Composing a Further Life

consciousness-raising groups. And in these consciousness-raising groups, they begin to say, ‘You know, I don’t know what I’m hearing, but I’m being told by many of my clients that they have experienced incest,’ and then another woman in the group would say, ‘I’ve had that experience,’ and they began to realize that this wasn’t one in a million, that this was very common. Why were they hearing this? They were hearing it because they were sitting face-to-face with their patients and responding empathically to their patients’ pain and even crying with them, and they discovered of course not only the commonness of incest but that restoring relatedness to the therapeutic process is what heals.” Jane told the familiar story with passion. “That changed everything. We now know that that limbic resonance between people is what saves lives and what allows people to heal. It really was the women’s movement that brought that about.”
    “My sense, Jane, is that all the time that you spent with veterans and soldiers in the Vietnam era, sure you were involved in the resistance movement, in trying to stop the war, but you were also countenancing them and helping them to understand their pain and their own dissent. I would guess that contributed to the evolution of understanding of post-traumatic stress, not for framing the diagnosis but for helping veterans to be able to say why it was so awful and helping them to say it to each other.”
    “I’ll never forget the first exposure I had to it, at Fort Ord,” Jane told me, “with this young man who could not speak above a whisper and could not get the words out. I finally intuited that what he was trying to tell me was that he had killed a child, but he couldn’t really get it out.” When Jane told her father about it, he was angry, saying that a soldier shouldn’t talk about such a thing, and she argued that he had to. “A lot of it came out of the FTA, the Free the Army Show. That’s something the GIs came up with, but really they meant ‘fuck the army’ and there was a GI paper called
FTA
and our show was called
FTA
. We would meet with groups of GIs and listen, and yes, I think that talking therapy empowered a lot of the guys.”
    “That new understanding of trauma has illuminated so many other kinds of events that happened to people,” I went on, “and yet we’re still trying to persuade them of the damage that they’re doing to civilians with their military adventures, to the children who see it, and to the soldiers themselves. How much of this society consists of people who are severely damaged either by abuse in childhood or by trauma as young adults?”
    “People don’t realize,” Jane said.
    “We abuse children in the same way in which we abuse the natural world,” I went on. “We think we own it. I wasn’t suggesting, you know, that you intuited or formulated the diagnosis of PTSD, but I think you contributed to the conversation that made it possible.”
    Like Dick Goldsby, Jane has been able to look at mistakes made in her youth, and perhaps the one she regrets most was allowing herself to be photographed in Hanoi beside an antiaircraft gun. “What happened to you has happened to many people. You got ‘quoted out of context,’ ” I said. “A piece of your behavior got pulled out of its context and used.”
    “I regret that that photograph hurt some soldiers and their families, because they felt that an American who had benefited from a lot of things this country has to offer had turned against her country’s troops, which of course was totally the opposite,” Jane told me. “That causes me pain, and I’m really sorry about that. The right-wing politicians tried to make it look like I was a traitor. But I know what I am. I’m of the opinion that if you are true and clear and coming from a good place, it blows away in the ether.”
    “You know, we seem to have the idea that all criticism is hostile. We don’t in this country have a clear understanding of loving criticism,” I said.
    “Our forefathers did—those deists!” Jane exclaimed.
    “I think it’s connected to a psychological issue about dealing with ambivalence toward parents that you love and you also hate a bit. You know, you can’t not love them, even the children of abusive parents can’t get rid of that love, but they do need to admit that something was wrong. When we criticize the policies of this country, especially in wartime, people say