Comfortably Numb?

Today we saw tens of thousands of women march for justice in 2021 across Australia. They were marching in direct response to the allegations of sexual assault and rape within the walls of Australian Parliament. Many thousands of accounts of personal attacks, violations of boundaries and loss of trust in others have been unhinged by merely being a citizen in Australia watching the news and social media accounts.

So many women gathered today in mass rallies because they were deeply moved and could identify by recent accounts of victims being dismissed, attacked by colleagues for speaking out and vilified as being mentally unstable.

I have never seen such a gathering of women with disparate voices yet all having the same need — to be heard. To be believed.

Invariably, every woman who discloses a form of assault or abuse by someone in power (usually a male but can be a woman) does so with surprise as the secret is leaked from their narrative as they sit amongst their safe place, often within doctor’s consulting rooms. The same can happen for many within sacred places in the church. Or within seemingly closed discussions with mentors in the workplace. Or over a coffee with a trusted friend. They don’t mean for it to happen. It just does, then they spend countless hours of time and energy trying to make the words go back to where they came from. Trying to get back to being uncomfortably numb.

The problem is that most people, even those who experience this, have no understanding of how traumatic memories are stored and retrieved. Because the trauma is so unbelievable even the victims cannot understand why their memory lets them down. It overpays fine details and ‘forgets’ the ones the body recognises might cause more trauma by what is caused ‘flooding’.

Every trauma survivor’s fear is the fear of experiencing flooding. Flooding is best described as an avalanche of traumatic memories returning as if the trauma was happening again, with no filter and no ability to control the release valve. Flooding manifests as nightmares, panic attacks and flashbacks, experiences set off by the most benign of sensory stimuli including smell. The flipside for this state of anti-homeostastis is the primitive defense mechanism of numbing and detachment.

Numbing and detachment don’t serve the victim well either, but as human beings, this is all our bodies are capable of.

Unfortunately, those caught up in the current Australian movement engaging the fury and rage of so many women and their supporters don’t understand this either. It would explain how a victim could still return to work or other places that can potentially evoke flooding. It would explain how victims could look ‘normal’ and perform their roles, again adding to the faulty evidence that they must have made the whole situation up. Nobody knows the extent to which the victims might buy safety to get back to the stage of being comfortably numb. This is why so many victims of trauma and abuse turn to mind altering chemicals such as alcohol and drugs, or even overwork and gruelling exercise to ‘cope’.

If the Australian Government would like to apply the ‘pub test’ as to whether to believe a victim of alleged sexual assault and it most severe form, rape, they should look at an accurate checklist of behaviors that identifies survivors. These survivors are ‘normal’ everyday people exposed to horrific abnormal events and ultimately being labelled as ‘poor historians’ having ‘different versions of events’. This doesn’t make them liars with secondary gain. It clearly identifies them as a victim, purely by what they are demonstrating with their memories, accounts and accusations, and most importantly, how they are told.

So, tonight, as I predict, when those directly affected and traumatised present at overcrowded emergency departments with little or no mental health care, those who cannot speak of their trauma, who present with self harm or substance use, please give them a moment of your time. They don’t want to be there either. Believe, undoubtedly, they want to remain ‘comfortably numb’. They don’t want to be woken up even if they could. They don’t mean to burden the health care system who is fixated on physical symptoms and more organic causes. Currently, they have nowhere else to go, until all of us understand how victims of trauma behave, and can inform their care while they recover.

And they can recover if given the space. I have seen it happen and I believe.