While I read copious amounts of good writing, rare are the moments when a work is so devastating, so essential, that I feel physically altered after reading. This is one such moment.
For I just read Mac McClelland's "I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD," and all I can say is that, if you can handle it, you must read it. Now.
Below, I'll offer some excerpts and explain why, perhaps, this piece struck me with such unmistakable force.
Below is how McClelland's essay begins – don't get put off by the seemingly casual manner in which this starts, for after reading the essay, it occurs to me that McClelland must begin with a light tone as an entry point, given the direction this gut-wrenching essay goes:
It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint. That's what she called me when I told her the story. We were drunk and in a karaoke bar, so at the time I came up with only a wounded face and a whiny, "I'm not completely nuuuuts!" Upon further consideration, a more explanative response probably would have been something like: Well. You had to be there.
There, McClelland goes on to explain, is Haiti, where as a journalist she not only witnessed and absorbed the trauma-induced convulsions of women who were violently raped, but saw the possibility of rape, of violence in the eyes of the men, the locals, around her.
A journalist who covers human rights issues, McClelland explains that she makes a living essentially absorbing the traumas of those who she covers, and that, coming back from her stint in Haiti, she was finally broken to the point of paralysis, and was diagnosed with PTSD.
And this is the part of the essay where I began nodding my head. For the DSM IV, the diagnostic manual detailing mental health diagnoses, notes that, in order to receive a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the following must be true:
The person has experienced, witnessed, or been confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others.
As a journalist, McClelland did not experience rape. She did not witness rape. Nor was she confronted with the actual event. No, what McClelland was confronted with was the results of the trauma, the after-effects of the violence that was visited upon those with whom she spent time. And this experience, of re-living the traumas by witnessing their effects, was so damaging that she began to experience the identical symptoms suffered by the women she covered in Haiti.
And this is the power, the legitimacy, of the secondary victim, the victim who does not actually experience a primary trauma event, but is so impacted regardless that the trauma becomes, essentially, one's own.
I know about this. I know about suffering from PTSD despite not having been the one who suffered a primary trauma event. Not in the same way McClelland experienced it, for as a woman part of her trauma was the fear that the event -- rape -- could be done to her, regardless of the country in which she resided (whereas by leaving Israel, the primary threat was, for me at least emotionally removed).
However, I too have felt the convulsive, paralyzing effects of PTSD as a secondary victim, and I too have decided to move toward the trauma as a way to overcome it, rather than away from it. For me, it was trying to confront the terrorist who tried to kill my wife.
For McClelland, inconceivably, it was trying to overcome her paroxysms induced by a fear of rape by moving toward that fear, by experiencing violent sex, by overcoming violent sex, by surviving it.
I'm not going to post an excerpt from her actual encounter with violent sex, which she experiences with a very close friend, and which is one of the rawest pieces of writing I've encountered in some time. Those who want to read it should go to the actual essay. But I do want to post the moment when, with her therapist, Meredith, she realizes what she must do:
Under the circumstances, violent sex wasn't a matter of recreation for me. It was a way, one way, to help get better.
"Do you have anyone who can do that for you?" Meredith asked simply.
I've got an ex-girlfriend who'd be happy to slap me around for old times' sake, I told her, but I wasn't having rapemares about women. "Isaac," I said. We hadn't slept together in a while, and although we couldn't get along as a couple, we loved and respected each other, blah blah. So here I was making a date to catch up with him over fancy pizza, and then drinking tequila neat. And there I was asking him if this was a sleepover, right?, and being pretty nervous about what my stupid brain was going to do when he got into my bed.
As soon as we were making out, my violent feelings started welling up. "I'm gonna need you to fight me on this," I said.
And this is the way it is for many who have experienced a trauma that they cannot get over: they choose to fight it, or to be fought by it. To move toward the trauma, to be engulfed by it again, or by the possibility of it again, as a way to prove that, yes, you survived, you can survive, you will survive.
After the violent sexual encounter, which is truly violent, Isaac tells McClelland "You are so strong."
It's a phrase that's repeated. A phrase some of us need to repeat to ourselves. In order to survive.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: McClelland's essay has got me thinking about many things, one of which is the issue of traumas experienced by secondary victims, and the power and existential torture such experiences can have. Years ago, when researching PTSD with regard to secondary victims for my book, I came across an article entitled “Understanding the Secondary Traumatic Stress of Spouses” by the social scientist Kathleen Gilbert.
In it, she notes that spouses, as secondary victims, often exhibit psychological symptoms mirroring those of the primary victim, so much so that a unique syndrome—secondary traumatic stress disorder (STSD)—had been identified and defined as “a syndrome of symptoms nearly identical to PTSD.”
In the article, Gilbert brings a striking anecdotal example of STSD from a qualitative study done in 1988 on the female partners of Vietnam veterans who remained home during the war. In interviews, the women claimed they were so affected by their husbands’ stories of trauma that they often had panic attacks “set off by triggers similar to their husbands’, such as ‘the sound of helicopters, sudden noises, gunfire, [and] the smell and sound of spring rain.’”
And I am also reminded, more directly by McClellan, of Antjie Krog, who wrote of her experiences covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in her powerful memoir Country of My Skull.
In the beginning, she was the objective reporter, the disconnected professional, in attendance during the commission’s first hearings, when nameless victims began limping forward to tell of watching nameless men chop their brother’s arms off, split their sister in two, wanting now to simply know where the bones were, to know where their souls rested.
Krog, the objective observer, dutifully wrote everything in a pad. But it didn’t take long before it became impossible for her to remain distant, disaffected, for the stories were so shocking, so brutal that she began to exhibit symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, began to viscerally react to the proceedings as though her story was being told and retold, day after day. The truth made her crack. The truth made her a victim, another victim wanting her story to be heard, craving an audience willing to listen to the truth as she knew it. A truth called memoir. Memoir for her an internal process of reconciliation, a writer reconciling with a newfound, frazzled existence.