There’s this Old Testament story about a locust plague that I used to think of often, in my early twenties. Israel’s gone polytheistic on her theistic deity, and, by the time His punishment has taken full effect, the food’s gone. Wine’s dry. Lights are out. And, everything is full of dead, insect bodies.

“Yet even now!” a little known prophet by the name of Joel would recount Jah’s word to his wayward countrymen, “return to me with all your heart…and I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25).

The years that PTSD ate up my life like a swarm of angry, green vermin, I used to imagine myself—small, in a blue dress—in Bible school, before the rape and rage and confusion, before the depression and years of drunken, tear-filled debauchery, and wish that I could hang my whole life on that, “even now.”

“The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible,” Ta-Nehisi writes to his son in his book, Between the World and Me. “That is precisely why they are so precious.”

I had been living with PTSD for the better part of 9 years when I started craving bacon and cottage cheese hard enough for my husband to start buying it in bulk. By the time I took a pregnancy test, the doctor said I was 8 weeks along — and showed me my baby like a tiny, kidney bean tucked away in the corner of my yolk sac.

At week 12, I found out that he did, in fact, have working kidneys, and I cried at the three inch, tiny human inside me, with the beating, butterfly heart. For a body that had returned to episodes of violence over and over and over again, it was the first time in my adult life that I was producing something — anything — that might be restorative, and I could feel the change. My breasts softened. My anger subsided. And, I started obsessively googling studies that showed pregnancy could improve PTSD.

Then, at week 26, when my baby was as big as a head of kale, a technician at Mt Sinai hit me — and him — with her blue gel wand, so she could see his stomach chambers. He jumped. And I froze — silent. Like so many times before.

When she left the room, my husband said, “We can tell them it’s not OK to do that without asking.”

“I will,” I said. But I wouldn’t. And I couldn’t.

Maladaptive: that’s what my therapist calls it. In studies with rats — which boast a close neurological match to humans — scientists have found that a pregnant rat will experience an almost complete rewiring of her brain circuitry before giving birth. By the time her babies are born, she’s bolder, sharper and more efficient, capturing her cricket prey at four times the speed of non-mom rats.

Even a rat addicted to cocaine can get straight in order to take care of her young. But put her in a cage with an aggressive, sexually charged older male rat, leave him to have his way with her, and she’ll come out at a loss. Her associative learning will suffer. Her stress hormones will spike. She’ll struggle to express maternal behaviors.

While our society fights for the recognition of a woman’s right to efficacy over her body, Sharon Dekel, principal investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, is developing a deeper understanding of what happens if we don’t give women that recognition. Her focus is on the potential negative consequences for a women in childbirth, and, afterward, on another demographic entirely: her children.

In a 2018 study of 685 postpartum women, her research team found that women who suffer from PTSD can have difficulty bonding with their babies — a symptom with the potential to undermine aspects of child development.  

A pregnant rat will experience an almost complete rewiring of her brain circuitry before giving birth—bolder, sharper and more efficient, she can capture her cricket prey at four times the speed of non-mom rats.
Click To Tweet

PTSD was a mystery to us before 1975, when, 479,000 cases showed up, all at once. We’d diagnose it just five years later, in 1980, and, eventually uncover one million lifetime PTSD cases from Vietnam. Later, we’d call it a “growing epidemic.”Almost 40 years later, there are as many estimated rape and assault victims as there are veterans alive in the United States, and 94% of them show signs of PTSD.

These women are at a higher risk of developing further mental disorders as a result of birth, according to Dekel. With nearly 4 million women giving birth each year, and up to 12% of them developing postpartum (PP) PTSD, PP-PTSD may be the most substantial, silent societal cost to the American woman’s loss of efficacy that we’ve ever seen.

There’s a whole lot we can’t control. We can’t go back in time and turn the tide of America’s rape epidemic. We can’t control whether a woman is young, whether there’s real risk to her baby, or whether or not it is her first pregnancy (all factors that also drive increased risk).

But in control itself we may find a solution.

Dekel’s studies show that one deciding factor with the potential to positively or negatively override almost everything else in a woman’s situation is her perception of whether or not she feels that she maintained efficacy over the birth process.

Providers would need to consider all the factors influencing her choices to create an environment where a woman is truly in charge, according to Ruth A. Wittmann-Price, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nursing and Health at DeSales University.

In a 2004 theory entitled, “Emancipation in decision-making in women’s health care,” she purports that a woman is almost always influenced by her own empowerment and personal knowledge in a situation, the social norms that exist around her, whether or not she has opportunity for reflection and if she is operating within a flexible environment.

To develop decision science without discussion of oppression and an emancipation process in the humanistic care of women, Wittmann-Price points out, would be to deny obvious barriers to shared decision-making. And my own emancipation began with the realization that I wasn’t ready to assert myself.

In the weeks that followed, while my nursery sat full of unpacked boxes, my husband and I focused our preparation on my mental well being. In the process, I learned that my experience of assault had taught me everything I needed to know. My requests would not be honored. My consent would be assumed. The power dynamics over me would be strong. I’d feel lesser, possibly even guilty for saying what I needed. It was up to me to change that narrative, even when my brain insisted otherwise.

There are all kinds of pre-existing factors that may influence how you react to a high-stress situation, according to Jim Hopper, PhD, a nationally recognized expert on psychological trauma. It starts with what he calls the hardwired, evolutionary stuff, that can predispose reflexive responses. Then, there’s your prior learning history, your childhood, how you dealt with aggressive and dominant people growing up, socialization and habit based prior learning.

In an environment like birth, they have the power to influence everything. The day I went into labor, they were all there — the reflex, the learning history, the socialization and the knee jerk responses. But in the small, sacred space between my disorder and identity, I found enough dissonance to use my voice. Through it, I developed my three most poignant memories of that day.

The most powerful is when I met my son — perfect, and purple, with a head full of thick, black hair. I had been pushing for three hours when his head and left shoulder finally ripped through my episiotomy, and I pulled the rest of him out of me and into my arms.

I love you. I love you. I love you. And I had never felt a love like that.

The second was labor hour eight, when I called out our epidural safe word: pineapple. My husband I had developed it based on a mutual understanding that in order to try for a non-medicated birth, I’d need to yell for an epidural without actually meaning it. Under no circumstances was he to agree to giving me one, unless I said the word.

We’d tossed around other words: pumpernickel (too long), coffee (too common), and watermelon (too much red puke in my recent past). Ultimately, pineapple it was.

Pineapple: put a needle of ropivacaine hydrochloride in my god damn spine, and do it now.

I’d said my safe word three times, and requested she turn the pitocin off twice, by the time my midwife, buried in the corner in a rousing game of Tetris, slowly said, “I think we’re here to have a baby, and we don’t want to slow things down.” But I knew my brain, and my body. The pain of pitocin-induced contractions was driving me toward a place I couldn’t go again. A place where the world would go dark, and I’d be on my back, in pain, submitting to someone else again.

Click To Tweet

By the time she reluctantly, slowly, moved across the room, and did what I asked, I’d involved advocates. My husband and doula, who had spent hours of deep conversation understanding my trauma cues, concerns and triggers, knew when to ensure I got results.

“Get her an epidural, now,” I heard him say.

“Turn the pitocin off — she’s asked you multiple times,” my Doula added.

“She can contract on her own. Let her do it.”

When I heard the beep of the machine turning off behind me, the pain I was feeling, six hours into hard contractions, didn’t improve in the least. Mentally, however, I was back in charge. And somewhere, deep inside me, I felt like the most powerful woman alive.

“But to let the baby out,” writes Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, “you have to be willing to go to pieces.” And pushing my son out put me past the brink of what I thought was physically possible.

I was told I’d get a second wind — some kind of strength I didn’t expect, especially when I saw the top of his head. But I didn’t feel anything except panic. I was going to pass out. I needed to puke. I couldn’t find the strength to push.

I have had the power siphoned from my body like a balloon blown up and let go. I have spent years picking my way with the gullied parts of me, where it no longer exists.

But I have never been more palpably aware of the power in, and over, my body than on floor 3M at Brooklyn hospital, on my back, minutes before midnight, when my midwife told me to stop breathing.

She said it like I had no other option: breathe, or birth a baby.

You’re not working hard enough (while pulling on the inside of my labia).

It’s been too long (while checking her watch).

You just don’t seem to want this (looking at me).

Poor kid, he’s got such a headache (looking at him).

I argued—on my back—insisting I needed air. Needed more time. Needed help.

Inside, feeling like I’d failed—like I didn’t love him enough to get him out. Like all the other women in the world knew how to give birth, but not me.

Human memory is a sensory experience, writes Bessel van der Kolk, a Boston-based psychiatrist noted for his research in the area of post-traumatic stress. And when a nurse grabbed my foot, I wasn’t in the delivery room anymore.

I was 21. And, someone else had their hand on my foot. Someone else was tucking it under their arm. And, someone else was telling me to be quiet, while they had their way with me, in ways I’d been trying to forget ever since.

Sexual assault is horrific in its own right. But it should be understood in the broader context of what causes long-term trauma in the body, which typically has two things in common: loss of empowerment and loss of human connection—i.e. being treated as an object—according to Hopper.

Inside I felt like I’d failed—like I didn’t love him enough to get him out. Like all the other women in the world knew how to give birth, but not me.
Click To Tweet

I felt both, in that moment. But I did what I wished I would have done, the first time. I yelled.

Get away from my foot, get my husband now, kind of yelling.

Don’t fucking touch me. I’ll push when I’m ready.

My bed a bailey, my partner and doula standing citadels, we enforced my requests.

I breathed.

I slept.

When I woke up, I ran my own fingers around my baby’s temporal bone, and noticed there something in my perineum that wouldn’t move — something that had it taunt and hard, like a rock, and not budging.

“Just cut me,” I said.

“You have room.”

“No I don’t. Do it.”

I had no way of seeing that my son’s hand was against his face, blocking his head from coming further than I’d pushed it, but that’s exactly how I would deliver him, an hour later, suckling his knuckles, heartbeat steady, on his path through my birth canal.

“I didn’t realize!” my midwife would call out. But somewhere, in the place that exists only between a woman and her body, I’d know that I did. And that I’d done what I wanted, midwives and naturalists, birth advocates and medical advisors be damned.

While there’s no concrete proof that my assertion of self in my birth kept me—a woman with almost all the risk factors of PP-PTSD—safe, Dekel points out that her studies show that a woman’s positive appraisal of her birth experience may have more to do with her mental health than the experience itself.

She’s encouraged by the fact that woman today are being screened for depression during pregnancy and postpartum, but notes we need to do more.

“Currently I don’t know of any program that focuses on empowering mothers or women prior to giving birth or postpartum,” she says. “There’s nothing routinely implemented to screen women at risk for developing PP-PTSD.”

Her hope is to that alongside others, her team can develop a more holistic approach to obstetrical care that integrates a better kind of team collaboration between psychiatry, psychology and OB department.

I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, mid-flashback of myself like a rat locked in a cage, while someone else has their way with me. I struggle with confusion. I wonder about efficiency. Like many women who have been sexually assaulted, I struggled at first with feeling like breastfeeding was a hostile take-over of my body.

A single sound or stirring from my son can cut through all that. Suddenly, my confusion is gone. And, in its place, a connection that feels as natural as breathing.   

I have another flashback that comes to me, increasingly often, in that place. In it, I see my husband’s teary face, looking at me, looking at my son.

“Look what you did!” he says.

“I’m just going to stitch you up,” the midwife adds, from somewhere beneath me.

I don’t have to close my eyes to feel the warmth of my son breathing on me, after that. Or, to feel the warp and weft of the needle, putting back together parts of me I used to believe were broken for good.

DISCLAIMER: Never share or distribute scenes or movies involving child pornography of any sort. Distributing these scenes to raise awareness can cause further victimization of children and may have legal consequences. Report child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

My husband accidentally showed me child pornography.

It happened a couple of years ago, when we first started dating. We were in that “getting to know you” stage and would frequently choose our own favorite movies to show the other when we went on dates. My husband decided on Moonrise Kingdom, thinking it would be right up my alley since I love coming-of-age stories. I understand why: Moonrise Kingdom is a poignant, critically acclaimed, visually stunning movie that paints a very realistic portrayal of the complicated emotions children experience when they are in the process of exploring their own growing independence. I was captivated by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola’s skillful storytelling, until the scene.

The two lead actors, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, were both twelve years old at the time of filming. I didn’t know this at the time. All I knew is that there were two children stripping down to their underwear on camera and French kissing each other. The young girl says that the boy “feels hard,” but that she likes it. The boy gropes the girl’s chest and the girl says she thinks they’re going to grow more.

I have post-traumatic stress disorder partly from childhood sexual assault. When I saw that scene for the first time, I felt like someone was sitting inside of my ribcage. I felt like I was suffocating under the weight of what I had just witnessed: two children being exploited in a public and permanent way. I sobbed so hard that we had to stop the movie.

“Anderson would have to get their parents’ permission, first,” my husband said. “He wouldn’t be able to do it without their consent.” My husband has always been incredibly sensitive and supportive toward my PTSD. He checks movies with me before we watch them to make sure they don’t have sexual content or nudity that might trigger a panic attack. When we decided to watch Moonrise Kingdom, he told me that I would have no problems watching it: since the main actors were children, the film contained no sex or nudity. I felt furious at my husband for showing me two children involved in a sexually exploitative scene. But beyond that, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

When I saw that scene for the first time, I felt like someone was sitting inside of my ribcage.
Click To Tweet

Maricsa Evans, a licensed marriage and family therapist, explains that “Introducing children to sexualized behavior at an early age causes a lot of problems later on developmentally, emotionally, and mentally.” According to Evans, the children’s lack of ability to fully understand the situations they are being exposed to can lead to serious developmental problems, such as engaging in reckless sexual behaviors from a young age. “If they feel traumatized or violated from experiences like this, it can lead to dangerous behaviors such as drug addiction or emotional distress where they need to have mental health services,” Evans said. Later on, if the children become uncomfortable or feel that they were unable to truly consent, it can cause them to have a troubled or negative relationship with their own sexuality or even lead to disorders such as PTSD.

Considering that children are not able to consent to these scenes, their parents shouldn’t have the right to consent on their behalf. “It’s exploitation of your children,” Evans said. “That in itself is child pornography.”

Federal child pornography laws, as specified in 18 U.S.C. § 2258 (b), apply to “any parent, legal guardian, or person having custody or control of a minor who knowingly permits such minor to engage in, or to assist any other person to engage in, sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct or for the purpose of transmitting a live visual depiction of such conduct.” Child pornography is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving children under the age of eighteen. According to federal law, the scene in Moonrise Kingdom falls squarely under child pornography. Why, then, were no lawsuits filed over this movie?

Nobody Told Me My Son’s Camp Counselor Was Accused Of A Sex Offense
theestablishment.co

When it comes to pornography, many people still subscribe to Justice Potter Stewart’s statement, “I know it when I see it.” In the case of Moonrise Kingdom, people fail to question whether the film constitutes as child pornography simply because it seems so “artistic.” Anderson relies on his signature storybook cinematography to entice viewers to feel detached from reality. Due to the soft fairytale aesthetics in Moonrise Kingdom, people are reminded that it is just a movie—thus, “art” and not pornography. Furthermore, people rarely question the scene because the children are engaging in exploratory behavior. “There is a normal developmental curiosity with children when it comes to sex,” Evans said. However, this behavior is never something an adult should facilitate—especially not for a film.

People are now opening up the discussion of films that include child pornography after Netflix began streaming Diego Kaplan’s 2017 film Desire. Viewers were outraged by the opening scene of Desire, which features two girls under the age of ten playing with pillows while watching a cowboy movie. One of the girls, mimicking the cowboy riding on a horse, begins to masturbate on the pillow. She eventually reaches orgasm. After Netflix’s choice to stream the film sparked such controversy, Kaplan released a statement defending the scene:

The girls never understood what they were doing, they were just copying what they were seeing on the screen. No adult interacted with the girls, other than the child acting coach. Everything was done under the careful surveillance of the girls’ mothers.

This defense misses the point entirely. If the children are too young to understand what they are doing, they are too young to consent to these behaviors. “Children involved in these situations might start questioning themselves: ‘What does that mean? What does that mean about me?’” Evans said. “A lot of doubt and questioning about themselves is going to happen, which is why certain things shouldn’t be introduced to kids too early in their life. It can impact their ability to trust their parents later on if they feel like their parents made the wrong calls protecting them, they’ll have a hard time trusting anyone.” This situation can be damaging to the young actress if she grows up and feels violated by what she was asked to do for the film.

In the case of Moonrise Kingdom, people fail to question whether the film constitutes as child pornography simply because it seems so artistic.
Click To Tweet

These consequences become even more disturbing when I considered what Anderson was actually trying to accomplish with the kissing scene in Moonrise Kingdom. Gilman stated that in the month before filming began, Wes Anderson wanted him and Hayward to exchange letters in the style of the “Dear Sam”/”Dear Suzy” letters. He also said that they did not rehearse the kissing scene beforehand. The scene was both of the actors’ first kiss and, as Gilman explained, “Wes wanted it to be authentic.” Hayward further noted, “Wes wanted it to be these two kids’ first kiss. So that’s how we did that.” Gilman also noted that, for the sake of their privacy, they were given a closed set for filming.

Closed sets are used for actors who are filming scenes that involve nudity or sexual activity that they might want a greater deal of privacy for. A child actor should not need a closed set because a child actor should never be put in the same position adult actors are in when they require closed sets.

It is clear from the beginning that Anderson wanted to foster a certain kind of relationship between the two children. Gilman stated that he e-mailed Hayward at first, but then Anderson decided that the actual act of writing letters was important to help the actors get in character. Anderson did not want the children to act out a scene of two characters’ first kisses: he wanted to create and capture a real sexual experience between these two children. And regardless of whether parents or filmmakers intended on pressuring these children, the pressure of this being a job can make it even more difficult for the children to feel comfortable about the decisions their parents made for them.

How, then, can filmmakers responsibly tell coming-of-age stories? The rules are pretty simple. “Filmmakers have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect children from scenes involving touching, nakedness, and implications of sexuality,” Evans said. “I feel they have a higher call to prevent this type of thing from happening. Children should never be in real sexual situations for these movies.” Parents have an even greater responsibility to protect their children by not consenting on behalf of them for scenes that can be developmentally damaging.

“Parents should not let anything slightly related to a sexual encounter guide them to do anything but protect their children and others that are out there,” Evans said. “If no one else, your own children.”

Even In Art, ‘Free Speech’ Can’t Override Consent
theestablishment.co

However, there are ways of telling stories about childhood sexuality without harming children. Gregg Araki’s film Mysterious Skin tells the coming-of-age story of two boys, one of whom is molested as a child and becomes a sex worker as he grows up. It’s a graphic, NC-17 rated film that has no issues depicting adult sexuality—but the filmmakers were careful to protect children when shooting scenes that had to imply child sexual abuse. In one scene, it is implied that an adult man is about to engage in sexual acts with a young boy. In order to accomplish this, the scene relies on close-ups of the actors faces that imply physical contact that is never actually depicted. This technique approximates intimacy between the actors without involving any actual interactions between them. By approaching the scene this way, the filmmakers ensured that they would not have to compromise their artistic expression when treating the scene—and the young actor—with the sensitivity they deserve.

Recent movies Love, Simon and Edge of Seventeen also create beautiful coming-of-age stories without featuring scenes of sexuality. The use of clever dialogue and imagery capture the relatable conflicts growing up. Teens in these movies experience the excitement and awkwardness of growing up, and struggle with trying to embrace an adult world they aren’t quite ready for while learning how to assert their independence and autonomy. Much of the beauty in these movies lies in the dialogue, which expresses the teens unique experiences with love, fear, and confusion in ways that are raw and nuanced.  

Dialogue, imagery, and point-of-view narration are just three tools that filmmakers can use to create poignant and realistic coming-of-age stories. Children should never have to be in legitimate sexual situations on camera. “It’s child pornography,” Evans stated. “No one should be able to consent to children doing sexual acts on camera.”

Adapted from Wikimedia Commons + flickr/BrickinNick

Survivors of family and intimate partner violence adopt many strategies for self-preservation, both with and without conscious intent. Two strategies I adopted in the past were numbing myself with alcohol and drugs, which was not very effective, and volunteering with battered women’s service organizations, which both educated and healed me.

In the 1970s, following my escape from violence at the hands of my adoptive parents and, later, my high school boyfriend, I also worked to prevent future abuse by closely monitoring cues, like the heaviness of a footfall or the tone of a voice.

Back then, I didn’t know I was suffering from PTSD, a diagnosis that didn’t enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, and wasn’t applied to survivors of child abuse and intimate partner violence (IPV) until the 1990s. Today, I recognize my response as “hypervigilance,” a common symptom of PTSD that’s described as the “experience of being constantly tense and ‘on guard,’” acting “on high alert in order to be certain danger is not near.”

The Many Faces Of Trauma

Hypervigilance wasn’t the only trauma symptom I experienced — I also endured recurring nightmares, intense anger, and startle responses to movements near my head — but it’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, in the context of our current political climate.

It’s not a stretch to say Trump behaves similarly to abusers. Many characteristics of batterers — grandiosity, alignment with traditional gender roles, using sex as an act of aggression, blaming others for their actions, denying or minimizing their own bad behavior, losing their tempers explosively, insisting on control — aptly apply to the leader of the free world.

In turn, I’ve seen many respond to Trump — and, for that matter, to other politicians acting in abusive ways — with the same kind of alertness I adopted while experiencing PTSD as a survivor of abuse. Only now, instead of taking place IRL, this hypervigilance plays out on social media.

Soon after the 2016 Republican victory, psychologists began talking about “Post-Election Stress Disorder”(PESD) — a way to describe the anxiety and depression that affected many after Trump ascended to the White House, accompanied by symptoms like headaches, lost sleep, and stomache pain.

My own anxiety began during the brutal election process, and has not abated since. And in my state of despair, I’ve often turned to social media.

As the election drew near, I checked multiple feeds for news each morning, and then each night. Every new misogynist revelation, every new racist pronouncement, left me enraged or numb. I felt fearful. I joined secret Facebook groups for survivors of domestic violence, where I read other women’s posts about being triggered by political rhetoric and disclosures of abusive behavior. My morning writing practice fizzled out in favor of huddling under the quilts with my phone, tapping at apps that kept me informed. My obsessive social-media-and-news-outlet-checking persisted post-election. After the inauguration, I kept checking with renewed diligence, even flushing spare minutes at my day job down the Twitter wormhole.

How Do You Keep Social Media From Destroying Your Mental Health?

By March of 2017, knowing my behavior was unhealthy, I resolved to keep at least my time outdoors screen-free. Walking my dogs in the woods, I’d tripped over a tree root while checking the New York Times on my phone.

My compulsive checking had reached a level that felt familiar; I was behaving the same way I did as a child in an abusive home, and as a teenager in an abusive intimate relationship. Walking on eggshells. Staying alert to mood changes in the abusers. Exercising hypervigilance. Back then, I hung on to the fantasy that if I could predict violence, I could prevent the next black eye, broken nose, split lip. Now, I was on alert for all the ways the government planned to abuse me and other women and marginalized people.

I published a short blog post, and later a poem, about the parallels between intimate, personal violence and the politically-induced terror in my [non] writing life. More women than I would have thought responded to the two pieces, saying something along the lines of “Yes, me too.”

One woman, a survivor of extreme violence, “understood instantly that having an openly avowed abuser elected to the presidency would give license to the closeted abusers everywhere.” Afraid to leave her house after the election, she relied on social media for support from women who were expressing similar fears, and as a safe place where she could monitor political developments. Today, she uses social media to stay connected with allies, and to keep tabs on political bullies and their agendas. “I would not say that the terror has abated,” she wrote to me in May 2017, “but that I have come to live with it, as I did in childhood.” Her hypervigilance continues.

Abusers and batterers can snap at any moment, which is perhaps the cause of hypervigilance among survivors. Karen Sheets, a social worker who teaches life skills in a Displaced Homemaker Program in Florida, calls it “crisis mode.” Her program frequently serves women escaping violence, and collaborates closely with the local domestic violence agency. Sheets, herself an IPV survivor, says that women can become addicted to crisis and continue to act in crisis mode long after the abusive situation is behind them.

Can post-election anxiety end for anyone when the president keeps the hits coming as fast as he has?

Being on such high alert as a PTSD sufferer can be exhausting, and in many ways detrimental to mental and emotional health — but it can also function as an adaptive strategy, helping one to make snap decisions under stress and avoid future harm. Studies of vigilant and hypervigilant decision-making often privilege the vigilant method, which relies on fact-gathering and consideration of multiple options. But many researchers have concluded that being hypervigilant is more effective in high-stress situations when the stakes are high. One study even found that abuse survivors in a state of hypervigilance walked in a way that reduced their perceived vulnerability, and concluded that this, in theory, would reduce the potential for harm.

There are, it seems, particular benefits to hypervigilance in the context of our current political climate. While IPV is often unpredictably explosive, institutionalized violence against American women, like institutionalized violence against African-Americans, is the result of policies and ideas that evolve over years. We need to monitor any development, alteration, or affirmation of those policies and ideas by the government so we can make decisions under stress and avoid abuse. With social media — the 24/7 panopticon — we can monitor threats, but at a safe distance, and we can do it obsessively.

How My Abusive Father Helped Me Understand Trump Supporters

At its best, this heightened social media altertness can also manifest as tangible action. This summer, for instance, the hypervigilance of millions of Americans on Twitter and Facebook played a key role in thwarting GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It’s too soon to quantify social media’s role in keeping citizens informed and in giving citizens platforms to exert pressure on officials — but the proliferation and popularity of voter-action sites like 5 Calls and Indivisible since the 2016 election demonstrate the existence of a demand for ways to use social media to both monitor danger and take action in response.

The Pew Research Center, in a study released in October 2016, found that nearly one-third of politically engaged users believe social media platforms allow them to get involved with issues that matter to them. Meanwhile, the anecdotal evidence is on your feeds and mine. Social media allowed me to track the status of proposed anti-ACA legislation, it gave me access to inspiration through posts from ADAPT members, and it offered me more ways to contact elected officials and make my voice heard. It gave that to me, and millions of others.

We’re not social media obsessives — we’re hyper-vigilantes who aim to enforce the principles of democracy.

In my nightmares, and in my obsessive following of both progressive and conservative social media feeds, I’m re-living the terror and anxiety of my teenage years on a macro level. America has long been awash in racist and misogynist violence. The recent election has validated and further normalized that violence. Our government seeks to put the health and safety of the majority of Americans at risk: women, immigrants, gay, lesbian, and trans people, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, and anyone who doesn’t look white. It’s much too much like the not-so-old days, when men were legally entitled to rape and beat their wives, when parents could abuse their children with impunity, when communities and governments sanctioned such behavior and excused it as “private family business.”

Abuse Survivors Speak Out About Being Triggered By Trump

In the face of all this, I have mixed feelings about whether to stop my relentless checking of Facebook, The Washington Post, The New York Times, or Charles M. Blow’s Twitter feed. Walking on eggshells doesn’t guarantee that the sleeping monster won’t wake up. Checking the news 20 times a day won’t, by itself, prevent the next police shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, or violence against immigrants, or the abrogation of women’s control over their own bodies. But don’t all those stories need to be told and re-told, and read and heard and analyzed? After all, if I hadn’t been checking, I might have missed Paul Ryan’s response to Kevin McCarthy’s assertion that Putin pays Trump. “No leaks, all right? This is how we know we’re a real family here,” he said. “What’s said in the family stays in the family.”

That sounds a lot like the 20th century rhetoric of abuse that enabled and excused paternalistic violence against women and children. The victim in me wants to say those days are over. But the watcher in me says pay attention. To everything. Every single word.

“I’ve always been interested in cannabis as a social justice issue and a matter of public policy, but I was never able to embrace it as medicine until these veterans really taught me how,” Sisley told me.

Sisley was “highly dismissive and judgmental” of marijuana at first but, over time, as more and more veterans shared their experiences, she started to accept its therapeutic potential.

Now, not only does she regularly treat multiple conditions by prescribing legal medical cannabis as an Arizona-based family physician, she’s part of a team involved in the first government-funded study to examine the effectiveness of cannabis in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in vets.

The growing awareness of this plant’s therapeutic potential — as well as the spread of legal recreational and medicinal cannabis across the United States — has eased issues of access, but some significant barriers remain. One such obstruction is a Veterans Affairs administration that remains resistant to the drug, asserting that “marijuana use for medical conditions is an issue of growing concern” and that “there is no evidence at this time that marijuana is an effective treatment for PTSD.”

This decade, however, has seen some movement on the issue: The administration today usually allows vets to use cannabis without penalty in states where its access is legal.

Still, the government writ large remains resistant to cannabis law reform, even though numerous studies already show that cannabis can hold promising benefits for treating PTSD and many other conditions, including chronic pain.

While Sisley and her colleagues are eager to begin studying cannabis’ potential benefits as scientists, veterans like Joshua Apollo are already helping fellow vets access cannabis and teaching them how to use it more effectively.

Apollo’s service as a U.S. Army infantryman left him with lingering physical injuries and struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, all culminating in a suicide attempt before he began treating himself with cannabis in 2010.

“Cannabis was the ultimate treatment for me. It saved my life. I haven’t had suicidal thoughts or tendencies since starting marijuana,” Apollo told me.

According to a recent study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, there are 20 veteran suicides per day in the U.S., many of them older vets — a shockingly high figure that some veterans I’ve spoken to speculate may actually be too low.

As a vice president of the Sacramento, California, chapter of Weed for Warriors, Apollo’s helping to raise awareness on the medical benefits of cannabis and the need for legal reform. Founded in San Francisco in 2014, the national nonprofit shares donated medical cannabis with veterans, ensuring they can afford their medicine and use it in the most effective ways possible.

And while medical professionals continue to debate the benefits of cannabis for PTSD, the plant is bringing veterans closer together — and giving them an opportunity to bond over their shared suffering.

“Our meetings aren’t just about passing out meds, they’re about bringing like-minded individuals, veterans, together so they’re not locked in their house, so they don’t feel so alone,” Apollo said.

Soon, in addition to this solidarity, Sisley’s research may allow more vets to access key — sometimes even life-saving — treatment options related to the plant.

‘Without Cannabis I Would Be Dead’

Apollo enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2001 at 17 years old. “Within a week of signing my paperwork, September 11 happened and that changed a lot of my view of the service and the world and everything that was going on.”

Apollo was shuttled around the U.S. before being deployed to Afghanistan, where he faced frequent firefights. Within a week of deploying, an IED (homemade bomb) put his life at risk. “I lost friends and comrades in war and outside of war,” Apollo said, recalling a team leader and squad leader who died in a “horrific” car accident in Hawaii, and the suicide of one of his first roommates and friends in the military.

“I was not prepared for that at 18 or 19 years old,” he said. “Physically, mentally, my mind was warped by the things I was told to do, the things I witnessed. By the things I had to do.”

Apollo continued, “Coming back from that, what was the main issue was seeing my family and not being able to tell them [what I’d experienced] . . . and the nightmares, that was the worst part.”

Once he’d been released from the military, he struggled not only with chronic pain from a broken leg and several other injuries, but also with PTSD, which can cause depression, social anxiety, unexplained anger and other difficult emotions, insomnia, and unpleasant feelings of hyper-alertness, among other symptoms. Veterans Affairs’ prescribed three different pharmaceuticals for Apollo, which he said left him feeling mentally foggy. Typical VA treatment for PTSD focuses on SSRI antidepressants, but many are also prescribed sleep aids or anti-anxiety drugs.

Like Sisley, Apollo was resistant to the idea of cannabis at first. Desperate for him to experience cannabis’ benefits after his 2010 suicide attempt, Apollo said his little brother “forced marijuana on me. He put me in the truck and hotboxed the truck.”

As he inhaled thick clouds of second-hand cannabis smoke, the effects were almost instantaneous. “I felt clear, I felt normal. I could grasp what was going on around me.”

Within six months, he told me he had quit using illegal street drugs and weaned himself off the prescription medications prescribed by the VA.

He still struggles with nightmares and insomnia, but said, “the only thing that allows me to sleep is cannabis.”

It also eases his social anxiety. Without cannabis, he said, “I would lock myself in my house and not go anywhere. I’m very much a recluse and a hermit without cannabis.”

He continued, “I don’t like the world, I don’t like how it treats veterans, I don’t like how we’re just left to die. Without cannabis I would be dead.”

Cannabis Has ‘Transformative’ Effect On PTSD

I asked Sisley about how she came to accept the potential therapeutic benefits of cannabis.

“There were a bunch of specific cases where patients had transformative responses where they went from being almost lifeless and nonfunctional on the conventional meds that I was giving them.”

Without Sisley’s endorsement, her patients would begin to treat themselves with cannabis after hearing about the plant’s potential by word-of-mouth from other veterans. She continued:

“Then these vets would come back to me. That’s what’s really impressive to me, when vets find that path with cannabis, they always are determined to share that with the world . . . They would always have their spouse or their kid in tow to corroborate their stories. Over time it was really compelling.”

Many veterans seem to have become self-taught experts on the plant and the ways it can be ingested. “I use different strains, different types of concentrates for different things that are bothering me, for different ailments — if I need to sleep, if I’m in pain, if I can’t focus,” Apollo told me.

“It’s amazing how sophisticated these vets are. They attack it like a science,” Sisley remarked.

“I actually prefer tea,” said Victoria, another Weed for Warriors veteran I interviewed, when I asked how she treats her PTSD.

Victoria is a private pre-school teacher in California now, and cannabis helps her control symptoms that include depression and anxiety.

“I put medicated honey in my tea, and consume that. A warm cup of tea before bed helps me sleep through the night.”

She also uses cannabis edibles and even bath bombs. Of the latter, she said, “It’s not like a high, it literally calms you, it just relaxes you.”

She never uses cannabis at school, but Victoria told me she’ll sometimes wake up early, so she can medicate herself and wait for the high to pass before work. “So by the time my day starts I’m fine, and I’m calm,” she told me, ready to deal with her students whom she described as “loud, loud, loud!”

Like the other vets I interviewed for this story, Victoria lives in California, where medical cannabis is widely available. “I haven’t been on any medication since I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD in 2013. In three years, I’ve been just using cannabis without meds,” she said.

When she doesn’t have access to cannabis, Victoria said she struggles with her mood and feeling hyper-alert to stimuli. “My depression kind of takes over. I’m way more irritated and easily startled.”

Before moving to California, she experimented with prescription antidepressants, but found them ineffective with unpleasant side effects. “I had really bad headaches and I felt like I couldn’t feel. I was just here. I was a gray blob. Just an outline of myself.”

‘They Don’t Want To Be In The System’

Until the Veterans Affairs issued an important 2011 directive on the use of medical cannabis, vets could lose access to other pain medications if they tested positive for marijuana. Thanks in part to veterans’ activism, the VA is no longer supposed to penalize vets for using cannabis in legal states. But even now, Sisley told me, the directive is “inconsistently” applied.

“There’s no consistent approach for how VAs will deal with this,” she continued. “Not to mention the other 20-plus states that have no legal market — those vets are out of luck. They have to stay on the black market.”

In July 2014, Kristoffer Lewandowski, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, faced life in prison for drug possession after a flare-up in his PTSD symptoms led to a domestic violence report, and police discovered the cannabis plants he was using to treat himself. Freed on bail, Lewandowski and his family moved from Oklahoma to California, where he easily obtained a medical permit for his treatment. But law enforcement surprised him in May 2015 with a raid at his children’s preschool, and extradited him back to Oklahoma to stand trial as a fugitive. Federal marshals said he was wanted for missing a pre-trial hearing, but Lewandowski told OC Weekly’s Nick Shou on September 7 that he’d never been informed about the hearing.

Fortunately, after Lewandowski’s story went viral last year, the state dropped felony charges against him, although he could still be sentenced to up to five years in prison at an upcoming sentencing hearing. His story remains an example of what can happen to vets seeking medical cannabis during the war on drugs.

In states without medical marijuana programs, Sisley told me, vets often avoid treatment at VA hospitals and doctors altogether, out of fear of that they could be drug-tested and lose their health benefits or violate a pain treatment contract. “Most of these guys will not seek treatment for any other medical conditions because they realize that cannabis will be a deal-breaker for their care at the VA.”

Many of them believe their disability benefits could also be put at risk. “I haven’t seen evidence of that happening ever but it’s a concern on every vet’s mind who receives disability payments,” Sisley noted.

“Vets in general are appropriately distrustful of the government. They don’t want to be in the system and be monitored by the government, to be tracked,” Sisley added.

‘I’m A Strong-Ass Person’

Sisley told me she’s seen “tons of patients who have opioid abuse or dependence and most of them are on methadone or suboxone and they can’t get off of it.” But here, too, cannabis offers promise as a “substitution therapy.” Sisley explained: “Cannabis has been a really successful intervention for a lot of guys who have been stuck on opioids for years. They micro-dose cannabis throughout the day to help manage the opioid withdrawal syndrome.”

As PTSD tends to provoke or worsen substance abuse issues, thousands of veterans are also struggling with addiction to prescription painkillers.

Michiko, another vet I interviewed, is self-treating her dependence on fentanyl, a potent and dangerous pharmaceutical opiate, with cannabis. After a total of six years of service in Afghanistan, she has PTSD, a herniated disk, and nerve damage in her spine.

“I joined the military basically in a man’s world,” Michiko said. “They never thought that I could do what they do. I was always looked at like basically I’m a weak link.”

Michiko’s using cannabis, in part, because her PTSD is triggered by hospital settings and authority figures, making it difficult or even impossible for her to receive conventional treatment. That’s because, when she was in basic training, Michiko’s commander raped her while she was in a military hospital suffering from a fever.

“I left with the same fever because I was so scared to be in there,” she recalled. “Then I come back and there’s [military police] at my basic training, and they’re hounding me for information.”

Although her commanding officer was eventually punished as a serial rapist, she told me she was left with little emotional support as her military career continued. In Afghanistan, Michiko was sexually assaulted again by another superior officer.

“Every time I go into a doctor’s appointment I get triggers,” Michiko said. “Even at dentist appointments they have to heavily sedate me.”

And managing her addiction is still a struggle — she told me sometimes she feels like she wants to tear off her own skin — but for her it’s far preferable to treatment in a clinical setting, and in general, cannabis helps her sleep at night and eases her pain.

“[The VA wants] to put me in a rehab program or a detox program in a hospital. Well what’s that going to do for a person like me? Trigger!”

Further, Michiko fears that if she sought treatment through Veterans Affairs, officials would “punish” her for her addiction by limiting her access to future pain treatment. And like Apollo, Michiko feels like the VA relies too much on pharmaceuticals.

“I feel like it’s a catch-22: medicate to medicate to medicate more — and they don’t hear me screaming for help.”

Sisley agreed that conventional medicine has few reliable solutions for addiction, and said cannabis “desperately needs more testing, and hopefully you’re going to see a lot more scientists focusing on this.”

She continued:

“We’re the opioid overdose capital of the planet here, and we don’t have any good solutions. We’re forcing doctors to go to seminars on how to cut back on their opioid prescribing, but honestly that’s not going to fix this. We have to find other good treatments to help the existing addicted population to stop, and we don’t have any good treatments now.”

For her part, Michiko told me she doesn’t regret her military service, despite all she suffered. “It made me into the person I am today. And I’m a strong-ass person, and I wouldn’t give that up for the world.”

‘Relentless Amounts Of Government Red Tape’

“I believe these veterans when they claim that they are better, but those are their subjective reports, and now it’s time to put the plant through the rigors of a randomized control trial and see what data we generate by that,” Sisley said.

Most studies of cannabis, especially studies with government funding, focus on the safety of cannabis, rather than attempting to quantify its potential benefits as a medicine. That’s beginning to change, in part thanks to a study — “Placebo-Controlled, Triple-Blind, Randomized Crossover Pilot Study of the Safety and Efficacy of Four Different Potencies of Smoked Marijuana in 76 Veterans with Chronic, Treatment-Resistant Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” — led by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which received final government approval to proceed in April.

The study has been years in the making, first originating in a 2009 conversation between Sisley and Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of MAPS. The goal is to demonstrate whether smoking marijuana can reduce symptoms in veterans whose PTSD is resistant to conventional treatment.

Sisley continued:

“I never expected seven years ago when we started down this path that it would take us this long to implement a study that was FDA approved so quickly, and had full funding. I had no way to anticipate the relentless amounts of government red tape that would be involved in trying to implement this thing.”

Controversy over the study even led to Sisley being fired from the University of Arizona in 2014, adding yet another hurdle. She told me her “personal opinion” is that “super wealthy, powerful groups” like the pharmaceutical industry, police, and the prison-industrial complex “have an abiding interest in keeping cannabis illegal, and thus any data that might legitimize marijuana as medicine is very threatening to them and to their business model.”

Through MAPS’ advocacy, the study not only moved closer toward its launch date through the years, but helped pave the way for future research as well. In June 2015, President Obama ended Public Health Service review of cannabis research, an extra review process that would frequently last months and which duplicated existing FDA standards for research.

Another stumbling block for MAPS is that researchers must use strains of cannabis grown by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a government-funded addiction research institute, which the government claims is a safeguard against research cannabis being leaked onto the black market. As a result, one of the four strains in the study is less potent than the team would like, and may not reflect the strength of cannabis that veterans are using in the real world. But, in August, the DEA agreed to let new growers provide cannabis for future studies. Though Sisley expressed grave concerns about the bureaucracy surrounding the process of accrediting growers, it’s still an important step toward opening the field to more research into how cannabis can heal.

This historic study is the first-ever randomized-control trial of the efficacy of whole-plant cannabis (as opposed to extracts or synthetic concoctions) in PTSD in veterans. Seventy-six veterans will be selected, each with chronic PTSD that is resistant to other forms of treatment. The research is funded by a grant of over $2 million from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE).

MAPS has assembled an impressive team of medical experts to take on the research. Sisley will study one cohort of veterans in Phoenix, while Dr. Ryan Vandrey will oversee the other at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Dr. Paula Riggs from the University of Colorado School of Medicine is overseeing the scientific integrity of the study as a whole, with Marcel Bonn-Miller, PhD, from the University of Pennsylvania acting as the study’s coordinating principal investigator.

“I have been forced to become an activist just out of sheer determination to get this study implemented, and to make sure our veterans get answers to the legitimate questions that they have,” Sisley said. “I think the public has this impression that I’m pro-cannabis when I’m not at all.”

She continued: “I’ve never used cannabis personally; I’m not part of the industry, I don’t own dispensaries, I’m a completely independent thinker on this, and I really have no idea what the results are going to show here. I hope that our hypothesis will prove correct, but there’s also a lot of variables here.”

Still, Sisley remains cautiously optimistic that the study will at least open the way to future research. “We just want to get objective data from any starting point.”

At the end of our conversation, Sisley praised the work of MAPS, but told me she thinks veterans are really the ones leading the way to nationwide legalization of medical cannabis.

“The political activism of the veterans groups are really astounding. It’s truly the tip of the spear here in persuading even the most conservative Republicans that this is medicine.”

Recently, while listening too closely to an audio book of Donna Tartt reading her work The Secret History, I accidentally drove straight in a Left Turn Only lane. I’d been distracted by the cute lilt of her voice, the way she’d managed to make each character sound exactly the way I’d imagined them sounding each of the four times I’d read the novel.

Unfortunately, the California Highway Patrolman who pulled me over couldn’t be convinced of Donna Tartt’s charms. When the citation arrived a week later in the mail, I was so shocked at the $300 ticket that I dropped an entire bag of groceries and my thermos of freshly-made coffee onto the freshly-swept front porch of my house. The yogurt split open, and the hot coffee fell right into it, curdling it into the sickly mess I imagine my stomach to be every morning after breakfast.

I’d never gotten a ticket before — never a ticket I couldn’t wide-eye my way out of, anyway. I have a kind of dopey, doe-eyed face — big green eyes that make me look like the world is slowly dawning on me one watt at a time. It makes strangers think I’m naïve and absent-minded, and since it largely conceals my absolute disdain for authority, I rarely correct them.

The truth was, I couldn’t afford the $300 ticket — who could? I am a poet. My income is largely from the contract work I do for a patient advocacy nonprofit (sporadically throughout the school year), ghostwriting for a publishing company, and the occasional copy editing/journalism job. So I decided to fight the ticket, even though it meant driving to San Rafael and appearing in court.

I’d done everything I could to prepare for court — I wore dark, professional-looking clothes, I carried a manila envelope (which was actually empty, but gave me the look of having proof of exoneration, so I thought). I even wore a casual lip, more maroon than my typical vintage red. When I stepped into the courtroom at my 1:30 p.m. slot, I’d prepared for absolutely everything — except being in court.

A friend from the Midwest once told me that buildings in California have the bizarre appearance of being simultaneously stuck in the ’70s and oddly futuristic, a mash-up that manages to resemble no future, or present, that we know of. The courtroom, dressed in a variety of drab browns, sharp angles, and rectangular florescent lights, did seem to resemble a beige octagonal spaceship.

If this had been television — and it did look like television, if the most epically boring space courtroom drama also took place in a portable classroom — then I’d have courageously and confidently walked up to the stand, delivered my sanctimonious statement of injustice, and been handed back the $300 I’d had to pre-pay, preferably in one-dollar bills that would look like the tears of working writers around the world.

Instead, this is life. Instead, I immediately felt my body freeze, my blood feeling as if it were slowly swelling up inside my skin. I couldn’t quell, nor understand, the sudden feelings of immobility and terror that overtook me, as I surveyed the judge, the bevy of police officers, and the 40 other working-class people who’d come to contest their tickets during my same time slot.

This is San Rafael, 2015, but suddenly it is Indio, Riverside County, 1994. The judge has the same face as any judge. The drone of names being called for attendance transcends decades, buzzing in a low vibration that makes me feel nauseous. I reach to hold onto something, but there only seems to be me, and I am floating somewhere above two of my bodies: the body of myself at age 8, and the body of myself at 28.

“Do you consent to living with this family?” The judge peers down at me. My aunt and uncle are not looking at me. My uncle, who never consented to anything, glares at the stucco on the ceiling above us. My aunt, I can tell, is silently praying, clutching her oversized handbag where she keeps her Marlboros.

My hand collides with the hard backing of a long bench, which elicits the simultaneous comfort and horror of a church pew. I am in Indio, but not. My adoptive parents are not in this room. The wood of the bench has collided my two bodies together so that I am now one person — one very terrified and blood-swollen person, but singular. The case is dismissed; the officer had failed to appear. As I shakily leave the courtroom and find my way back to my old blue pickup truck, I collapse inside the hot interior. I lay down for a good, long time before I am ready to drive home. I vow never to listen to audio-books while I drive again.

Do you know about EMDR? If not, it stands for Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing. There are a lot of things it does, but the big one, as I understand it, is this: it reroutes and reprocesses the way your brain responds to things, so that you no longer respond out of trauma-instinct, and instead can process events and situations with rationale and analysis. Like normal, non-traumatized people.

I began going to EMDR last winter, after my life began to become really, really amazing. Because after my life started to become really, really amazing, I began waking up in the middle of the night in terror, afraid, suddenly, of death. I’d be in a crowded room full of people, laughing and enjoying being present and then suddenly, be overcome with the dreadful thought that this was a memory already. I began to feel, even in daylight, that I was floating outside of my body, hanging around myself as if by the ribbon of a balloon.

But the middle-of-the-night terrors — those were horrifying. I’d often wake myself up sobbing, not understand why I was crying, only knowing that I was so scared, and so tired, and so tired of being scared. I began to be afraid of going to sleep, and then afraid of the dark, and then afraid of late afternoon. Only the brightest part of morning was safe.

This made perfect sense to my therapist — because she’s a genius and goddess of the world, apparently. So we set about working on changing the neuropathways of my brain to switch from chronic-trauma brain (the other shoe is always going to drop, always stay ahead of everyone else, trust no one, you are going to lose everything) to normative processing brain (it’s OK to have good things happen, take a deep breath, yes loss will happen but you can handle it, you can handle everything, here’s a plan).

“And then I just became terrified, frozen in place,” I tell her in a session, after the courthouse incident. “I’m grateful I didn’t have to speak, but I am worried about this . . . nonconsensual time-travel that happens when I get teleported back to traumatic events. It’s like ending up in Knockturn instead of Diagon Alley.”

(Note: I use Harry Potter metaphors ceaselessly when talking about trauma. I don’t know if J.K. Rowling knows how much her books made understanding trauma-brain easier for me, but I owe her some serious credit for the way I study brain patterns.)

My therapist has me envision both courtrooms, and my responses to each, while she pushes a button that vibrates the small, football-shaped buzzers in each of my hands. She asks me to think about the responses that come up for me, and to lean into them, even if they make me feel sick, or scared.

“What are you afraid of?” she asks.

“Voicelessness,” I say, thinking about the 8-year-old me who’d lost her parents, who had no say in where to go, who couldn’t even begin to understand what was happening to her. Thinking about the 28-year-old me who didn’t know she was walking into a wormhole when she decided to contest a traffic ticket.

Then she asks me to think about what I need in that moment, in order to feel like I was in control.

I think of my hometown. It is a small, orchard-lined town of about 6,000 people, mostly migrant workers. It is poor, and it is beautiful. There is a road where someone once told me R. Crumb used to live. It’s called Moody Slough, and it stretches out lazily past the creek bed, dry now, alongside the Agriculture Site where high school students raise pigs, and into the foothills. I used to drive my old Volkswagon, Lola, through the darkest part of night, to the end of Moody Slough, and cut the engine. Cut the lights. Open the doors that were nearly rusted shut, and drape myself across the hood, where thousands (it seemed) of frogs yelled into the night, in and out of sync, and the stars glared down as hard and glinting as a million knife points.

When I was a teenager, and my parents would kick me out, I’d often come here and sleep on the hood of my car, or in the fields themselves, until it got light enough to go to my 4 a.m. shift at the bait shop. When I go back to my hometown, I still drive to Moody Slough, and thank heavens it has survived the slow development that all of rural California eventually succumbs to.

My therapist has me transpose the two, and suddenly, I am back in the courtroom, surrounded by the same nameless people who are also fighting their tickets. I cut the engine of my body. The fluorescent lights have dimmed, and as I open my rusted self, every one of us begins to sing the terrible, loud, wild songs of frogs.