what is present. 

Sorry about all the scientific words:  I think I have used them correctly.   

I’ve been deeply reassured to learn that there is a robust neuroscientific framework for what was happening.  However,  it didn’t, it does not, change my experience.  It’s important to state this, because I feel we have a tendency to think that explaining something (especially explaining it scientifically) also explains it away. As if diagnosis is the ultimate goal and makes everything alright.  It doesn’t.  Nor do I feel it would have helped me to read the book sooner; in fact, I tried and I couldn’t.  Van Der Kolk also says trauma ‘by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension’, so the sufferer’s capacity, my capacity to make sense of what was happening to me was itself lost in the chaotic disruption.  There was no quick fix.  My wise therapist could sometime drip feed me with significant anchor points, but her main task was, I think, to keep me safe and provide limitless reassurance (This is a phenomenal achievement, I am immensely grateful to her).  There were also things to be done – the cause of the trauma required comprehension, and evaluation and decision making.  But most of all the injury had to be endured, in the hope of recovery.   And I had to find my own tools, make my own sense, find my own words to draw myself back together.  Reconvene my self.  Step by step. 

Shakespeare, of course, knew about this.  The loss of reason is a theme in many of his plays:  individual characters go mad, or feign madness, and in his comedies he sometimes transports us to strange places beyond the bounds of reason.  The wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one such place – woods are often, symbolically, such places, where our unconscious and our deep emotions run riot.  In his comic world view, order returns at the end and, while it is restoration, it is also a new beginning.  Characters are aware that they have been changed.  As the lovers wake and try to make sense of what has occurred, Hermia says:

Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act IV Sc i

For myself, I want to use Helena’s words about Demetrius, and use them about my own sense of self.  It has been returned to me ‘like a jewel, mine own and yet not mine own’. The same, but different. Newly valued. 

I am not, of course, ‘together’ again in any absolute way.  But I have, once again, a past.  It returned gradually, piece by piece, precious and tender.    I read an article in the New Yorker which suggested we tend to be ‘continuers’ or ‘dividers’ regarding the way we think about our past: whether we feel life is one single narrative or a series of episodes; to what extent we identify still with our former selves:  I identify strongly with the ‘continuer’ mode. So the sense of losing my past was both a natural response to trauma and a personal indicator of the depth of damage;  conversely and to an equal extent, the restoration of my past is both to be expected and hugely important to me.  This is the basis upon which I can again create a sense of who I am now and, therefore, what I want to do from the choices available before me.  

Hence, my relief, gratitude and joy at being reunited with my friendly ghosts.  They are welcome indeed.