Trauma-informed

A door is slammed and in a split-second Daniel, the foreign correspondent is belly-down on the concrete. His body is smart, it knows the drill. He knows how to fall. His wife is not so lucky – alas, she never had to practice this. Her knees are bruised. She is nursing her arm, which he yanked in his instinctive effort to save her. It’s just that there was nothing to save her from. It was just a car, and it’s already far gone. This is the moment she asks him to go see a psychiatrist. He might have PTSD. He knows, of course he does. Only he knows how many times he had needed to tame this animal reflex inside, to act fast enough, faster than his own body, faster than the thing inside himself that sounds the alarm at every noise. If he is fast enough, if he keeps his wits about him, he gets to blend in. He might even fool you that he is fine, far away from the front line, in this peaceful city that has not seen bombardment for decades. He should be fine, why not? Readers love him, he has a roof over his head, liquor in his veins, no mortal danger. But the odd thing is, without mortal danger he somehow loses his own life, his death. Instead of life, all he has is rage, instead of death – numbness. If you ask him how he is he sees blood. Yours, his own, someone else’s, it doesn’t matter much. He muzzles his rage and tries to act polite, but you see his eyes; they betray him. Away from the front, away from his reporting he is like a tiger behind bars. His wife is right, he knows.

All he has seen is catching up with him. What for has he witnessed it all? When he sleeps and lets his guard down, and his memories come for him. Gunshots, soldiers turning pale as they hurry to apply a tourniquet, bombed-out mothers adjust their hair as he takes their portrait. He might have forgotten their names, but he cannot let them go. They come for him with their demands. Fair game. After all they allowed him to witness them in moments, when they deserved help and intervention, not pity. They mostly did so in the hope their stories would matter. So now they come in his sleep to devour his present, eat themselves into his future, asking him what happened to those stories.

To tell the truth, he doesn’t want these ghosts to fade. He does not want to be better. As long as he can clutch on his nightmares, he can trust that he’s not forgotten his dead and what he owes them. As long as he has his rage, it will point the way and keep his focus.

He can’t possibly tell his wife, but he suspects that healing would just rob him of this. Because for him to get better, for his body to believe there is no drone to dodge, no gliding bomb, he would need to close some chapters. He would need to get out of the eternal present of war. But if he does move on, who will yell at the living?

PTSD is like time had a concussion, and now it’s all vertigo and shiny contours. Retching but there is nothing to throw up just shame. He knows it’s stupid, he knows he is just a scribe and his words won’t stop anything. But secretly he fears he might just be a peddler of disasters and sob stories, a pathetic salesman trading in false promises.

He hangs in there, feeding his sanity to rage, mortal fear, shame. These are his only allies, the only arsenal he has to bully himself into staying in this war. His shame is like his fear: fast, vicious, involuntary. Before he blinks, he’s on the ground, surrendering to both. His stupid body, his beaten mind: an acceptable price to pay.

I think that in our line of work, once you stop being an outsider, whatever you do you become a shame-eater. A rage-eater. That’s the fuel you run on.

I know this well. For years, whenever I attended a yoga class, I struggled with intrusive thoughts. When the teacher said we should leave all negative thoughts behind, as we arrive on the mat, my body forced the same scene on me. I saw a video my friend sent me in the first days of the full-scale war. In it, someone is filming a Russian tank chasing a car. The whole family is inside; you see four crowns of heads. The tank accelerates and simply drives over them, everything and everyone crushed like a snail’s shell under a boot. Her legs give out, we hear screams, the phone catches the ceiling, we hear her sob, end of recording.

I went to yoga a lot, so I must have seen this mental script hundreds of times. But I am not here to tell sob stories either.

Doctors call the shame-eating vicarious trauma. Our memories, these hungry ghosts feed on our compassion; in exchange, they inject us with that shame and the rage. How much can you see without acting? How long can you fool yourself that your words do something? How long can you keep your poker face presenting your findings in countries far away from the war, as you feign impartiality? And who the fuck believes in words anyway?

Trauma is vicarious when it’s not really yours. Just exposure. You insert yourself to where it really is, and while recording it, you absorb a healthy dose.

The respectable organisations that strive to understand or improve the world, who deploy us to work in war zones do worry a little about this. Rage and shame are rather impolite; they might impair our work. Even if they don’t, our productivity might suffer. But mostly, they worry about the court cases. Institutional reputation, liability.

So even before you get your dose, all you are made to talk about is trauma. Our institutions don’t speak ghost. For them, trauma as a distinct object, a clearly visible, avoidable landmark. Everything revolves around trauma. Did we witness it, cause it, trigger it? During interviews, did we clearly remind participants that they have the right not to answer our questions? That they might want to seek counselling. Oh, and by the way, did we manage to avoid trauma ourselves?

We claim we are ready. We write pages and pages of scenarios for all this. We are trained. Our work is trauma-informed. We know how to spot, foresee, and manage distress.

But do you know who you will be when a drone flies over you? You duck down and seek shelter, running as it hovers over you. You know you shouldn’t look, but you can’t stop yourself. When you glance up, you realise it’s no machine, it’s a predator. Its camera-eyes stare right at you, and as you look back you are prey. You are video game material for an unknown Russian soldier. Reduced to a target. And now you know who you are when you are shit scared. I mean – you might not know it immediately. I remember my false calm. The barista who didn’t stop making latte art as we stormed into his café, the giggles we let out. Nausea comes later. Sometimes days later.

But it’s not this stuff that pushes you over. The insect noise of drones, the thunderclap of bombs falling on the neighbouring district, the calming thuds of the Ukrainian air defence working overnight. That’s what wires your body to be alert. But they don’t occupy your mind.

What I remember is the mother I saw during a blackout in Kyiv, who held up her mobile phone’s torchlight for her son to build a snowman. I remember Vanya who built a cultural centre in a town in the Donbas, now all occupied. His manic grin the only thing that stops him from crying: my whole life’s work is gone. Hannusya listening to frightened whispers of her fellow servicemen in the hospital: women will never look at them without a leg. Olena recalling her pregnancy in an occupied village with a smirk. At least she had no risk of gestational diabetes, she winks.

Small shards of stories. Nothing special, just stuff of life. The first time they feel big, when they become weird is when they cross borders. Abroad, they get heavy with significance. They make audiences uncomfortable. The border is like a wall: you will not laugh with them here, on the other side.

Your awkward silence will make it much worse for them. They were just trying to tell a story. So they go quiet, to make it easier for everyone. Me too, I will avoid talking to anyone. What with all the solemn silence?

Shame and rage don’t mature well. There is only so much you can take, at least upfront. When they have drained you, you are left calm, indifferent. Your hungry ghosts still loiter around, but now they feed on quiet despair. Cynicism. You conserve your energy. You convince them the world is fucked-up, hopeless. No point of haunting you, no point of you haunting anyone else. Away from the war, there’s less and less to talk about. In Ukraine too, silence sets in. But the jokes that remain are better.

If I were to chat with the esteemed colleagues who run the ethics committees, I could happily reassure them, I am finally ready. My work, I am pleased to confirm, can be confidently called trauma informed.