No place to go but in
Lockdown, generational trauma and considerations for living in a post-pandemic world
Until the day she died, my grandmother would take used coffee filters, dry them on a clean towel and reuse them until the grounds began falling into the coffee pot.
She never spent a dollar of her money on tupperware or new food containers. If she had leftover lasagna, it was smashed into a plastic Country Crock tub she'd cleaned the night before. This same grandmother would use every last inch of food in her freezer—a habit I do think is wise and admirable—but I also remember how, as she stretched on her tiptoes to reach the last bag of frozen peas, the anxiety in her body would ripple out toward anyone nearby. It sometimes felt like she still had to answer to the Office of Price Administration, using ration cards and stamps for things like jam, cheese or coffee. The trauma from WWII, the fear of going hungry, never seemed to leave her.
When I think of her, a more recent memory emerges. I think of early 2020, receiving the first lockdown order and watching the foreseeable future disappear. I remember feeling guilty that the rhythms of our newly established mountain life—like buying toilet paper, pasta and spaghetti sauce in six-month supplies—seemed to have already set us up quite well to make it through a worldwide lockdown. I remember using gloves to grab boxes from UPS, spraying them down with Lysol, only to then thoroughly wash my hands and then add a layer of Germ-X just to be extra careful. But I tried not to follow that line of strenuous germ protection too rigidly. To be honest, I didn’t have much energy left to panic about the pandemic in those early months; I’d already been in a state of lockdown for most of my life—and more specifically in 2019.
You see, as the world began shutting down, we weren’t even three months removed from losing a second daughter in the second trimester. The lockdown orders felt especially cruel. I couldn’t leave my house at the exact time that I was finally feeling the energy to go shopping in town at my favorite stores. How I was used to healing (through distractions, busyness and cooking) would necessarily have to change. By some stroke of good luck, before lockdowns began, I established care with a trauma-trained, body-based therapist, whose presence in my life would come to feel divinely appointed in the months and years that followed.
Laying the groundwork for hearing
A few weeks into the pandemic, my husband and I drove from our house in Pine to Denver. The locals call it “driving down the hill,” where for the first 30 minutes drivers twist and turn through tree-studded mountain majesty. But as we made our way into the city, I looked at all the shuttered businesses and the four lanes of empty highway around us, and I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, They finally know what it’s like.
With the lockdowns, I sensed some righting of wrongs, where the introverted, highly sensitive and bullied were finally at peace, allowed to stay home. They could avoid stressful commutes and exhausting chatter. But the folks who were used to bursting loudly and rapidly through their days were finally being locked into a life that feels near impossible to contend with much of the time. The world finally felt quiet to me, even though my picturesque mountain life was growing increasingly frustrating.
We’d purchased a small mountain home for a few reasons. It had been a longtime dream of my husband’s to live on the side of a mountain, and I was in a years-long pursuit to find some sense of ease in my life. It always seemed, looking out at everyone around me, that even my best, most labored intentions to be useful, insightful and original, were destined to let me down. I thought the quiet serenity of living among the mountains, tucked away from most people, could help me find the missing ingredient I’ve longed for my whole life.
I remember one specific day, standing on the back deck of our home. I was scanning the trees that stood in front of me—hundreds of pine trees, densely packed in every direction. And I realized: there are voices only growing louder in my mind. The pleas, the instinct to hide and burrow in, even in the safety of the mountains, left me exhausted and hopeless. If I’m not at ease here, in an actual paradise, then when will this heaviness ever lift from my shoulders? Luckily, in the years leading up to the pandemic, I had been laying the groundwork to find my answer.
Some time in 2017, I was freshly married and trying to find my footing in some very big life transitions (I had recently moved away from content management and work with my self-publishing team). I discovered this interview with Bessel van der Kolk and chased a rabbit trail of information about trauma research. I was particularly intrigued and heartened to read about the work to understand why some soldiers can experience first hand combat and come back home, relatively unscathed, while others struggle not just with depression but unrelenting suicidal thoughts.
My cousins in the Army had experienced direct combat overseas in multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan—one came back pretty much OK, while the other, fresh home from a tour, once went screaming and crying down the road in the middle of the night. I had no way of knowing how to help her. I was surprised to read van der Kolk’s work because it was also deeply resonant. Here he was saying that there’s a reason soldiers can’t just “shake off” the horrors of war, and I felt embarrassed that he was putting shape to something I’d experienced my whole life. As a child, teenager, young adult, the response to how I moved through the world was a consistent, resounding, “That shouldn’t be scary.”
I was compelled enough by my research to try EMDR therapy for about eight months and genuinely felt something shift inside me. But I also found it to be such an intense modality that it seemed my whole life had to stand still in order for me to make it to another session. Because of this groundwork, however, I knew after another second-trimester miscarriage in 2019, that something had happened inside my body, and I had no way of knowing what it was or how to dig my way out.
Once I found safety, I received the diagnosis no one ever wants to get
My therapist’s name was Maggie. When I first found her website, I thought she seemed warm, gentle and wise. She also had extra training in dissociation, which I thought was curious at the time, since my family often joked growing up about how “Dad’s always dissociating” or “Oh yeah, Dad’s just having a conversation with himself again…” But I didn’t know much else about dissociation. Maggie wasn’t trained in EMDR, but rather a “sister” modality known as somatic experiencing. When I tell people about it for the first time, I start by saying that a man named Dr. Peter Levine was intrigued by the notion that animals in the wild aren’t traumatized. He wanted to know why, and over time he built a growing body of research around what happens when we humans are met with a threatening situation, and how our fight-or-flight instincts kick in, surging our bodies with adrenaline and energy to survive.
But what happens when we can’t exercise that instinct and move the energy through and out of the body? It gets stuck, and sometimes so do we. Where a deer who knows it is under attack can run at full speed, stretching its legs out far and wide, jutting left and right through trees to escape—and can return to peaceful grazing or afternoon naps (as they were fond of taking in my backyard), we humans cope with this trapped energy in different, sometimes debilitating ways. Dr. Levine posited that it’s not the instinct of fight-or-flight that’s the trouble: it’s the reality that many of us don’t have agency to express it as our own animal bodies see fit in the moment.
For eighteen months, Maggie and I met weekly as we tried to untangle the inner workings of my life, using the methods of somatic experiencing. She helped me see how often I responded to my own needs as threats to survival in my family of origin. She taught me how to notice sensations in my body and look for the information they were trying to get to me, rather than dismiss them as inconveniences. I learned that re-telling a story over and over again can be a form of re-traumatization. And each week, we shaped our sessions not around a long timeline of events I could remember and write down in an intake session. Instead she asked if I’d had any particular dreams or memories floating to the surface—because this is a sign that the body and mind are ready to address something. Our work together created a foundation of confidence in my instincts I’d never felt before. I was even compelled to finally seek out a clinical team to evaluate me for autism (which resulted in autism spectrum disorder and PTSD diagnoses in April 2021).
Not long after, I was finally able to put words to an experience I could only describe as both frightening and yet also familiar. It was the night I tucked away in our guest room, breathless and frightened. I had run down the stairs, away from my husband as if he were a stranger. And when I dropped down on the guest bed, I heard a young voice urging me to climb out the bedroom window and run up the side of the mountain. A swirling sensation created a sort of tornadic vortex in my mind, and I begged my husband not to go for a drive and leave me alone at home. Later that evening, I would walk past a mirror and for the first time put shape to something I’d experienced before: the chatter of a young girl’s voice, now asking, “Is this who we are? Is this who we’ve grown up to be? Is that my face?”
I typed everything down, exactly as it happened, almost like an objective journalist reporting facts to my therapist. Based on this experience, she said in our next session, I had crossed off the last element required to confirm dissociative identity disorder (DID). She was quick to say that she didn’t see me as someone with an insurmountable label, but that DID creates a distinct experience in my mind and calls for a different treatment protocol. I was both relieved and so frightened that my teeth were chattering and my body was shaking. But I also knew I was in good, capable, loving hands with Maggie. And I knew I could trust her to guide me.
What I know about myself in light of a DID diagnosis
I’ve since learned that DID is one of the more complex diagnoses a person can get. It takes an average of 6 to 8 years to diagnose properly, and to make matters worse, most people will be diagnosed with something else entirely such as an eating disorder, anxiety or depression—all of which I had been diagnosed with and all of which have commonly accepted treatments that are contraindicated for DID. Because of this lack of awareness in the medical community, people like me with DID often internalize their trauma even further, believing that the problem is with them not knowing how to apply sound medical advice and get better once and for all.
It’s been two and a half years of receiving weekly treatment for DID, and I can say that it is the only therapy that's made a real, tangible difference in my quality of life. As a person with DID, I have learned that instead of one cohesive self, my brain has been creating a “system of selves” from a very young age.
I have had to sit and listen intently as quiet, timid voices interact in my mind and remind me of what happened to us. (Dissociative amnesia is something I have experienced for a long time, and my first time to “remember” something from my childhood was described in this essay here). I’ve had to let myself free-form draw with crayons and watch as my mind creates houses, eyeballs and a dog to tell my adult self the story of what’s going on inside. Sometimes I look at my drawings and know intuitively: this is what I would’ve drawn if I’d received care from a child psychologist at a young age. Once when I was having a panic attack, I ran to my journal to try to communicate with my system, and on this one page I can see where my handwriting changes from a 30-something woman to a teenager to a young girl and eventually it trails off into scribbles because my hand went limp and I briefly couldn’t remember how to hold a pen. I’ve learned that with DID, it’s like living with a meticulously preserved pile of time machine vaults, each created to tuck away the scariest, ongoing moments of my life; they just took a piece of me with them.
Over time, I’ve come to realize that DID is also what helps me be a really different, expansive kind of editor: when I’m reading, I pull from a distinct “vault” of knowledge which is filled with memories and sounds of everything I’ve ever read or edited or researched, all weaving together into decades-long patterns of speech, writing and communication. Before knowing I have DID, I’d mercilessly shame myself for not knowing how to “just push through” with an editing task on occasion; now I know how to recognize this resistance as a request for rest (before my editor self is pushed to dissociate in order to get what she needs). As you might imagine, things in my mind are complex, and the work of DID and communicating with my “system of selves” will continue for the rest of my life.
Where do we all go from here?
When I think back to my grandmother and the coping mechanisms she developed from her experiences in WWII, I can’t help but reflect. I wonder if we all have grappled enough with the fact that living through the pandemic could have easily procured the same invisible coping mechanisms as a years-long, horrific war. (Anybody still hoarding hand sanitizer “just in case?”) I can’t help but wonder, even though most of us are wired for resiliency, who among us can ever reasonably be expected to feel the same again. And are the readily available talk therapy resources enough to support us as we make our way through the world again?
I often hold a sense of angst about how little we collectively know about treating trauma and how the brain copes with overwhelming circumstances. The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation says that trauma-related dissociation is “sometimes described as a ‘mental escape’ when physical escape is not possible, or when a person is so emotionally overwhelmed that they cannot cope any longer.” When I read this, I can’t help but see images in my mind of people trapped in apartment buildings all day long; or people whose jobs disappeared overnight in order to stay home and become full-time caretakers for their children. Trapped, suffocating with no end in sight. Creating a “mental escape when physical escape isn’t possible” sounds like our collective pandemic experience in a nutshell. And I wonder how we’re going to get the care that so many of us deeply, truly need to flourish in life again.
Looking back, I can see now that the lockdown, isolation and years-long hypervigilance of the pandemic were quite familiar to me—they were mimicking the turmoil I’ve lived with for much of my life. A kind of turmoil that kept me pushing relentlessly through all forms of therapy and medication for almost 20 years in hopes that something about me could make sense. What I prayed for most was that someone could see me and say, “I know what you’re describing, and I know how to help.”
While millions of people were going into lockdown, I was learning for the first time how to come out of it in my own mind and body. And I don’t take that for granted. Because of the good fortune and deep, abiding care I received, I feel almost responsible to cultivate a more nuanced conversation around how we individually respond to threat, how trauma gets planted inside us, how this shows up in what we are and are not able to offer to our writing practices and by extension, to invite more people in to understand the nature of their own minds.
So if you feel like you were pushing through life even before the pandemic showed up, or if you found yourself coping in ways that seem dramatic or even crazy, just take it from a woman whose brain is made of time vaults and who sometimes draws like a 9-year-old: your mind did its very best to get you through an impossibly frightening time in the world. And you deserve to live a life beyond the line of survival. There’s a way to make sense and to get the resources you need. And if you’re ever in doubt, I’ll do my best to be here to listen.
Resources + Further Reading
How Trauma Lodges in the Body, interview with Bessel van der Kolk; originally aired in 2013 but revised in 2021
A Revolutionary Approach to Treating PTSD, published May 2014 but still an excellent overview
More information about Somatic Experiencing (SE) International can be found on their website.
The directory of SE trained therapists can be found here.
A Somatic Experiencing 101 explanation can be found here.
Coming soon
Cave of the Heart interviews with
; ; . Plus a conversation with my editor about making first impressions in the Substack ecosystem.
An incredible essay. I nodded along to all of it and I agree that the pandemic experience needs SO MUCH UNPACKING.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Amanda.
This really resonated with me and moved me to tears. We’ve had very similar experiences in life and I feel fortunate I just found you on here. Thank you, Noha, for restacking and sharing Amanda’s story.