A Therapist’s Journey to Healing Unresolved Trauma

These images stay in my mind, 25 years after Dean died. A sweaty forehead, blue lips, the smell of tea tree oil, the sound of Enya playing, unlaced sneakers on still feet. They are images in a picture book with no words. They tell a story that jumps from moment to moment, hard to pin down any particular one, their order random, not chronological. They are burned into memory and when they bubble up; time has no relevance. Often eliciting the caliber of feeling from something that might have happened 5 minutes ago, not decades ago.

I’m receiving these images as I sit in the passenger seat of my husband Andre’s car after our friend’s fiftieth birthday celebration, and I share some memories Andre has never heard. Late snowfall on a spring day viewed from a dorm room window. The detective sitting across from me in a hospital janitor closet I was brought into for questioning. The hospital staff descending like ants in that clipped pace of a life-or-death emergency. I tell Andre about the fog I lived in for months after my friend died, about the social wildfire that caused me to shrink into myself, exacerbated by major media outlets covering his death.

As I share these thoughts, our children asleep just inside, my husband listens. I can hear Andre’s steady breathing, patient and loving. As I talk about this wild time, my body starts to shrink, my chin drops. I realize I am turning my body away from him, hiding almost, shrinking again, as I share an old deep seeded feeling of guilt and responsibility I carried in the death of my friend.

Dean was my neighbor. He was charming in an unassuming way, intelligent, and a bit shy. I had known him the (nearly) four years we attended our small liberal arts college. He lived with a group of fun, very smart, wild boys. Sometimes I’d be let into a back room where maybe they’d be doing drugs, and—even though I didn’t typically partake—I had a high tolerance for witnessing this kind of behavior. The morning of his death I had no idea what had occurred or been consumed in the hours before I entered the room. Yet when I did, I knew that something was very much not right. This non-judgmental stance taking the form of complacency was at the heart of my guilt.

“I never knew you felt this way, do you still?” Andre asks.

“Logically no, but some small part of me still does.”

In my clinical consultation groups, we therapists often talk about the phenomena of patients, after several years into treatment, sharing an impossibly horrific story. Some clinicians can’t imagine how they have not told us this major thing that explains so much of this person that we know so well. Even now, there are details of that day I keep to myself. In part to protect the profound intimacy of someone else’s death. Also, the details, challenging to pin down, are hard to say out loud or imagine someone reading them.

I understand why sometimes a patient fails to tell me about something awful that has happened to them until years into treatment. For many, these moments that scar us, change us, change the story of our lives, they are stored away in some deep recess of our being. We learn to compartmentalize the moment, pack it up and put it away, rendering it invisible to others. I think it took me years to tell my parents the full story. And then many more to share it again with a therapist. Even still the stark images mostly remain locked away. And yet this singular moment in time marks me.

My older brother was the first person I called when I returned from the hospital to my cinder-block-walled dorm room with a twin bed and Gap scented candle. I spoke to him after the DOA, the isolated interrogation, the delivery of another boy on death’s door to the ER. He may remember more from this time than I do. Months later it was that same brother who counseled me when I was upset, late at night after the rehearsal dinner of our cousin’s wedding. “Not everyone will be able to understand what you have been through, Annie. Not everyone will see it.”

It was so odd to imagine that this brutal moment in my life might go invisible to others, for it had irrevocably changed me. Yet I somehow understood: This was how it goes. And it allowed me to let go, in a way. It was a relief to know that some things happen to us that others may never understand—and that is ok.

We ourselves may never fully understand the devastating things that happen. Many never understand how these moments affect them except that they haunt them. That is, until we find ourselves, somewhere down the line, sitting across from someone we love or someone we have come to for help and share the story. We brave the telling of it not so as to relive it, but rather to better understand how that time has affected us, shaped us, and influenced our decisions.

Losing my friend in such a shocking way, bearing witness to his death from an overdose of drugs, and feeling responsible for his death for so long—the totality of it all wove invisible threads in my life. As I look back now, with my wisdom of hindsight and through the lens of the seasoned psychotherapist that I am, I trace the threads. I see in the years that followed, it oddly led me down a path dating lost souls, a string of man-children who needed healing or saving. I thought my unrelenting love would save the day. You can imagine how well that went for me.

When I turned thirty, I changed careers, ready to leave the theater and film worlds behind to have a new adventure. It was a decade after my friend’s death, but I see its silent push in the decision I made to become a therapist. I wanted to help people. I felt like I failed someone so miserably in that time in my life, and that—just maybe—with skill and learned understanding, I could make a real difference. And I have.

I now see it affecting certain moments in mothering my three children. It whispers to me, spurs on my desire to shield my children from their pain. I am moved by an invisible ripple to make sure that they feel safe enough that they won’t ever turn away from me to drugs. This comes up despite my well knowing that addiction so often has nothing to do with parenting and more to do with timing, exposure, genetics, circumstance, sensitivity, influence, and trauma, all wrapped up into a messy ball of yarn (or sticky web might be the more apt metaphor). I don’t want my children to feel alone even though I know that everyone, even the most loved of us, feels alone sometimes. I understand that I must allow them to experience these feelings and find their way through them with me there—just down the hall in the kitchen sautéing vegetables—waiting to, as we say in therapy talk, hold space for whatever they need to express.

A big part of my life is spent listening and exploring the ways people carry their invisible wounds of trauma. How the fractured images of a time continue to play out in their mind, in a weird time warp dream state. (They can find themselves dissociated, parked in the driveway twenty-five years later, lost somewhere between the past and present in both body and mind). We explore how in some ways, they are tethered in time to that moment.

I work with dreams in my private practice. And these memories, like dreams, shift and change, there is often no order or logic. Our dreams help us process our experiences. Recurring nightmares of traumatic events are common in PTSD and for anyone living through misfortune. These recurring dreams are correlated with repeated, replicated neural activity night after night. They are not random. Conversely, studies by John D. Gabrieli and Marie Therse Banich showed a correlation of the activation of specific parts of the brain when memories are repressed. When a memory is unwanted the hippocampus and amygdala (parts of the brain that help us process emotion and form memory) are deactivated while the prefrontal cortex (part of the brain that is used in rational thought, executive function and operating with intention) is activated.

And therein lies the dance of wanting to forget and needing to work through our trauma. Our connection to our wounds, and the need to process them, is both conscious and unconscious.

We are trying to understand what has happened. And often we get lost in the question of why this happened.

For the most part, I have learned to relieve myself of the responsibility of my friend’s death. I was just a 20-year-old young woman who stepped into a room where decisions and chemicals collided in a way that was well beyond my awareness, and certainly my control. I have since come to witness many people engaging in self-flagellating for the traumatic events in their life. If only I had…, we all say. I believe we take on responsibility for the horrible accidents that happen in our life in part to imagine that in some alternate universe, or in the future, we can prevent bad things from happening to us again.

In contained ways, we can honor those traumatic moments to better understand how they impacted us. I have mostly led a fortunate life; my foundation was and is a solid one of love and support. I’ve also experienced a handful of rotten, awful things in my life. Witnessing my friend die was one of them. Over time I saw the ways in which I had soldered shut the wound of that event in the best way I could. And as I got older, I had to learn to dissolve the crude ways I had bandaged myself so that I could face the weight I was holding and set it down, for it is not mine to hold. Then I could tend to the wound in a more graceful, wiser way.

But this takes time, patience, and curiosity. While in it, in my twenties, I did not understand why I went from wounded boyfriend to wounded boyfriend. I couldn’t see the threads from my traumatic loss until they were pulled taut by perspective, woven through a larger tapestry for me to reflect upon later in life while in the arms, or passenger seat of the car, belonging to a safe and loving partner.

What happened to you? What are you carrying? I truly believe in our resilience. We can process our experiences, metabolize them, and find peace in our lives over and over again. I also know it to be true that our memories, like dreams, resurface at different points in our life. As we develop and change so does our relationship to our past. I no longer carry shame or fear around that awful day. Now what remains is tremendous compassion for the group of young people, myself included, whose lives were changed or ended by a terrible accident.

Our gift and our saving is to keep open, curious, and tender-hearted to both ourselves and others. For we all have invisible wounds, and we must hold one another in grace.