Blog Post 6: Write to a Friend in Pain

A strange thing happened when I launched this project. My dearest living girlfriend—let’s call her Zelda—took great interest in it.

But she suddenly dove down into complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD).

This abrupt change startled me on two counts. The first is that I have known Zelda for decades, and I was well aware of her horrible history of child abuse. But I thought she had processed it all in therapy.

She thought so too.

The second reason for my surprise is that she had just written down the story of her trauma, in detail—exactly as I recommend that trauma survivors do, based on extensive research, my experience and the beneficial impact of doing so for many survivors.

But my friend had been recently triggered by three events. First, the abrupt changes in our political landscape and the social texture of this country. Second, a dear friend had just turned on her in a vicious and surprising way (without warning). The third event was writing down her trauma story for this project. 

Suddenly she was reliving it all—that pain and abuse from childhood, in new depth.

How well I know that pain. I also know how flashbacks can ambush you after you think you’ve already deeply processed all your trauma. Since Zelda and I now live far apart, of course I phoned her.

But I also wrote her a letter of support and love. The letter had an impact. Here it is. At the end of it, I will tell you how it helped us both, and why I am so deeply glad I wrote it.

Writing to friends can often be more powerful than phone calls—or even meeting in person.

                                                                        June 12, 2025

Zelda,

Thank you so much for sharing your honest feelings. It meant a lot to me. I’ve thought about you deeply ever since. 

The first thing I want you to hear is that you’re beautiful. Not only physically, although that too of course! I mean your spiritual beauty.

I have known you more than thirty years. I have watched with admiration and a little envy your spiritual journeys through Al Anon and Quaker meetings, self-interrogation and reflection. You have tried—at times with every fiber of you—to give yourself to the powers that shape our being. You have worked so hard to become a better person.

I bow to that journey. There has been dignity and self-respect in it. It made your Quaker wedding beautiful and spiritually elegant. I loved its unpretentious simplicity and charm. The wedding moved me deeply, and I adored the bucolic setting and reception on the meeting house wraparound porch, where we sat in chairs that overlooked rolling woods and fields. All this made your wedding seem like a sculpted brooch on the chest of God, both an ornament and an artifact of your inner joining as a couple.

Your wedding spoke to both of you, and to the quality of your relationship. But most of all, for me, it spoke to the power and beauty of your spiritual search.

That journey will feed you now. You probably won’t feel it yet, too deep in the bowels of the misery. But it will guide you. Everything you’ve given to your spiritual journey is ingrained in you.

You told me on the phone how you feel like dirt, detritus and “damaged goods.” As I did too, during my own PTSD, and I think most sexual trauma survivors do. And those feelings are horrible and real, and I honor them. But…

Feelings aren’t facts. They are the truth of your feelings, but they are not objective. As one who stands outside you, and your honest friend, I cling to your outer and inner beauty. It means so much to me. It humbles me. I am grateful you are my friend. I respect and honor you. You and your journey.

Please hold on to that, that you inspire admiration and humility in me, who have made my own dire journey. I don’t think anyone understands what trauma does to our brain and body who hasn’t experienced PTSD. How it batters us, flesh and soul. How we want to beat our head on walls. It’s wildly strange and wrong and unfair. We were the ones hurt. Why are we twice punished? For that’s how it felt to me.

But this price we pay for numbness comes because we didn’t have the strength to fully process all the pain as children. And we sensitive artists are hardest hit, I think, on several counts.

First, artists are overly sensitized by virtue of being “high gain,” prone to absorb even tiny stimuli. Second, we tend to be more “receptive,” a word I use to encapsulate our physiological tendency to retain sensory stimuli longer for processing in short-term memory, and also in our cells and pores and blood, which makes the stimuli more available for conscious analysis later—often a gift to artists—but also compounds the intensity and extremity of almost any trauma’s impact.

At least, in my experience.

Thirdly, most artists are ruminative. We reflect. We digest. We assess our life experiences constantly. And so it becomes difficult to avoid neurotically fixating on our trauma. Personalities (preponderantly, but not only, men) who are both biologically and by virtue of their family and broader socialization prone to distract themselves from pain and adverse events are lucky in a way: they can deflect or reduce traumatic impact by taking action as distraction. As a result, they tend to ruminate far less about traumatic episodes and become depressed less often. 

We artists lick our wounds. We’re made for it. It’s why so many artists leach their trauma into artistry. Our work product is simultaneously art and self-healing, a way to process the darkness in complex and holistic ways. (I also believe that’s why so many artists fixate on anomie, although the modern-day splintering of our social fabric plays a dark role too.) 

Which leads me to the last reason I think artists tend to absorb trauma deeply. We’re made to express the world, beginning with everything that happens to us. The more extreme the event, the more it will find expression in our life and speech, our acts and days and art, whether or not we’ve conscious of it.

For decades, I couldn’t understand why my fiction fixated on rape and abuse. Which seems rather amusing in retrospect, since I knew my own history quite well, but I had emotional amnesia for it. I never saw it as abuse. Cognitive dissonance…

You mentioned your fears of abandonment. I was struck that you, my close friend, had never told me before how you lash out at Bob in ways that disturb you both. When I asked you last week why you hadn’t told me this before, you said only, “Shame. But to hell with shame now.” 

You said it bitterly.

You also mentioned losing interest in sex and in making yourself attractive. I can testify that nothing is more normal during PTSD for sexual assault and child abuse. God knows, I went through that too. But I came out at the other end with such vibrant joy in my sexual being, and in making myself pretty and appealing. The payoff with Jim is huge, in all kinds of ways. Not only sexual. He is always holding me, complimenting me, paying attention, saying he loves me, spending time with me and loving the time we spend together. Cherishing it all, and me.

In other words, to go through the darkness brought me to a far happier sexual place. And I revel in being 70 and attractive quite as much as I did in my thirties—which I never expected. It’s so much fun.

So I hope you will go to Bob and tell him, “This is what’s happening to me, and Mira said to tell you this is why I was lashing out at you. It’s not you. You didn’t threaten me. But getting close to you threatened me. The way you love me threatened me. Because the only way to open up to you was to open up to this darkness and horror. And now I’m here, in the throes, and the only way out is through. But I’ll be kinder to you when it’s over, if you can hold on. Please forgive me and hold on. I love you, and I want to be with you.” 

I believe he will hold on. Because he loves you.

And if you can’t tell him so yourself, feel free to give him my letter. Because Zelda: I went through all this at least roughly at the same point in my relationship—in my case, about seven years after Jim and I became a couple and five years into our marriage. I know for a fact my PTSD launched because Jim’s love gave me a solid foundation of love, support, affection, companionship and deep human connection to face the trauma ahead. Emotional bedrock.

But Jim, before that, always complained about my “walls” and the way I shut him out internally. That was my version of lashing out. It caused him tremendous pain. Ironically, he was the very reason my walls came down.

Because here is the truth about dissociated trauma. It is postponed so long precisely because we don’t have the strength to process it at the time and can do so only when we have the strength and the emotional foundation for the hard work of plunging into darkness.

Getting into therapy is a necessity. Thank God you’re doing that. Perhaps medication, who knows. Writing it all down was likely helpful, and maybe the therapist will want you to peruse your own story, or read it aloud. (In fact, there is one kind of trauma-informed therapy that focuses on repeated exposure as a way to desensitize oneself to the trauma.)

When I was in the throes of my own delayed and deeply complex PTSD, it mattered that people like Jim believed I would be well. I didn’t believe it at the time myself—but people believing in me mattered. Hugely. I see that now.

And I want to tell you, with utter truthfulness: I believe you will be all right, and far stronger for this experience once you’re through it. Zelda, I’ve known you so long. I love you. Take the time, do whatever you need to do. But I am standing here, your friend, ready to give you or do whatever you want or need from me. I love you.

I can’t tell you this path will be easy, or what it will resemble. The twists and turns. Each journey is unique. Almost always, the road to healing is powerfully painful and too long. But how much joy lay at the other end for me! Inexpressible joy. I could never have believed that anything was worth the pain of the PTSD. I was mistaken.

I want that joy for you. I hope with all my heart you find it. These things take time. This is your path. But your years of spiritual journeying and growth will inform every step of the process. They may not ease the pain just yet, but they will shape it, and help you move slowly toward your healing.

I repeat: I want joy for you, and deep healing. Once you come through, Bob will be rewarded with a richer, deeper, fuller and kinder Zelda than he ever knew before, and he loved you from the start. I wish him that joy too.

Oh, Zelda! I love you both so much. I cannot get you through this, but at least—an honorable least—I can be your friend who loves you.

It’s the only gift I have to give you now. But you have it with all my heart and being.

And tears in my eyes.

Your adoring friend,

Amira

As for my friend’s response… It was an impassioned letter in answer to my own, opening up a new and deeper correspondence. Then soon after I saw her in person during a visit to my grown children. Twice, for dinner and lunch.

I found us more deeply connected than before. Writing letters had proved powerful. 

Zelda also reassured me that the problem wasn’t writing down her story at my suggestion. It was the environmental triggers that came first.

Most important, she is getting better. She is going into both individual and couples therapy. Slowly feeling better about her marriage. About herself.

And our loving closeness as friends is richer now. Because, of course, when you communicate from the deepest parts of you, you become who you really are. If you have nothing to hide, you can only be yourself.

Really, that’s all we can share. Our own true selves.

So little. And so much.

 Love and kisses,

Amira