This diary began as a comment to the excellent series of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diaries by Compound F. It grew large and cumbersome, and seemed too self indulgent, so I discontinued my efforts. Events caused me to write again, and I do believe it might have value to some. So here is my first diary. It’s still self indulgent and long winded.
Twenty years ago, because of a back injury, I left work as a ski guide and returned to my old job at a residential environmental education program with the intent of taking night classes and obtaining a teaching credential. I had concerns about the mental stability of the new director, but since the program was administered by a large county schools office I naively thought that his conduct would be constrained by labor laws. It didn’t go well. He’d skillfully lie to manipulate people and cycled through a repetitive series of mood swings, showing temper outbursts and even firing employees during his bad periods. Staff members expressed concern over his screaming outbursts when dealing with children.
One employee of this outdoor school resigned after enduring repeated invasions of her staff housing, when during her absence, somebody with a key would come into her mobile home, rearrange her bedding and smoke Marlboros, leaving the cigarette butts (the director’s brand by the way). When she tried to discuss this outrage he dismissed her concerns as "female hysterics". Another employee was told not to return because the director felt threatened by her advocating the use of barbless fish hooks after several students were injured with conventional barbed hooks. He justified this act because he felt the staff was "ganging up" on him. I spoke out because people I cared about were being hurt, and as a result became the focus of disciplinary actions, accused of fomenting strife at the school through gossip and insubordination.
We worked at a remote location with no oversight, and he could twist the truth and fabricate events as the need arose. Anything I did became reason for a complaint which I had to answer with a formal written reply. When I told the county schools administration that employees at the school were scared, they scoffed at me. In meetings with administrators it was his word against mine. Eventually the county schools office hired a rather unethical psychologist to work with him. She came in professing to be an impartial arbitrator, but from the beginning actively served as his facilitator and advocate. At one staff meeting she excused his saying that I didn’t belong at the school because I was working on my teaching credential. I endured closed meetings in which he could attack me with her support. The two of them spent many hours together at his residence in private meeting. Being accused of gossiping, and organizing the staff in insubordination, any conversation with other employees was the object of suspicion. I was forbidden to discuss the situation with other staff. I became subject to special rules which didn’t apply to other employees. The administration told me to desist from having former employers send them character references. Needless to say this was all rather stressful. Swamped under a barrage of formal complaints requiring written response, I even made the poor decision to stay home at the school during Spring Break in order to formulate my replies, instead of relieving the stress by spending a week skiing with my partner.
Initially I refused to resign but after several years the situation took its toll and they broke me. My last year at that outdoor school I was sick a lot. The director was in a position to talk with and manipulate the visiting teachers, and if they had any concerns involving me, I had to use him as an intermediary. I had no way to determine if any of these communications were truthful or know what he was telling others. I recognized that I’d never be allowed to obtain my credential while working there, and that eventually I’d be accused of inappropriate conduct with children. So I submitted my resignation. When I finally drove away from that outdoor school I was crying. I’d lost a job I loved, a home, a life partner, and really no longer had any friends there because people were afraid to be associated with me.
I used to be a relaxed happy go lucky guy. After this experience I was a lot more uptight. Nearly a year later when a video was taken of me walking along a pathway, it showed me staring at the ground lost in deep thought. I really didn’t joke around with people any more.
Sometime after a year had passed, I received a phone call from the woman who’d been hired to replace me as naturalist at this outdoor school. She was distraught, afraid to talk. She told me, "The walls here have ears." She explained how during her job interview the director had asked her to accompany him on a summer trip to Arizona. She’d declined his offer, but now was confronted with his telling her that he had letters from three male employees complaining that her promiscuity was destroying staff morale. Nobody would fess up to having written a letter. When she pled with the county schools office for help she was told she had to deal with him as her supervisor. The resident psychologist backed him up. She was scared. I assured her that she was sane, but trapped in an insane situation and that she should consult an attorney. She was too scared to fight them and resigned. This was the last straw.
Former staff members got together. We collected copies of as many letters of resignation as we could get our hands on. We wrote a timeline of events at the school. We formulated a statement that the present director was unfit for his position at a remote residential public school, and obtained as many signatures of former staff as we could. We put all of this together into 100 information packets. We handed some out at a county school board meeting where we described the abuses which the current administration was facilitating. Other copies were mailed out, with one going to every school which sent students to this residential outdoor education program. The county school superintendent called us "disgruntled former employees" and weathered the storm. But now it was different. Before, their psychologist could work to keep the lid on the pressure cooker with the goal each year of keeping the dysfunctional outdoor school program functioning till summer vacation, and then start anew in the fall. And if staff were persecuted and forced to resign, the county schools office could claim that it was a one time event, a "personality conflict". Well now the word was out.
Concurrently, working as a resident ranch caretaker I hurt my lower back again. This time very badly. I’ve always wondered how I might have healed without being involved in this affair. A chiropractor damaged my cervical spine. Eventually I decided on the surgery option. The day after arranging a surgery date I was laid off and told to vacate the ranch. Eventually I was allowed to keep my residence for a limited time after my four-level lumbar surgery. I didn’t heal right. Life devolved into a nightmare of workers comp insurance lawyers and doctors...people working, not in my best interest, judging me, with the power to negatively impact my life. This too was a rather stressful period. I was basically homeless and lived with different friends. I think I moved over ten times in two years. I went back to school as part of vocational rehab. I had trouble focusing, meeting deadlines, and sleeping.
I had wanted to obtain my teaching credential but was afraid what would happen if anybody checked with my former outdoor school employers. This problem took care of itself. As the events were described to me; .... At the outdoor school where I had worked, the director just "got crazier and crazier". Visiting teachers complained but the county schools office did nothing. One employee who was the director’s current focus of harassment was fighting to keep his job and happened to encounter someone who had a copy of our "information packet". He presented this to the county school’s office as documentation that his case was not an isolated personality conflict, but a part of a long history of abusive employment practices. The jig was up. The county schools superintendent quickly closed the outdoor school program, laying everybody off, and telling the press that it was simply a budget matter. The program was handed over to the Boy Scouts (who owned the facilities) who rehired everybody, except for the director. When the now former director went to the county schools office to deal with some paperwork regarding his termination, he lost control, flying into a violent rage which resulted in the evacuation of the building and his being escorted off the property by the sheriff. The Boy Scouts obtained a court order to keep him off the outdoor school property. Going through the files they found that the evaluations which were filled out by visiting teachers each week had been carefully edited. Any negative references to him had been whited out before photo-copies were sent down to the county schools office. The strange thefts and break-ins at the site came to an end.
I now felt safe re-entering the teaching profession and moved back home to live with my mother while attending school to obtain my credential. I found myself overreacting to stressful situations. Taking exams in French class of all things, was an exercise in anxiety like I’d never experienced before. The instructor would often ask if I was OK. Finding work in a difficult school in an economically depressed gang dominated neighborhood, my teaching in the classroom was negatively affected by an excessive adrenal response. It seemed that my body was stewing in stress hormones which only clouded my thinking and hampered my ability to calmly manage a classroom of 50 to 36 ninth graders. During the school year I woke up in a sweat every morning at 3:00 AM. I had students film my classroom technique. Watching the tape I was shocked to see myself pacing the floor and mumbling. Reading about unrelenting stress having profound effects upon the brain I knew that I was hurting myself. The constant stress levels seemed to renew memories of what I’d endured at the outdoor school. I was asked by a student, "What are you always thinking about?" Whenever my principal and school superintendent observed my classroom I’d have anxiety attacks. At one staff meeting the superintendent actually brought up the subject of the "teacher who always appeared distressed when observed in his classroom". I never felt welcome there after that. A former administrator returned to the school to help teachers in their classrooms. Because we shared a background in environmental education she took a special interest in me. My impression was that she was incompetent, and I was frightened of her power to impact my life.
My mother’s sudden death, holding her hand in intensive care while she went into cardiac arrest emotionally destroyed me and gave control of the family home to my oldest brother. I was extremely uneasy about his having this power over my life. Still, based upon his assurances of the stability of my housing situation, I risked sinking my monetary resources into real estate in a small rural town which I hoped to move to in three years. My brother’s next actions contradicted his former assurances and compromised my financial situation. As a result he lost my trust and to get out of this situation I insisted we sell the family house, the home I needed to keep my teaching job. Because of my cervical damage I needed to moderate the amount of time spent looking down while sorting my parent’s possessions, this pain and the stress seemed to work together in a feedback cycle. Financial worry, and the months of moving and endless sorting through my parent’s lives provoked an excessive and unrelenting flood of stress hormones. I have never experienced anything like it. The sense of anxiety was overwhelming. Near the end, trying to finish repairs so the house could sell, I was making ridiculous mistakes because I was so amped up. Friends looked at me askew wondering what was wrong with me.
Completing the move to my new home I knew that I was now somehow different, something was wrong. After the death of my mother I had bought "Healing Emotions; Conversations with the Dalai Lama". Now reading the chapter "Stress, Trauma, and the Body" which discussed PTSD in torture victims, I saw my situation at the outdoor school and how it had changed me.
It seems that living and working at that school, surviving for years in a surreal irrational hostile environment, not able to trust anyone, subjected to the machinations of those with authority over me trying to psychologically break me, had set the mold. For my body, living with an overload of stress hormones was the new normalcy. I now feared situations where others had power to pass judgment upon me, and pull the rug out from under my life. The events surrounding my spinal surgery only reinforced this new worldview. I was trapped in a cascading positive feedback loop of adrenal response. Each stress episode left me more sensitized and susceptible for the next event. And prolonged intensive periods of stress had indelibly changed my abilities and personality.
I’ve always been entranced by a multitude of interests. A Zen master once bestowed upon me the name of Mon Pok (Ten Thousand Happinesses) but now this gift became a hindrance with a reduced ability to focus on important projects. What was once a gift of excitement about so many wonderful things in life had become amplified so that in describing things to others my presentation was unfocused and over the top. People noticeably looked at me differently.
A sudden need arose for a substitute instructor at a community college where my former partner worked. She recognized that I could teach several of these classes and suggested me for the position. Jumping in several weeks into the semester with no preparation was an experience. Again I found my stress levels elevated by an interminable series of deadlines preparing lectures and exams. This was way more difficult for me than it should be. To compound the situation, it was uncertain whether my job would be for two weeks or three months. And the larger of the two classes had been presented to students as an "easy pass", with take home exams which the original instructor had been using for years so that most everybody already had access to the answers going into the class. I wouldn’t use the old exams and the students reacted negatively. My stress response resulted in my becoming more uptight which only compounded the situation. When other faculty observed my class I was overwhelmed with anxiety and began to sweat. On the last day of the larger class I was counting on students asking questions about the upcoming final exam, but nobody had a question about the material. I realized that with no questions I had to punt. Feeling unprepared for the lecture I was suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety. It felt like someone stuck a needle in my arm. An invisible hand squeezed my adrenal glands like a lemon and I began to sweat and shake. I turned to the blackboard and forced myself to begin an outline of the course content, which provided focus and allowed me to regain control of my nerves. This was an extremely troubling experience. I asked my friend to tell me how I was now different from when she knew me years before and she responded with an outburst describing how I was now scattered and disorganized and unable to focus properly. She felt bad afterwards for her blunt and emotional assessment.
In the rural area that’s now my home I’ve interviewed three times for a high school teaching position. The last interview was the motivation for this diary. In the first, I came into a room of administrators and was overly cautious and reserved. The interviewing principal was kind enough to discuss this with me later in a phone call, explaining that there were moments when a glimmer of my personality showed through but they were too few. Because my second interview took place after my experience in a community college, I was concerned about my anxiety. I made an effort to be more outgoing, things went well, everybody was all smiles. Then for a moment I had difficulty finding the words to explain my teaching philosophy, and became self conscious and anxious which made it more difficult to find those words. Others seemed happy with my stumbling explanation but the principal looked at me oddly, with concern.
My last interview was for a dream job. It was at a small continuation school with a handful of students. These were good kids, nowhere near as difficult as the third generation gangsters I’d worked with in overcrowded classrooms. I spent half a day in this classroom with the retiring instructor, and we hit it off well. The students were a pleasure to work with. This was a low stress position, where I could contribute to my community, within walking distance of home. I was told that I was the most qualified of the applicants. In the interview I tried to be outgoing. Somehow our discussion touched upon my leaving the previous outdoor school, and the principal/superintendent and another administrator quickly discussed who would be doing the background checks. A sudden feeling of concern flashed through me, and I kept on, but my presentation was over the top. My answers to questions were not thoughtful and appropriate but instead were repeats of previous interviews, relating more to my former classroom situation instead of the position I was interviewing for. I talked more about myself than the needs of the students. It was as if my brain was on autopilot, replaying a previous routine instead of focusing on and processing the moment I was in. And still I kept on, playing to one interviewer who was enthusiastic about my resume, instead of adjusting my presentation to those other interviewers who’s facial expressions communicated, "Who is this clown?" At the end, I shook everybody’s hand. The retiring teacher, who I’d spent time with and had favored me for the position, looked dismayed. Only after several days did it slowly register what I’d done. That I’m aware of the details of this fiasco shows that my cortical reasoning brain was observing and processing, but that wasn’t the brain which was in control at the time. When I think about this I feel sick inside. I believe that I would have been exceptional in this position.
I spend more time now laying awake wondering about my finances than I do ruminating about my past. I ponder having to return to an urban area to obtain a teaching position in what will probably be a stressful environment. But from what I’ve described, I question if this would be fair to the students, and would I be hurting myself, irreversibly? But bankruptcy is not an option. I’ve turned down several job offers for more physical work because of my back. My physical disability is well documented through the worker’s comp system, and it’s easily understood by most that I need to limit myself to prevent further physical injury. But now a workplace induced psychological injury has been aggravated and after more than fifteen years has returned to haunt my life. It’s a troubling situation to be in.
This saga began because of psychological pressure applied to drive me out of a job. My problems are insignificant compared to those who’ve experienced the trauma of combat. Our servicemen and women in Iraq are subject to the constant threat of violent death from insurgents trying to drive us from their country. What are the consequences of placing young individuals into an urban environment where the only way they can tell the difference between the enemy and those they are supposed to be helping, is when someone tries to kill them? ... and for multiple extended deployments? ... with inadequate rest time? ... and for no good reason? ... based upon lies? What does it do to a person to scoop the remains of their best friend into a body bag? Our Iraq misadventure has sacrificed thousands of American lives and sacrificed the physical well being of many thousands more. But the unseen mental trauma from this extended occupation will leave us with untold thousands of psychological injuries which will haunt the unfortunate for many years to come. And the consequences of the resulting broken families will manifest for generations. You’d think we would have learned from Vietnam.