Let the Sunshine In

letting the sunshine in

Let us clear the air by speaking the unspeakable

Today is one of the hard days.  A day when I woke up crying, tormented by a night of painful, terrifying dreams that left me feeling hopeless and overwhelmed by despair.  A day when my hands won’t stop shaking.

I take prazosin to help with the nightmares brought on by my PTSD.  It’s actually a blood pressure medication.  It does not completely control my nightmares.  It doesn’t even control my blood pressure, which has gone from textbook perfect to “oh shit, you might have a stroke” over the past year.

My once steady heart now beats erratically, causing me to feel dizzy and lightheaded at times, creating an unpleasant skipping sensation in my chest that leaves me gasping for breath.  There’s nothing physically wrong with my poor heart.  It’s simply feeling the toll of four decades of constantly elevated adrenaline and whatever other chemicals my brain pumps out when the pain and the panic take control.

I went to a CLE (that stands for continuing legal education) recently on the impacts of childhood trauma on later life.  It was presented by the Children’s Advocacy Center of New Orleans and was actually meant for social workers and other care providers who treat traumatized children.  But for some reason they got it qualified for CLE credits and I need the hours and I thought it would better help me understand the mess inside my own mind, so I went.

The day was very informative.  It also triggered a massive fucking panic attack that left me screaming and sobbing in my car for an hour afterward.

At least there was a free lunch.

The first hour of the CLE was called “Beyond Burnout: The Cost of Caring.”  I thought that was fitting because I’m about 100 miles past burnout and still accelerating in the wrong direction.

The first thing the presenter said was “post-traumatic stress is a normal reaction to an abnormal event.”  I nearly started crying right there in the conference room.

All I’ve ever wanted is to be normal.

They talked about how people in “care positions” experience a lot of vicarious trauma and vicarious grief just from hearing the stories of the people with whom they work.  They were referring to social workers and psychiatrists, but it applies to district attorneys and public defenders as well, even though we aren’t technically “care givers.”  We hear the same stories and we share the burden of being expected to make things better for the victims and the defendants that we work with, albeit in a different way than therapists.

I struggle to find words to describe how hopeless it feels when you realize that most people who commit crimes do so as a result of their own victimization and trauma.  As an assistant district attorney, I had to do a bond argument on an absolutely horrific drive-by shooting.  One of the shooters was a 17-year-old boy, born into a family of violent drug dealers.  His father had a rapsheet as long as my leg, and died in a firefight at the age of 30.

I “won” a 2.3 million dollar bond, then cried all afternoon, not just for the victims, but for this kid who never had a chance in the world and will now be tried as an adult for attempted first degree murder and spend the rest of his life in Angola.

In 2012, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012), which held that mandatory life sentences are unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment when applied to juveniles because they do not take into account the impetuousness of youth and the capacity young people have to change in response to rehabilitative programs.  However, Miller only said that life without parole cannot be automatic in the case of juveniles, and did not eliminate such sentences altogether.  It merely created a requirement that juvenile offenders who commit murder must be given individualized sentencing hearings at which a judge must consider the standard sentencing factors, including the circumstances and characteristics of the offender and of the crime they committed.

In 2021, the new—and exceedingly brutal—Supreme Court held that there need not be any specific finding regarding a juvenile defendant’s capacity for rehabilitation.  As long as a separate sentencing hearing is held and life without parole is not automatically applied, any shallow, non-substantive, sham of a hearing will do.  Jones v. Mississippi, 141 S. Ct. 1307 (2021).

The guy who was denied the possibility of parole in Jones was fifteen when he stabbed his own grandfather in a domestic dispute.  The facts of the drive-by shooting I worked were much more horrific, and the defendant was two years older than Jones was at the time he committed his crime.  I have no doubt that the sentencing judge will simply say “I have taken his age into account” and order life without parole without further consideration into anything.  Those are the magic words now.1  “I have taken the offender’s age into account.”  As long as that is in the record, the sentence will stand.

The shooting was part of a domestic dispute.  The ex-boyfriend of the teen’s older sister took out a restraining order against her, and for some reason this riled up the entire family.  I can’t prove it, but I have an unshakable feeling that the shooting was a hit ordered by the mother of the teen.  The way all the facts line up overwhelmingly indicate that the mother was the instigator in this situation.

Makes me feel pretty good about my own parenting in comparison.

The circumstances of the shooting were horrific, but so are the circumstances of the shooter’s upbringing.  Between his father’s criminal proclivities and his mother’s willingness to sacrifice her children to satisfy her own bloodlust, the kid’s life was basically forfeit the moment he emerged from the womb.

Our society did nothing to save him from his terrible fate, because why waste valuable resources on a young black man from the New Orleans projects, amiright?  After decades of studies and experimentation in other nations, there is absolutely no doubt that funding high quality schools for all income brackets, creating universal healthcare programs, providing paid maternity leave and affordable childcare, and funding community recreational programs are incredibly effective at reducing crime by preventing it.  But all of those programs cost money, and tax dollars are finite.

Why spend our tax dollars on “the homeless.  The hungry.  Those forsaken by men and gods.  The people of mists and mud, whose only strength was somewhere on the other side of weakness…whose wishes and dreams, undemanding as they were, were of no consequence.  The invisibles.” (Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett, 1991).  So much better to give our money to the oil companies, so they can continue to destroy our already ravaged coastline until the next great storm comes and solves the crime problem permanently by wiping out New Orleans altogether.

Ask me again why I think we’re in the middle of the apocalypse.

All things considered, that shooting would have been a lot for even the healthiest, most mentally stable person to handle.  For someone like me, with decades of my own unresolved trauma, it was absolutely soul-crushing.  That hearing shattered me, and I was NOT OKAY for several days afterward.

I have so many stories like this.  So many cases that I can’t bear to think about.  So many people for whom I still cry, even a decade after their lives crossed mine.

In the Beyond Burnout lesson they told us about “secondary traumatic stress.”  This is where a person develops PTSD symptoms from repeated exposure to the trauma of others.  And when you pile secondary trauma on top of unresolved primary trauma, when you layer PTSD on top of PTSD without a solid foundation for dealing with any of it…

It should come as no surprise that I came undone.  It isn’t shameful.  It was to be expected.  I held it together admirably for quite a long time, all things considered.

The most comforting thing I heard in the Beyond Burnout seminar is that self-harm is not that unusual in people with PTSD.  It comes in different forms, but as a whole it isn’t uncommon.  We don’t talk about it, but it’s there.  The use of physical pain to distract from emotional pain happens more than our society is willing to admit.  But burying it and stigmatizing it does not make it go away.

I am not alone.  I am not “crazy.”  I am certainly not dangerous.  My unspeakable problems wouldn’t be so severe if we as a society permitted them to be spoken about.

I am willing to start the dialogue.

Today is one of the bad days.  But writing it down helps.  My therapist once told me that the next time I want to pick up my exacto knife, I should pick up my pen instead.  This may have been the best advice anyone has ever given me.  I haven’t harmed myself since February.  In that time I’ve filled two notebooks with disjointed lamentations on my pain and incoherent rants about those who have harmed me, but I haven’t harmed myself.  And that’s progress.

There is comfort to voicing the unspeakable.

We are told not to air our dirty laundry in public.  But if you don’t hang it outside for all to see then you aren’t really airing it at all.  A closed off room will always smell musty and dank.  Exposure to sunlight and a fresh cool breeze is healthy and restorative for all humans.

It is time that we, as a society, open some windows in our minds and in our hearts.  It is time to view our fellow citizens, ALL our fellow citizens, with the same love and compassion we would show to our own families.  The job of the government is to care for its people.  Ours is failing miserably, and it is costing us valuable lives.

No one is disposable.  Not even the poorest and most broken among us.  Every soul has value, and it is time that those of us with a voice rise up and fight for those who cannot speak for themselves.

It’s time to talk about the things you don’t say in polite society.

It’s time to let the sunshine in.

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  1. “Magic words” are kind of a big thing in criminal law. In many, many situations there are phrases you MUST say to get relief, and phrases the judge MUST say to ensure that relief is never granted. Knowing the magic words for a given situation is a huge part of being a successful criminal attorney, regardless of which side for which you are arguing. ↩︎
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