Pilgrimage Toward the Light

Copyright © 2020 Christa Mackenzie.

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WestBow Press rev. date: 6/26/2020

I

respectfully dedicate this work to my therapist, who stood by me through all the years of remembrance and pain with patience, longsuffering, care, and compassion. He has been my God-given guide through all the difficult years.

In addition, I wish to dedicate this work to my sweet husband, who by his loving support, faithfulness, and encouragement helped me heal and helps me heal more every day.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1     DARKNESS WILL NOT WIN

2     TESTIMONY TO THE LIGHT

3     EARLY POETRY

4     PILGRIMS ALL

5     MY SAFE PLACE

6     MISSION JOURNEYS

7     HOSPITAL TRAUMAS

8     LATER POETRY

9     ABBA’S HOUSE

10   BRAND NEW LIFE

11   MOVING ON

12   TO BE CONTINUED

RESOURCES

INTRODUCTION

The problem of this project is the observation and evaluation of the struggle of a woman through the complexities of childhood trauma; how she survived and overcame these complexities. A background is given herein of the disorders caused by complex trauma pertinent to this testimony. I pray to assist the hurting individual, and by God’s grace help with the healing.

Many years ago, I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Anxiety Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder, and Major Depression due to traumatic abuse in childhood. Today there is much information documented on the disorders of my focus here, and help is available to a greater degree than in past generations. I was terrified when I was told that there were very real reasons that I suffered and felt crazy, and unreal. I did not want to believe that the events really happened to me that caused these diagnoses. When the unthinkable happens to young children, the result is much the same as for a combat veteran of war, as both groups can be affected by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Shocking sights, sounds, and terrors grip the hearts of the young and old alike. Children are sometimes better able to shut out the memories and go on with life, at least for a few years, while traumatized adults simply cannot forget the horrors they have faced. Sometimes events in childhood can be perpetrated by evil abusers and sometimes there can be accidental events that cause a person to dissociate, both of which happened to me.

Post-traumatic stress affects over 80 percent of Americans, with approximately 9 percent developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Post-traumatic stress is more common in those in law enforcement, those in disaster work, and war veterans. Though many people have post-traumatic stress reactions, not all develop the disorder.¹Persons who do not receive help after a crisis may develop the disorder after a period of time. PTSD is common in children following abusive, stressful, and shocking events. PTSD is characterized by the lack of treatment or care, for whatever reason, of the severely stressed person. Stress reactions are survival mechanisms in a psychological crisis. An acute response to this type of crisis happens when a person’s psychological balance is disrupted, causing increased stress, when one’s usual coping mechanisms have failed, and when there is evidence of significant distress, impairment, and dysfunction.² While post-traumatic stress is a survival mechanism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a pathogenic mechanism of those who either do not receive help or who refuse help from others.

In children who have been abused, help is usually not available except in special circumstances. Most are left to wander on alone into adulthood and then many never receive help. Some people refuse to look at the past, refuse to believe what has happened to cripple their lives, sometimes refuse to believe their lives are crippled, and refuse to give up addictive processes such as alcohol, drugs and other addictions that are helping them temporarily cope. These people never receive emotional healing, but dysfunction is perpetuated in their families, sadly. Those who are left to wander often become severely mentally ill.³

There are two types of stress: eustress and distress. Eustress is good stress, or low levels of stress, which can heighten awareness in the individual and assist them in performing certain tasks more efficiently. Distress is harmful stress of high magnitude following a crisis.⁴ With proper help, traumatized individuals can recover from traumatic distress. Distress, if left untreated, can become chronic, leaving individuals to live in a heightened state of crisis most all the time.⁵

Severe levels of stress can affect a person in every aspect of their being, affecting the physical, spiritual, emotional aspects, as well as the thought processes. Physical symptoms that signify severe stress are excessive sweating, increased heart rate, rapid breathing, increased blood pressure, dizziness, and weakness to name a few.⁶ Physical disease is therefore often caused by stress, as stress affects all the major body systems. Much sickness and many hospitalizations are due to physical stress on the human body.⁷ Physicians agree that stress has effects that cause disease.

Thought processes can be impaired and is evidenced by several signs and symptoms as well. Anxiety is the body’s response to a threat or danger perceived by the person even when there is no current danger. The person has most often had a threat of death to the self or has witnessed threats to others, whether or not the act was carried out. Later in the process of a stress disorder, the person has panic attacks for no apparent reason, even when circumstances prove that all should be at peace within. Anxiety attacks often happen at unpredictable times, even years after the original trauma, due to flashbacks. Flashbacks are images that appear in the mind and memory for no apparent reason. Usually there is a reason for the impaired thought processes of flashbacks, though the reason may be unknown to the survivor.

Signs and symptoms of impaired thought process are as follows. Some examples of cognitive symptoms are confusion, nightmares, hypervigilance (always looking for and feeling one is in danger; being always in fight or flight mode), intrusive images (or flashbacks), and poor concentration.⁸ This list is not exhaustive. Symptoms of emotional stress are fear, guilt, grief, panic, denial, anxiety, emotional shock, depression, intense anger, and emotional outbursts. Behavioral symptoms are withdrawal, erratic movements, addictions, and changes in ordinary behavior. Spiritual stress can cause anger at God, questioning basic beliefs, loss of meaning or purpose and sense of isolation from God.⁹ All these symptoms and more are evident in severe stress reactions and are temporary if the person is treated properly.

In PTSD, however, more symptoms appear and linger. Further symptoms include numbing withdrawal and avoidance, antisocial acts, repetitive, intrusive memories or recollections of the trauma and/or events related to the trauma. All symptoms have a duration of at least one month and cause significant distress and dysfunction.¹⁰ In stress management teams, members are taught to do immediate work to provide assistance to those in crisis.

A stress disorder such as PTSD occurs when a person has been traumatized at some point in life, either in the past or in recent days. The goal is to stop the process before it can become chronic, which takes the expertise of mental health professionals. P.T.S.D. is listed in the DSM-IV and is diagnosed according to these criteria in persons who have experienced, witnessed, or have been confronted with an event involving actual or threatened death, serious injury, or threat to physical safety of self or others causing intense fear, helplessness, or horror. ¹¹ It can be avoided by facilitating healthy groups of survivors. Survivors should be put together in like groups for therapy.

PTSD, the disorder, requires long-term psychotherapy, intensive counseling to heal. Healing can take many years and then it may only be better, but not fully healed. For instance, personally, though I am living a happy and healthy lifestyle, I struggle at times with flashbacks and wonder if I always will. I have had some help through E.M.D.R. which is a fascinating process. The acronym stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It is difficult to imagine how it works, but I have been helped. I am not immobilized by flashbacks now. I simply slow down, acknowledge the flashback, deal with the emotions surrounding the flashbacks, and move on. I am able to do this processing of emotions quickly at times, but not so quickly at other times, depending on the amount of stress I am experiencing at the time. At time, the stress itself may cause the flashbacks. When I am very stressed, I know that I need to engage in de-stressing behaviors specific to me. I do not have flashbacks as often as I once did.

My personal de-stressing behaviors are taking a very warm bubble bath, watching a movie (one that does not require much thought, so that I can just be a couch potato and enjoy), and, sometimes, playing the piano. The most effective is to go camping and hiking in the mountains and the wilderness with my husband. We do the latter as often as possible. Every person will have their own de-stressing behaviors and what works for one person will not necessarily work for another.

There is much documented on Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is a common reaction to trauma that is so severe that the human mind cannot comprehend what is happening to the body. Dissociative Identity Disorder does exist, but with very specific criteria defined in the DSM-IV. DID is characterized by two or more separate personalities with distinct postures, gestures, and ways of thinking. The person literally dissociates himself from a situation or experience that is too violent, traumatic, or painful to assimilate with his conscious self.¹² Understanding the development of multiple personalities is difficult, even for highly trained experts. It is the most severe and chronic manifestation of the dissociative disorders that cause multiple personalities as defined in the DSM-IV, the main psychiatry manual used to classify mental illnesses, and includes dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, and depersonalization disorder.¹³ However, there is help out there for people with this troubling, complicated disorder.

The traumatized person must be given kind, compassionate, professional care. DID is a controversial disorder, a complicated disorder, and a convoluted disorder. It takes a great deal of time and commitment to treatment on the part of both therapist and survivor. The time involved depends on the individual being treated, the level of trauma experienced, and the amount of commitment to get well on the part of the survivor. It takes a great commitment and an investment of time that many therapists simply do not have for one reason or another. The survivor should ask questions and ensure that the therapist is someone with whom they will be able to interact and receive the necessary help and time. The therapist should be empathetic to trauma in the human experience. I believe that as Christians, we should not discount the help of psychological counselors. There are many that bring their expertise to bear and have much compassion toward people of all religions. The therapist must be chosen carefully.

There are several protective devices that a severely traumatized individual will employ for personal coping. Dissociative amnesia refers to the inability to recall important events of one’s life and cannot be attributed to mere forgetfulness, which occurs during dissociation. When the person becomes another in order to cope with the devastation being experienced, he or she cannot remember any of the other personalities and their beliefs. The person switches parts so as not to remember; the phenomenon causes the person to feel safer inside, as it never feels safe to speak one’s true name after certain types of traumas where the person was threatened with death. When the person begins to heal, co-consciousness occurs. The different parts become aware of the others and inner communication begins to happen.

When a person with DID switches parts, they become someone else, another personality, in order to deal with a particular pain or traumatic event. It is always easier if someone else takes the pain. Then the person does not have to feel the pain. This is a completely unconscious process. They will soon switch again, often into the previous part, the different personality they were before, or perhaps even someone different still. This is dissociation, which refers to the ability of certain persons to split into different parts as a coping mechanism during an event that the person is unable to handle. The part the person lives in changes at different points in life. One can stay in a certain part, or alter for years at a time, then seemingly for no reason, switch into a completely different part or alter. Each alter or part has a different and necessary role in helping the whole person cope with life. I use part, and alter, interchangeably throughout this book.

Dissociative fugue is another protective device unconsciously used by a person with DID. When the trauma is too great, the person goes blank in their mind and just walks away from the trauma without remembering that trauma. The person will often return to their home or a safe place without remembering how they got there. It is even said that a person will return to their childhood home and be unable to remember traveling there. Persons with these disorders may also travel to another state or part of the world, then switch parts and be unable to remember the trip. Perhaps not only a temporary trip, as some persons are known to begin a completely different life.

Dissociative fugue is the sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s customary place of work, with inability to recall one’s past; confusion about personal identity, or the assumption of a new identity; or significant distress or impairment.¹⁴ This troubling aspect of trauma survival is certainly possible, though somewhat unusual. According to the Merck Manual, a fugue state can be seen as an escape from responsibility, and cases take up only a fraction of a percentage of the population. When in a fugue, people disappear from their usual routine and may assume a new identity, forgetting all or some of their usual life … [fugue] may develop as an alternative to suicidal or homicidal impulses … a fugue may last from hours to weeks, months, or occasionally even longer.¹⁵ These are extreme circumstances, of course, but possible with severe trauma and could possibly account for some of the anonymity of some people living on the streets.

Depersonalization disorder occurs as an aspect of DID, when a traumatized person has the sensation that they are not real, that they are a robot, plastic, or feel as if always in a dream. Catastrophizing is also common and one cannot get past thinking that they are in grave danger even while in quite safe conditions.¹⁶ Life can be going just fine and the person may panic or look for danger. Hypervigilance is an aspect of catastrophizing and is listed in the symptoms above. The person feels safe while in direct danger because it feels normal to them; they sense normality in their bodies. They flashback to the past when danger felt normal and may have difficulty recognizing that they are now safe, even if they are in safe surroundings with safe people and are truly safe. It can take years to convince oneself that safety has arrived and that a healing pilgrimage is in progress. Danger feels safe and safety feels dangerous.

Under the umbrella of depersonalization is derealization. Derealization means that the person disconnects from their humanness and senses that one is not real, which is differentiated from feeling that one is unreal, suggesting an emotional reaction.¹⁷ While some persons can experience this fleetingly, those who have the feelings constantly or have frequent recurrences are diagnosed with depersonalization disorder. It can involve the sensation that the limbs are detached from the body.

Globalization, also under the umbrella of depersonalization disorder, involves all or none, or black and white thinking. Those persons who have PTSD, DID, and or a panic disorder are likely to experience these troubling disorders. These disorders, as well as panic, are brought on by stress and trauma and not by drugs, alcohol, or other outside means.¹⁸ I experienced all three: dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue states, and depersonalization disorder. At this writing, I have been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for 21 years; healing is a process. I will tell of my healing in this work. Memories come in different forms; mental and physical or body memories being two.

Body memories are memories of sensory quality, not just the feeling of emotion. The body carries the senses; the senses reside in the body. The cognition must marry the body, meaning that one has to repeat the facts of the current reality over and over; the cognition and body must converge. The mind must be clear on reality and relieve the body of its distortions. These distortions have been