Seeing My Trauma in “Jessica Jones”
As has been the case for the last three-and-a-half years, since I had something of an “awakening”, stories and the archetypes within them have become very important to me. Life seems to dump a story in my lap just when I need the content within it for some aspect of my life. Trauma has been the focus of my life for the last couple of years, since a breakdown that sent me to the hospital. I’ve had to heal from the breakdown itself as well as from the initial trauma that caused it in the first place. While going through this process, life handed me Marvel’s Jessica Jones, the very angry, very traumatized, hard drinking, unwilling super working as a private investigator in New York City. I liked her immediately. We have a lot in common, including trauma and anger. We’re entitled, though.
Jessica is guilt-ridden from feeling like she caused a deadly car accident as a child, following which she was experimented on, turned into a super, and made to believe people were dead that weren’t. At one point in her life, Jessica fell under the literal spell of an evil man named Kilgrave, who had the ability to make people do anything he wanted as long as they could hear his voice. I’ll leave it to your imagination if you haven’t watched the show (which is on Netflix) as to how that turned out for Jessica. Not well. She escapes him, but like all evil bastards, he shows back up in her life later (season 1), giving her panic attacks, something I was just having to deal with myself for similar reasons.
I tried her technique of naming the streets of her childhood to calm herself, and it worked surprisingly well, though it often has the effect of making me cry. Crying seems to be the primary way my body releases excess emotions of any kind, which is something I’ve just had to get used to. Just naming streets isn’t usually good enough to ground myself well enough in that state of mind, depending on what I’m thinking or feeling in the moment aside from panic. My childhood streets don’t have enough happiness associated with them for that, so I had to expand out to include other places I’ve lived and spent time. They form a trail on a map in my head that starts with where I grew up in Detroit, goes to Houston where I also grew up, and then to where I live now in Austin, where my neighborhood has streets named after other places in Texas. One of them is a beach town on the Gulf Coast, so I use that street as a way to “go” to the beach, where I name the things I see in my mind from memories: wind, water, sky, clouds, sand, birds, life. Ending on the concept of life is very important in this sequence.
One of Jessica’s other big issues is anger, something she deals with mostly by drinking heroic (literally) amounts of cheap bourbon. I grew up with alcoholics and don’t want to do that to myself or my family, so aside from the odd glass of wine, booze really isn’t my thing. Which isn’t to say I haven’t had a lifelong anger problem that I’ve had trouble coping with from time to time. Like Jessica, that often manifested as broken objects and sometimes frightened and confused people. I also smoke a lot of weed, which is probably better than drinking, but it’s still an escape mechanism that can be unhealthy when excessive. The anger contributes to another problem of Jessica’s (and mine): an abysmal self-esteem which she copes with by trying to be helpful to other people by being a private investigator and later, reluctantly using her superpowers for good purposes, even though it brings her a lot of grief. As she says to someone else struggling with a self-image problem, doing good “helps the self-loathing.”
Like Jessica, my anger problem persisted no matter what I did to address it. I didn’t wind up in anger management like she did, but I did have a massive breakdown, during the aftermath of which I remembered things from childhood my subconscious had previously hidden from me out of self-preservation. Only in discovering these things did I understand why I had always been so angry, and the same thing happens to Jessica. She learns the truth of being experimented on and everything that entails, and in doing so understands and unravels the mysteries of her life. She’s still angry, but the knowledge empowers her to do something about it instead of consuming herself. I’m doing the same thing, but it’s a hard slog due to the aforementioned self-loathing.
This isn’t a magic pill that makes everything better about her life, though. She’s still the same bitchy Jessica she was before, but it’s a bitchiness covering up a deep care of other people and a willingness to serve as a hand of justice when no one else can or will. I’m not a super like Jessica, but like her, I try to do good in the lives of the people around me, which is mostly my family. The best way I can help them is by continuing to recover, which helps me be a better person, which further empowers me to continue working on my life goal of not passing any more trauma onto my family and teaching them not to pass it onto others. Putting the brakes on four generations or more of violent dysfunction is like stopping a freight train. Slamming on the brakes is going to cause a derailment, so it’s a long, slow, sometimes screechy deceleration, one that can be stress-filled if you’re trying to avoid a collision in the form of some dysfunctional family calamity.
The family train hasn’t derailed so far, though it came close a couple of times. Sometimes I want to turn into a bird and fly away just to have some peace, though. If I really wanted to, I could probably wrangle running away somehow to somewhere, but I’d just be trading one set of problems for another, and a whole lot of guilt. Jessica, too, has a chance to walk away from her life in New York. She gets all the way to the ticket window in the bus station, bag and everything, and then turns around and walks back out, a small smile on her face. I haven’t watched Marvel’s Defenders to see how Jessica is doing, though I think I should. I wonder how our lives will compare this time.
