What My Heart Did: The Journey to a New Personal Narrative
Introduction
“Some things are better forgotten,” my older brother told me years ago when I asked him to help me fill in the spots of a troubling lack of childhood memory. In certain circumstances, I might agree with him. But there are times when what the brain and body do with buried, inaccessible memories is confusing and harmful like a foreign object lodged deep in the flesh and bone. There are times when the only solution is digging that object out.
My ego wants to say I’m living a wonderfully successful life since I published What My Heart Saw: Untangling Memory and How the Brain Heals in 2012, a memoir about childhood sexual abuse, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and reclaiming a brain gone awry. But the truth is that more than a decade later I’m still navigating the mystery of recovery. WMHS only spoke of part of the journey from victim to survivor to thriver—primarily of coming to awareness about the source of the trauma and realizing there can be recovery. In this story my intent is to share the next phase —discovering how the experiences of my youth and the ways my mind processed and recorded them in memory affected more than my thoughts and moods. This is an inquiry into how my body expressed and released the trauma over time. Decisions– some conscious, some not–that my body absorbed, processed and eventually reacted to in surprising ways, led me to discoveries I see mirrored all around me in other people’s lives, in their relationships, in their health. It’s not just my story. It’s the story of a whole tribe of survivors determined to thrive. My hope is the sharing of the totality of my story with complete transparency and humility, it reaffirms that even though the journey may be fraught with painful steps, when the heart is allowed to lead anything that happens can be made whole.
***
Chapter 1, Episode 1
Getting to the Brilliance
September 2013
It’s the first cool morning of fall. As a coffee lover preferring the dark taste of a strong brew upon waking, I’m not thrilled to be nursing a cup of ginger tea as the sun turns the corner of the quirky penthouse apartment I occupy in downtown Staunton, Virginia. But my disturbed gut demands the herbal substitute. The old wood frame windows are fogging up as the morning tiptoes between red brick, alleys, and black and silver roofs. As I watch it set the autumn colors afire on the hillsides of Mary Gray and Sears Hill, I let the burn of the spicy ginger slide down my throat. The irony that something innately spicy is supposed to soothe a disturbed gut raises the edges of my mouth in a slight smirk as does the silhouette of the giant neon Stonewall Jackson Hotel sign rising above the carefully restored historic buildings of this storybook town tucked in the mountains of the Shenandoah Valley. Perhaps that’s why I’m such a fan of this place. It cradles a sweet irony that makes the details of my life a little less difficult to swallow.
The odd fact that more than eight years since my flight from a life I am just beginning to see clearly, I once again live in an enormous building filled with history and intrigue and errant energies that jostle and soothe me. I began a loosely autobiographical novel about that first experience in the bed and breakfast in Florida not long after moving to Virginia, hoping that I could purge my demons with fiction. It sits waiting for an ending. The urge to tell the rest of this story, one of history and intrigue and ghostly whisperers that have prodded me along through a troubled life remains. So, I try again. Here.
I attempt to savor the aroma of the tea, allow it to do its work on my second brain—that mysterious destination of food, swallowed emotions, tightly held beliefs, energetic entanglements. I was flipping the channels on the car radio yesterday and landed on an NPR story about how scientists are just beginning to discover the real impact of intestinal bacteria on our moods. Like my personal discoveries about the power of the unconscious to make decisions without our awareness, I realize I have also intuitively discovered the direct relationship of gut to brain. If one is out of balance, the other isn’t far behind. My path to recovery has led from brain to heart to gut.
As the city begins to vibrate with sunlight, I feel myself tighten at the thought of writing about this. I breathe into my abdomen, feeling my heart ache with pressure and discomfort. My belly clenches. As with the writing of my first book, the prospect of throwing myself out there so openly still hurts. I don’t want people to know how broken I’ve been. But the commitment to let the light of recovery to shine out from this tale is greater than the fear of revealing. The irony of ginger tea, neon and old buildings and the core of personal happiness being dependent on very basic bodily functions is not lost on me.
We are, after all, a tangle of contradictions with moments of clarity that burst upon us like a crisp fall day. The sunlight and color are brilliant. But the leaves can make a mess. It’s taken me some time to understand messes are an inherent and beautiful part of life.
***
Chapter 1, Episode 2
Personal Purge
2005
I’ve just walked six miles in the dark at 4am. I’m now in a Dunkin’ Donuts in DeLand, Florida watching truckers and the early crew dose up on coffee and sugar. I’m not sure what I look like after this rather shocking middle-of-the-night-hike, sweat stains on my t-shirt, hair plastered to my head, grass stains on the hems of the legs of my jeans. But no one is staring, so I assume this crowd is used to oddities. Remembering my days of working the graveyard shift in all night restaurants during my twenties, I realize despite feeling pretty fucking crazy at the moment, I am barely visible compared to the lost souls that often haunt this time of the night.
Not that my story is any less sordid when honestly compared to the spectrum of addictions and social malfunctions. My drug of choice has been fake normalcy chased down with a cocktail of a secret life. Now I’m dealing with the reality of coming out of the lie.
The coffee hits me like liquid hope. I sometimes wonder if my tendency to calm down as I drink coffee is some sort of strange chemical opposite, like hyperactive children being stimulated by barbiturates. I’ve come to understand my brain doesn’t necessarily respond to things in a predictable way, and my current tendency to end up walking the streets when I wake at night is a perfect example. Walking seems to soothe the internal beast clawing to exit my body.
I live in an old hotel turned bed and breakfast on New York Avenue. I book guests and clean rooms and listen to a lot of religious TV coming from the business owner’s room (which is across the hall from me) at all hours of the day and night. She tells me I am not allowed to have the images of my newly embraced Buddhist philosophy in the room I get in exchange for duties. “No idols in my Inn,” she says. But there’s all the organic coffee I can drink available in the parlor and she sometimes treats me to General Tsao’s chicken from the local Chinese restaurant and nice take-out meals from the hot bar at Whole Foods. The hot bar stuffed cabbage tastes like earthly redemption, so I overlook the barrage of charismatic Christian lingo.
The current situation came about after I decided to leave my marriage of 27 years. We were living in a tiny trailer on the edge of the Ocala National Forest and two things in a long string of marital difficulties pushed me over the top of my Patty Hearstish-Stockholm-syndrome acceptance of verbal abuse. He spit on me. And then he pushed me into a bookcase when I was trying to walk away from a fight. And while those two incidents on the spectrum of horrendous, bloody, life-ending spousal abuse seem minor, I snapped. The next day I emptied my personal belongings (the few that were left, but that part’s coming later) into garbage bags and hauled them to the park dumpster, leaving two small tote bags to carry away. I tucked those under the steps to the back door for when I made my escape.
Now I’m here to tell you I’m no saint, so don’t condemn him just yet. I was repeatedly unfaithful to this man and he knew it. It happened during our early years together and we had faced it down. I went for counseling, got treatment for depression and began a long journey towards understanding what was causing my behavior. I have worked hard to be a better person in the face of some pretty challenging circumstances. He however, apparently simmered, stewed, held a grudge. And it came out every time I disagreed with him or wanted to do something for myself. He said he had forgiven me yet he acted as if he resented the air I breathed. But this story is not about him or our life together. This is about rewriting the stories that keep us in prison.
Some days I wonder what the years of spiritual and psychological work truly accomplished for me. Yeah, I am free of the marriage, but at this point in time I am emotionally and financially broken. A wreck. Obsessive. Cowering. Alone. Barely able to work. A shell of who I once thought I was.
The waitress gives me another fill-up and I scan the room as I add a touch of half-and-half, no sugar. Coffee has become my Prozac, not that I feel like anything short of shock treatments might solve my current state of mind. I watch another man shuffle in. Looks close to my age—late forties. Blue work duds. Steel-toe boots. Cropped hair slightly graying. He’s not standing straight now, but I sense at some point in his life he was a man that liked to look you in the eye while he talked. Now he’s tired. I wonder where his body has given up. I wonder if his heart hurts like mine most days.
From the two-person booth I’m planted in, I can see the sun starting to peak through the trees with fingers that seem to stab and poke. My eyes hurt. I’m suddenly not sure I can get back to the B&B to start my morning chores. I slug back the last of the cold coffee that’s been quivering at the bottom of my cup and gather myself for the hike back. I hope I can slither past the owner’s door before she can ask where I’ve been at this time of the morning. I hope this obsessive walking carries me out of the mess I’m in.
***
When I get back to the Inn, I quietly slip into my room, strip my clothes off and head to the shower. I stand in the tiny bathroom staring at my naked body trying to make sense of what’s happening to me. My skin is peeling from the bottom of my neck to the top of my legs like I’ve bubbled up from a bad sunburn. Every surface normally visible to others– face, legs and arms– are normal. I have a lump emerging on my back the size of a plum. It protrudes from my t-shirt like a hump if I wear anything too clingy. My hair is falling out in clumps, so I pin it up to cover the bald spots. I feel like a walking disaster.
Stepping into the shower, I let the hot water run over me like salve. In spite of what feels like rock bottom, I know the slow purge of a poisonous past has begun. My body is burning up what it no longer needs to hold. I am molting.
The TV preacher is giving the pitch for love offerings when I step out into the hallway to start my day. It’s a little after 7am and I brew a pot of coffee for Irene, pouring myself a cup to take down to the Inn office with me. I can smell muffins baking at the restaurant downstairs, and know the few guests we have that night will be wandering down shortly to relax with their coffee on the patio before they check out.
I boot up the computer and wonder if this refuge I’ve found can handle the inevitable messiness of my personal purge.
Chapter 1, Episode 3
It Is Solved by Walking
2013
The city is still deep in slumber as I lace up my shoes. The restless walking has started again, but unlike the first few months of my flight from a troubled relationship and the subsequent recovery of an early life of blank memory spots, I now know what it will accomplish. I know it is a way to release the byproducts of a physical chemical system gone awry. The view from my bedroom window is mesmerizing and difficult to leave, but I know there will be remarkable shadows and errant moonbeams falling between the steadfast structures that have occupied this place for several hundred years. The moon will illuminate the brick sidewalks and side streets I will traverse this morning.
I creep down the stairs leading to my apartment, exit the inconspicuous door that dumps me out from the attic apartment, tap the down button and wait quietly for the elevator to hum up the shaft to a stop. The sounds of the elevator works are soothing and familiar. They have been my version of friendly waves and neighborly conversations across the fence for the past three years of living alone perched above the city. I am thankful I have had this private space smack in the middle of a sleepy little town. There has been comfort in proximity and safety in being invisible. No one needed to see the agonies of my metamorphosis. Writing about it is enough. Recovery and reinvention are more easily encouraged in others when the dark nights are softened with the memories of moonlight. We need to be reminded that the moonlight always returns.
I step into the checkerboard-floored elevator and push the 1, suddenly struck by the fact that the ancient buttons on the panel remind me of the keys on my first Royal typewriter. And humbled by how much has washed through the corridors of memory since then. The doors hum closed and the slow descent to the street begins. I breathe into the cocoon-like movement of my body encased in a box traveling down an empty tunnel. The empty tunnel is surrounded by a structure, a structure that is merely a frame for more tunnels and corridors and pockets of space. It makes me think of the old cumulative tale nursery rhyme “This is the house that Jack built.” And it makes me think of miracles.
This morning I didn’t consult the crumpled map on my wall, a relic I have resurrected from year two of this eight-year comeback. When the Florida phase of walking continued after moving to Virginia a year later, I decided to at least make the compulsion meaningful. I vowed to put my feet on every street in Staunton and had begun ticking each off the map in yellow highlighter. The project stalled somewhere between the realities of a business failure and yet another family crisis in year three. But you’ll see what I mean as this story unfolds.
So I dug it out when the walking started again. A fresh new map hangs beside it, waiting. The maps are a reminder that life is full of fits and starts, hills and valleys, discarded dreams and chances to start again with a new perspective. Just like the lessons of sunlight and moonlight and messy trees, remembering there’s always another way to look at any given situation has turned my life from despair to hope. Unlike the frantic walking of eight years ago, these latest morning treks have taken on intention. I softly repeat a favorite quote from St. Augustine, “It is solved by walking,” as I burst out into the dark. The air is a lover’s embrace. The air, the pavement, the historic buildings, the urban trees, the energy of the city have replaced the things the first 45 years of my life failed to provide. In this place and time, I am finally safe enough to come home.
Chapter 1, Episode 4
Just Let It Go
2005
Returning to the scene of a crime isn’t always a great idea. But I didn’t know what else to do. Mind you, this wasn’t a crime I perpetrated, but one I inherited with a good dose of amnesia attached. It was passed on to me like an heirloom quilt and I remained cloaked in it until the very fabric of my life crumbled to reveal the messy truth. In making the decision to once-and-for-all escape the malfunctions of my marriage, I also took a fast inventory of what I had left of a life to piece together and where I would most likely be able to recover a few threads from which to start. I realized my only hope in finding my way to freedom was to start over where things had gone awry. DeLand, Florida. The town I grew up in. The place where this story ultimately begins.
I step out from the Inn office onto the massive front porch. Straight ahead is another huge old Florida house turned dentist office. Flashes of hours spent there as a young girl come back to me. It used to be the public library. It was a museum for a while. I took pottery and photography classes, entered projects in science fair exhibits. I can still feel the cool hallways and staircases that gave me refuge. It was a place that allowed me not to have to go home. I did everything I could to not be at home.
My feet and legs are sore. There’s a subtle itch working its way to a throb along my shoulders inward towards the hump on my back. I shiver and step back inside the building. My body isn’t quite ready to face more remembering. There’s work to be done, and I can’t imagine why I need to be reminiscing or hashing over the past again. In spite of years of not remembering or knowing what caused a twenty year spin into clinical depression and a series of unfortunate decisions in trying to cope with that, I now know the contributing factors. An atomic bomb of childhood sexual abuse, neglect, fanaticism and parental mental illness set the stage for a rocky path for me by damaging my developing brain. It fused and wired strange experiences into memory that still come back with a smell or a flash of recall. Some parts shrunk instead of growing, others reacted inappropriately to stimulation that shouldn’t trigger such response. Developmental trauma had left a crater of smoking rubble in my head.
But at this point I believe I have faced the realities of it, gotten help and made a serious effort to move beyond the circumstances of my earlier life. Now I just need to deal with the fallout. I have to accept and transform what the not remembering has done to my professional life, my marriage and my son. Starting life again free from the residual resentments of everything that has gone wrong is just one step. I have no idea how the radiation sickness is going to impact the rest of my life, but the odd physical manifestations are definitely a clue. This isn’t going to be a simple reset. There is still a lot to be discovered.
The chores around the Inn are actually soothing in their precise simplicity. Booking, admin, marketing, taking care of guests and cleaning rooms. Irene has taken me under her wing in her own unique way, and has taught me her very precise method of cleaning and prepping the rooms after each guest. While I sincerely appreciate her kindness and a soft place to land while I decide next moves, I am very aware of my reaction to her immersion in charismatic Christian culture. When she throws the lingo around, it literally hurts like I’ve been kicked in the gut. Puts you in great shape for trying to reinvent your life, I tell myself. Bent over in pain at the mention of Jesus, molting like a diseased bird and growing a hump on my back of unknown origins. “Excellent start to this whole new life thing Karen,” I mumble out loud as I shut the office door behind me.
***
2013
The walk is invigorating as I wind my way through the Staunton streets that have become my haunt. I head west on Beverley, then up Central Avenue that leads from the downtown hub to the various parts of the city I have come to know well by foot. There are things you see on foot that you will always miss by car. Subtle changes in the pavement after a particularly harsh winter. The architecture of a tree dressed and undressed by the seasons. A child’s chalk drawings in front of their house or the soft touches of a gardener’s plant choices from year to year. The way the smell of an approaching rain or someone’s dinner bubbling on the stove travels on the breeze. Memory that carries hope forms on such observations, and has allowed me to slowly find a new story to tell about my life.
I’m reminded of the lessons of mindfulness that have been so vital through the recovery process from a traumatic childhood and young adulthood. Mindful walking has been my therapeutic way out of despair towards some sense of meaning in a confusing and painful existence. This morning I am thankful that through walking and a variety of other treatments and practices I have begun to unearth the contents of my unconscious that have been causing all the post-traumatic disturbances. Until I knew the story that was stored in my head, I couldn’t begin to rewrite it.
I reach the intersection by Young’s Hardware and turn left towards Gypsy Hill Park. Next walk I’ll brave the steeper hill that rounds the Staunton Public Library to the right. Today I need the soothing trees and early morning quiet of the park. Many hours were spent at the park when I first arrived in Staunton. After six months at the Eastwood Inn in the old home town, I realized three things. One, I wasn’t cut out for an innkeeper’s life; two, there was nothing left in DeLand to help me recover my sanity and; three I was still too close in proximity to the ex-husband for optimal recovery. So when my sister offered a chance to move to Virginia to take care of her elderly in-laws for awhile, I jumped at the opportunity. New surroundings, a simple existence, a chance to heal. Harold and Madeline lived a block from the park I was now entering on foot and I took respite from the caretaking walking here.
The sun is just starting to hint at its impending arrival with soft hues of color bleeding into the sky behind me. I take a right towards the duck pond, savoring the lack of other people cluttering up the street with cars and dogs and bikes and kids. Morning is a blank piece of paper being slowly rolled into that old manual typewriter that got me through page-after-page of college term papers. I watch it take on letters and words and sentences as I turn the corner by the playground, the golf course up the hill to my right, crows heralding the beginning of the day with staccato strikes of sound. I round the bend by the National Guard Armory, then drop down the hill towards the bandstand. Lewis Creek running through the center of the park is full today. There has been recent rain. I see walkers beginning to mark their place on the page as I turn towards Thornrose Avenue to exit the park. The day has begun.
2005
Days and nights at the Inn are mostly quiet. The rooms are seldom full. Irene complains that attracting guests is getting more difficult all the time and she’s not sure how to change her marketing to fix the problem. Sure, the place is booked during the top NASCAR race dates and bike week activities in Daytona (at less than 15 miles away, DeLand is an easy overflow for busy events in Daytona), but the rest of the year the Inn isn’t a preferred destination. I keep quiet about what I already see as part of the problem, especially since quiet is just what I need at the moment. I need to think.
The Inn office, like the rest of the building is an eclectic mix of Victorian and modern décor and memorabilia. I realized the first weekend I spent in the gigantic old building that my fascination with historic places and structures was more than the comfort of what had sheltered me as a child. I sometimes thought I could feel something in the floors and walls and sidewalks as I walked through certain spaces and streets. Vibrations, flashes of light, smells, movie frames. I dismiss the sensations as emotional frailty and a touch of insanity picked up from my unconventional religious upbringing and the difficulties of my marriage. I hoped that as I stepped out into a new existence, I would lose the “woo-woo” experiences and get a more grounded foothold on a rational life. I desperately wanted to put the oddness of the first half of my life behind me, and slipping into some “New Age” embodiment of more of the same didn’t make sense no matter what I was “feeling.” I mean what’s the difference between tongue-speaking, holy ghost-possessed fainting and twitching spells in a church and a tranced-out seer or an earth-based spirit reveler by the fire? My study of Buddhism has taught me to embrace clear-headedness over emotional reactions and illusion, so I chalk up my own sensitivities as figments of an overactive imagination that had been fed a lot of hooey as a child.
As I immerse in the running of the Inn, the molting stops. I treat the “hump” with an old home remedy of “black salve” the pharmacist at the Winn Dixie recommends. Somehow the tried-and-true nature of the coal-based ointment is reassuring and familiar, but I’m not sure why. It feels like something an old-time grandmother, if I could really remember one, would use. I spend my spare time writing about gardening—a pastime combined with Buddhist philosophy that I attribute to aiding my ability to begin turning a troubled, clinically depressed existence toward a more positive light. I have succeeded in getting a few articles published in magazines, so I dream about making a living as a “garden writer.” Who knew there was such a career?
There remains a restlessness however, and I find myself traversing the streets in the early mornings before the light can reveal my desperateness to others. I am unable to keep the demons at bay without a physical expression of release, and there isn’t enough privacy at the Inn to allow the grief and despair to escape unnoticed. Muffled sobs and fitful nights aren’t enough to clear the nightmares anyway. I begin to believe I must pound the lost memories out into the pavement to get them out of my body.
2013
I boot up my computer and pour myself another cup of coffee. I know I should be drinking ginger tea, but the comfort of my morning java ritual is nearly impossible to give up in spite of the nagging gastric disruption I live with these days. I know the morning walks often shake something loose from my fractured memory, and today is no different. I need all the comfort I can get at times like this.
I type “post traumatic stress associated memory loss” into the search box and begin scanning a variety of articles about the effects of traumatic experiences on brain development and memory. As much as I have wanted to put childhood drama behind me, my curiosity about how the developing brain handles events it is not prepared to process remains. I want to understand and articulate not only the damage that can occur from events that people still say “just let it go” about, but also the healing that can take place when we recognize the physical scars that endure. I want to tell the story of recovery from start to finish.
I tiptoe through the general articles and tick off the details of my own life again. Raised in a wildly emotional and strict Pentecostal home, I was a sensitive child immersed in situations that frightened me terribly. I was seldom comforted, but more often chastised for crying or clinging. Strange places and people that told me I was bad if I told anyone about the things that happened. Distant parents and siblings. An early life of isolation and terror and inappropriate interactions.
I’ve read a great deal about what happens to the brain when early childhood development is interrupted by traumatic events that are not adequately supported with attentive caregivers and recovery environment. I know that my upbringing, the people that surrounded me and the subsequent lack of care set me up with a less than functional brain. I spent my early adulthood understanding and overcoming the behaviors and thought disorders that ensued. The past decade has been spent extracting the memories and beliefs my mind and body so efficiently hid from me. And while it may make sense to just “let it go,” the reality is quite different. Throughout our lives, body and behavior are fueled by an invisible underground stream of unconscious data and experience. So even when we make a “conscious” decision to leave the past in the past, there are often traces in the stream. And when the groundwater is polluted and we refuse to actively clean it up, it can make us sick.
I think about what the “walking therapy” has been interspersed with since the publication of the first memoir. While the first several decades of my life were marked with the emotional fallout of interrupted brain development, the past couple years have been significant for the introduction of physical symptoms and phantom physical illnesses. There have been periods of time when I couldn’t pound the demons into the pavement because they were expressing themselves in physical pain and exhaustion that has immobilized me. During those times, I am forced to find other methods to continue cleaning up the poisoned groundwater.
Leaning back in my chair, I suddenly understand the “let it go” reaction of those unaffected by post-traumatic stress disorder. They don’t get the metaphor of the underground water source. Yet they wouldn’t think of drinking from a stream they knew to be polluted. And therein lies the conversation. How did we learn that water can contain unseen elements that will make us ill, yet we cannot understand that our minds are not any different?
My eyes scoot through the article on the screen once more, searching for something that will confirm my suspicions about the impact of not addressing the toxins left in the unconscious stream of an individual touched by childhood trauma. It’s a Wiki article, which I always find suspect, but nonetheless often provide clues to more reliable sources. The article attributes developmental PTSD to trauma that has not been “…moved from the mind to the hippocampus of the brain where it should have been processed. When unprocessed trauma events build up and reach a certain point, then the individual’s mind, followed by the brain become overwhelmed due to the lack of communication between them.” Hmmm. From mind to brain? What’s the difference?
I click through links about “unprocessed trauma events” and am led to familiar experts from the research for the first memoir. I realize that in the years since What My Heart Saw was published, the research has evolved. There are new insights that could shed light on this stage of recovery and assist with the revisions of my own tale. I click through the remaining links and make a list. I have some reading to do.
Lanius, Ulrich (2014) (coauthors: Sandra L. Paulsen, Frank M. Corrigan). Neurobiology and Treatment of Traumatic Dissociation: Towards an Embodied Self. New York:Springer Publishing Company.ISBN 10: 0826106315.
Siegel, Daniel (2012). The Developing Mind, Second Edition: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford press.ISBN 13: 978-1462503902.