Bang Bang

It feels like I am chasing my own tail. There is so much that needs to be done but what I really need is to sit back and relax a little. Last week I needed to clear the closet in the attic where the central heating is stationed because a guy came in for the annual maintenance (for the heater). I store many things in that closet like camping stuff, suitcases and the cradle and pram which belonged to my babies. Before he was finished he called me up there and said apologetically that he had broken the glass of a painting which stood near the wall in the closet. My own fault, I had not seen it when clearing the place. It was the first painting my first love and I had bought a long time ago. A beautiful painting of a sunset colored sea.  It did not suit my living room walls because of the color of the passe-partout but I still feel rather attached to it. I carefully carried the picture frame with the shattered glass down the two stairs. Some pieces were too big to put in the carton box I had found and I shattered them further in the backyard, using a big old towel and a hammer after the guy had left. The frame was not useable anymore and I removed the picture from it. Without the passe-partout it suited my walls wonderful and I decided to re-frame it someday when money is not so tight, with another frame, a silver colored one.

The closet needed some cleaning and vacuuming before I could put all the stuff back but I left that until yesterday. There were so much other things that needed to be done and frankly I could not see the point of cleaning there when the chances are so high that I have to move houses soon. I plucked up the courage to do it yesterday though. The cleaning was not so hard to do. However, when I picked up the cradle a dreadful flash of pain shot through my lower back. Damn, that hurt. I managed to return slowly upright and put all the stuff back and even did some more chores that day. In the evening I could barely make it on or off a chair anymore, frozen halfway descending by the pain. And when I really had to stand up it took me a couple of minutes to walk slightly bended forward. It reminds me of the few other times I had my back hurt. The first time was when I fell off a galloping horse. An even more dreadful experience was after I fell backwards in a stairwell, with my three months old first born in my arms, especially when I recovered from being unconscious for a short while to find my baby was taken away. It turned out that a helpful lady who was passing by took him to the address where I was originally going to, and asked for help. After being collected by my husband we went to the hospital to have the baby’s head examined with x-ray, that was my main concern. He was okay, thankfully, and the following week I climbed and descended the stairs in our house sitting on my bum.  

For a long time I could not recall the event of falling backwards without  feeling as if there still was a huge well behind my back, and my body reached automatically forward, like to prevent me from falling again. Last week, before I hurt my back this time, I was clearing my email inbox. An email from two months ago was about various podcasts about trauma therapy. One of the renowned specialists in the trauma field is Babette Rothschild and I own a book from her:  The Body Remembers, about the psychophysiology of trauma and trauma treatment.  I decided to re-read that book.

The book explains how the body responses to threat through the limbic system in the brain and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) with fight, flight or freeze. Once the traumatic incident is over and the fight or flight has been successful, the natural hormone cortisol will halt the alarm reaction and helping the body to restore to homeostasis. Sometimes this goes wrong and the adrenal glands do not release enough cortisol to halt the alarm reaction. On a chemical level the continued alarm reaction typical of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is due to a deficiency of cortisol production. Throughout the book a story is woven of a boy who was chased and bitten by a dog when he was riding his bicycle. This boy functions normal when he grows up except that he keeps avoiding dogs. This is where PTSD is distinguished from Posttraumatic stress (PTS), traumatic stress that persists following (post) a traumatic incident. It is only when posttraumatic stress accumulates to the degree that it produces the symptoms outlined in DSM-IV that the term posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be applied. PTSD implies a high level of daily dysfunction. The chronically aroused ANS causes the traumatic event to continually float into the present perception, as if it were occurring now, rather than occupying its locus in one’s past. That is where carefully carried out trauma treatment come into hand. I have experienced that myself a couple of years ago for overcoming the feeling of being pulled backwards when I recalled the falling event. Now I can talk or think about it without the bodily reaction I have had before.

Yet, I don’t know if and what my body is telling me know, as I crawl from my chair to my kitchen. Maybe just that I am forced to sit back for a while and stop chasing my own tail.