Gnarled Tree: PTSD and the Ancient Wisdom of Wilderness

Gnarled Tree: PTSD and the Ancient Wisdom of Wilderness

by William Katzhaus

Copyright © 2016 William Katzhaus

All rights reserved

Cover and photographs, copyright © 2006 - 2015 William Katzhaus

The tree may prefer calm

but the wind will not subside

–Chinese proverb

Contents

1. Doleful Chambers

2. Following My Own Tracks

3. Passage Toward Light

4. Coyote the Trickster

5. The Ancient Wisdom of Wilderness

6. Gnarled Tree

Bibliography

Preface

Few places in this world are more dangerous than home.

–John Muir The Mountains of California

With scraps of cord and duct tape holding one boot together, a week's supply of gear on my back, and a big smile on my face, I felt the wilderness begin to heal my wounds. I reflected on the profound lessons of earlier that morning as I hiked into an alpine meadow surrounded by rock outcroppings that formed an amphitheater of sorts. Suddenly I thought, why not write a book about how wilderness heals? The idea was still rattling around my head 15 years later. I scratched out a few outlines during those years, but promptly forgot them. Too many excuses not to write it: the material is too personal, I was not ready to share, how would I find time, and who would publish it?

During a vision trek in late September 2013, in another remote wilderness, all those questions were answered. Alone in a dense grove of pines and quaking aspens near a cold lake, with tiny snowflakes falling fast and the temperature falling faster, I felt loved, the kind of love that gives one a purpose in life. At that moment, a purpose, a clear reason for being was exactly what I needed. Writing this book is my survivor mission.

What I survived was a crime committed against me at about six years of age. Mere words are insufficient to convey how it affected me. Today they call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). They will probably call it something else in the future. If asked, I would suggest Eternal Trauma Disorder because neither post nor stress accurately describes how it feels. In many ways, the trauma never ends.

This book is about a journey that began with that crime, took many painful twists and turns, skirted the Great Null a few times, and now continues here. It is about darkness, light, fear, and hope. Mountains, deserts, forests, and hearts are the places where I do my healing and always have been. Memories from my early life center around my trips alone out back to the very edge of our little farm, the farthest place a six year old could get from the twisted soul that committed the crime. Solo backpacking trips and vision treks later in life led to the pages that follow.

My purposes are:

To use the lessons I have learned to help just one other person to find inspiration and healing. If it turns out to benefit more than one, all the better.

To submit my innermost thoughts for analysis by mental health professionals and fellow sufferers. If being a lab specimen indirectly benefits others by furthering understanding, then I will have succeeded in two ways.

To answer some burning questions: why did this happen to me, why does it happen to so many, has it always been and must it always remain like this?

To derive powerful lessons for healing through intense encounters with wilderness.

My story will not really that special. Sadly it is all too common. There are millions of other stories far more traumatic and far more inspiring than mine. But as one member of a group therapy session once told me, it's not a contest. If it were, we would all lose. Moreover, ever since I was about seven, I have been writing. Were it not for the aggravation the craft of writing brings, I would be tempted to say that I love it. People tell me I write well, and I have given up trying to correct them. So to the extent that I have any ability at all for writing, I will use it to benefit my fellow sufferers.

Writing this book in my spare time over the past 21 months was an emotional rollercoaster. If a word existed to express feeling anguish and freedom simultaneously, I would use it here. It is a song of sorts, with an uplifting melody but sad lyrics. The very act of speaking my truth heals.

But it would not have happened had it not been for my psychologist, Jocelyn. As I arrived for my first therapy session after returning from that September 2013 vision trek, where I had spent three days fasting at about 10,000 feet up on a mountain, I told her of my plans to finally write this book. She was completely supportive from the outset. Examining the details of one's traumatic life is not easy. There is a great deal of hurt to work through and writing it was part of the therapy. Reviewing my entire life with fresh, healing eyes and talking about it in therapy made something glow inside. Jocelyn offered everything from compassion to review feedback, but most importantly, wisdom.

Words fail in expressing thanks to my close friends for their encouragement, love, and review feedback, and to the numerous supporters and fellow sufferers from the MyPTSD forum.

William Katzhaus is a pseudonym, as are names of friends, enemies, and mental health professionals. That is to protect the privacy and security of people I care about.

Reading certain passages will be disturbing and may trigger dissociative reactions in those of us that suffer from PTSD and related disorders. Such passages begin with Trigger Warning:, appear in italics, and end with Safe to read.. The first of these is by far the worst, though what triggers one person may be nothing to another. Hopefully I have identified all of them, but I apologize in advance if not.

1. Doleful Chambers

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god

Wandering, wandering in hopeless night

Out here in the perimeter there are no stars...

Out here we is stoned –immaculate

–Jim Morrison (poem fragment, later used in The Wasp by the Doors)

Answering Keyrn's knock on my door let the darkness in. It took 30 years for me to realize that it also offered a passage out of Hell. My college roommates and neighbors, including my just-recently-ex-girlfriend Keryn had planned a trip into the desert to relax before final exams. I was not feeling very social, and so decided to stay home. When I opened the door, Keryn stood there with angry tears in her eyes, holding a teddy bear I had given her, twirling it by one ear as if it meant nothing to her. It was her way of trying to tell me that I meant nothing to her. Teddy had been her pet name for me.

She began to rake me over the coals at first for my antisocial decision to not join in the desert trip. But it soon became clear that it was my lack of feeling in general that was the real issue. In fact, breaking up with her had not bothered me at all, and my numbness showed.

That day, I could not see what is obvious now. Whenever someone speaks to me in a reprimanding tone, I start to freeze up, cower down, and try to disappear. That day there was no way out. Freezing and cowering brought no relief from her wrath, and soon her words overwhelmed my defenses. The world closed, my vision tunneled, and suddenly I was no longer in my apartment. I had been transported back 15 years through time beyond the perimeter, to age six in the loft of a barn.

One at Midnight

Well now there's two, there's two trains runnin'

Well they ain't never, no, going my way

Well now one run at midnight and the other one

Runnin' just before day

–Muddy Waters Still a Fool

It was a piss-poor excuse of a barn, not the red, picturesque kind you see on calendars. If you were to see it for yourself, you might fumble around for the right term. It was more of a white trash, unpainted lean-to with one side open for vehicle access. It had a loft for hay at one end, which is the only reason anyone would dare call it a barn.

This barn sat along a two-lane country road from the small farm where my family lived. The road had a yellow dashed line down the middle and on both sides its edges crumbled into gravel, then weeds, then ditches. It was a few miles outside Merde Vista, a town of maybe a thousand lost souls. We lived a short distance down the blacktop from the family that owned the barn. Our farm had more than a dozen acres and a couple of piss-poor buildings much like their barn. All told, it was barely enough for the seven cows and horse my parents bought. My dad made a living as a tradesman so the animals were just supplemental. We were short of money. I had only one pair of pants and one pair of shoes at the time. Most of what my dad earned went to pay the mortgage. But we were not poor. We always had a roof over our heads and food on our table.

Buying this farm was a lifestyle choice my parents made. They had both grown up on farms and my guess is that this made their hearts warmer. Little is known about the family down the road, who lived in a smaller, darker house on a farm of similar size. They may have made a living from their land. If they did, it was not much of a living. They seemed worse off than we were, though not as bad off as another family that lived in a tarpaper shack.

When you live in out in the sticks, your playmates are few in number and range in age from five to 15 or so. There is very little choice of who your playmates will be. For the twisted young man across the road, that was an ideal arrangement.

I have very little memory of our relationship with the neighbors. We passed the time with the kids from around the three or four other houses in the area, including the five or six or twelve kids in Chester's family. There are even fewer memories of Chester who was about 14 at the time. I remember being at his place on a couple of occasions and playing in that barn at least once before the crime took place.

My description of the primary trauma, being sexually abused, is based on memories that range from vivid to vague. Some gaps can be filled with logical deductions of what must have happened given other events, and some extrapolations about what probably happened based on triggers that have affected me throughout my life.

I must have been over there to play with one or more of those kids one day. Somehow, Chester managed to isolate me from other kids and any adults that might have been around.

Trigger Warning: Chester either tricked or compelled me to help him look for something in the loft of that barn. I remember ascending the ladder leading up to the loft. He must have also tricked or compelled me to take down my pants, bend over a hay bale, let him get behind me, and anally rape me. Chester must have explained this away as some form of searching technique. There are vague memories of the hay irritating my elbows and stomach.

I have a vague memory of the event being interrupted. I believe we both looked behind to see the small silhouette of another kid's head poking over the floor of the loft. Chester shouted something to the effect of get the hell out of here toward the head. It must have been Chester's youngest sister, a year or two younger than me.

When Chester finished, he removed himself from me and then reached his left hand around me so that I could see the semen on his finger. He twisted it slowly in front of my face. He must have wanted me to fully appreciate its color and texture, and how it began to drip toward the floor. While still breathing heavily, he said: see, this is what I was looking for right here.

I have faint memories of coming down the ladder and going home. Chester remained in the barn. Coming back into our house, I was unable look at anyone. I felt had to keep a secret. All the things I have felt for the past decades happened right then. My oldest brother looked at me and perhaps sensed something was different. There is a foggy memory of pulling down my underwear in front of my mother and showing her the bloodstain. There must have been some kind of interaction before that but there is no memory. Was I crying? Perhaps I told her about being hurt. Decades later, I wrote in my journal about a memory of a shovel handle. Perhaps my six-year-old self thought that his penis was a shovel handle. Safe to Read.

Another One Just Before Day

Nobody came. Not even an echo spoke back to reassure him.

–George R. Stewart Earth Abides

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

–Antoine de Saint Exupéry The Little Prince

My mother shut down on seeing this and did not want to know more. Her normal pattern would have been to ask, exclaim, and wonder aloud, but that normal pattern is loudly absent. Somehow I knew that writing this down might bring out more memories, those that hang just slightly over the edge of consciousness. Was she stunned? Did my mother put two and two (meaning my playing with the kids across the road and blood in my underwear) together and freeze up? Is it possible that I mentioned helping Chester look for something? Is it possible that I told her we were alone together in the barn? Did I mention pain? These questions cannot be answered right now. Maybe someday I will remember.

This is the main source of what I call the secondary trauma, that my immediate caregivers subconsciously drew the correct conclusion but buried all conscious thought as quickly as it emerged. In recent years I have become convinced of this. Some thirty years ago, my mother served as a juror on a child molestation case. The defendant was acquitted, mostly because the jury, including my mother, did not believe the little girl. Serving on this jury is an important event in her life. It must be, because she speaks of it every few months or so. Each time it comes up, she sneers about how this girl, while on the witness stand, twirled her hair, squirmed, and kept looking to the back of the courtroom at an older man. In other words, the traumatized little girl acted like a traumatized little girl, and that did not convince the jury. My mother and other jurors felt the man in the back of the room was coaching the girl. Every time my mother repeats this story, I remind her that the man may have been there to threaten her too, which in my mind is more likely than that she was being coached.

There are other child sexual abuse cases close to the family. One involves a father that had been molesting his children, all under age four. He ended up in prison for another 130 years, thank goodness. To this day, the mother does not allow the perpetrator's parents visitation with their grandchildren. My mother feels this is wrong, that grandparents should be allowed to see their grandchildren. My opinion: one wonders where the perpetrator learned to perpetrate. The mother may have a perfectly sound reason to keep the grandparents away from her children. Conversations about this case always end in the same place. She believes the father got too stiff a sentence. My mother will state: one day those kids will want to know their father as if they have been deprived of something valuable. It is as if she feels a life sentence for this guy was too much because of how it might affect the kids. If anything, it is too light because of how it might affect the kids. My response to her is always: they already know him, would not benefit, and might be terribly harmed from further contact. My mom clearly has a major block in her concept of what sexual abuse does to children.

The other case close to the family involves an older man that was accused of molesting a young girl in the neighborhood. He was acquitted in a he said/she said case. A few years later, there was another accusation, this time resulting in his dismissal from his job. The next year, three more young women came forward, resulting in a trial. He was convicted but got off with a light sentence. However, my mother's feeling is that the parents of these girls are using their daughters in a way to extort money from the guy. Just recently, I told my mother that such an idea makes no sense because he does not have any money and after the expense for his defense, he never will. She still does not understand. My mom is not a bad person, but it troubles me greatly that she seems to always identify to some degree those accused of sex crimes. When I am not numb about this, I wonder why.

Following the day of my trauma, I endured three years of almost daily terror. During the school year, I had to cross to Chester's side of the road, walk a few hundred yards, and wait for the school bus. The bus hauled all the kids from 1st grade through high school along our road. The smaller the town, the more likely each kid interacts with other kids of different age groups. Schools are smaller and span a broader range of grades. My school spanned 1st through 8th grade, roughly ages 5 through 13. The bus dumped the high schoolers, including Chester, a few blocks before the rest of us. I have an indelible image of Chester, sitting in a forward seat, staring