In part II of “Making Sense of the Impossible: a trauma story,” Analysis Now blog co-editor Blair Casdin, LCSW, continues to share the intertwined stories of her family, her patient, and herself, grappling with questions central to traumatic experience: How do we make sense of the impossible? How do we go on after losing so much?

Read part I of “Making Sense of the Impossible: a trauma story” HERE

 

“How do people go on after losing so much?”

When the question arose in a recent session with my patient, Jennifer, who lost her father at age four and was about to move in with her boyfriend, I wondered how my grandfather, Pop, who lost so much during the Holocaust, could go on with his life, marry, raise a family, and flourish in post-war America. Trauma and how we cope with it has been on my mind since that conversation, but really has been part of my thinking since childhood.

My family reached America in 1949. Life was hard, but they slowly managed to set down roots. Pop took whatever work he could find, from the steel mills to the sweat shops, and eventually built up a successful dry cleaning and tailoring business. (My grandparents liked to brag that they cleaned Frankie Valli’s suits!)

Pop never stopped trying to be a hero. Even in his retirement, living in Florida at 90 years old, he carried a passed-out man up a flight of stairs. His neighbors called him Superman. No surprise then that he continued to greet me at the airport and refused to let me carry my bags as long as he lived. For Pop, the experience of the Holocaust changed him forever, and he spent the rest of his life trying to protect his family from harm, whether real or imagined. According to Levine (1982), the survivor is “ever vigilant, ever on guard, and totally involved with his survival and the survival of his or her family” (p. 74).

To say I was overprotected as a child would be an understatement. A swim in the ocean was a possible drowning; lighting Hanukkah candles near the window spelled antisemitic attacks by neighbors (Nazis?); a sneeze of course meant illness; in my twenties, living with a male roommate, risked rape. This was not the kind of “saving” that I needed. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, despite its own brand of pedestrian terrors (!), did not require the same kind of vigilance as 1930s Poland. We know that it is common for victims of trauma to maintain a hypervigilant frame of mind for years; in Pop’s case, it was a lifetime. What was once a life-saving form of self-protection morphed into a maladaptive coping mechanism for him and often a nightmare for his family.

Years after my grandmother passed away, when Pop’s memory started to go, the paranoid thoughts held strong. He accused my late grandmother of cheating on him and obsessively worried about his money being stolen. But Pop could be equally as silly as he was serious—perhaps another strategy for coping with trauma? Among his Borscht-Belt routines were his long-island duckling joke with the punch line, “Bend over and I’ll find out”; endless punning (“Don’t be a nar, get in the car”); his infamous bird whistle; and ordering at every restaurant pasta fagioli with a thick Italian accent. I’m pretty sure he had never actually eaten a bowl of pasta fagioli!

Of course, trauma impacts everyone differently. Unlike Pop, my grandmother avoided the topic of her painful history at all costs. She coped by keeping busy. She could knit a sweater in twenty-four hours, or whip up a holiday meal for fifteen all by herself. She would work a full day at their tailor shop, drive me to a piano lesson, cook dinner (her famous Hungarian chicken and potatoes), clean it up, and do it all again the next day. Her manic energy had its benefits, but underneath that drive, I believe, were intense feelings of anxiety and lack of control. In a study of survivors in Israel, Knafo (2009) found that only after retirement, with nothing to occupy their minds, did this group show serious signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

*

Growing up surrounded by traumatized people, I developed a keen ability to remain calm, keep a straight face, minimize my feelings—and avoid sneezing at all costs! I also grew up listening to stories. Pop needed to tell his story, over and over, to anyone who would listen. I tried to imagine what it was like to be hunted by Nazis, or how he saved my grandmother’s life and the lives of hundreds of Hungarian Jews. Imagining it is near impossible, but perhaps it is the attempt itself that opens me to the stories and experiences my patients share. It is no surprise that many second- and third-generation survivors become mental health practitioners (Laub & Auerhahn, 1993).

Hearing horrific stories as a child can be traumatizing in and of itself. Keeping my emotions in check in the service of protecting my family of traumatized Holocaust survivors served as a coping mechanism for me growing up. As relational analysts, we are taught to tune in to how we feel with our patients, and to use ourselves to enlighten our patients about the way in which they may be relating to us and to others. Psychoanalysis has been essential in my own understanding of how the transmission of trauma has impacted my life.

My patient Jennifer has been coming to my office for the past seven years. She has opened herself up to me in ways she could never imagine possible. As she sobs, and asks again, “How do people do it? Go on after losing so much?”, there is an understanding that the undoing of trauma is happening right here in the room. She gives voice to long-buried feelings, and she is no longer alone (Auerhahn, 2013).

As for Pop, he died peacefully at home at age 98: a rebel, a tyrant, a hero, and a flawed human, very much loved and missed.

 

 

Blair Casdin, LCSW, is a graduate of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, and is in private practice in Manhattan. At MIP, she is co-editor of the Analysis Now blog, co-chair of the Colloquium Committee, and teaches Ethics in Psychoanalysis.

 

References

Auerhahn, N.C. (2013). Evolution of Traumatic Narratives. Psychoanal. St. Child, 67:215-246

Knafo, D. (2009). Freud’s Memory Erased. Psychoanal. Psychol., 26(2):171-190

Laub, D. and Auerhahn, N.C. (1993). Knowing and not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 74:287-302

Levine, H.B. (1982). Toward a Psychoanalytic Understanding of Children of Survivors of the Holocaust. Psychoanal. Q., 51:70-92