Trauma and Transformation

Life is full of challenges. We grow by baby steps, facing risks, being supported by older/bigger/wiser folks around us. We learn to handle stress, expand our capacities, discover our resilience. And all this prepares us when challenge becomes trauma. Trauma is injury or emotional distress caused by events that overwhelm our ability to cope. Abuse, assault, battle, betrayal, drastic injury or illness: we do not wish traumatic events upon ourselves or each other, but they happen. We are triggered into trauma when events beyond our control veer out of control.

We are also fascinated by trauma—especially when it’s not our own. We seek out stories that allow us to travel vicariously through the drastic edges of human experience, cheering for people to learn, to thrive, and to show us the way. We understand that trauma is a hinge-point: it will make us or break us. The ‘hero’ comes through trauma incorporating wisdom; “I have suffered and here is what I learned.” The ‘villain’ uses trauma as a wrecking ball; “I was wronged by life, and you shall suffer for it more.”

Writers embed trauma in stories because trauma is embedded in life. In the formative years of writing my historical novel, The Beekeeper’s Question, an editor told me, “Do not protect your characters. They must make bad decisions, costly mistakes, hurt each other and choose what course their lives will take. When in doubt, make it worse.”

“Make it worse” became a mantra writing scenes for the story. World War II is happening: trauma is everywhere. I had to write about this within the perspective of that time. The US Army in the North Africa campaign (where the young soldier, Franklin, is sent) applied what was called “forward treatment,” shipping overwhelmed soldiers to a field hospital putting them into an induced sleep cure for a week, and then, supposedly rested, sending them back to the front. Though trauma has always accompanied soldiers home from war, society didn’t address it as a collective issue, just sent survivors to their families and communities and hoped they’d carry on.

After the Vietnam war, the 700,0000 American servicemen and personnel who required psychological help, taught us that unaddressed trauma escalates in delayed response. The persistence of what was named “post-Vietnam syndrome” led to defining Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and opened up the study of trauma. My friend Michael Orange, a Vietnam veteran, helped me “make it worse” for the character of Franklin Cooper, the beekeeper’s son confronted with war, battle, and physical trauma.

Trauma is also present in the experiences of the women in the story: sexual assault, miscarriages, beatings, deaths of loved ones. Maire, Franklin’s wife, suffers from nightmares and anxiety. Willow, her sister-in-law, carries both the spiritual wisdom and intergenerational trauma of her Blackfeet people. In fact, women are twice as prone to PTSD as men but their trauma, often arising out of domestic life, is persistently discounted as an aspect of being “the weaker sex,” and enduring “women’s conditions.”

For those who have read The Beekeeper’s Question, I will be hosting a dialogue with Michael author of, Embracing the Ghosts, PTSD and the Vietnam Quagmire, and his wife Cynthia author of, Shock Waves, A Practical Guide to Living with a Loved One’s PTSD on the role of trauma and PTSD in the book. The ZOOM is MARCH 22, 9:00/Pacific—do the math for your time zone as needed. Click here to register. This takes you to my email–ask and I send you the zoom link.

The 1940’s has many echoes of then to now, and those echoes only grow stronger. I found a tee-shirt on Etsy printed with the slogan: “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany, you’re doing it right now.”

Trauma is a catalyst. It shifts our lives—ready or not. The person we become depends on the choices we make in response to trauma. The same is true for communities and countries as we collectively respond to war, oppression, natural disaster, regime change. We become how we respond. The year 2025 is exposing trauma from the personal to the global—and we cannot avoid it. We are in a hinge-point of reckoning.

Image from social media.

As an American born just after World War II, I have been steeped in the mythos that mine is the “greatest country on earth,” that we are forever the righteous victors. I have been steeped in arrogance that American character, our delusions of the self-made (white) man, should be a model for all of societies. We are Americans: we can do anything we want, and the world will be better for it.  Evidence to the contrary disregarded. Welcome to our reckoning.

We are living through a huge shift in how we be human on the planet. We are collectively deciding whether we descend or ascend in our basic nature. Reckoning at this scale is terrifying. No matter how much we read, scroll through news sources and analysis, we cannot get true perspective. We are small and the issues are huge. We are embedded in the moment like tiny pieces in the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle. Yet anyone who does jigsaw puzzles knows even the tiniest missing piece impacts the whole. We are needed—everyone of us—to stay present and play our part, to fit ourselves into the pieces around us, to make a pattern and a story within the perimeters of our lives.

Americana Art Enterprises: The world’s largest commercially available puzzle called What a Wonderful World is an 8′ (2.4m) tall by 29′ (8.8m) long 60,000 piece world map.

It took me ten years to channel the enormity of World War II through the microcosm of Pigeon River, Montana and the lives of the Cooper family. And now I am challenged, in my aging years, to live through this crisis in the microcosm of Whidbey Island, Washington and my own life and community. As I stagger out of winter’s shock, in the greening of early March, I am determined to use every added minute of light and each unfurling bud to rise, to meet trauma with transformation. I take the tiny piece of my life and snap it into connection, find the adjoining pieces, and act with trust that the whole picture will emerge—whether or not I live to see it.

Page 101, The Beekeeper’s Question: it is August 1942.

Rocking on porch chairs waiting for night breeze, Leo whispered into the dusk, “This war is a three-headed dragon, each black mouth round with teeth, consuming young men.”

“That’s surely the strain of it,” Doc peered skyward, “We don’t know what will become of them. Or us. Or our country.” Caged between the Big and Little Dippers, Draco the Dragon writhed in the night sky. … Doc stared at the cosmic expanse of the Milky Way.  “You’re the local preacher and I’m an old country doctor, what can we do?”

            “Help people live through the sacrifices required of us now.”

Even if you’re a rusty, one-legged scarecrow, you have a job guarding tulips. Let’s go…