by Maria Murriel
I’ve always been good at school. I like reading, taking notes and finding parallels across topics, so when I enrolled in TRF’s Certificate Program I figured I’d spend an hour or two every week listening to lectures and writing down what interested me. I don’t know if it’s the pandemic, or having been out of school for more than a decade, or the fact that I’ve been in therapy long enough to have a degree in it, but moving through the course materials was not as simple as I expected.
A quarter of the way into Dr. Jana Pressley’s lecture on adult attachment relationships, I was emotionally exhausted. Echoes of my mother, father, and every romantic partner I’ve had hung all around me as I took notes on what comprises a disorganized attachment style. At times reflecting too personally had me on the verge of tears. It was hard learning about myself.
I grew up in a multigenerational household filled with unreliable caretakers. I’m a child of today raised by people “from another time,” meaning the alcoholism and emotional neglect I was exposed to as a child is by no means uncommon. The key, as I have learned in this program, is that these and other risk factors compounded into a profoundly negative impact on my emotional development, on my sense of self, on my ability to feel securely attached.
Over the last five years, I’ve spent approximately 250 hours talking all of this to death with a licensed mental health professional. That’s spurred in me an immense amount of healing, as well as an interest in the mechanisms of trauma: neurological, psychological, societal, all of it. So I enrolled, knowing I could parlay this material into my work as a journalist, and hoping I could use it to access something more.
Seeing my trauma reflected back to me, it took me longer than I expected to move through the material, which frustrated me. Then, about a month in, I injured my ankle and had a slow recovery. Later in the year, my city was hit by a major hurricane. Throughout 2021, I had no choice but to continuously slow down. To be gentler with myself. That wasn’t my first impulse – first, I wanted to resist, to push through and force myself to go at the “right” pace. But over the course of the year, the lecture materials and my continued therapy sessions did help me access “something more”: understanding.
I understand that needing more time to process the lectures makes sense, given that this is my first time studying trauma in an academic setting, and I’m building resources to manage my triggers as I go. I also understand the nature of trauma more deeply, and have better language to communicate it to others. Since starting the program, I’ve led workshops on trauma-informed journalism for the Association of Independents in Radio and graduate students in NYU’s journalism school, and at attendees’ requests, am working on more.
This understanding of trauma has also informed a project that had been brewing in my mind but lacking the clarity I needed to materialize it: For years, I’ve wanted to write a book about my family. I have known with such certainty that there is a significant story carried in the people who shaped me, but haven’t known how to frame the tangle of threads begging for unraveling. Over the last year, I’ve understood the story I need to tell centers on my rich inheritance of generational trauma, which has made developing intimate relationships an unbelievably excruciating experience.
As I outline this book, I recognize I needed to take all that time – to watch these lectures, give a few of my own, and continue to poke at my tender spots with my therapist – to arrive in a more healed place, a more ready place to own my narrative in this way. And I recognize that even after 10 years out of school, I’m still taking good notes and making good connections.
Maria Murriel is a journalist pursuing the Trauma Research Foundation’s Trauma Studies Certificate. She is co-founder of Pizza Shark Productions, a podcast network and production house working toward radical inclusivity in media. She lives in New Orleans, where she works on storytelling as a healing practice. Read more at mariamurriel.com.
