Her night terrors subsided after several months, as the parenting books said they would, and did not return. She had the occasional nightmare from time to time, but nothing like the awake-but-asleep episodes she’d had while adjusting to Nate’s existence, and the question of whether or not I was a real enough mother for her was put to rest, for the time being.
Unlike Emi, I remembered my night-terror episodes in my waking hours, and they struck me as being a comically exaggerated shadow version of a process that unfolded in my daily life, as I lay in bed, trying to retrace my steps and find my way back to the moment that started it all. Just like in the nightmares, which were only slight variations on the same theme every night, I kept finding myself endlessly revisiting the series of events that had resulted in my ending up where I was. If I hadn’t gotten sick. If I hadn’t left the house. If I hadn’t coughed. No matter how many ways I tried to think about it, I was inevitably led to the same conclusion, which was that it didn’t matter how I thought about it or how I understood it: It had happened. Knowing exactly how or why wouldn’t help me, wouldn’t heal the tear in my dura, wouldn’t stop the leak or prevent the pain or undo the damage done. And yet I’d find myself returning there in my thoughts, such as they were, the same way I’d find myself awake in the night, on the landing or the stairs or in my bathroom, my chest tight with fear, battling against the inevitable nocturnal disaster.
I continued my pre-bedtime self-talk. I took the advice of my sister Jessie, who recommended setting an alarm to wake myself just before I slipped into the sleep phase that somehow sparked the nightmare scenarios for me, usually within a few hours of my falling asleep for the night. I wrote more notes to myself, I listened to calming music and guided meditation, I fell asleep to peaceful, tranquil sounds. I tried, variously and with little success, Benadryl, trazodone, melatonin, lorazepam, alcohol.
I listened to a podcast one night where a man shared his story of surviving a terrible accident and how he coped with the night terrors that were part of his PTSD. He said that instead of replaying the story of the accident for himself, he began to try to rewrite it. Before going to sleep, he’d talk himself through what happened—except instead of the tragic ending, he would turn the events of the day that changed his life into just a regular, boring, ordinary day. He still woke up confronting the reality of being partially paralyzed—that would never change; but the night terrors stopped holding him in their grip.
This made sense to me, this idea of changing the narrative, the conscious brain coming up with new options for the unconscious brain to mull overnight. The stories we tell ourselves are important, especially the ones that aren’t true. The fairy tales, with magic and suffering and improbable yet happy endings; the fantasies of things we want to do; the endless replays of things we wish we hadn’t. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are healing ones, stories that reframe the narrative, exploring it from an oblique place when the full story may be too much for us to bear. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves allow us to make sense of things through repetition, the way Emi told and retold herself and me the story of Nate’s accident, each retelling an act to free herself from the trauma of what she’d witnessed. But sometimes the most powerful stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are the bad ones, the ones we can’t stop thinking about, the ones that wound us: the ones that say, I’m always like this, this is always what happens, this is what I do, I always lose or fail or miss out or get left out or left behind. Much of my parenting work involves talking my children through these stories, helping them learn to reframe them, to hear themselves when they say these stories out loud, asking them to examine those stories and question the reliability of the narrator to find out: What’s the payoff for believing this particular story right now? What’s in it for me to believe the story I’m telling myself?
Nate calls this “telling myself the bad story,” and we work together to catch that kind of self-talk when it happens, attempting to recognize the moment when we are caught in the process of telling ourselves a story about what’s happening in order to avoid the real story of what’s happening, and then attempting to refrain from allowing ourselves to get lost in that story. It’s tricky, and it doesn’t always work; but even if they continue to listen to the story they’ve been telling themselves, the process of acknowledging for even a moment that it is, in fact, just one story, one way out of an infinite number of ways of interpreting things, helps them free themselves, just a little, from becoming stuck in the narrative.
It’s not lost on
