When I began writing my novel She Ran Away, my protagonist was a woman drawn into a present-day mystery at her family’s ranch in the Southwest. But I hadn’t done much thinking about her backstory. As I sat at the keyboard, my muse began to reveal more about my main character Cate Finley’s past. The more I saw and wrote about her, the more I realized her traumatic history had to inform her present. But in what ways? I went searching for a book that could educate me on the effects of trauma and found Peter A. Levine’s Waking the Tiger already on my bookshelf. I’d picked up a copy a dozen years earlier when I first began to work in the equine-assisted mental health field. I’d signed on as the horse expert, with limited experience in the behavioral health field. My therapist partner recommended the book
as a proper introduction to working with PTSD clients.
Re-reading the book years later, one of the premier symptoms of trauma caught my eye—dissociation. We often think of this state in its most dramatic form, the person with multiple personalities, but dissociation can be subtle.
Someone who constantly daydreams, who comes across as spacy and otherworldly, can be mentally separating themselves from the discomfort (and threat) of their past trauma. Another person can function at a highly competent level in the present while wholly cut off from their trauma history. Often the only way they can access their traumatic memory is under hypnosis. In both cases, the person’s present-time behavior falls into the normal range. That won’t stop their trauma from triggering them unexpectedly via a seemingly harmless and unrelated event.
People in treatment for PTSD often need to tune into their somatic self—the body’s sensory memory of the trauma—before they can heal. That’s why experiential therapies, such as equine-assisted psychotherapy, have become successful. The way past trauma is through it, and that takes support and bravery.
The subtitle of Waking The Tiger reads, “The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences.”
Transformation … isn’t that what we all aspire to in our lives?