LIFE

My therapist explained in our first session that trauma didn't only consist of the bad things that happened, but it could also be caused by the absence of good things that should or could have happened. This definition of the word trauma made me reflect for a long time on my existence from the earliest childhood to adulthood. What were the good things missing in my life as a little boy, teenager, young man, and middle-aged man?

I stared at the question for a while, my nose up to the ceiling, my mouth hanging open, stunned by the omnipresent darkness (I no longer tolerated the light of day which gave life) and by months of fatigue from lying in bed, unable to sleep. Did I even have the right to answer sincerely without being immediately judged as being the most ungrateful of all, or too demanding? After all, wasn't there so many people worse off than me in the world? Besides, at least, I had survived, hadn't I? How about all the others? 

Shut up, Borys!

My therapist also explained to me that for people like me who spoke two or more languages, it often happened that each language was associated with a very particular experience, a very specific trauma. She encouraged me to pay attention to what she liked to call "the language of an emotion". If thoughts came to my mind, in what language did they manifest? When I remembered those who had loved me, in what language did my memory manifest? And what happened in the bad memories? How about the nightmares? 

"Why did you join the military forces?" My therapist's voice came out of the darkness of the room like a dream, questioning me in a curious tone. She was sitting in the armchair next to me.

"My dad's idea," I replied dismissively as if there could have been any other explanation.

"And did you like working in the Forces?" She continued seemingly interested.

"Would you like being directly or indirectly involved in the suffering of millions of innocent people?" I replied sarcastically, turning angry dark eyes to her direction.

"I understand. You don't like talking about your experience in the Forces," she said. The tone of her voice didn't sound like a negative criticism, but rather like a simple observation. The artificial light of technology suddenly appeared as my therapist began tapping on her tablet, her figure emerging from the darkness like a ghost. I turned to her again to nod curtly:

"No, I don't."

"You told me your paternal grandfather was held in the concentration camps during the Second World War, has he ever told you about it?" My therapist continued after a few minutes of silence. She put her device back on the small coffee table beside us.

"Yes, but not much," I replied with a sigh. I propped myself up on one elbow. I turned to the direction of her voice and asked her in an irritated and reproving tone:

"Is it for stirring up all the painful moments in my life and that of my family that I pay you?"

Men's unhealthy curiosity about the misfortunes of others had always deeply disgusted me. Did that woman really want me to tell her everything I had done or seen in over thirty years in the Forces? As a matter of fact, not much. It is that Air Force pilots can't look their victims in the eyes when shooting from several meters in the air while sitting comfortably in the cockpit of a sophisticated aircraft as solid as a vault and as fast as as the speed of light. As for my grandfather who survived Auschwitz, he had died well before I was even born. So, I had never known him. What did his story have to do with mine more than a century later? On the other hand, in the camps of artificial intelligence, I had seen the story of humanity repeating itself right before me. In the eyes of these mutilated men, women and children, I had seen my own demons: fear, greed, shame and ego.

At that very moment, all the existential conversations I had had with Alegria on the balcony of the family home came back to me like slaps on my face. It was the harsh realisation that all these beautiful life lessons I had carelessly tossed into a lost corner of my memory had to be taken up again from the beginning. Lesson 1: reconnect to the earth and nature. Lesson 2: listen to the pains of our ancestors. Lesson 3: Forgive them and make better choices. Even though I didn't like it, I had to go back and reveal the dirty secrets of my parents and grandparents to find the origin of the pain that was killing me.

Suddenly, my eyes filled with tears. I sat down on the couch sobbing like a baby. My therapist grabbed her tablet for a fraction of a second. She took the pack of tissues from the coffee table to hand it to me without saying a word.

"I've let down everyone I love, even Alegria," I said between two sobs, staring at the wall in front of me.

"Who's Alegria?" The therapist asked quietly.

"My maternal grandmother," I began, wiping my nose. "I lived with her in Cuba all my childhood and adolescence."

"Cuba," the therapist resumed with great interest. "Why did you and your family return to live there?" She continued, intrigued.

"I was the only one who went to live with Alegria," I exclaimed, lowering my head, overwhelmed by the memory of the night of the separation.

"Why was that?" My therapist asked calmly.

"I'd kissed another boy in the schoolyard in front of all my classmates," I said in disgust, the memory of the scene bringing a dry bitterness to my throat. I turned my gaze to my therapist to imagine her reaction to that revelation. I visualised her serene face staring at me with compassion and curiosity, but no judgment.

"How old were you when your parents sent you to live in Cuba?" My therapist asked in a peaceful voice.

I laid back down on my couch, allowing my eyes to wander in the melancholy inspired by the topic of our conversation. I took a deep breath. I answered in a low voice, as if this piece of information had to be kept secret:

"Five or six years-old."

"Would you like to go back there?" She continued. The assurance and softness of her voice soothed me, but her question left me puzzled. I frowned and turned to her to ask:

"Where? To Cuba?"

"No," she replied immediately. I guessed she smiled. "In your childhood? At the exact moment of the separation," she said, reaching out again to grab her device from the coffee table.

"Do you know how to go back in time?" I asked without conviction.

"Time only exists inside of us, Borys. Outside of us, there has never been and there will always be nothing else, but the present moment. Paradoxically, it's this moment that we must trust to find inner peace. she began, then she stopped for a split second as if to give me some time to reflect on this fact that I had always known without ever wanting to accept it.

"I'd love to talk to the five-year-old boy if you don't mind. What languages ​​did you speak at that time?" She went on immediately.

"Polish and French. I didn't speak Spanish, but I understood it perfectly."

"If you understood it perfectly, you were quite capable of speaking it too," she says. "Children from couples like your parents learn from an early age to categorise their mother tongues into dominant language vs dominated language," she continued. The language of the country where the child grows up most often becomes the dominant language, but in some cases, the dominant language represents the domination of one culture over another, in history for example."

"How many languages ​​do you speak?" I asked my therapist, curious.

"My father was South African of Greek and Dutch descents and my mother was German. Having lived the first twelve years of my life in South Africa, I grew up speaking fluently English, Afrikaans and German. When my parents moved to the UK at the end of the Apartheid, I learnt French and Spanish at school. I've lived and worked for many years in Latin America and Switzerland, so I speak these two languages ​​fluently. So that's five."

I lay there for awhile without saying anything, trying to imagine my therapist's childhood and the domination traumas of her parents' story that she undeniably carried within herself. I understood why Fatou had insisted that I chose this therapist among all those available in the city.

"How are you going to get the five-year-old Borys to talk?" I asked, breaking the silence.

"Hypnotism. Do you know what it is?" She said simply.

"I've heard of it, but I'm not sure how it works."

"Would you be willing to try?"

"Why not, if you think it can help me."

"I think so, but you'll have to be aware of your emotions during the hypnotism."

"How can I stay aware of my emotions if I'm hypnotised?"

"Hypnotism puts you in a deep trance state, but you remain conscious and aware of all your senses," she explained quietly as she placed her tablet back on the coffee table. "Pay attention to how your body reacts and interacts to the sound of my voice."

I frowned, confused by my therapist's instructions. How many of us learn how to pay attention to our body? We go through the passage of life from birth to death without ever understanding the signals of our own body: anger in the back, fear in the stomach, sadness in the chest, shame stuck in the throat, confusion in the head. As surprising as it may seem, my therapy sessions reconnected me to my body more than to my mind. Session after session, I learnt to feel and listen to the energy that brought to life the smart, talking remotely controlled puppet I had been conditioned to become.

"Very well," she snapped, then she continued in the same soft, peaceful voice: "Close your eyes... Take a deep breath and relax the muscles of your body: your face, your neck, your shoulders, your arms, your fingers, your belly, your legs, your feet, your toes. Take a deep breath. Exhale... Inhale... Exhale... Concentrate on the steady rhythm of your breath passing through your nostrils; follow the movement of your belly with each breath. Inhale... Exhale... Inhale... Exhale... Inhale... Exhale... Visualise yourself getting on an airplane. You're alone. You're only five years-old..."

"Where are my parents? Why aren't Ania and Iwona coming with me?" I asked in a frail, shaky voice. All the muscles in my stomach contracted at the same time.

"I don't speak Polish, Borys," a female voice interrupted in Spanish. "Do you speak Spanish?" The female voice continued softly.

I didn't answer as the pain in my stomach grew.

"Mum's afraid of the monster. I'm afraid of the monster too," I finally answered with difficulty in Spanish.

"What monster?" The female voice asked.

"The monster that took mummy's daddy away," I asserted as hot tears rolled down my cheeks.

"Did your mum tell you that?" The female voice questioned softly.

"No," I started with certainty. "Mum thinks her voice called out the monster into her house and the monster kidnapped her daddy," I instinctively added.

"And how do you know that, Borys?"

I didn't answer. The certainty of my mother's trauma felt as palpable as the air around me: invisible, light, odourless, but as real and undeniable as the life that animated my whole body. I had no idea to how I knew that, me, a little boy of five. I might not even have understood it if my mother had told me in her own words. Adults like to tell stories to children with well-written sentences and colourful drawings, but it is the stories without words or images that they tell us on a daily basis that stick with us the most. Their indelible imprints permeate us like ink.

"Everyone's afraid of the monster on the island," I resumed with a deep sigh as if to release the fear around which I felt was choking me. "The monster's everywhere. He watches and listens to everyone even during the day. It's not a night monster like in most stories. This monster lives freely in broad daylight. He owns everything and leaves us with nothing. No one can defend against him when he attacks. You just have to pay attention to everything you say; it's the only way to escape the monster."

"And your dad, was he afraid of the monster too?" The female voice in French asked after a long minute of silence.

"Dad?" I resumed anxiously. " Where is he? He'll soon come and pick me up to take me home. Then, I'll be able to have all the food I want."

"Why do you say that, Borys? Can you explain to me?"

The pain in my stomach intensified at the same time as if I hadn't eaten for days. I had no memory of such pain: throbbing, invasive, perpetual.

"Do you have a stomach ache? Is that why you say that?" The female voice resumed in French immediately.

"Yes, I'm hungry," I replied confidently. "Alegria and Pedro too. We eat when there's food, but there isn't always any, and not as much as at dad's place."

"Why aren't Ania and Iwona with me?" I asked shyly in French, breaking the silence.

"They didn't kiss the little boy in the schoolyard," the female voice replied in a tone that sounded neither reproachful nor judgmental, but like a simple recount of the fact.

"Is it wrong to kiss boys if you're a boy?" I asked as my heart suddenly started racing.

"No, Borys. It isn't wrong," the female voice replied calmly. "Why do you think it's wrong?" She asked.

"I don't know, but dad only punishes me when I do bad things. So, ..." I stopped short, troubled by the doubt in my mind as to what I had just said.

The knot in my belly seemed to indicate both my discomfort and the revelation that my doubt had suddenly unveiled. My father's authority had nothing to do with whether my actions were good or bad, but they had rather everything to do with the expression of his de facto authority over me and others. As a little boy himself, he was told that he too would have an all-powerful voice over some, but not all, when he grew up. He had waited many years for the right to be able to demonstrate his authority over those who had belittled him: men. As a little boy, his opinion counted for nothing. However, once a grown man, his opinion would become as powerful as those of the men of his childhood. Again, no words told me of my father's delusions of greatness or his own discomfort with his failed ambitions. Yet here too, I could sense the certainty of my father's trauma as palpable as the energy that animated my whole body.

How to describe what matters, what is needed if everything is just a bunch of words without meaning or value?

Have I lived half my life in a well-defined corner of my memory, trapped between my mother's fears and my father's vengeful illusions?

The answer to this question terrified me. I opened my eyes again and sat up in a surge of panic. I grab the tablet from the coffee table to light up the room as I turned to my therapist. She watched me silently, her face closed, but peaceful. What other secrets would she help me reveal to myself if only I had the courage?

When I was a teenager, Alegria had told me that life wasn't easy, and this was truth, but she had failed to tell me one important thing about life: for survivors, living was also unbearably long. Survivors see everyone else die around them, powerless. While a supernatural force seems to strike all the others making them disappear in a flash, the survivors on the other hand, stand there, untouched, spared by the same supernatural force. 

Why?