Trauma

I will tell you something that is a fact: all the bad stuff that happens to us before the age of seven, all the trauma we experience as a child, becomes a part of who we are. It is in every cell in our bodies. It is true of all ages, but it is especially true before age of seven.

I’m past it, so I have no need to relitigate it, but I grew up in a violent house until the age of seven—at which point my parents divorced. Let’s just say that I experienced physical discipline far above and beyond spanking. And as you know, I was a 9/11 survivor, so there is that. And I had some trauma while in the Coast Guard, too. Throw in the financial crisis while you’re at it. If you were to draw charts of various addictions, criminality, and other social ills, you would find that they have a one-to-one correlation with trauma in childhood. Which means: if you are getting married, and you are having children, your first and most important responsibility is to shield the child from potential trauma. That is the difference between a future Nobel Prize-winner and a convict. It is very, very hard for people to succeed in spite of their trauma. Some people do, but it is exceedingly rare.

I watch some TV. You want to know what I notice about TV? Everyone is smiling all the time, like on American Idol. Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, and Luke Bryan are always joking around. They seem to be really enjoying themselves. None of them have that haunted look like me, or people I know who have experienced trauma. People tell me to smile all the time. What the hell is there to smile about? If you had been through what I have been through, you wouldn’t smile, either. And I know some people who have been through what I have been through, and much worse, and they’re not big smilers. They are serious as a heart attack.

Right now, there are some people pushing a narrative that talk therapy is next to useless. I can see why some people might think that. I think talk therapy is like a lot of things in life—you get out of it what you put into it. In other words, it is work, and you have to do the work, in and out of sessions. Most people just sit there, passively receiving information, a spectator to their own recovery. After 9/11, in the beginning, I would have panic attacks if I heard the sound of jet engines. I finally came to terms with it around 2009, through years of therapy. I came to terms with a lot of things through therapy. I will add that a lot of therapists are patently unskilled, so in order for it to work, you need someone who knows what the hell they are doing, and you need to be willing to put in the work. You have to want it, which is true of just about everything. You have to want to get better, and deep down, a lot of people really don’t want to get better. They like to sit in the pain, because it is familiar, and comfortable. And you have to get honest. When therapy doesn’t succeed, the vast majority of times it is because of the insouciance of the patient, not the acumen of the therapist.

Most people, when they experience trauma at a young age, or at any age, spend the rest of their lives seeking out things that are soothing. This is where the addictions come in. Some people might be soothed by drugs or alcohol, resulting in addiction or alcoholism. Some people might be soothed by prostitutes. Some people might be soothed by obsessive-compulsive disorder or other ritualized behavior. All of these things allow the person to perpetuate the illusion of control—if I can change the way I feel, the thinking goes, then I have control over my situation. Of course, all of these behaviors are self-destructive, and lead to bigger consequences down the road. The solution to this is to not pursue behaviors that are soothing, the solution is to do things that bring joy. For me, most of the time, it is music. I play music in my house and time disappears. The cats also bring me joy. For some people, it might be swimming in a pool, going for a walk in nature, or going to a concert. Joy is the antithesis of trauma, and at least, it is the alternative to self-destructive behavior.

The number of people who experience a quiet, drama-free childhood is actually pretty small. All of us are carrying around one trauma or another. There is that quote about how you should be gentle with people because you never know what burden they are carrying. Boy, is that ever true. We are all a bunch of screwed-up people, trying to find our way in the world, bumbling into shit and making mistakes, and trying to clean up the mess. I’m big on forgiveness, for just that reason. I have only not forgiven someone once. Usually, if you’re dealing with someone and you find their behavior disturbing or incomprehensible, just know that 90% of the time, you’re dealing with trauma, addiction, mental illness, or some combination of the three. Mentally stable, healthy people generally don’t go around leaving a path of destruction in their wake. There are some assholes out there, but not many. The number of truly evil people in the world is breathtakingly small. I always, always bet on the goodness of people.

And then you think about the people in positions of leadership who have experienced trauma. John McCain, for example—one of the greatest war heroes in history, but when you learn what he went through in Vietnam, the torture he endured, and he came within 4% of becoming leader of the free world? Look, I’m not saying he wouldn’t have made a fine president, because he was a man of character, and that is what is important. But remember what I said about trauma—it is in every cell in your body, and affects your decision-making in ways that you can’t even comprehend. I keep bringing up the Goggins book, as much as I disliked it—the one thing I kept thinking about when I was reading that book is that he also grew up in a violent household from age 0 to 7, even more violent than mine. All these triathlons he’s running—that’s not perseverance, that’s not willpower, that’s soothing, and it doesn’t take a psychology PhD to figure that out. But we live in a society that values superhuman endurance and physical prowess and tolerance of pain, so a few million books later, he’s a hero. I wonder what you’d find if you did a psychological study of Navy SEALs about what trauma they endured in childhood. It would be pretty interesting.

I can tell you how I deal with trauma—I write about it. You know how I finally, finally put 9/11 to rest? I wrote about it. I wrote a 2,000-word piece for The Daily Dirtnap for the 20^th anniversary in 2021, and then I turned that piece into an essay for my book Those Bastards. That was how I finally came to terms with it. I am not the only one who does this. Graham Greene wrote, “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” If I didn’t write every day, I would…never mind. I would be pretty unhappy to say the least. People thank me for writing stuff all the time. Hey, don’t thank me. I don’t do it for you, I do it for me. The alternative is to bottle it up and turn into a miserable fuck. No thanks.