Trauma, according to Webster’s
“An injury caused by an extrinsic agent or
behavioral state resulting from
considerable mental disruption and
duress; acute physical suffering or
emotional upset inflicted by a mechanism or
force that causes trauma.” I’ve spent years
grappling with the trauma that tanked my kids’ mental
health, and the diagnoses that have dogged them.
Intimate abuses are potent, and they suffered the double
jeopardy of their father’s gaslighting ire and uncle’s
kaleidoscopic offenses. Claims of familial
love conflated with cruelty create a funhouse
mirror wherein truth is distorted, its reflection unstable.
Nietzsche wrote, “the constitution of existence might be such that
one would be destroyed by a complete knowledge of it.”
Perhaps this is why the truth of trauma is so elusive. It is dangerous.
Quixotic armchair analysts tout treatments to
repair the damage wrought by trauma, but there is no ready
salvation to be found—recovery is a lifetime’s work.
Therapeutic tools are just that, the wrench wielded
under the hood when the engine kicks. The shop
vac when everything falls to the floor and you don’t know
where the mess ends and you begin.
Xanax to take the edge off the rising panic.
You can only understand the work through metaphor.
Zayde told the kids to “get well soon.”
Lisa Delan
Lisa Delan’s poetry and prose have been featured in a broad range of literary publications, and she has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have been set to music by leading classical composers, and she has written the libretto for a choral work debuting in 2025 in her adopted hometown of San Francisco. When she is not writing, you can find the soprano, an international performer who records for the Pentatone label, singing songs on texts by some of her favorite poets.
