9/11 and PTSD

There has been an orgy of media coverage for the fifth anniversary of 9/11. As if anniversary were an appropriate word for the murder of over 3000 innocent civilians, and the ongoing murder of over 12,000 rescue and construction workers who toiled in the chemical aftermath of that attack. I wanted to talk about something else today, but the media coverage wouldn’t allow me to let it go. It kept coming back. Even in the chair at my dentist’s office today, I found no rest from its onslaught. Looking up at the ceiling, my doctor had a poster of New York prior to 9/11 up in one room, with the Twin Towers on the left of the shot, looking pristine in the morning sun. The whole of New York looked pristine in the poster, as if there were no noise, no pollution, no murder, no fighting, no alcoholism, no drug abuse, and no sex crimes on the face of that tiny slice of the world.

A well-known feature of post-traumatic stress disorder is that reminders of traumatic events, especially anniversaries, can bring back horrifying memories of the event, to the extent that the PTSD sufferer can re-experience the trauma in all its horrifying detail. There was plenty of trauma to go around in New York City on 9/11. The most horrifying were people jumping out of windows to their deaths. What horror was inside, that jumping to a certain death was a better alternative? Surely, it was burning to death. The quick snap, the horrifying thud and then finality, had to be a better choice than slowly burning, or even worse, surviving such a burning. But those bodies hitting the ground had to traumatize some of the people there to the extent that there is no image that will ever manage to replace it. I never saw this image, that is, the image of someone hitting the ground after jumping from that height, 100 or more stories. No one did. The media would not show such a horror. I would not know of it at all, except for one NPR reporter who mentioned it once, and then never again, just before the second plane struck on that day. I didn’t feel the trauma of 9/11 until that report. Until I knew that people had fallen as many as 100 stories to their deaths, at speeds so fast that their bodies disappeared upon impact, leaving barely an oil slick on the ground. I remember clearly the reporter saying he saw a body hit the ground so hard, it was forced into the concrete sidewalk. That’s when the terrorists accomplished their mission, in my eyes. I was terrified. I was completely, totally in the present. I was under attack, at my desk in Raleigh, North Carolina. Good for you, Mr. Usama. For that moment, I realized that I had no family, no lover, no life at all, and it might be over any minute. I was in a building housing an FBI office, and I was inside a potential target. 

However, the media warnings of these reminders strike me as hollow and false. Most PTSD survivors are iron men and iron women, and when trauma strikes again, they don’t feel. So today is not the day when PTSD sufferers will have the most pain. People will try to spare them. Stay away from the TV, they will say. They will offer comfort, but today is the wrong day for that. Today PTSD sufferers will soldier on, I think. Today they will see the memorials, they will listen to President Bush justify his war, they will see the pictures of those planes and the smoke and the falling bodies and the people running from the buildings, and they will feel nothing. They may even congratulate themselves that they are holding up so well.

But tomorrow, or the next day, or next week, the rubberband holding the trauma in check will finally snap just when the coast is clear, when everyone is done talking about it. That is when survivors will collapse in their bathrooms, screaming in despair. That is when the bodies will fall again, in their bedrooms, in their living rooms, in their kitchens, and the sound, the terrible sound of death, will replay and replay, and they will do anything to stop it from hurting them.  They will wish to close it all up, to push it down, to drink it away, but they must open themselves up to it or they will never get past the terror. Or the terrorists. Neither will any of us.

We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open, and still we must peel away the layers of our heart. – Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Tags: ptsd, 9/11