Big Ugly Kiss for my partner on his Birthday

Aside from the heavier content of my previous email, I'm also thinking about how glad I am that my partner was born. And how lucky I am that his path crossed mine. Last year around his birthday was when we got more serious, and I'm grateful for his presence in the world.
Aren't you?

National Center for PTSD

Last week I attended a week-long training put on by the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was a rich week, with lots of learning (and sitting) (and powerpointing!), but here are a few things I learned:
1. Anyone who has a traumatic experience goes through a lot of life upheaval, involving emotions, worldview, relationships, etc. It takes a long time to heal from an experience like that, and healing takes a lot of different forms. Some people get stuck in a repetitive pattern that disrupts their lives and the lives of those around them for a much longer period of time--to a point where they or their loved ones try to seek treatment for it.
2. Few people experience "a trauma." Instead (as Eli pointed out a while back on this blog), they experience traumatic experiences. Some of them concentrated around a specific situation, and others around a number of different situations.
3. There are a number of different "empirically-proven" therapies to assist people in gaining a sense of equilibrium or growth (including Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure Therapy, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). Most of these involve a fairly understandable set of structured therapies designed to assist people in grappling with emotions, behaviors, and thoughts.
4. I don't know if I can do what I want to do with the degree and career path I'm headed for. Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) sounds like basically my theological worldview put into a systematized, methodological therapy. That excites me, and I'm reading more about it.

That's about it. I recommend checking out the website if you're interested: www.ncptsd.org

There are a lot of really great people working at the VA, I have to say.

Happy Birthday, baby

Tuesday is my partner's birthday, but we celebrated a little bit early. Last night I took him for a surprise dinner at Metro Lafayette. It was a cool little restaurant in the middle of this random town east of the Oakland hills. There are a lot of interesting restaurants out there. They even gave us dessert free for his birthday...dense Valrhona chocolate brownies with dried cherries in port and lavender creme anglaise. They gave us miniature water glasses, and the water filler never let our glasses get below 3/4 full. She must have come 10 times during the dinner to top us off. Then Emily joined us at the Bench & Bar. I don't know if I'll ever to go the Castro for dancing again after that. Bench & Bar is right in downtown Oakland, and it's got a much better mix of people than I've ever seen in the Castro. It got a bit irritating after midnight when they had a show--and we preferred just to dance. The coolest thing was, earlier in the night, the mix of music they played--from hip hop to house dance to salsa and merengue to some really fast couple dance that was cool to watch but I had no idea how to dance to it. It was funny to see how the mix on the dancefloor shifted depending on the music. And the people had style. It was great.

starry-eyed hope again, sort of.

This week I've been attending a PTSD clinical training at the National Center for PTSD. Part of the training is to sit in on sessions of the residential men's PTSD program they run for combat veterans. Yesterday morning we (rather uncomfortably) sat on the other side of a two-way mirror (or is it one-way mirror?) and watched a group session where veterans did life history reviews, and one of them talked about some childhood traumatic experiences. It was difficult to face some of the stories, to hear what one human being can do to another one. I still don't know how to fit it all together. But when we got out of the session, I walked outside, and there were these brilliant little yellow flowers. The sun was shining, the grass was green...I didn't know what to do with it all. Somehow it fits together without fitting together--beauty, joy, tragedy, horror....I don't know, I feel like I'm babbling. That's what it was like anyway.

tears / another good book

So this morning I was driving down to Newark from home in Oakland, and I've started listening to the classical music station sometimes. It puts me in a zone and stops me from getting annoyed at Greg & Fernando on 92.7. They played the theme from the soundtrack of Big Country (which is apparently a Western filmed int eh 1950s). And I just started crying. There was something about the optimism and open space expressed in the music. It was a little crazy, but I needed it.
For the past couple days, I've been heavy with the weight of what it means to be at war, to be part of yet another generation that will bear responsibility for being home to returning veterans--young men and women scarred by experiences I can't really comprehend. Not to mention we still bear the responsibility for being home (or failing to be home) for so many Vietnam veterans.
There was something about that music that touched me heart and reminded me of the hope I see around me. I don't get hope from heaven or God or the idea that goodness will win out in the end. What gives me hope is that people survive. Impossibly, people survive incomprehensible experiences, and some even heal. Maybe that's what Christianity is trying to say with the whole Jesus and resurrection thing, but I can tell you that if you come down to the VA, you'll meet something far more powerful than that.

PS -- Among the string of good books I've read, I'm just starting Jonathan Shay's "Achilles in Vietnam." He's a psychologist who works with Vietnam-era veterans suffering from severe combat trauma. In this book, he writes about how Homer's Iliad, the story of Achilles at war, reflects the reality of war combat trauma long before psychology was even a field. He extensively quotes veterans in their own words and then shows how this mythology reflects a truth that is beyond a reflection of mere events. Hot damn, that's what mythology ought to be about, if it's about anything.

a new book

Here's the next life-changing book for me: At Hell's Gate by Claude Anshin Thomas. Mary Ann Finch, my supervisor at Care Through Touch Institute (www.carethroughtouch.org) recommended it. It's the autobiography of a Vietnam veteran who becomes a Buddhist monk. He is honest about what he did in Vietnam and how it haunts him, and he speaks accessibly in his analysis of how and why he came to do it--drawing conclusions about the broader world, reflecting truths he found in Buddhist Scriptures. In doing so, he helps me figure out my own shit, growing my awareness about when and where it happens that I want to hurt others. And he encourages me not to fight it, but to consider it. In considering, I end up having a choice in how I act. Which is pretty damn difficult, but cool when it happens. Reminds me of a conversation I had with EJoye, about learning habits without realizing it--and how sometimes an act of difference, breaking that habit, can snap us into awareness about our own behaviors. It's kind of cool.

yes i am a dork

Today I attended a seminar on cognitive science and religion, with a focus on trauma. It was pretty amazing. The first speaker was a philosopher who got in on the interdisciplinary cognitive science ground floor in the 80s, working with a neuroscientist. As a philosopher, she decided that in order to do her job, she had to tell scientists they were looking for the wrong thing when it came to trying to figure out how we become aware of our world. Instead of the 50 year old hypothesis that the world comes to us in pieces that our brain puts together (which had yet to be proven), she proposed (after 3 years of sitting at home thinking and writing and conversing with a neuroscientist) that the world is a seamless web that our senses break down into parts and our brain tries to reassemble. The theory never caught on (it's hard to tell scientists that they've spent their whole career and a flawed hypothesis), but she succeeded in meeting the Dalai Lama, who told her to study Buddhism. After being a Tibetan Buddhist nun for about 15 or so years, studying the Buddhist concept of emptiness (ca. 500 BCE), she is still promoting her theory and suggesting that meditation techniques allow a person to step back from the constructions of the mind in order to experience that seamless web that our senses lie about. She was followed by a professor who talked about how forgiveness creates neurological changes in the brain, creating habits beyond the fight-or-flight responses to trauma and injury. Then some interesting panel discussions about how sometimes childhood trauma can alter brain chemistry and neurobiology--short-circuiting a person's ability to reflect, stabilize identity, and creating "brain noise." There was a brief discussion about "re-tuning" neural pathways that formerly triggered trauma responses (what I would call PTSD, I think).
What also happened is that there was an audience member who seemed to be upset and little points about the trauma presenter's talk. While I don't know who he was, it seemed that he was a trauma survivor who felt that his trauma wasn't recognized or described in what the speaker said. For me, it brought in the reality that trauma is not abstract, it's not something that "we" (the members of the seminar) treat, but that trauma is something that happens to all of us. This was the background of the nun's talk, as well, though it wasn't explicit. This is a Buddhist concept of interbeing, and she also mentioned that she is a trauma survivor.
The whole thing was rather exciting for me, given the intersections of religion and science, self and reality. It also helped that I'm finishing Proust was a Neuroscientist and reading about Virginia Woolf's understanding of the self as an ephemeral mix of disparate perceptions, memories, thoughts, etc--as shown in her stream-of-consciousness writing style.