My father lives on a small farm in Northern Minnesota where he grows tomatoes and experiments with varieties of seeds from his travels. He raised chickens until last month when an aerie of eagles took every last one. I visited him last week for the first time in two years. “Bring some old clothes,” he told me. “We’ll be out in the fields.”
When I was a kid, when my parents were still together, my Dad would come home from work, lace up his army boots and head out to his garden. He was out there long after dark, heaving his weight onto the shoulder of a shovel and turning over endless rows of earth. To me, the garden was onerous. To him, it was a place where he could escape his ghosts.
PTSD wasn’t introduced into the medical lexicon until 1980 but it was present in our house for as long as I can remember. My father’s flashbacks were so vivid that he would not know if he was in Vietnam under mortar fire or at home with his family. He never told me or my siblings any of this, but I felt it. I remember a persistent uneasy feeling in my body. Like my father hiding in his garden, I found my own ways to escape the discomfort, mostly through books.
“When it’s painful to be ourselves, we often seek relief by withdrawing, numbing out or, by reaching for something that will make us feel alive, complete, or whole,” says Dr. Gabor Maté. Maté is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician, author and subject of the recent film The Wisdom of Trauma. “We can be addicted to anything. It could be drugs, alcohol, sex, the internet, shopping,” he writes. For him, it was shopping for classical CDs. After working with addicts on the streets of Vancouver for 12 years, he believes that all addiction stems from trauma. By his definition, addiction is “any behavior that we crave and which provides temporary relief or pleasure but results in negative consequences or suffering,” Trauma isn’t relegated to combat experiences like my father’s. Trauma, which is Greek for wound, stems from the stresses of our fractured society, income insecurity, political turmoil, and climate change. These past two years have contributed to what he sees as a global epidemic of trauma which shows up in a host of ways: depression, anxiety, autoimmune disorders, violence, ADHD, addiction and suicide. “Trauma isn’t what happens to you,” Mate says. “It is what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. It is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.” Trauma is passed from parent to child. When adults are stressed, they are unable to provide the secure attachment that children need to develop. Like so many of us, I was born into trauma.
I believe pleasure has the ability to heal our trauma. But there is a fine line between pleasure and addiction. “Addiction is any behavior that we crave and which provides temporary relief or pleasure but results in negative consequences or suffering,” Mate says. Addiction is “a forlorn attempt to solve the problem of human pain.” Pleasure, on the other hand, doesn’t erase the pain, it embraces it and metabolizes it into a sense of connection to oneself, to others and to the planet. Pleasure isn’t a behavior, it more like a posture, a way of approaching the world, one that requires attention and practice. Pleasure demands gratitude and, in turn, it gives us a feeling of wholeness, a sense that everything is perfectly imperfect.
When I was in high school, the garden was no longer enough to contain my father’s pain. Afraid that he would hurt someone he loved, he checked himself into the VA Hospital. Among other veterans, he was able to talk openly about the secrets he had been guarding. He worked with different medications and modalities until he found a balance that worked for him. A few years later, he remarried and he and his wife bought 40 acres of land where he could farm and raise animals. “There is a wisdom in trauma,” Maté says, “when we realize that our traumatic responses are not ourselves. And we can work them through, and thus, become ourselves.”
I had never seen my father’s farm at harvest time. The summer’s drought had forced an early turn of the leaves, but the fields were still chlorophyll green. After breakfast, my father put on his flannel shirt and pulled a pair of old boots out of the closet. The canvas was faded by still distinctly army green. Five decades of wear and the leather still held its shape.
“Are those the boots you wore in Vietnam?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “They’re built to last. And look at this,” he said. He reached inside and pulled out a nylon mesh liner. “This is original, too. It’ll prevent a metal spike from penetrating your foot.”
The boots were a perfect metaphor for my father. The Vietnam War isn’t some distant memory for him. It is with him when he tills the soil, plants seeds and coaxes the shoots from the ground. I asked him if he would change anything about his life. “There’s no going back,” he said as we cut ripe tomatoes off their vines. “We can only change the future.” He pointed to a bean that was nearly two feet long, a variety he found in Cambodia. “I get an unbelievable amount of pleasure out here,” he said. “There is always a chance to create something new.” At 83 years old, he still has night terrors but he speaks freely about them and he gets help when they persist. He still needs to be called in for dinner sometimes but he’s got a lot of other pleasures he wants to pursue. He’s an avid fisherman and he and his wife love to travel and ballroom dance. I definitely inherited some of his trauma and I’m learning to be grateful for the wisdom that accompanies it.
FROM THE INSTITUTE OF PLEASURE STUDIES
Imagine a trauma-informed world. Might the teachers act differently in your schools? How about the doctors seeking to help you heal? The judges responsible for deciding sentences? The policy makers who define our collective structures and the leaders we appoint to represent our voice? These are the questions the filmmaking team behind The Wisdom of Trauma are asking. It’s a beautiful film. I hope you get to see it while it’s streaming now or next round. The Wisdom of Trauma is online now until October 10th and will be available again at a later date.
Dr. Gabor Mate has written several books including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power is Dr. Mate’s TED Talk that makes a connection between addiction at a personal level and the way we treat our planet. This is a really good one.
Another great read! As an aside, I think in the fourth paragraph the term for addiction is misattributed to trauma. It’s correct later in the piece but had my eyebrows raised when first cited.
I have been reflecting on trauma a lot the past 4 years done I discovered and met my paternal birth family, including birth father. I have struggled a lot over the years with adoption and this discovery and consequential learnings around trauma helped me better understand myself and the feelings I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Turns out there is quite a bit out there now about trauma that can occur in vitro and after birth that can result in PTSD or similar symptoms much later in life.
I also enjoyed reading and learning more about your father. I was oblivious to so many important aspects in my friend’s lives back then and am glad you were able to share that story years later.
Your posts always give me much to reflect on and think about. Thanks, Sue.
Beautifully written and with clarity too Sue!
The photo of the boots drew me in. Such an important topic for this time! Thx
Remembering the field of war but in a new
Garden/ life right niw