Occupational Trauma?

In My Humble Opinion
21

It takes a pretty heavy toll on my husband.

I’ve been working on behalf of victims of crime for ten years. I don’t work directly with clients at my agency, but domestic and sexual violence is certainly a pervasive element of my job. I have PTSD and do end up triggered by things periodically. I’ve seen videos of women getting strangled by their partner (it just takes a few seconds before they lose consciousness. It’s amazing how fast they drop if the perp knows what they’re doing. And the woman had no awareness of what happened after she regained consciousness. They had to show her the video.) I’ve read detailed case histories that include injury reports for sexual assault forensic examinations. I’ve listened to men describe their methodology for identifying, targeting, and serially raping women. And I’ve heard individual stories that will haunt me until the day I die. It’s weird because the nature of my job is largely writing and administration, so I can be just going about my business on a typical day and then encounter something massively triggering right out of the blue.

I did reach a point of suicidal ideation at one point. It was the contrast between the work we are trying to do and the insane amounts of rape apologism and misogyny flying around during the Kavanagh hearings. I remember leaving work one day and I was up to my ears in it, I just had to get away, and I went to my local Panera, and as I’m sitting there eating lunch two women start in about the Kavanagh trial and how the woman is probably a liar and I almost utterly fucking lost it. It just seemed like you can’t get away from it, sometimes. And then you start thinking about how nothing has changed since it happened to you and all the work you’re doing is for nothing.

I figured my way around it, though. The first thing I had to do was create some cognitive distance between myself and my own story and the stories of other survivors. I had to be able to say, “This is not about me.” The second thing was not feeling like I had to be “on” 24/7/365. Like I didn’t have to be a keyboard warrior off-hours. I don’t have to reform every rape apologist or misogynist I encounter. I could take as much or as little of the burden I wanted, at any time. And I had to learn to recognize that people’s opinions, however repugnant, are not a physical threat to me, even though my body interprets them that way.

I’ve still had some triggering events since then but I feel like I can let them go faster.

I think everybody if they do this kind of work reaches a point where they ask themselves, “Can I keep doing this?” And for a lot of people that answer is no. And that’s okay. I think I was just lucky to have the guidance I did at the time I needed it. At least right now, I can keep doing it.

22

Oh, just to add, one of the challenges I have is knowing what’s going to be triggering, upsetting, or uncomfortable for other people, because this is mostly just my job. I was once at a party (I hate parties, first of all) and for some reason the subject of customs came up, and I was like, “Yeah, well, that crossing happens to be the #1 sex trafficking corridor in the country, so it warrants extra scrutiny” and let’s just say things got awkward fast. Most people don’t want to think about all the stuff happening just beyond the periphery of their awareness, in their own community.

I mean the irony is this goes so many levels deep. The forensic nurses where I work have zero capacity to consider that the things they encounter daily are pretty damned upsetting to the rest of us. It’s like every department has their own individual level of comfort within the subject matter and we’re all periodically bumping up against one another because what’s in a day’s work for you may not be what’s in a day’s work for me. You know?

23

This speaks to my conversations at work. I have regular conversations with social workers at my job and realized over the last twenty-five years that I’m glad I’m a Job Coach as opposed to a Social Worker.

My sister, a seventh grade English teacher, has said there are things she’s reluctant to tell me about her job. My friendly neighbor, a police traffic sergeant, said he sanitizes what he tells me about his work a little bit too. I definitely know what @Spice_Weasel’s talking about here.