Stone Tape Theory
I’ve been reading Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, and it’s been a strange experience. Seeing the symptoms I thought were unique to my trauma history, the things I never saw any expert address printed in such a matter-of-fact way has made it a tough, but good read for me. It’s been taking ages to get through, and for once I really don’t mind. It’s a slow plod, but a pleasant one, and I’m getting a lot out of it.
Still, I think the weirdest thing has been some of the symptoms I don’t have. In particular, I’m realizing that one of the few symptoms of CPTSD that everyone has nailed down, that there’s no debate about, simply doesn’t affect me. I don’t have poor self-worth anymore, it turns out, and while that’s certainly cause for celebration, it has made me pause and consider what I do think about myself.
If I think of myself as anything, it’s either stone tape theory or a tuning fork. If you’re unfamiliar, stone tape theory is meant to explain residual hauntings, or the ghost sightings in which the apparition seems to be following its normal course of business and isn’t aware of anyone or anything else around it. The idea is basically that the buildings themselves are absorbing the energy of whatever activity is happening inside it, recording it the way the grooves in a record do. Once the activity has stopped, and there’s nothing left to absorb, the tape plays and apparitions are seen doing bed checks, washing dishes, and walking down hallways.
Complex trauma is a lot like that. The constant barrage of traumatic events leaves grooves in a person, barely perceptible at first, but deepening as months and years pass with no relief from the pain. Once we escape, once we’re physically safe from whatever was happening to us, the effect of that slow erosion plays out over and over. It doesn’t matter that whatever was done to us has stopped, the etching is still there, and it plays out in us, if not in our actions, then in our emotions, until we can either fill the cracks or chisel them off.
Over the years I’ve been in therapy, I’ve found again and again that the worst of my mental health issues, the worst of my emotional and behavioral challenges are all rooted in trauma. Emotionally, any time I encounter an issue that comes close to a piece of what happened in my childhood, that stone tape takes over and I internally respond the same way I would have when I was a child. I’ve done a decent job of not letting my external behavior match that internal quivering terror, but it’s still difficult to self soothe my way through the big emotional reactions to realistically small triggers.
It often feels like I’ve gone into auto pilot. Something will happen, usually something small or at least manageable, and my brain will automatically tune into that stone tape and start playing out the emotional response I had then, regardless of whether or not that’s a rational or helpful response. I spend a lot of time going about my life in a business-as-usual fashion while the inside of my head is screeching and making demands I cannot meet. It sounds melodramatic to say that I feel haunted, but it’s also accurate. Every day I get through my writing time, work, cleaning, meals, time with my cat with a body that’s responding like it’s being hunted for sport and a brain that’s positive we’re about to be fired, assaulted, or humiliated over every minor mistake or shift in someone else’s mood. Meanwhile, I don’t respond. I keep doing my job. I keep taking care of my space. I keep going about my life because I simply don’t have any other option.
I mentioned a tuning fork, and that’s also accurate. It’s not the purpose that feels so close to my day-to-day experience so much as the vibration. One small tap and the whole instrument quivers and hums at a predictable frequency. While feeling like I’m constantly vibrating isn’t a good experience, it is predictable. I know what will happen when those small collisions happen, can feel the note in my molars before anyone else can hear the sound.
Maybe none of that is having a positive self-worth. It’s also not the soul-crushing self-loathing I felt when I was in my late twenties, when I thought I had nothing to offer the world but my writing, and that even my one acknowledged skill was not refined enough or polished enough to have any value. I remember so acutely that session with Fanny Pack when he started poking the bear that was my self-worth at the time. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to me but hurt and beautiful words. Everything else had been taken from me before I could remember having it.
Now I can see that I do have worth beyond whatever small comfort my writing can offer people. Comparing myself to stone tape theory may not be perfect self-esteem, but there is compassion there, and that’s a starting point. If nothing else, I’ve survived more than most people could imagine. While the building of my body has certainly absorbed all of that trauma, and while the subsequent haunting is difficult to manage, I’m stronger than I was giving myself credit for back then. After all, for the stone tape theory to be observed, the building has to still be standing, and that’s not nothing. The vibration of a tuning fork may feel odd in one’s hands, but it does serve a purpose.
I can also see that not having a clear sense of who I am as a person isn’t the horrible detriment I used to think it was. It’s an opportunity. There can be new recordings in the walls of my body. The grooves can be shifted, made to play a different scene. I have more hope now, and I have more appreciation for the fact that my survival was never guaranteed, that only I could decide whether or not everything I went through would be the end of me or the beginning.
Things do get better. It happens imperceptibly, over months and years. It takes work, and it takes fallow seasons, and then it take the wherewithal to start the work again. It’s not easy, but realizing that I don’t hate myself nearly as much as I did ten years ago when I first sought therapy makes me think it is possible, and it is worth it.
