The Myth of Normal 18

had taken over while the rational, calming, self-regulating parts of my brain went offline. “All trauma is preverbal,” the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has written. [4] His statement is true in two senses. First, the psychic wounds we sustain are often inflicted upon us before our brain is capable of formulating any kind of a verbal narrative, as in my case. Second, even after we become language- endowed, some wounds are imprinted on regions of our nervous systems having nothing to do with language or concepts; this includes brain areas, of course, but the rest of the body, too. They are stored in parts of us that words and thoughts cannot directly access—we might even call this level of traumatic encoding “subverbal.” As Peter Levine explains, “Conscious, explicit memory is only the proverbial tip of a very deep and mighty iceberg. It barely hints at the submerged strata of primal implicit experience that moves us in ways the conscious mind can only begin to imagine.”[5] To her credit, my wife will not allow me to get away with pinning the entire blame for my arrivals-gate hissy fit on Nazis and fascists and infant trauma. Yes, the backstory merits compassion and understanding—and she has given me an abundance of both—but there comes a point when “Hitler made me do it” won’t fly. Responsibility can and must be taken. After twenty-four hours of the silent treatment, Rae had had enough. “Oh, knock it off already,” she said. And so I did—a measure of progress and relative maturation on my part. In times past, it would have taken me days or longer to “knock it off”: to drop my resentment, and for my core to unfreeze, my face to relax, my voice to soften, and my head to turn willingly and with love toward my life partner. “My problem is that I am married to someone who understands me,” I have often grumbled, only partly in jest. Really, of course, my great blessing is to be married to someone with healthy boundaries, who sees me as I am now and who will no longer bear the brunt of my prolonged and unplanned visits to the distant past. What Trauma Is and What It Does