Hello Trauma Warriors! How many of you suffered from soul death at least once in your childhood? I know I have. So did Frederick Douglass and yet he still became one of the most important men in American history. His story of how he defeated soul death remains the most empowering story I have ever read. It’s my hope that his story does even more for you than it did for me.
In Part One, Frederick Douglass shares his age sixteen story. In Part Two, our “Q & A” he guides me through my own soul deaths. I solemnly swear I did NOT channel that man’s spirit, but the healing and wisdom I received sure made me feel like I did. All I will say for now is, what you’re about to read is proof of the healing properties that exist in both creativity and imagination.
The following terms from Trauma Glossary 1 are referenced: Borderland; Borderline Personality Disorder; Cluster B Personality Disorders
In Master Toolbox 1: tools for Learned Helplessness (especially Poised Readiness, a formula that was developed out of the very comic you’re about to read)
As always, captions for each picture are included underneath, so that those from non-English speaking countries will be able to follow along with the translator.
Part 1: Daily Devotionals Brought to You by American HistoryIf CPTSD is the result of repeated trauma over an extended period of time, then you’d better believe that in the slave population, CPTSD ran as rampant as the plague.Hello, Children of Cluster B parents. I’m Frederick Douglass: writer, orator and father of the civil rights movement.That’s how history remembers me today. But how many of you know that when I was 16 years old, I suffered soul death?Believe me, if I had any hope of living up to my legacy, I first had to defeat my soul death. And that’s the story I’m going to tell you today. I hope it inspires you to rise up too!When I was 16, I was rented out to a man named Edward Covey.Covey had a reputation for being the Slave Breaker.How do you think Covey did this? By breaking the spirits of the powerless, helpless human beings who had no hope for legal intervention.(Next 3) Frederick Douglass describes his soul death in his own words: from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Chapter 10“We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. The longest days were too short for him and the shortest nights too long for him.”“A few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed…”“The cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man was transformed into a brute!”One day, Covey beat me so badly, he cracked my head open and I was bleeding profusely.To this day, I believe the only thing that saved me was that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the wound.When Covey was finished with me and, his attentions diverted elsewhere, I managed to flee for my master’s store.The 7 mile journey took me 5 hours, given my feeble state.From the crown of my head to my feet, I was covered in blood. This was the state I presented to my master as I begged him to use his authority for my protection. Guess what he said?Well, you probably deserved it.I told him Covey will surely kill me, just give him some time.You’re in no danger of Covey killing you. I know Covey, he’s a good man. Here, you can stay with me overnight but first thing in the morning, I’m returning you to Covey.Dear Children of Cluster B parents, I know that every one of you grew up feeling powerless, helpless and without hope too.How many of you tried getting someone on the outside to listen to you? How many times were people quick to disbelieve you?And how often have you heard others shut down your truth because they think they know your abuser, even though they never experienced living with them?How many times have children been murdered by their own parents and yet, people failed to believe that the fact that you survived your own hell was nothing short of miraculous?Slaves were murdered by their masters just as often in my day, and yet here was my master, refusing to believe that Covey almost killed me!A couple of days later, while feeding Covey’s horses, he walked in the stable with a long rope and made a grab for my legs. But at this moment – from whence came the spirit I don’t know – I resolved to fight.His amygdala got hijacked! That hair-triggered fight response in CPTSD ain’t nothing to mess with, mmm-kay?I seized him hard by the throat, and as I did so, I rose up. For two hours, we fought. I drew blood from him; he drew none from me. Twice in our fight, he called for help…Hughes! Come help! Take him off me!I gave Hughes a heavy kick under the ribs and he went down. Then, Bill wandered into the stable upon hearing the commotion…Bill! Come! Take hold of him!No, my master hired me out to work, not to help you whip Frederick!Hahahaha! I just love that part, don’t you?Ahem…Sorry…(Next 5) Frederick Douglass describes his resurrection from soul death in his own words: from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Chapter 10“This battle with Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It revived within me a sense of my own manhood.”“It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired in me again with a determination to be free.”“The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow; even death itself.”“My long-crushed spirit rose; cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I would remain a slave in fact.”“I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the next white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”BOOM BABY!The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger on me in anger. He would occasionally say…Don’t make me get hold of you again!(No, you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.)
Frederick Douglass works out how he escaped his punishment in his own words. (Next 3) *See notes at the end on why.It was for a long time a surprise to me why Covey did not send me to the whipping post. It was a crime to raise my hand against a white man in defense of myself.The only explanation I can now think of is that Covey enjoyed the reputation of being the first-rate slave breaker.Had he sent me – a boy about 16 years old – to the public whipping post, his reputation would have been lost.This is my story of how I defeated soul death. I confess, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the only one who fought my overseer and lived to tell.Four years later, at age 20, I would escape to freedom, forever free from the yoke of slavery.But mine is one of many slave narratives. In each one, you will see examples of soul death and how they resurrected from it in order to escape like I did.Running away was dangerous. There were dire consequences, if caught. So it took courage, it took moxie, and more importantly, realizing that we were more than how society chose to define us.You’ve heard the saying: History repeats itself. When you know history, you can make the beautiful parts repeat itself in your own life.Empower yourself. Validate yourself. Know your worth. Know that you did not deserve what happened to you and therefore, your future deserves better than what you’re enduring right now.Part 2: Q & A (*Questions and Answers) with Frederick DouglassTwo points you made at the very end that slammed home for me. First, I was one year older than you were, when I challenged my abuser. She never touched me again but she would occasionally make empty threats, just like Covey.I am sure she never followed through for the same reasons. She knew she would come off even worse than before.Oh, no, it was nowhere near as great as yours. Mine was more like an intense stand-off. My BPD mother walked away without a fight.You won, just as surely as I won against Covey. You became your abuser’s obligated child in form, but no longer in fact. So tell me, what was your other takeaway?When you worked out Covey’s pride being the reason you were saved from the whipping post, you were right! It never occurred to me until I read your story that my mother never told my father that I challenged her. For the same reasons.Intriguing! So your mother enjoyed her status as the house tyrant. Confiding to anyone about your successful stand-off would have threatened her sense of power.I always took it for granted that just because my father could hear us that morning in the hallway – and I know because I heard him whining her name from their bedroom – not that he could even bother getting out of bed on his daughter’s account…Easy now. Listen, you did not need him, anyway. As terrified as you were, you, a child of 17, stood your ground until she walked away. Hold that in your heart, because my story gave you that missing piece of the puzzle.Would you say the only way out of soul death is through healthy fight?You’ve suffered soul death three times. Tell me, how were you able to resurrect it?Well, the first time, summer of ’86 happened to me. Long story short, when school started that following year, my BPD mother was still beating me every day, I went to my guidance counselor and she called CPS.Sounds like fight came out there. You got fed up enough to do something. You dared to tell.Except for how they sent me home after I filed my report. They expected a 12 year-old to stick to the story in spite of all the gaslighting.At least I knew that my mother’s treatment of me was considered child abuse and it was wrong. I carried that validation with me for the remainder of my childhood. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had.Which brings us to your next soul death, age 15. She destroyed your self-esteem to the point where you wanted to die. What saved you?It was two weeks before my 16th birthday. It hit me suddenly that I had just survived sixteen years in hell and I only had two left.Ah! You had a specific date for when your suffering would end: your birthday. Didn’t you learn something significant in regards to trauma survivors and unpleasant memories having an end?Yes! Trauma feels infinite, like it will go on forever. It’s why trauma gets us stuck, because challenging it feels like we’re reactivating eternal hell.So in order to recover, we have to practice enduring unpleasantness, while knowing there’s a specific end.Very good! You gave yourself a specific end to your unpleasantness. What did you do for your self-esteem in order to endure your last two years?I told myself, it isn’t me: it’s my home life. My BPD mother has made my growth, my very identity impossible.I said: I’ll figure it out somehow, after I move out, when I’m free to be myself, whoever that is.That very self-talk was enough for you to manage your confidence, despite what she continued to put you through.It was strange, those last two years. It was like a force field went up against her negativity. Nothing she said or did to me could penetrate my core. I knew her time for having any claim on me was running out.You did one more thing that led to that morning you challenged her in the hallway.The awareness that I was now taller than her and more fit. I had a need to fight back. To stand up and take MY power away from her.It took me well over a year to get to that point. It was a looping process of “Next time she hits me, I’ll hit her back.” Then losing my nerve, only to tell myself again, “Okay, next time it happens, I’ll fight back.”Poised Readiness! When you’re acutely aware of the present, your mind is able to scan for opportunities in the now. You were developing your courage while remembering what CPS told you when you were 12.You keep blowing my mind! This is lining up with the Healthy Freeze Period theory that I developed after studying you and one other person in history who also had CPTSD.Hold up now. Our discussion developed out of your question, when you asked if healthy fight was the only way to defeat soul death. You just gave a brilliant example of healthy freeze. Tell me, what do fight and freeze have in common?They are both ruled entirely by the outer critic!So perhaps the key to resurrecting one’s soul from death has less to do with which trauma response than it is to shrink one’s inner critic by expanding one’s outer.So, what happened to you in your last soul death?No love! Credit shot! I suck!It was everything, a complete loss of control over my life. I was 21 years old and I could no longer use the excuse that it wasn’t me, it was my home life. I was free from Borderland and yet I was too tainted by it for the world to embrace me.I was free from slavery and yet I still had the Black Man’s skin. For every one person who embraced me, there were fifty who despised me.You had talent, I did not. In fact, learning that I had no talent as a writer was the final nail in my soul’s coffin. I depersonalized for a year. That fanned the flames of my self-hatred because I didn’t understand what was happening to me.How did you resurrect from this?I didn’t. The self-hate was too much for me to retrieve my old self. I rebuilt myself from scratch, told myself that someday I would be good enough. Self-improvement became my new identity.You had no clearly defined time for the end of your suffering because you took everything that went wrong in your life as a means of defining yourself.Hope was what kept me alive in my childhood. The belief I carried that the world would love me more than my parents did. When my hopes were destroyed, I didn’t know how to handle it.Your fear of rejection was so strong, you turned a blind eye to opportunities. Where you should have noticed opportunities, you saw only risks. You were so afraid of confirming that you weren’t good enough, that it stopped you from trying to put yourself out there.I didn’t mean to! I was just trying to get rid of the taint of Borderland, but I didn’t know what it was. No matter how much I learned, no matter how much I improved, it was still there. Opportunities were for the untainted, not someone like me.I was a Black Man who carried the taint of slavery. I was a by-product of an institution that believed people of color had no opportunities at all. A society who believed my people should know their place and stay in it.People judged me if I told my story. I was labeled bad if I had resentment towards “my own mother” for what she did to me. It made me that much more determined to put my past behind me. Forge a new life that had nothing to do with Borderland.I was chased down and beaten for telling my story. My past could not be changed any more than you could change yours. My past and my resilience was what gave me my unique purpose.When they tried to silence my voice, I fired back with another narrative and then another. I used my stories and my gift of wisdom – which was forged in trauma – to champion for my people who had no voice.Your greatest error was rejecting the very thing that made you unique. You forgot to acknowledge the series of events that led to that morning in the hallway when you were 17. You never fully realized its significance until we started talking.The clues to defeating soul death lie in both my story and yours. After two decades of sleep, you’re finally resurrecting. You’ve discovered the very reason you were put on this earth. What is it?Educate and champion for my people. Stand up to the rise of the abuser’s culture until we stamp it out. Just like you stood up to slavery, so I will stand up to abusers.Remember that change is scary. Challenging a system that’s already in place will always be met with resistance. Stay resilient and agitate, agitate, agitate until you bust through. Prove to yourself that you are ready. That you can handle it.
*First, pertaining to the note towards the end of Part One, I chose to quote Frederick Douglass, himself on why he was spared from the whipping post. The reason is, if you choose to research Frederick Douglass, you will sadly, encounter some who doubt that Frederick Douglass actually fought the slave breaker. They argue that had he done this, he would have been sent to the whipping post.
I can only conclude that such doubters must not know Frederick Douglass as well as they think they do. Frederick Douglass was a man who stood for integrity and honesty, after all. What a shame to his character if people accuse him of exaggerating what happened when he stood up to his abuser.
While true, that was the punishment of his time, and in fact, (as you saw in his own words) Frederick Douglass, himself was surprised he wasn’t sent to the whipping post. His means of working through how he escaped his punishment is proof that he understood the inner workings of abusers better than his doubters ever will.
One more thing deserves mentioning in Frederick Douglass’s story. It concerns someone who was in his life at the time, a fellow slave named Bill. Bill was the one who dared to defy the slave breaker’s orders, in spite of his limited power. When Covey ordered Bill to pull Frederick Douglass off of him, Bill’s response “My master hired me out to work, not to help you whip him,” became my favorite line. Unfortunately, Bill’s face is forever lost in history. So I went to Alamy and searched for a picture of a slave without a name:
I did zoom in somewhat from the original but you can find the full picture here. The rags he’s dressed in and no shoes on his feet. We will never know the identity of this young man. It’s my hope that I have shown respect to both slaves who are lost in time, by giving Bill a face and this young man a name.
It’s important to note that when I created my first history comic, I did it for myself. I was only trying to pull myself out of my shame spiral (Trauma glossary 2) and it worked wonders. With this one, which I wrote in March of 2021, I did it for my group. I was only trying to inspire them in the same way Frederick Douglass inspired me the first time I read his story. I got more than I bargained for, in every beautiful way.
When I wrote Part Two, I was only thinking of how I imagined Frederick Douglass would respond to me, knowing him the way that I do. My shocked facial expressions, my eureka moments and especially when I said “You keep blowing my mind!” was real. I could not believe that such new ways of looking at my old traumas existed. I certainly never anticipated creating a new formula worthy of the toolbox, itself.
While I was writing this script, I half-jokingly referred to it as voodoo because I experienced three days in a row of EMDR-type side effects. I had a vivid dream where I told off my first therapist, “Dr. Quack” in front of an unusually packed waiting room. (Trust me, “Dr. Quack” was a legit quack, even by the low standards of what passed for “therapy” in the 90’s.) I also experienced a gentle “fuzzy” sensation, like someone was tickling my brain; a sensation I had only felt while I was in EMDR. This project rewired something crucial within me.
For years, my last soul death had me by the throat. It was so bad, I kept enduring the job I despised because the idea of daring to make positive changes woke up that old trauma. (Which is classic CatastrophizingTrauma Glossary 2 in action.) Writing this script, however, reversed my anxieties. Where fear of change itself once existed, excitement for my future took its place.
It never occurred to me that how I came out so victorious from my second soul death was thanks to how I handled my first. I never appreciated what I had done for myself that morning I took a stand in the hallway but I do now. I look back on age seventeen me in awe and I take that memory with me today as I forge ahead into my future.
Here is what I hope I leave you with today. Your imagination is a tool that’s both natural and powerful. Dare to get creative with it. Also, never underestimate the importance of processing your trauma. Chances are pretty high that just like me, you’re only a perspective away from discovering the most valuable parts within you.
And now, as my thanks for reading all the way to the end, I have two bonus “memes” for you. May they make you smile and help validate your most beautiful parts.
“Oh Frederick, you’re in no danger of that Slave Breaker killing you. I KNOW him, he’s a GOOD man.” Flying Monkey language: using the same script since 1834.
Just in case you don’t know what a flying monkey is, I defined them, as well as four other types of community victim shamers here. Now, to commemorate the beauty of standing up to abusers…
When you get your butt kicked by Frederick Douglass but you still wanna talk “shiitake” anyway…
