Slowly, my eyes began to focus again. I was lying face-down on the ground, and immediately below me lay two teeth, surrounded by some spit and blood. It took me a moment to realise that these were my own front teeth. But my thoughts were interrupted by a boot that impacted forcefully with my ribcage.
Minutes before, I had been sitting with my girlfriend at a tram stop in Mannheim, Germany, blissfully ignorant of the small gang of men that had just left a pub close by. The ring leader had a beer bottle in his hand and poured the beer over my head out of boredom. I instinctively jumped up, but a few quick blows to my face sent me straight to the ground. I was thirteen and had no clue how to defend myself. My girlfriend had run away screaming, and I didn’t blame her. She was as freaked out as I was. The kicking and punching stopped at one stage, and I got back on my feet. The gang must have gotten bored and were walking away from me. Suddenly, the gang leader turned around and asked me if I would go to the police. “Of course, I will!” came my response, muffled by the blood in my mouth and the rapidly swelling lips. It was then that the knife appeared. When you read about such things in books, they say that time slows down, and you can see everything in great detail. Not in my case. The guy made a serious attempt to turn me into a kebab, and I have no idea how I turned away in time for the knife to miss me. By now, the tram was approaching and with that came the relative safety of witnesses.
I was close to the front door of the tram and had to pass the driver, who did not say a word. Neither did any of the passengers who were busy looking away. No one offered me help or asked me what had happened, whilst the front of my shirt looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. Blood and snot were everywhere. As it happened, the tram passed a hospital, and I got out and reported to the Emergency Department. After a few X-rays and a few stitches, my parents picked me up, crying, bloodied and humiliated.
I did not realise until much later that one of the most damaging core beliefs was laid down that night: “A lot of people saw what happened, but no one gave a damn. Therefore, no one cares, and no one will ever be able or willing to help you. You are on your own.”
From then on, my life would never be the same again. I went to the police and later testified against the ring leader. He was sentenced to three years in jail and threatened to kill me as soon as he was released. I believed him!
Within weeks, I started training Ju-Jutsu at the local police sports club. Ju-Jutsu is a no-nonsense combination of Judo, Karate, and Aikido and is adaptable to subduing a drunken teenager or killing a combatant on the battlefield. Apart from going to school and earning money in a part-time job, I was training in combat arts every other waking hour. My body changed. The podgy teenager with the little muffin tops turned into a lean fighting machine. I was good at what I was doing. After all, a life-and-death fight in the near future is a good motivation for anyone on this Earth. I became Rambo.
Needless to say, this was a very dark time. It was the late 70s, and a diagnosis of PTSD was not even invented. “Come on; young man. Boys don’t cry! This makes you a real man!”. Now I know what a bullshit attitude this was. But then, I believed it.
At the time of the original assault, my front teeth had been knocked out, and for the next five years, I sported temporary crowns. Combine the darkness in my head with the social awkwardness of a teenager and the poor teeth – it is fair to say that for five long years, there was little laughter coming out of my mouth.
But that all changed in my first year at university. I was in a different town, and in the time before the internet, I was sure that the ring leader would never find me. By now, my teeth had been fixed, I had discovered girls and one day, I had an experience as earth-shattering as any seismic event could be.
It was Saturday afternoon, and I was sitting in a beer garden with two friends. We all had a Stein of beer in our hands, and much of the one-litre content had already gone down our thirsty throats. Out of the blue, a wave of loving warmth washed over me. My shoulders relaxed, and sounds of pure joy poured out of my mouth. It was the first time since the assault that I truly relaxed, and in a fraction of a second, my mind indelibly linked up pleasure and release from pain with alcohol. And not only that – alcohol became a friend who allowed me to put my inhibitions aside. The combination of my well-defined body and my devil-may-care disinhibited attitude attracted girls like moths to a flame. Life was good.
It would take me decades to realise how dangerous my new habit would become. Instead of learning to deal with setbacks and negative emotions, I became a master of running away. The demons of the darkness were still haunting me mercilessly, but alcohol allowed me to escape my reality.
At some stage, I found Mrs Right, and we emigrated, bought a house, and started fighting. We were both broken people and could have done with regular psychology sessions from our teenage years onwards. Wishful thinking! Instead, we focused on our careers, had children and fought some more.
We both used alcohol to run away from our problems without ever taking time to feel our emotions and make sense of the chaos that reigned within our brains. In my career, external validation was all-important to me whilst the imposter syndrome ran riot in my brain. I guess I became a workaholic long before I became an alcoholic. Life challenges multiplied in spectacular fashion, and more and more alcohol was needed to escape the pressure. The attached shame and guilt further prevented me from seeking help, and anger and resentment became driving forces in my life.
However hard I worked and played, the demons continued to ride me. Like clockwork, I was awoken at four am to be shown the highlights reel – “Worst of Stephan over the last forty years”. I would, at times, wake up saturated in sweat with vague memories of the dream I had just escaped from. There rarely was blood and gore. Instead, my dreams placed me in situations where I was utterly out of control. However much I struggled, I could not succeed in my dream. There was no hope. There was no help. Like Sisyphus, I was condemned to push the stone uphill only to see it tumbling back down.
When my children grew older, they would ask why I was suddenly twitching as if someone had punched me in the stomach. I explained to them that I sometimes get flashbacks of things that happened in the past, which made my body respond outside of my control. Soon, this became a daily game, and my sons were keen to figure out how Daddy had made a fool out of himself in the past. I realised then that those flashbacks had really been a constant in my life for a long time.
But I still lived in blissful ignorance. I had reframed my trauma and was now a successful man by many measures. Even when my alcohol consumption increased to dangerous levels, and I ended up in inpatient rehabilitation, I did not appreciate how my longstanding response to trauma had been the root cause of other behaviours.
It would take another five years of sobriety and soul-searching until the truth came knocking. A colleague of mine had been in the Special Forces, and his PTSD started catching up with him in a nasty way. I became pretty worried about him until one day he said with a smile: “Don’t worry, it’s all going to be fine!”. Now, I was petrified. Did he intend to find a permanent solution to a temporary problem?
In my mind, I ran down the list of PTSD signs and symptoms that he had displayed, and suddenly, the lights went on. I was describing myself. Part of me, of course, did not want to believe that. But some things you can’t unsee. I paid close attention to my friend’s progress. Within a week, he was back to his old cheerful self. I was stunned. He had seen a life coach who used hypnotherapy, among other tools. I was intrigued and finally humble enough to seek help from that person. She asked me questions that allowed my brain to formulate the correct answers. She helped me with three hypnotherapy sessions that completely changed my symptoms. The flashbacks dramatically reduced, and the crazy, stupid nightmares also changed in nature and quantity. It was as if my body finally made peace with my mind, and both were no longer fighting each other. Or better said – I finally listened and dealt with the emotions that were stored like molten lava just underneath my body’s surface and erupted at the most inconvenient times.
Don’t get me wrong. My life has not magically changed, and the challenges keep coming. If at all, the world has gotten more violent and unpredictable. Both men mentioned here in this story have since suffered violent deaths at the hands of others. I cannot change that. Neither can I change my own past. I, like so many others, have been the victim of violence, and even if I could, I would not go back in time and undo that. My past made me who I am now. It is said that hard times create hard men. Hard men create easy times. Easy times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.
My vigilance will always be at a higher level than that of most people around me. When my PTSD was out of balance, I could genuinely call this hypervigilance – too much vigilance, which in itself is harmful to you. Nowadays, I am happy with the level of attention I pay to the things that happen around me. If we meet in a restaurant, I will sit with my back to the wall and know where the exits are. I will notice new people coming into the restaurant, and I will ask your forgiveness here and now if I may seem distracted. This is not the case. I am listening to you but am also looking out for your and my safety. I am grateful for my situational awareness and no longer see it as a negative symptom of PTSD.
The same situational awareness also makes me a good doctor you can trust. It is pretty hard for you to catch me out. But I no longer put everyone else before me. I am no longer the knight in shining armour who feels compelled to rescue everyone around him. In an aeroplane emergency, I will put the oxygen mask on me first. In the zombie apocalypse, I know I can only rescue very few people around me. And I can only do so if I am in my best possible state. Therefore, I look after myself and take active steps to prevent me from burning out. I have become far more resilient because I pay attention to my nutrition, hydration, and sleep hygiene. I rarely feel the urge to escape my reality, may that be through alcohol, emotional overeating, working around the clock or any other form of addictive behaviour. When such thoughts invade my mind, I understand them as signs from my body that I have not looked after myself the way I deserve.
The violence in my past has allowed me to explore many coping mechanisms that did not work. I made mistakes which, combined with more trauma, resulted in tremendous battles and life challenges. Sometimes, I won, and sometimes I learned. Only now do I appreciate the tremendous growth I was forced to undergo? I have experienced a profound darkness without which I would have never learned to cherish the light. I have felt hopeless, helpless and alone, and because of that, I aim to be the candle in the darkness of others. PTSD is a double-edged sword that, when wielded correctly, can cut down the weeds and let beautiful flowers grow in a barren landscape. Without my violent past, I would not live my life in the same intentional way. This is a privilege that many others will never experience, and because of that, PTSD has become my superpower.
