Will Sandy Hook finally force us to face our national PTSD?

Learning to work together to create beauty instead of pain

Once concern is that much of my history with violence involves others I loved. Mom and Dad. My first husband. All of them are dead now, but that actually makes it harder because telling my story also tells theirs, yet they are not here to tell their side. That can’t be true. You’re exaggerating. I knew those folks. They weren’t like that.

I also worry that people often look at you differently after they know your story, dismissing whatever you say or do as being part of your history with the pathology of violence. Damaged goods. A lowlife. A loser.

Living with trauma

So I ached with empathy watching Rep. Hansen Clarke talk with Alex Witt on MSNBC last Saturday about witnessing a murder on the streets of Detroit when he was only nine years old. It is wrenching to see his pain and understand the price he pays each time he shares his story.

Like Clarke, I made up my mind when I was young that I would find a way to help build a better society where we focus on taking care of each other. When I was five, I witnessed a similar scene outside my bedroom window. A jealous husband chased down his wife and stabbed her in full view of neighbors who stood by and did nothing.

I have never known for sure if she survived. But I vividly remember putting my pillow over my ears so I did not have to hear the screams.

I also remember when Raymie, the 15-year-old boy who lived two doors down, took a gun to school and shot his teacher. And the seemingly endless Friday nights when the man next door would come home, get drunk and beat his wife while we listened to her moan.

In my neighborhood, violence was all too often the norm, not the exception.

Sadly, I also remember being beaten myself. Physical punishment of children was also part of the culture in our low-income, ethnic neighborhood, a patriarchal tradition brought to this country from the old ones.

The most damaging incident occurred when I refused to call my father Dad, not Hank. I had grown up knowing him mostly as the man who slept days and worked nights on third shift at the steel plant. His schedule meant that I had to tiptoe around the house during the day so that I wouldn’t wake him, facing his wrath if I did.

Since I thought of him as a stranger, I called him by his first name. But my parents were concerned about what the neighbors would think.

The showdown occurred when I was roughly the age of the kids who ere killed on Friday. My parents confronted me, with my father holding a belt, and I was told to start calling him Dad or else.

I refused, so he began beating me. I refused to cry. The standoff reached a point that I think horrified us all. In some ways, our relationship never healed after that.

I became a self-mutilator, pulling out all my eyelashes, an ugly condition with the innocuously musical name of trichotillomania. I stuttered. I had allergies and asthma.

I suffered bouts of spastic colon, where the abdominal pain would become so intense I would be rushed to the hospital, an expense my parents feared. Unfortunately, a doctor explained that stress and emotion were likely triggers, which translated to my parents that my illness was “all in your head.” As always, their solution was to threaten violence if it happened again.

I also remember standing in the kitchen with a butcher knife aimed at my bellybutton, dispassionately wondering if plunging it in would be the best way to stop being yelled at and hurt.

I felt a murderous rage building within me. Society has good reason to be thankful that estrogen took the edge off when I hit puberty. But it also left me suffering the classic signs of PTSD. Heightened startle reaction. Intrusive memories and flashbacks. Emotional numbing. Anxiety.

The lessons of Sandy Hook

When the news about the enormity of the loss at Sandy Hook became apparent Friday afternoon, all my PTSD symptoms flooded back. Like Rep. Clarke, I found it hard to talk.

But it was then that I began to realize that it wasn’t just me. Our nation suffers from PTSD, and it risks robbing us of the will to take action. We become anxious and self-destructive, retreating into a numbness that ends up allowing the problems to fester and grow.

We watch in horror as Columbine becomes Virginia Tech becomes Aurora. But instead of doing whatever it takes to make us safer, we let the assault weapons ban expire and put nothing in its place. We cut budgets for mental health services and schools, making it more difficult to identify and treat troubled kids who grow up to enjoy the “freedom” to have access to military-style weapons.

We have become a nation of self-mutilators, gouging our own eyes out to avoid seeing the damage we do.

But maybe Sandy Hook will make a difference. Maybe we will step back a moment and realize that you don’t treat pain with more pain.

I remember looking into my father’s eyes and seeing something snap during that awful time when he kept hitting me, demanding that I bend to his will. In a flash, he realized that he had to pull back, and he never beat me like that ever again.

Down deep, my father knew what he was doing was wrong, but he had no other frame of reference. He came from a family where his father beat him, as his father had beaten him.

After his parents divorced, his mother gave him to a farm family as a laborer when he was in his teens. Poverty is also violence when it means you can only afford one son, not two.

Imagine what it must have felt like to grow up knowing that you were the one that your other did not love the most? The only way for him to distance himself from his pain was to inflict it on others.

Yet he learned to change his behavior, becoming a much better parent by the time my sister was born. Can we do the same?

Our country’s turning point?

Can our society learn the right lessons from Sandy Hook?

On one level, I worry that we only seem to care when the victims are beautiful, much-loved children from affluent families. We have pretty much ignored the kids being killed who live in neighborhoods in Chicago and Detroit like the one I grew up in, a significant part of the 12,000 gun homicides each year. We also don’t seem to care as much when kids are killed by our new high-tech drones in countries in the Middle East.

But I will take change where I can get it. Anything that leads us away from the darkness and toward the light is a move in the right direction. I am happy to see conservatives like Joe Scarborough willing to consider dealing with the arms race escalating around us.

The challenge lies in understanding that healing takes both time and effort and that backsliding is always a danger. As an adult, I have suffered from anxiety and panic attacks, the residual effects of my childhood and a violent first husband. Each time an incident like this occurs, my PTSD comes back full force.

However, as a society, we can learn to transmute our pain into progress. Better mental health services for disturbed young men. An end to bullying in schools. Parents empowered to wrest the video game controller and the gun from those young boys’ hands. Stopping the sale of semi-automatic handguns and military-style weapons and then removing those weapons from our streets and our homes.

Creating a virtuous circle

Once we begin to get a handle on the problem, we can go further. Shift money from “defense” to social programs as part of demonstrating that violence is not the way to solve problems. Stop glorifying warriors and dismissing peacemakers as weak. We must also confront the damage that white male privilege inflicts on vulnerable young men who feel powerless to leave their mark in positive ways so they grab a gun instead.

We will all have to lose something to gain something. Reaching common ground means I will have to give in on access to violent video games and movies if you will agree to finding a new hobby that doesn’t involve guns.

As we learn the importance of dealing with problems wisely, we can begin to address the raft of other traumas that have left us paralyzed. We have endured the trauma of forest fires and hurricanes Katrina and Sandy but do nothing about climate change, afraid to push back against those who live in denial.

We suffered an economic collapse that rivals the Great Depression. But as our fellow citizens run out of unemployment benefits, we let the Tea Party shift the debate to cutting the deficit instead of creating jobs. We bail out the banks but not the people thrown out of their homes.

In Michigan, we even let our supposedly moderate, data-driven Governor Rick Snyder cut taxes on the rich, shifting the burden to the elderly and the poor. Last Tuesday, I watched him and his GOP legislators rush through Right To Work legislation, rolling back a century of struggle that put worker protections in place.

Allowing the 1% to rob the 99% is also an act of violence. The prediction is that 70% of the new jobs that will be created in our country during the next decade will offer no better than poverty-level wages. Can’t we do better?

I am encouraged because I feel something moving in the culture, a seismic shift toward an awareness that we have caved in to the forces of darkness for too long. Bullying is not a valid point of view that deserves respect, but a tactic that must be resisted.

The bottom line is that policies that hurt people are bad. Those that help people are good. Pity after the fact doesn’t step the next horror from happening. Healing our wounded culture requires finding the courage to do what it takes to care for each other and keep ourselves safe.