TRANSCRIPT
I’m gonna tell a story about trauma and resolution of trauma. It started when I was 13 years old in seventh grade. I was a really small kid, hadn’t gone into puberty. I was one of the shortest, skinniest kids in my class, and it was a class with a lot of kids in it. My grade had over 300 kids in it. I was probably in the bottom one or two percent, and I was also not very popular. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I was in a really socially awkward period. My family had moved to a new neighborhood, and I was trying to fit in with the school kids, but it wasn’t really working. They didn’t like me too much.
The story happens when I was at my locker one day in school. I was putting some books in, switching. It was between classes, so I was putting some books into my locker and getting out some folders or something. Something caught my eye out of the corner of my eye, and I turned around. It was this very large girl who was probably about six or more inches taller than me. She was basically physically a woman, and she was a year older than me. I later found that out. She probably outweighed me by about 50 pounds.
What happened is she was walking toward me, and she was actually very, very close when she caught my eye. I turned, and boom! She punched me so hard right in my stomach. I didn’t even have time to tense my stomach, and so she hit me, and it completely took the wind out of me. I went down, but I didn’t fall down. Instead, I just sort of went into a crouch, and I sort of leaned into my open locker. I had my eyes open the whole time, except for I think the moment when she hit me. But I had my eyes open, and I saw that she just walked away, so I knew she wasn’t going to attack me again.
The first thing that went through my mind at that moment was not my pain, not the fact that I couldn’t breathe, and that feeling that, oh my god, I think I’m going to die. What it was, was this incredible sense of humiliation. I didn’t want anybody to know that I was in this totally vulnerable, helpless, pained position because there were other kids around, and nobody did anything. I totally played it off almost like I wasn’t hurt at all. I managed to keep my face very straight and just looked like it was cool. But the truth is, I couldn’t even breathe, and it was like this moment of panic set in. But I was like, I refuse to give in to it. Instead, I just played it cool, played it cool.
After, I don’t know, it felt like a long time. It was hard to tell. I was able to breathe a little bit, breathe a little bit more, a little bit more. I kept pretending to fiddle in my locker because I didn’t want anyone to see the horrible, horrible position that I was in. What I also did is I turned and I watched her. She walked away, she walked to the other side of the hall, a little bit away from me, and there were a couple of her friends that she was with, older girls. They were eighth graders, and they just stood and laughed at me. They watched me, and they laughed, and then they just walked away, and nothing came of it.
I eventually was able to breathe again, and I went back to what I was doing. I got my folders and my books for my next class, and I went to my next class, and nobody ever said anything. I never told anybody. Now, I was traumatized by that. It was a feeling of overwhelming helplessness, vulnerability, shame. I had the silence that goes along with trauma. I dissociated from the event. I actually didn’t really even consciously think about it for a long, long time. But at a certain sense, I did because one of the things that I started doing is I wanted to figure out who she was. I didn’t even know the girl. I’d never even seen her before.
So I started doing detective work, and I watched her. I mean, we had a big school in my middle school. This was in middle school. There were probably over a thousand kids. So I started watching and found out things about her. I found some kids who I saw talking to her, and I asked very surreptitiously who she was. I found out what her name was. I found out where she was from, where she lived. I found out who some of her friends were, and yet I never told anybody my reasons. I just wanted to know. I wanted information. Also, I was scared of her. I was like, what if she does something to me again? But I played it totally cool. I pretended like I’d never seen her before.
I ended up passing her in the hall quite a number of times that year, and she didn’t even seem to notice me. What I realized is that it was just a completely incidental attack. She just had chosen somebody who clearly was vulnerable and alone and wasn’t hanging out with his friends and was small, and you know, she just attacked him to make herself feel good, make herself feel powerful, whatever her reasons, to get a laugh with her friends.
But I watched her, and we all went to the same high school. She went a year ahead of me because she was a grade ahead. But for the next four years, I watched her, observed her. I kept my eye on her, never once spoke to her, but I always knew who she was, and I never told anybody. I mean, you think I could have told my mom, but my mom, it was too difficult to tell her. She wouldn’t have heard me. She wouldn’t have done anything. She certainly wouldn’t have made it better. She would have just pitied me probably, and that would have made me feel even more humiliated.
I didn’t tell my dad because my dad himself was a lot of a bully. He bullied me a lot. He was humiliating me. He would say really mean things. He would pick on me all the time for not having good friends, for not having any friends at all. All the time, he’d say, “You don’t have any friends because you’re this and this. Your best friend is the dog. You’re a loser. You know the way you act, and not surprising nobody would be friends with you.” What’s sad is because of that bullying from him, I couldn’t share how what was really feeling. And heaven forbid I ever did share how vulnerable I felt in my life, then he just upped the bullying.
I think because in a lot of ways, he was a very rejected person when he was a child, and he had a lot of shame and humiliation. That seeing me not do very well socially kicked up a lot of his shame, and his way of dealing with that, because he didn’t want to feel ashamed, he felt like a big guy in the world, and he felt really important. And yet underneath that, he felt all that shame. So when I overtly expressed my feelings of humiliation and smallness and vulnerability and shame, he wanted me to push those feelings down, make them go away, because it made him feel the same way. I reflected how he was feeling on the inside, so that’s what made him bully me even more and pick on me and humiliate me and shame me.
So it’s like he was someone that I definitely could not go to to talk about my vulnerability. And when I think about it, a big part of the reason I couldn’t go to my mom either, if my mom saw him humiliating me, if my mom saw him bullying me and picking on me and saying nasty things to me, and she never defended me. So if she didn’t defend me against my dad, against a person whom she had an intimate relationship with, there was no way she was going to go to my school and in any way defend me against some girl who was a year older than me who I didn’t even know. And then on top of it, there was the whole thing that I’d been attacked by a girl.
How humiliating was that for a boy, a 13-year-old boy who was like, wanted to fit in and be cool and all this? So it’s like there was no way I was telling anyone.
Well, part of how I dealt with my shame and my humiliation, because I didn’t have any self-therapeutic tools, I didn’t have an ability to self-reflect, I had nobody safe I could talk about this with. I had no witnesses who would listen to me. I didn’t have really anybody who even cared, certainly not in school. So I tried to be even tougher. I tried to be even cooler.
What I did is I started becoming a bit of a bully, and I’m so ashamed to admit that. And it’s so painful to admit that I became kind of a teasing person. I used my cynicism, I used verbal cleverness to be mean to kids. And I did this in seventh grade. It’s like I was trying to write my inner ship. I was trying to balance my inner sense of feeling so ashamed and small. So I turned it around, and I did it to other people. I replicated the trauma. That’s like looking at it years later, it’s like, oh, and even at the time it made me feel even smaller.
Well, I had a sort of friend in school who was also a small kid, and we would argue sometimes and have conflict. Well, I would punch him sometimes. I would hit him. I would push him, and I would bully him. And he told someone. He told a teacher, and I ended up getting in trouble. I got forcibly sent to the school psychologist, this middle-aged woman. And I had to sit in her office, and I remember she had this really tough look on her face. She looked at me, and it was the quickest session ever. She said to me, “You’ve been fighting. You’ve been picking on this kid, and if you keep doing it, you’re going to get put in in-school suspension.”
And that to me was a horror, absolute horror. Because every day in school, they would send around this sheet, and the teachers would all get it, and it would say all the kids in school who were in in-school suspension. And they had their names and how many days they were in in-school suspension for. And they were the bad kids. They were the troubled kids. They were the screwed-up kids. They were the kids who had a lot of problems and did all sorts of bad things. And I was in the honors classes. I was in the classes with the supposedly really smart kids. And it was like I had never once, in all the time I was in school, ever seen one of those really smart kids go into in-school suspension. And here I was getting threatened with it by the school psychologist. And it was like, oh my god, this would radically increase my shame and my humiliation. So it was like I couldn’t afford that.
So what happened is I didn’t fight in school anymore, but I didn’t stop what I was doing. I didn’t stop being sort of a nasty teasing bully. So I just instead did it much more verbally and much more cynically and a little bit more carefully so I wouldn’t get in trouble. I still, you know, did get in trouble. I had a couple of teachers make comments about how it wasn’t nice, and certainly it didn’t win me a lot of friends. And it had certainly made a lot of people not like me, and it made my life a lot worse, which is really sad because really the goal for what I was trying to do is I was trying to be liked more. I was trying to feel more empowered, and I was doing it in the totally dysfunctional way, much in the way of what that girl did to me.
But I thought about that. It’s like that psychologist, she had a whole class period to sit with me and talk with me. She probably talked to me for a grand total of five minutes. And I said, “Yeah, okay, I won’t do it anymore.” And I didn’t do what she said anymore because I didn’t want her threat to come true. But she never asked me what happened to me. She never asked me anything about my life. She certainly never asked me about my home life. She never asked about how my parents were treating me. She never asked about how I was fitting in in school. And she never asked if I had any traumatic incidents that happened. And basically, she showed no compassion at all.
Now, because she was such a nasty type person, I still remember that look on her face like she despised me. So had she asked me those questions, I am pretty convinced I wouldn’t have told her anything. But what if she had shown compassion? What if she had cared? What if she’d really said, “Sweetie, why are you doing this? What’s going on in your life?” What if she’d really wanted to know? I probably would have spilled my guts. I think I was dying to be able to tell someone who felt safe, and I had nobody safe to tell. I had nobody I thought who really loved me, who cared for me, who stuck up for me, who was fighting for my best interest. So I was all alone with it.
And it really, actually, that whole experience with therapy, it set something in mind for that after. I was like, in general, I despised therapists for a long time. But I also realized the power in their role. The power to really destroy people. The power to make things a lot worse for people. But also later, when I started hearing some people talk about good stories of therapy, I realized what this woman could have done and what, when I became a therapist, what I wanted to do. What I wanted to look at people not for their bad behavior, but for why they were doing it. What had happened to them that was causing them to act out? Because it was a model for me what I went through.
It’s like once I started grieving when I was in my 20s, and I started crying and feeling for myself and loving myself for the way no one had really ever loved me, I started seeing what I went through and realizing, oh my god, my acting out, my this behavior, my abuse were all coming from what had happened to me. And it was really complex. All these different things had happened to me, tons and tons of things, and mostly starting from within my family, but certainly the outside world. This eighth-grade girl, for example.
Now let’s fast forward. I graduated from high school. I went on in my life. I went into my 20s, and thank God I started connecting with myself. It was like something magical happened. I think a big part of it was that I got away from my family, and I started realizing, you know, people in the outside world actually seem to like and respect me a lot more than my own family does. And they seemed a lot healthier in a lot of ways.
And what I started doing is I started following the model of being more loving with myself. I did start grieving, and I started studying my history, and I really stopped a lot of my acting out, if not most of it. And what happened as it went on through my 20s and through my 30s is I started resolving a lot of my different traumas. However, the trauma with this girl who punched me in the stomach, that never went away. It stayed in my unconscious, and I knew it because I kept dreaming about it a lot. But probably once or twice a year, I would remember a dream in which this girl, this mean huge older girl, attacked me.
I had all sorts of different dreams. I had dreams in which I fought back against her and I beat her up. I had dreams in which I would come from behind her and attack her. In almost all of the dreams, I was much smaller than her. Sometimes she would attack me. Sometimes she’d attack me with my friends. Sometimes I’d set traps for her. It was like all these different things that I was still trying to resolve that trauma unconsciously.
Well, so that trauma happens when I was 13. Fast forward 30 years. This is maybe three years ago. I was 43, and I had another dream with…
Her in it, another violent, scary dream. When I woke up, like in a shock, I was like, “Oh no, whatever happened to her?” So I looked her up on Facebook and found her. I saw that we had a mutual friend in common, and I thought, you know, I think I want to connect with her after all these years. I want to tell her what happened to me.
So I sent her a friend request, and she accepted it. I felt a little guilty because the truth is, I really didn’t want to be friends with her, but I didn’t want to be enemies with her anymore. I don’t want to have violent dreams. I didn’t want to hate her. So I guess in a sense, like, I did want to be maybe friends with her, or at least Facebook friends with her.
Well, she accepted my friend request within like an hour, and I sat it. I looked at pictures of her, and she’d grown up. She didn’t look like a particularly happy person. She’s pretty unsatisfied from what I remember. I think she was divorced. I think she had a couple of kids. She looked quite a bit older than me. She looked like life had not treated her so nicely, and I kind of fell for her. I looked at her and, hmm, I did have compassion for her. I was like, you know, I can only imagine what she went through to do that to a vulnerable little boy.
But at the same time, I still had my piece that I needed to say. So I wrote it down, and I thought about it for a day. I wrote down what happened, and I wrote her a private message. What I told her was, you know, I don’t want to ruin your day, and I don’t even want to make you feel bad. I just want to share what happened between you and me 30 years ago.
I told her the story of how I was at my locker, just minding my own business, and that I was a vulnerable, small, kind of lost kid. How she was with some friends standing in the hallway and waited until a vulnerable moment when there were no teachers around. She came over and punched me as hard as she could right in the stomach and took the wind out of me, and then just laughed and walked away with her friends.
I shared that with her, and I tried to be fair because I didn’t want her to feel bad. I really didn’t want to ruin her day. I didn’t want to get vengeance. I just wanted to say it. I wanted to acknowledge what had happened. I mean, I remembered her name for 30 years, literally 30 years. And oh, I held my breath and I pressed send.
A couple of hours later, I got a reply from her. She said that she was really sorry and that she didn’t actually even remember the incident and that she feels bad about it. But, and she wished she did remember it, but she didn’t. And then she asked me, “So what are you doing with your life now? What are you up to now?”
I thought that, uh, and I just said, and I thought about it. Mmm, so she didn’t remember it, and actually, I believed her. I really do believe it. Part of what I believed her is I did a lot of pretty horrible stuff too. Until I started really engaging, really deeply on my grieving process, I didn’t even remember a lot of the stuff that I did because a lot of the stuff I did was just acting out, replications of my traumas, and it went right into my unconscious too.
So, from watching her behavior and seeing it, I really did think she probably did it to other kids too, and I was just one kid. So I sat on it, and I replied to her something along the lines of, “I understand, and I just want you to know that I no longer hold it against you at all. I really appreciate you listening to me.” I told her a little bit about my life, and then I sat on it for another day. She didn’t reply.
Then I thought, you know, I actually don’t think I really want to be Facebook friends with her. I felt a little guilty, but then I thought, you know, it’s okay. It’s alright. I wasn’t a jerk to her, and so I unfriended her. We haven’t been friends since.
But the weird thing is, it’s been three years now, and I haven’t had one more bad dream about it. I realized that one incident, little tiny incident that took 30 seconds, a minute, is no longer a traumatic incident in my mind. A lot of the other deeper stuff is a lot of my family stuff. It’s not so easy to resolve. It’s not one incident with one random person. It’s like, actually, in a way, this is a very simple kind of trauma. But I would say for that one, I resolved it.
And so, yeah, no more dreams and no more anger at her. I really can’t say now I do wish her the best. I wish her the best in her life, whatever it is.
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