Parent's Corner: The Letter Your High School Senior Can't Write You.

Dear Parent-

Stop talking about next year. I mean it. Stop it. I can’t deal with it right now. You ask me about my applications, my essays, my recommendations, and ‘have you talked to your guidance counselor?’ You see this as my job and all I can see is loss.  I can’t stand your excitement because it isn’t how I feel about it. Can you please stop talking about it?

I know. I know. I know all of the things I have to do, but it's hard enough doing what I need to do for tomorrow, let alone next year. I am swamped with everything I have to do right now –how do you expect me to do all of this work for next year at the same time? And I know. This is what I have been working for. And this is what I do want. And I know it’s hard for you. And it’s a big sacrifice for you and it’s what I have asked for. But not right now. I want it and I don’t want it.

Every time you talk about next year my stomach drops. I feel empty. I know I act like I can’t stand you sometimes but when you talk about next year all I can feel is fear and panic. I can’t imagine myself living anywhere else—when I try, it is as if I have just disappeared. It’s like I don’t exist. I feel desperate. When you talk about next year what you are really talking about is me moving out, being gone. Leaving you and everyone here. Leaving my friends.

I am afraid of having to leave and I am afraid that I won’t be able to. What if they don’t like me? What if no one wants me? I want to stay and I want to be chosen. I want both. I want to be wanted. Somewhere. Right now, you are pushing me to go and no one has taken me in. I am nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.

How did you do it? How did everyone else do it? Leave? Leave everything behind? It looks impossible. It hurts. All I want to do is cry and ask you to stop. Beg you not to forget me. I want the impossible: I want to stop time so everything stays the same. I just want to stay here.

And all at the same time, I don’t. I can feel myself excited for next year. How can you want both? To go and to stay?  It makes me feel crazy. But I do. There are times when I am excited about next year. I’ll get to meet new people. I will get to do new things. I can see myself in my new world. I can feel a bit of the confidence I have. And the clearer the picture is, it can suddenly switch: I see myself doing well, feeling excited and then in a flash it switches to loss. I will lose you. I will lose all of this. And I want to crawl under my covers. I want to stop everything. Most of all I want to stop you from talking about next year. Because when you do, it feels too real.

I know you can’t. And I know I can’t. It feels like this kind of loss is not survivable. I know other people have done it. But I can’t imagine how.  I am not sure that I understood as much as I do now that there is loss in moving forward. In getting what you want. I know you can’t stop asking me about next year. And I don’t really want you to. I need your help. I need your nagging. I need your editing. And what I really need is your reassurance. I can’t do this by myself because I want both things: to stay and to go, which makes me kind of freeze up and go no where. I need your help and I need you to hear my frustration in this conversation as a backwards compliment: as much as I am excited to go, I want to stay. This is my way of surviving good-bye. 

Love, Your High School Senior

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Remembrance--holding and healing through stories

“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Remembrance is the holding of a story: and the eventual telling of a story. When people think about healing from trauma they most often think of people telling their story: the story of what happened to them. But the story of trauma is just not that simple. Every trauma is different yet shares one thing: the memories are fragmented pieces that must be reassembled in order to become the story that resembles the experience. The memories are nearly a million poppies that make sense only when they come together in one place.

Last year in London for Remembrance Day they amassed 888,246 ceramic poppies to represent the soldiers who died in World War I.  It was a staggering sight of red surrounding the entire Tower of London. You could not take in the entire installation in one view—thousands and thousands of poppies. It was beautiful which kept you looking. And devastating which helped you understand what you were really being asked to understand. The story of what a nation endured by looking at all 888,246 poppies and then imagining all of the losses for each family that went with each poppy, and and all of the communities. 

Trauma is so hard to absorb. Not just for what we would consider psychological reasons but because our physiology is designed to protect us. Our defenses against being overwhelmed and incapacitated help us not take in trauma as it is happening. There are a number of things that happen with the physiology of our brains that keep us from taking in the whole story. Trauma keeps our brains from encoding or storing the information in the way it typically takes in information. Stress activates our fear or emotional memory so that the memory gets stored as a memory that you know but don’t know how you know--they call this a procedural memory (like riding a bike or tying your shoes).

To make this even more likely, the high levels of stress hormones from trauma inhibit the neural networks of the hippocampus-cortex circuit —effectively taking our memory for knowledge “off-line” which means that the details of the memory, the story of the memory and the context of the memory are not properly “written down.”  The memory is there, your brain recorded the information, but the information was stored without a connection to context and often, time. Think of it as memory scattered. A red poppy here and a red poppy there.

Even more striking is the loss of language during and after trauma. During trauma, and even recalling trauma, the language center of the brain has reduced blood flow which inhibits the capacity for language. This inhibition impairs encoding the event into language and can impair the retrieval of memory into language.⁠ When we say that trauma is ‘unspeakable’ or that language fails us—it’s not just a metaphor: the language centers in our brain keep us from the story.

So we need patience, we need time and we need repetition to tell our stories. The stories that individuals need to tell. The stories that groups need to tell. The stories that countries need to tell. There is no one single war story. There is no single telling of any trauma. We need metaphors. We need art. We need 888,246 ceramic poppies and we also need the pictures and letters and crosses tied to the fence so that the stories can come together, the scale of the magnitude and the small love note for a country and for ourselves. 

Research: Trauma and Memory

1. Release of norepinephrine heightens activation of amygdala and intensifies memories of trauma. McGaugh, J. (1990). Significance and Remembrance: The role of neuromodulatory systems. Psychological Science, 1, 15-25.

2. Cozolino, L. (2002). The nueroscience of psychotherapy: Building and rebuilding the human brain. NY: WW Norton.

3. Rauch, s., van der Kolk, B., Fisler, R., Alpert, N., Orr, S., Savage, C., Fischman, A., Jenike, M., & Pitman, R. (1996). A symptom provocation study of posttraumatic stress disorder using positron emmission tomography and script driven imagery. Archives of general psychiatry, 53, 380-387.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014

On Veteran's Day, Be Careful with the Word Hero

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small piece of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Be careful with the word hero. I know it’s Veteran’s Day. I know the instinct and intention to use the word is good. I know you are trying to show respect and gratitude. But the problem with the word hero is that most people who live through war, most people who live through any long and repeated trauma, and most people who witness war and repeated trauma do not feel heroic.  Most trauma involves experiences of helplessness and terror. These experiences usually result in shame, not courage; in fear, not bravery; in despair, not resilience.

There is a tacit agreement between a population and its soldiers: you go to war, we call you a hero, and we never have to know what really goes on during a war. If we call you a hero, we never have to hear the real war stories, because we have made it so that you can’t tell them. We call you a hero to make ourselves feel better, and it keeps you quiet.

In old Native American culture, warriors returned home from battle and shared their stories with the community in a big ceremony. The community as a whole had to hold these stories –not the individual warriors. We don’t do that and we ask our warriors to hold the stories themselves.

The injuries to soldiers are vast—with TBI on the increase. And the public is now widely aware of PTSD. But there are other injuries that are difficult to measure, discuss and treat. Yes, a soldier can suffer the traumas of flashbacks and anxiety of the war. But PTSD doesn’t cover the complete loss of self: the loss of who I was before the war, the loss of my sense of dignity. How do I hold the me I thought I was with the me who knows what I did during war?

Surviving war doesn’t feel heroic. Surviving any trauma doesn’t feel heroic. When you use the word hero you need to know that the people hearing that word can feel miles away from your intentions. You say hero and they remember shooting a screaming old woman or a dog. You say hero and they remember feeling frozen and not being able to do what they wanted to do. You say hero and they remember themselves at their most helpless.

Psychiatrist Jonathon Shay calls this injury to your sense of self a moral injury. The invisible wounds of war that keep soldiers injured long after the symptoms of PTSD clear. PTSD is what Shay calls a primary injury--it's symptoms are visible like the break of a bone. But a moral injury is like internal bleeding. It is a silent killer. Soldiers often report feeling like a piece of them died during the war and others have referred to it as ‘soul murder.’ Soldiers fear telling their stories because they think people will hate them for what they have done. We ask them to go to war and then we ask them to hold their stories by themselves. This is likely too big a burden. The suicide rate among Veterans is staggering: 22 Veterans die from suicide a day.

As citizens we can be grateful for their service, but we shouldn’t be naïve about their sacrifice. We need to have a more complex view of the impact of war and trauma and expand the conversation of healing all the injuries of war—not just the medical symptoms we can see and treat more easily. We need to support the soldiers in their healing by not telling them who they are and what their story is, but instead creating the possibility that they could tell it. We need to change the conversation about trauma to include the long term impact and the symptoms that we can't see. On this Veteran’s Day, let’s thank them for their service and ask to hear their story with the reassurance that we will hold their story with them.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015


Parent's Corner: What if I think he lied?

What if he lied about what he did?

I have been asked twice in the last three weeks about what to do when your 8-11 year old does something wrong (breaks a rule or an object) and then either refuses to “fess up” or lies.

Here’s the thing. As a parent its always best to simply deal with the infraction when you can and not get caught in the ‘he’s lying’ trap. If you know or are pretty sure that your child has done something wrong—they are simply busted—they don’t need to confess, parenting isn’t a democracy and there’s no need for the confession. If you find that eventually you are wrong about the charges you can simply apologize and model being wrong graciously.

Here’s why not to get caught or worry about the whole lying thing. Children and even young teens don’t have brains that are that well set up to deal with big stress. They have limited options compared with adult brains. Adult brains can manage stress a number of ways. If you as grown up mess up something big you can laugh at yourself, you can remember times when you actually did the right thing, you can imagine making up for your mistake, you can rationalize why you made the mistake, you can plan for ways that you can do it differently. Children mostly have two options: they can choose denial that it happened or they can say the thing they wish happened, or they can go numb and not feel it.  To parents this looks and feels like lying or a lack of remorse. And most parents panic that this means their child will grow up to be an axe murderer. Truth be told, most adults try this first as well (think of all the politicians and sports figure who say “I don’t’ recall” or “I didn’t’ do it.”)

If you know they did it. Just say so. If you track your teen's whereabouts on your cell phone, then don’t ask. Just say it. Let the problem be the problem: the broken ipod or the broken rule. Don’t add “lying’ to the mix because then you are trying to solve two problems at once. Not to mention that when you pretend not to know as in “where were you?” when you actually know, you are lying to get to some ‘truth’ which you have to admit is confusing.

The kids who have the easiest time telling the truth are kids with hot-headed tempers who often don’t care about the consequences and really, really easy going kids who roll with consequences. All the other kids in the middle tend to struggle.

Remember that kids have a hard time holding both sides of a problem (I can be a good kid and do a bad thing) so if you want to help your children to speak the truth, then you have to help them hold both of those things at the same time. And learning to speak the truth takes as much time as learning everything else, maybe more. We don’t expect that they get it right with math all the time, and they aren’t going to get it right with this either all the time. Your honest reaction to the infraction “I am really disappointed that you didn’t follow the rule” is often enough to have real conversation about the broken rule or item. The calmer the conversation and the child, the more likely you will have a real conversation.

© 2015 Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD