Bamboo Promise: The Last Straw Vol.2 Ptsd Self-Healing

By Vicheara Houn

Vicheara Houn began sharing her battle with post-traumatic stress disorder in Bamboo Promise: Prison without Walls.

In this second volume of her story, she delves deeper into the traumas that have seared her soul and left her with invisible wounds. With so many worldwide tragedies, readers of all cultures and ages will appreciate her story.

Despite a traumatic childhood in Cambodia, she thought shed founded happiness after getting married in 1975, but then the Khmer Rouge forced her and her family from their homes. For four years, she endured starvation, illness, and the agony of losing all of her loved onesincluding her young husband.

While she would survive, escape Cambodia, and find love again in the United States, the horrors of the genocideas well as her second husbands alcoholism and abusewould threaten to destroy her life.

This raw and remarkable story is complemented by the insights of Dr. R. Russ, a licensed psychologist, who provides a medical framework to understand how PTSD progresses at the end of each chapter, giving the authors story more value to anyone who is struggling or helping a loved one struggle with PTSD.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532015014

Vicheara Houn

Vicheara Houn was born in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia, to a wealthy family that was politically and socially prominent. She lost her mother at a young age and suffered through starvation, illness, and the agony of losing her entire familyincluding her then husbandunder the Khmer Rouge regime. This book continues her account of battling post-traumatic stress disorder that she began in volume one of Bamboo Promise. She lives with her third husband and son in Arizona.

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Copyright © 2017 Vicheara Houn.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-1500-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1502-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1501-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919265

iUniverse rev. date: 02/23/2017

Contents

Acknowledgements

Message

Historical Background

Introduction

PART I: INVISIBLE WAR WITHIN

Ch 1: Endless Traumas

Ch 2: Light Of Heaven

Ch 3: My Khao-I-Dang Paradise

Ch 4: Goal Fulfilled

Ch 5: That Man

Ch 6: Magic Night

Ch 7: Abandoned – Again

Ch 8: What A Change!

Ch 9: Disapproval

Ch 10: History We Must Remember

Ch 11: Destiny Of Khmer Refugees

Ch 12: Things Happen For A Reason

Ch 13: Believing In God

Ch 14: After The Rain…

Ch 15: Relationship Turns Out To Be Poisonous

Ch 16: Gone With The Wind

Ch 17: You Let Me Down

Ch 18: The End Of The World?

Ch 19: A New Door

Ch 20: New Gate of Life

Ch 21: Rubbing the Wound

Ch 22: He Killed My Baby

Ch 23: Our Next Journey

PART II: POST-TRAUMATIC- STRESS-DISORDER

Ch 24: Out Of The Jungle

Ch 25: Declining Mood

Ch 26: This Place Isn’t For Me

Ch 27: Assertiveness

Ch 28: In My Real Life

Ch 29: Shadow of the Aftermath

Ch 30: Don’t Insult My Father

Ch 31: Walking Through The Clear Water

Ch 32: The Last Straw

PART III: TREATMENT AND HEALING PROCESS

Ch 33: Ancient Treatment

Ch 34: The Buddhist Principle And The Universal Life Energy

Epilogue

Glossary

I have had the strength and courage to write this book because of my love for my Papa, Kim Houn Suy, who was a victim of the Cambodian Genocide which occurred between 1975 and 1979. He died, in my arms, from starvation and malaria in the killing fields in Cambodia in 1977. He was my hero and my savior, after God. Even though he no longer had an earthly presence, he remained a powerful source of strength as I struggled over the next thirty plus years to turn my ‘upside down’ life to ‘right side up’. Without his constant spiritual support, there would have been no story to share. In a world I found full of fear, agony and despair, his physical, and then his spiritual presence, guided me from my nightmare of living through the Genocide all the way to the conclusion of this second book. I have conquered many adversities because of the lessons my father taught me.

I could not have reached this point in my journey of healing but for the love of my husband, and my two beloved children.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep appreciation to all friends and family members who encouraged me to proceed with this second book. Without all of them, my story would never have become a book.

Message

The last straw is the continuation of my autobiography Bamboo Promise/Prison without Walls.

One definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) includes the simile that it is an invisible wound. This can be a problem when the idea of a wound causes people to believe that the treatment will have to depend on psychotropic medications, when actually it is not always true. I prove it in this book.

I see PTSD as an invisible war. It is my past doing battle with my present. The trauma of this war has wounded my soul. My book explains how the war still lives inside me; how the war carries on even decades after the traumatic experiences. Why it is so much more difficult to heal a wounded soul than to heal a wounded body?

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is frequently in the news today because so many military veterans suffer tragically with it. Civilian victims of war and mass murder, such as genocide survivors like myself, are very sympathetic because we, too, have suffered for decades with a wounded soul. In this second book, I speak on behalf of the PTSD victims: the veterans and others. I have been on a long and difficult journey to heal myself of PTSD and I want to share my discoveries with others who suffer because I have found a path to health.

Treating and healing PTSD is hard and complicated. Healing without understanding the causes and trigger points is hard. I have discovered that the path to healing for many patients must be linked to their personalities, their life experiences, their support systems or lack thereof, and most profoundly: their beliefs, their cultural context. It is a package deal.

Cambodian genocide survivors! Remember the horror at Mountain Dangrêk, and the misery in the Khao I Dang camp. I speak for you.

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Historical Background

My homeland, Cambodia, was one of the many nations which became battlegrounds for pro and anti-communist forces in the decades after the Second World War. In Cambodia, the communist rebel leader was a man who came to be known as Pol Pot. Pol Pot was strongly influenced by Mao Tse Tung, who had become the communist dictator in China and was responsible for the deaths of untold millions in his quest for power.

Pol Pot fought a guerilla war against the Cambodian monarchy represented by Prince Sihanook. In 1970, with the help of the United States, Prince Sihanook was officially deposed and General Lon Nol was designated as the President of the Khmer Republic. Regrettably, the pro-western coup resulted in Prince Sihanook forming a government in-exile in Peking with the support of the Chinese communists. His fateful decision to join forces with Pol Pot and his communist guerillas, known as the Khmer Rouge (KR), in order to overthrow Lon Nol, led to the horrible events of the Cambodian Genocide.

Pol Pot advocated a particularly bizarre and austere form of communism which called for a return to the ‘Year Zero - a social system based purely in agriculture wherein all modern and urban lifestyles were despised and destroyed and only agricultural labor was respected. This extreme form of anti-intellectualism led to the Cambodian Genocide which occurred from 1975 to 1979. Over two million innocent lives were sacrificed as the cities were brutally emptied, books and records were burned and a person could be executed for the crime of wearing eyeglasses. Millions of urbanites were force-marched to country villages where they toiled for years as slave laborers for the communist overlords. They were starved as rice was exported to China to pay war debts. They were beaten and murdered as their crimes", such as being literate, were exposed. Many thousands more died of diseases which could easily have been cured by access to modern medicine.

The American involvement in Southeast Asia – primarily Vietnam – expanded in 1962 when US military forces used Agent Orange to clear the jungle along the Vietcong’s ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ that ran along Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. This trail was used by the North Vietnamese as the route for weapons and soldiers to fight the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. Although many remember the war in Vietnam, what many may not know is that to stop this flow of men and arms to the south, the American government also waged an undeclared war against the countries neighboring Vietnam. Cambodia was one of those. I was born and raised in Cambodia and my life was forever changed by these wars and their aftermath.

The initial bombings on Cambodia were approved by former President Richard Nixon. Americans dropped one hundred thousand tons of bombs on this trail - more than were dropped on Japan during WWII. About thirty per cent of Cambodia’s population was internally displaced. As many as five hundred thousand people were killed and hundreds of thousands more died from the effects of displacement, disease or starvation during this period. This catastrophe influenced many Cambodian peasants to join Pol Pot and his KR.

The war in Vietnam was raging during this period and tens of thousands of American troops were dying. The war was very unpopular with the American public and the American forces withdrew in 1973 and Vietnam fell to the communists led by Ho Chi Minh. This withdrawal had terrible consequences for the anti-communist government in Cambodia; and Pol Pot and his forces completed their takeover of this small country in April of 1975.

There was silence from the rest of the world when the demonic Pol Pot and his followers embarked on their insane march to the past. The KR was one of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century. Cambodians were locked up in the KR regime for almost four years. Execution, extermination, starvation, and malnutrition deteriorated the Khmer psyche, replacing it with fear, hopelessness, agony, frustration and oceans of tears.

In December, 1978, the North Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to defeat Pol Pot and the KR. But by then, millions of Khmer (Cambodians) were weakened or had already perished. The invasion defeated the Pol Pot regime and strengthened Vietnam as a power in the region. For the starved and desperate Cambodian population, it was a continuation of the national nightmare. As the survivors began to realize they could leave the prisons and labor camps and struggled out with no help, they had to evade both advancing armies and retreating guerilla bands. Here again, millions of drops of Cambodian blood and tears were spilled as the battle raged between the KR and the North Vietnamese.

The North Vietnamese eventually gained power and then installed a puppet government including KR defectors.

The shooting war seemed to be over, but another war appeared and has raged silently inside the Cambodian survivors ever since. Even decades later, survivors struggle to come to terms with the horrors visited upon them and their families. PTSD is their constant companion.

Introduction

Human beings are strong and resilient creatures. They are also fragile and sensitive. These qualities reside within our psyches in a delicate balance. For those who endure extreme trauma, this balance can be disrupted and we can become unbalanced and in need of help and understanding as we struggle to find peace between the horrors of the past and the hope of the future.

All of us experience stress at one time or another and have varying abilities to deal with it. But even the most resilient may endure life circumstances that leave coping mechanisms brittle and vulnerable. When that happens, the fortunate ones are diagnosed with PTSD and receive help that they can really connect to. Those not so lucky can be labeled as crazy, self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, withdraw and isolate, traumatize others, or even turn to suicide.

I lost all my family and everything material that had comprised my former life during the Cambodian Genocide. It was an utterly unreal reality! I worked very hard to move on, but after settling in the United States, the horrors I had experienced throughout the killing fields and the all-consuming loneliness I lived with every day finally overwhelmed me and triggered debilitating symptoms that led to a diagnosis of PTSD. It is said that every Cambodian who survived the genocide suffers this mental affliction which has been described as a wounded soul. When it was first suggested that I suffered with PTSD, I rejected the idea as shameful; then I thought that PTSD couldn’t be very serious, surely far less so than cancer or heart disease. I had much to learn.

As a result of the effects of PTSD, I have been analyzed, counseled and medicated by a wide variety of health professionals. I have been so low that I tried to take my own life, and yet ecstatic with joy when I became a mother. But nothing could relieve the gnawing, empty wound inside me. There was something I needed that did not exist in the treatments offered to me.

One psychologist even came to me asking, How can you cure PTSD? Ironic to be confronted with this question by a professional who should know more than I did. However, it was this question that led to this second book, written to help health care providers understand that PTSD has a very important cultural context, a context that can be invaluable when devising a treatment plan.

INVISIBLE WAR WITHIN

1

Endless Traumas

My life experience is shared in this chapter. I had reoccurring trauma not once, not twice, but many times starting from an early age. I was not conscious about it.

Unforgettable Youth

Dukkha Anicca vata Sankhara … — the Pali chanting from the Theravada monks sounded throughout my home in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia. It was 1959.

A child of eight ran into the room where the chanting originated, then stopped as she saw her mother (Mak in Khmer) lying very still covered with a white sheet. Confused and frightened, the tiny girl moved slowly to her mother’s side. That tiny girl was me and my journey to PTSD was beginning.

Mak’s eyes were closed. I touched her in case she only pretended to sleep while waiting for me. My Papa had just come to me and said, "Mak’s dead" but what exactly did that mean? I was confused. The word ‘dead’ became clearer when she didn’t breathe or respond to me as I tugged at her and called her name.

A year ago, before my mak became paralyzed and unable to speak, Mak always smiled in secret when she heard me memorizing my lessons aloud, but I always caught her smile. I had favorite places to study, either outside in the garden or on the balcony. Mak didn’t know that in my silliness, I raised my voice not only to impress her, but somebody else…the boys of the neighborhood who were hanging out on their balconies.

As Mak’s illness worsened, I came to study the lessons more quietly beside her bed. She sometimes heard my voice and turned to me. I knew she was still impressed, although she could no longer smile or speak. Now she lay totally still, totally quiet and a feeling of dread and confusion overcame me.

As I stood beside her, a family member looked at me and said, You have no more mother and she won’t be back. That was the last time I saw my beloved mother and I carried the heartbreak silently because no one reached out to me in sympathy.

Why doesn’t she cry for her mother? I heard guests asking.

I cried but with invisible tears. I was in so much pain but I didn’t know how to let it out. I stayed silent, but I felt something wrong inside me. I thought myself very unlucky to be born in this life. I was told at that time by an elder that in a past life I must have done something very bad for my mother to die – karma in the past would carry over the present time. This was the first stone in the mountain of guilt that I would carry for many years.

The loss of my mother was very hard; yet I soon had to deal with another reality - that I would have to face life, as my grandmother warned, with a stepmother. That was as terrifying as my fear of ghosts.

Dukkha Anicca vata Sankhara … The three days of my mak’s funeral was an endless trauma for me as an eight-year-old. I did not understand the Pali chanting, intended to comfort the living. I remember the pain of loss, loneliness, and the fear of losing my Papa also. The chanting did not comfort me; it haunted my broken heart.

Dukkha Anicca vata Sankhara… I knew Dukkha meant the suffering because of my mak’s death. What did suffering mean to me? Perhaps it differed from the sadness? I didn’t know whether I was sad or I suffered. All I knew was that my life would be upside down if my father remarried. The feeling of hating my own life began now at eight years old.

For three nights in a row, a senior monk was invited to give the overtone chant or Smot for my mother. I did understand a few things from his chanting: Impermanence, suffering, and unreality are part of life. What did this have to do with my mak? The Theravada monk explained in his chanting about suffering: ‘birth, old age, sickness, and death cause suffering’. It didn’t make sense. Why was my mak born – and why did God take her back? It was not fair. I was angry. I was lonely. Children around me had their parents, why was I different. Why? Why?

Everyone kept telling that I now had only Papa and warning me, Don’t lose him! Losing him was another threat to me. I was warned to take good care of him, as he was the most important person of my life. Do not make him mad! Do not make him unhappy. Be obedient!

How about Papa? Would he still love me after Mak’s death? His behavior was confusing. My Papa clearly loved me. He spoiled me. He bought me anything expensive I asked for, but he beat me more often after my mak’s death. Corporal punishment, even brutal beatings, were acceptable in Cambodian culture. It was said, ‘Bend the bamboo when it is still young’ to mold children into ideal adults. It was said also that I was a spoiled brat and would need to be bent like a young bamboo. And I believed it!!

My father was an inconsistent and ineffective parent without my mother’s calming influence. He alternately indulged and terrorized me. I lived in a state of constant anxiety. This behavior, combined with the introduction of a jealous stepmother three months after my mak’s death, made for a very traumatic childhood.

Unforgettable Adulthood

When I finished secondary school, my Papa convinced me to enroll in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Phnom-Penh. It was there I met a young man who would become my husband, Leang. He was not an acceptable choice to my Papa in a society where social status governed most aspects of life. My father was wealthy and politically prominent; Leang’s family was not. Our forbidden romance caused much conflict, but eventually we prevailed and married on January 1, 1975, four months before the KR invaded Phnom-Penh and turned our lives upside-down, on April 17, 1975.

It was a shock to me when the KR took over our country. My father had convinced me that it would never happen. Since he was a government minister, I thought he surely knew best.

All the residents of Phnom-Penh, including my entire family, were forced out of our homes and expelled from the city by the KR rebels, in a mass forced march. We believed the propaganda of the KR that we would return home in three days after the city had been searched for Americans but instead, we were force-moved from one isolated village to another and ended up living in a tiny hut in the countryside far from Phnom-Penh. My husband’s family, who had left the city with us, were placed nearby.

One by one, every member of my family died from starvation or illnesses that could have easily cured by access to modern medicine. The pain that remains constant, however, is the experience of watching my very proud Papa always clinging to the hope that America would rescue us, and that we would return home soon. With me still, 35 years later, is his final surrender to starvation, as I held his frail body in my arms and he took his last breath. I can still hear his defeated voice imploring ‘America come to rescue me, I am starving’, while his emaciated body was shivering and shaking from malaria. These images still haunt me. America never came. – No one did!!!

Dukkha Anicca vata Sankhara… I had learned the Pali chanting by heart because I wanted to recite them for my Papa, believing that my respect and pure love would be helpful. I tried in every way possible, under the searing tortures of the KR, to keep my father alive, just as I had been warned to do during Mak’s funeral. I believed I had been obedient to him so why couldn’t I save his life? I understood now the whole meaning of Dukkha Anicca vata Sankhara was not meant to save my father’s life. It was meant to help me to understand the suffering of the birth, old age, sickness, and death are unavoidable — but why so soon for Papa? This tortured me to the core. It was all my fault. I didn’t try hard enough to protect him from the sickness and death. ‘There is suffering in life’ said the Buddha. The loss of my father is my suffering. Loneliness is my suffering.

Now only my husband and I were left alive from our family of nine. I expected him to live and be with me, because he was too young to die. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted him being dragged away by KR soldiers. I never saw him again. No matter how hard I tried, my family couldn’t stay with me. The shock of seeing my husband walking by and then disappearing from my sight remains with me today. I felt his fear, his pain. The KR tortured him to death. I felt his voice screaming for help in the darkness. I felt he was thinking of me; how to say good bye, and how it felt to die. America never came. – No one did!

Now completely alone, I moved in with my in-laws, who resented having to share food with another person, while they also carried grievances against my father for delaying the wedding plans for years. As the struggle to find enough food grew worse, I increasingly felt unwanted and unwelcome, until I was finally kicked out of the house because, Vicheara, you are cursed and bring bad karma on my family!

This man, my father-in-law whom I trusted to love me after the loss of my husband and father, cruelly broke my heart — yet again! After all these horrible experiences, I blamed myself. Why did my life differ from their lives? Why didn’t this family lose everybody? What was the difference between them and me? Is this about karma again? When will I pay off this horrendous karma and live like a normal person? When would I escape the unspeakable horrors of the four-year Cambodian genocide?

My Father had taught me to not forget where I came from and as a result, when my in-laws kicked me out, I resolved to show no reaction. I knew I didn’t belong to that family; I remained strong by not begging to stay. My tummy was as flat as a punctured tire and all my bones stuck out because I was in the last stages of starvation. I understood so well the power of starvation but I continued to breathe even though it hurt my ribs. My meals were nothing but pain and tears. I had to swallow them all.

The pain strengthened me to strike out on my own, and I found a space in the KR hospital (Hospital of Death), awaiting the arrival of my own demise. I didn’t know the dates; it was sometime in between 1978 and 1979. We had no calendars, no clocks. Each miserable day blended into the next.

Enduring Guilt

In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and defeated the KR the following year. They presented themselves as saviors but they were really just another conquering army—but with the intention to establish control over Cambodia with a puppet government. They replaced the KR communist government with pro-Vietnamese communists. The KR survived into the 1990’s as a resistance movement, operating in western Cambodia from bases in Thailand.

Emaciated and alone, I managed to survive several weeks in the hospital until one day when our KR minders simply disappeared and word began to filter in that we had been liberated. The survivors were left entirely on their own, without help from anyone. After six months of terrible hardship, I made my way back to the capital of Phnom-Penh and eventually to my home, located at 182 Phleuv (street) Samdech Ponn. However, my home was not mine anymore. People unknown to me had moved in to various parts of the large house and claimed it as their own. I had now also lost my home! I lost my family, my husband, my dogs, my privilege, …everybody, everything!

I had left Phnom- Penh with a family of nine expecting to be gone three days. I returned ‘home’ four years later, a penniless orphan, with only the rags on my back. As I stood in the yard of my once beautiful house, I screamed aloud to reach God. As I did so, I could feel coldness around me. It must be the presence of spirits. I could see the shadows of my family appearing one by one in front of me. In the white fog my father’s face had a sad smile. I remembered this same smile as he had implored me to stay alive and to return home with or without him. He had encouraged me to live even as he knew he was dying. I felt the spirit of my Grandpa who laid on the hammock in the front yard watching me to be sure I didn’t sneak behind him to steal his coconuts – I did anyway and ran away laughing. The coconut trees were here, only he wasn’t. My Grandmother had sat on the stone garden bench with me, right here where I was standing. Now, the bench was gone like her. My dogs…how often I had watched them as they chased each other on the rocks. The rocks remained but couldn’t tell me where my dogs went. My husband…my beloved husband who teased me under the jackfruit tree. The jackfruit was alive; my Leang was gone.

All that remained were the education my Papa had demanded, his entreaties for my success, his tooth, his handkerchief, and our LeCreucet pot, which I had carried along the entire journey.

After all these losses: family, home, possessions, pets and any sense of safety and security, I prayed for a bright future but I carried a silent stream of endless pain. I knew I wasn’t the same person who had been driven from my home years before. Do I even know who I am?