Me? Traumatized? By Marsha Jacobson
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In her recent memoire “The Wrong Calamity” Marsha Jacobson recounts a life of trauma and grief set in motion by childhood abuse. Her story moves through the trauma she suffered in childhood and adulthood to hope and a rebirth of sorts when she takes back control of her life and devotes herself to her writing. Marsha’s book portrays a poignant picture of both trauma and recovery that survivors, the public, and professionals alike will benefit from reading.
How had I not realized I was traumatized? In my professional life, I had a talent for identifying the source of problems. Yet, in my personal life, I couldn’t recognize that I had self-defeating responses to the world and that they derived from a past that was clearly traumatizing.
My parents neglecting and undermining me? That, I told myself, was “sad.” My first husband refusing to help me when I was stuck in quicksand? This, I told myself, was his “quirkiness.” His throwing furniture; his kidnapping my daughters; my own nearly fatal health emergency . . . these things I walled off and never thought about.
Raised to believe I was a no-account, I agreed to marry a secretive, controlling man and move to Japan with him because I saw no way out. In Tokyo, I unexpectedly got a job at Mattel Toys Southeast Asia and realized—for the first time—that I had some talents. As my confidence grew, my husband became so abusive that when we returned to the US, I had to grab our two toddlers and escape from him in a police chase. Only a last-minute stroke of luck kept me out of jail. While building a successful career, raising my girls, and fending off their vengeful father, I was constantly on guard, sensing him out there, ready to attack at any moment.
I married again. This marriage was wonderful—until memories my second husband buried in childhood revealed themselves: he’d been terribly abused by both his parents. When he had flashbacks, he became aggressive. When he shared with me what had been done to him, his traumatic memories became mine as well. His PTSD shattered our marriage and me. Traumatized? Let me count the ways.
The power of the pen
After my second divorce, I started writing personal essays. One of those pieces got me accepted into a writing group led by the author Joyce Johnson. By then, I’d decided I wanted to publish my essays as a collection, but Joyce felt strongly that I should instead turn my work into a memoir. I argued strenuously, but, fortunately, she persisted, and, finally, I agreed. The theme seemed obvious: my evolution from insecure to self-assured, resulting from two broken marriages.
As I worked on my memoir, The Wrong Calamity, many of my essays landed on the cutting room floor. A two‑pager about a hat became just a few lines. A short piece about my losing eighty pounds became a whole chapter. An 800-word piece about the quicksand became a few paragraphs, with all the humor removed because I now understood that the incident was emblematic of the bullying I’d let myself endure.
My book grew, and I discovered connections between what I’d thought were unrelated pieces. I couldn’t include the hat without connecting it to grief. Writing about my first marriage made me grapple with the issue of self-esteem. Far from being just about the impact of two broken marriages, my story was a tangle of interconnected themes that included neglect, eating disorders, single-parenthood, domestic violence, vicarious PTSD, triumph, and the sources of my resilience.
“Now I have hope.”
About five years ago, I did a reading of an excerpt from my still in-process memoir. Afterward, a woman in the audience came up to me. “All the details were different,” she said, “but you were telling my story. Now I have hope that I’ll make it through okay.”
Standing face‑to‑face with someone who said I’d inspired her made me feel a moral obligation to be more open. I realized I’d made my own story look too easy. I’d omitted some things that reflected badly on myself. I hadn’t been clear about how incapacitating my trauma had been and how long I’d lived with its profound effects. What followed was more than a year of hard thinking and rewriting. During that time, I came to see ways I’d undermined myself.
I’d accepted my parents’ gospel that I was someone who couldn’t handle things, someone who was always wrong. When I did something well, I told myself it was the exception that proved the rule. As I wrote in The Wrong Calamity:
. . . back then I saw myself as my mother did: nothing worth caring about; and as my father did: nothing worth thinking about. And I thought that somehow I’d wronged both of them.
I’d spent years blaming my young self for my dysfunctional adult behavior instead of changing my own behavior. I was obese, I’d told myself, because “she’d” eaten uncontrollably. I’d had an ex-husband who stalked me for years because “she’d” agreed to that first marriage, as this passage from The Wrong Calamity describes:
In the instant before I said yes, I saw, clearly, an image of myself in a coffin. I actually heard the sibilant exhale of the pistons and the decisive click of the lock as the lid closed on me. “It’s over,” I said to myself, meaning I’m not sure what, and to him I said again, “Yes.” . . . it’s inescapable that when it mattered, for just an instant, I knew this marriage would nail me into a very bad box, and immediately I was resigned to it. The sorry truth is, I was relieved to have things settled.
In my second marriage, I’d gone too far in protecting my husband’s privacy and consigned myself to a secretive life. This selection from The Wrong Calamity elaborates:
Under orders from myself to act with friends and family as though things were normal, I found I had no stamina to pretend. I pulled back from everyone . . . Without intending to or even noticing, I was the one who became excessively withdrawn.
Finding myself
Finding and trusting my strong self took about twenty-five years. At the heart of it was overcoming the demoralizing, debilitating, and exhausting effects of low self-esteem.
Though my parents neglected me, to my great fortune others supported me. My grandmothers were most significant, but there were also teachers, friends, employers, a doctor, a lawyer, and others who saw more in me than I saw. They helped keep me moving forward. One gift of writing The Wrong Calamity is that it spurred me to reach out to those people and let them know how much they’d mattered.
Ending my binge eating and losing eighty pounds coincided with my increasing sure-footedness. My eating disorder isn’t gone, but it’s usually in remission. In especially difficult times I still overeat, but I get on top of it pretty quickly. Now I realize it’s a sign that something’s triggering me, and I focus on figuring out what that is.
As I developed self-esteem, I came to see that I could do more than just wait for the next bad thing. For example, I realized I could leave my abusive husband. It would be frightening and hard, but staying with him would be worse. I was empowered by the realization that even if I couldn’t change others’ behavior, I could change my own. This insight came in baby steps, venturing a tiny defiance and, gradually, bigger ones. Even the tiny ones were daunting, but the discovery that I often prevailed kept me motivated. In The Wrong Calamity I describe one of the early breaks from my usual compliance, when my husband wanted me to cut off relationships with friends he disapproved of.
“I told you . . .” Peter started, but I cut him off. “She’s my friend,” I said quietly. “And I am having lunch with her. We can talk more about this at home, but not here. If you make a fuss, I won’t be a part of it.” He stormed out onto the street, a tornado of a man. “Men!” I said, back with my friend. “Can’t live with ’em. Can’t live without ’em.” But my hands were trembling on the table.
A word about writing and therapy
When The Wrong Calamity came out, many people asked if writing it had been “cathartic.” Even more said some version of, “Writing’s like therapy, only cheaper.” I disagree. I’ve done writing, and I’ve done therapy. They’re not equivalent. Writing my book helped me get my story straight. It made me remember incidents I’d walled off and helped me realize their importance. I’d previously been in and out of therapy, but it hadn’t been effective, and I’d given up on it. Once I had a clearer sense of my story and more awareness that many of my self-defeating actions were connected to my past, I started again, this time successfully.
I don’t know if I would have gone back to therapy if I hadn’t written my memoir, but I do know that writing it gave me important insights and opened me to new ones, even very difficult ones. In short, it made me want to keep growing.
