Overcoming PTSD with PTG

Connecting Life & Comedy (Comedy Mindhacks #6)

I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard of PTSD. And we all know that it’s awful, crippling, and doesn’t discriminate. Most people associate it with soldiers, and rightly so. But trauma doesn’t only wave its ID and clock in at military bases then clock out some time later in life at the VA. I’m serious about that! Trauma shows up in pain-filled hospital rooms, in shattering phone calls, in relationships that implode, and in church board meetings where the deacons and elders refuse to stay on topic. (And the last of those three I just mentioned may well be the worst! Dante had what, 7 levels of Hell? I think church board meetings that go off track was possibly the highest level. Lol.)

Anyway…I once had a soldier tell me to my face that I couldn’t possibly have PTSD because I never put on camo. Dumb! I had just gotten back from an insanely traumatic overseas experience in Ethiopia. It was awful. I had spent nearly 2 months there alone. I was isolated and depressed. I was trying to finalize the adoptions of two of my children but was also busy doing things like getting held up at gun point, bribed, ghosted…you name it. I had packed enough clothes for a week. That’s how long I thought I’d be there. Nope. 2 months.

Daily I was dealing with the aforementioned problems while also visiting government-run orphanages where kids were living in some of the worst conditions humanly possible. I saw and heard neglect, abuse, and for the first time, despite growing up poor by American standards, saw real, deep poverty with my eyes. No, let me rephrase that: I saw destitution. And in some ways, it’s hard to come back from all that and reintegrate, just like I imagine it would be for a soldier who’s gone overseas and seen battle. Heck, even going overseas and not seeing battle and reintegrating is hard enough.

Nevertheless, it was a wild thing to hear a grown man who, after I shared with my church group the things I was dealing with, and what my therapist definitively called PTSD, say the following: “You don’t have PTSD! It bothers me when people who aren’t soldiers say those kinds of things. You really should reconsider your choice of words.” That was infuriating and devastating. The idea that you need to have carried a rifle or machine gun to carry pain is stupid. Like, really stupid. Grief and shock and pain and trauma do not check credentials or do uniform inspections. Everyone suffers. And that suffering can wreck you. But here’s what I learned: suffering doesn’t have to be the end. (By the way, I do personally see a trending up in the use of the word “trauma” in recent years and I, in no way, am attempting to jump on that bandwagon with this post.)

So yeah, we’ve all heard of PTSD. But there’s also something called PTG: Post-Traumatic Growth. It’s the idea that after trauma, you can actually grow. Not just survive, not just limp along, but grow. Thrive. I’ve been ruminating on this for some time now. Several years ago I worked on a thesis project with a high school student of mine at the time; his dad was dying of cancer during the school year. Before the semester ended, his dad did, in fact, die. My student was trying to understand his own pain. I encouraged him to explore PTG and I’m glad he did.

Having gone through some tough losses myself, I’m returning to PTG as a comedian and with fresh eyes and a fresh perspective. I think I’ve had enough trauma in the last decade to get a punch card if there were such a thing. I have the receipts. One more breakdown and I’m pretty sure I get a free smoothie and two nights of quality REM sleep. But here’s the brutiful (brutal + beautiful) thing: stand-up comedy has become a way for me to process. Without even realizing it, I’ve been using PTG every time I walk into a club, grab a mic, and try to turn everything messed-up into laughter.

Doing stand-up is basically introducing yourself to semi-controlled trauma on purpose. I mean it. You get heckled. You forget jokes. You bomb. You sweat. You die on stage. You pour your soul into a crowd who would rather be on their phones looking at a reel of an ape driving a golf cart. You tell the truth, and they stare at you like you’re the awkward cousin at the family reunion. And…wait for it…then you go back and do it again. How insane is that?!?! But if you stick with it, something incredible happens: you stop being afraid. Not because the pain goes away, but because you’ve already lived through it once, twice, thrice, fource (what comes after “thrice”?).

That’s the essence of PTG. I’ve known about it for years, but I didn’t realize until recently that it maps perfectly onto comedy. PTG researchers say this kind of growth shows up in five key areas. Every single one of them plays out on stage.

1. The first is personal strength. After enough sets and life struggles, you stop flinching at failure. You become like a trauma-trained ninja warrior. Someone throws a heckle at you and you deflect it with a story about your family history or toss back a playful roast. You go up and over the obstacle.

2. The second is new possibilities. If you stick with it and work hard at it, comedy often opens up strange and wonderful doors. Life does, too. In comedy, you start by telling jokes to your steering wheel. Then you get the courage to tell your family and they make you question whether you should be doing comedy at all. Then one night you’re in a bowling alley at 10pm killing with a bit about your colonoscopy prep. These people came to roll balls and stayed to watch you emotionally unravel. That might not sound like a “possibility,” but it is.

3. Third is improved relationships. Comedians are often trauma people or traumatized people. We’ve all been through things, and that’s why we laugh the way we do. You start to form bonds that are forged in kilns of awkward silence. There’s something beautiful about standing outside a gig with another comedian, both of you silently nodding because you know what it’s like to die in front of a bachelorette party visiting Hawai’i all the way from Tallahassee.

4. Fourth is appreciation of life. Once you’ve bombed in a room where a man in Crocs with socks and cargo shorts made eye contact with you for ten minutes without blinking, everything else in life feels just a bit easier. Once of you’ve been through those trenches, you start to believe that maybe life isn’t about avoiding pain, but learning how to make it funny on the way through. What a great lesson!!! You get to that point where your kids laugh or a stranger smiles or you just remember that you’re still here. And each time “that” happens, laughter becomes a bit more sacred.

5. The fifth and final one is spiritual development. I know not everyone would describe stand-up comedy as spiritual, but those people have clearly never had to follow a guy doing jokes about squirrel mating in front of a mostly sober crowd. There’s something deeply spiritual about telling the truth, hoping to connect, and risking rejection. It’s one of those things that’s tough to explain and people almost won’t really get it until they’ve tried it. You know, deep down, when you’re up there you’re not merely performing. You’re offering up little pieces of yourself to strangers and hoping they say, “Yes! Me, too!!!”

Stand-up didn’t save me. That’s on Jesus. But stand-up has repeatedly shown me where the cracks in me were/are and put the light right on them. I used to be afraid of bombing. That’s what kept me from doing stand-up for so long. I used to want to avoid the pain. Now, when pain comes knockin’, I just ask it if I can get a five-minute bit out of it. I used to think healing meant being happy again. It doesn’t. Happiness is fleeting and unimportant. These days, I think healing looks a lot like being honest in front of people, especially when it makes people laugh so hard they snort or cry or snort-cry.

I’m not good at comedy because I’m strong. Quite the opposite: I’m strong because I kept doing comedy after I bombed. And trust me, I’ve bombed, and not just on stage either. I’ve bombed a lot in life. Like everyone, I have mental notebooks full of war stories. But here’s the thing, perhaps the thing that makes me different from a lot of people: I kept going. And every time I go up on stage, something gets rebuilt. A part of me gets rebuilt. I get a little more courage, a little more clarity, and a little less ashamed. That’s PTG! So hear me on this: if you can learn to laugh at what once tried to destroy you, you’ve already won. You’re bulletproof. And if you can make someone else laugh, too? Even better!