A baby trauma
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Forrest Gump
And then, I met the president again. Not India!
Last year I found myself in India, when I had promised myself, cross my heart, “never again”. It happened strangely, almost without my knowing, through cracks in my awareness that I did not see coming. It was as if the Universe had decided for me and my brain had abdicated.
At the start of the year I had been offered a first contract, one module of which was to take place in Bangalore. I did not refuse, but to say I accepted would be false. Instead, I behaved unusually: I negotiated a very high budget, with an exorbitant day rate and ministerial demands. So much so that other coaches overtook me and won the assignment. Relief.
Six months later I was asked to respond to a big tender. One of my talents is thinking about the client’s objectives and designing innovative, tailored programmes; I love it. We won the tender. In the first meeting with the client we ran through module 1. The client was satisfied and suggested moving on to module 2, “to talk about the set-up in India”.
I nearly fell off my chair! I had spent hours studying the tender and had simply not seen that there was a module in India! Apparently I was not the only one among my colleagues to discover it, but they were not surprised, since India is the client’s largest site.
Alone in the lift, a mix of panic and anger washed over me: how could I not have read the administrative sections in detail?! Not only is that unprofessional, it is not like me! Having flogged myself thoroughly, my brain curled up into infant mode and started looking for idiotic pretexts to escape reality (my great-grandmother dying for the third time, and so on).
In the middle of a conflict of values, I decided to deliver the module in India: no way out, I had to honour my commitments. I tried to convince myself that everything would go fine. And the businesswoman in me hammered home the key argument: for a return flight and a short three-day session over there, the job pays properly — Céline, make an effort!
But I was kidding myself: obviously a mission like this would not happen in a single trip, and I am supposed to know that! Yet I told myself it was a one-off — utterly stupid. I have done dozens of assignments of this scale, and they are never one-offs. A second crack in my awareness, then…
The next day I learned, to my dismay, that the mission would take place in Delhi, one of the largest megacities in the world, one of the most dangerous and most polluted. It is a city my husband and I always carefully avoided when we lived in India. Delhi, “rape city” to those who know it, is an extremely dangerous city for women. Rape is commonplace, probably the highest rate in the world.
I protected myself by choosing a flight that would land in daylight: a woman alone does not arrive at Delhi airport at night. My colleagues took me for a fragile little thing, I could see it in the way they looked at me. I did not care; they do not know India, I lived there for four years, I know what I am talking about.
When it came to applying for my business visa on the Indian government’s official website, I suddenly fell apart. Brain frozen. Panic attack. I burst into tears. I called my husband so that he would fill in the forms for me. In three minutes I had regressed to infancy; I was no longer even able to tick the boxes on a form. I did not recognise myself.
What had I got myself into?! What had made a part of me consent, when the Céline I am refused this trip with every ounce of energy?
Delhi, help!
I will never forget arriving over Delhi. As the plane prepared to land, it was not a city we were flying over but a black globe — not grey, not even charcoal: black. The dome from The Hunger Games. Complete dystopia. Stepping off the plane, I walked into a mass of thick, suffocating, almost scorching air. It was 45° in the shade.
It was not so much the heat that bothered me — as a child I lived with my parents in very hot countries — as the pollution. It is perceptible, palpable, it stinks up the air. No fooling yourself, no deceiving yourself as in Paris, where it is odourless. Here the prevailing smell is exhaust fumes, diesel, fuel oil, tar — a chemical smell, greasy and black, that settles on the skin and the membranes and goes straight into the lungs. With every breath I could feel myself being poisoned a little more.
What struck me is that people seem indifferent to it. Some even cycle to work, as in any company in France. The day after I arrived, I decided to enjoy the hotel pool. I put on my swimsuit, grabbed my towel and burst onto the rooftop — naive as I am. The dreadful smell hit me as soon as I stepped out of the lift. Yet the pool was magnificent and guests were happily splashing about. I would die if I stayed there one minute longer. I went back down to lock myself in my room.
I organised my stay in lockdown mode, and fully intended to do the same for the next ones. All my journeys consisted of breathing the minimum of outside air: airport–taxi–hotel–taxi–company–taxi–hotel–airport.
Holed up alone in my room, I tried to analyse the situation. A strange phenomenon had been with me ever since I found myself swept (trapped?) — by a pirouette or two of my awareness — into this mission, and I could not explain it.
Back home. To laugh or not to laugh
A few weeks later, as I was about to go through customs before boarding, another panic attack. I was certain my ticket would not go through. I have always travelled a great deal; I am used to long-haul flights, to walking through gates, being searched, handing over my papers, answering men in uniform. I had no reason to dread Indian customs when my papers were in order, I had paid for my flight and I held a business visa and a mission order! Yet I was on the verge of tears and my stomach was in knots. I was quite simply afraid. Of what? I had no idea.
As soon as I was back in Paris, I booked a working session with my supervisor. We identified all the ingredients of a trauma linked to India, and therefore to my time there ten years earlier, since I had not been back since (and had resolved never to…). What had been traumatic back then? I went over various episodes that had happened to me. I had indeed run into problems with every visa application, but I do not think I experienced them as traumas. In my book “The Tribulations of a French Coach in India”, I describe my long stays in government offices and the comical exchanges with Indian civil servants. But I describe them in a burlesque tone; in fact I remember that we laughed a lot in the evenings when I told my husband about my adventures.
Laughter, of course, is a defence. Could it have served to hide suffering? I remember one particularly gruelling scene that I had never revisited. It is literally an interrogation scene, as in a police film; and I am the one being questioned. I remember spending four hours with an Indian policewoman in a small square room with no window, furnished with nothing but a table and a chair on either side. The policewoman was sometimes seated opposite me, sometimes standing. At times she went out into the corridor, walked away, came back. She did not even offer me a glass of water. She grilled me for four hours about my reasons for coming to India, about why I travelled so often to Singapore, about my stays in Paris without my husband or my daughter. I answered her questions tirelessly, always the same ones. I was crushed by the heat. I took it, waiting for her to be even wearier than me. She eventually gave up and let me go home.
At the time I had told my husband the scene laughing, and had almost turned it into a sketch, a one-woman show, to amuse friends. But working with my supervisor I put on a different pair of glasses and realised that I had lived through a genuine interrogation, exactly as if I had committed an offence, as if I had been mixed up in something shady. I was the suspect.
Other episodes came back to me. One scene in particular. It was a few months after we had settled in India. It was the first time I wanted to return to Paris for business, and I needed some paper or other in order to leave Indian territory. I found myself in a shabby little office, in front of an official who stubbornly refused to speak to me: I had to come back with my husband. When the two of us returned, the official addressed only him and ghosted me completely; I felt literally transparent. At the time, we laughed about it. Today I realise it was extremely violent, a genuine negation: I no longer existed. That scene repeated itself several times, with a few variations, but the feeling of humiliation was always the same.
Bad mother, bad wife
Every time I returned to France, the customs officers asked me the same questions: why are you leaving? Your husband has a good job, why do you work? And then more or less explicit allusions to my duties as wife and mother: who will look after your husband? Who will take care of your daughter? Are you sure you are coming back? And I would answer, invent stories, lie, justify myself, like a child caught out. Guilty.
For four years I had to fight for every visa. No official ever showed me trust or understanding. I was always made to feel I was an unworthy mother and an ungrateful wife, practically a delinquent. I made my friends laugh a great deal telling them my stories from another world, another century…
I resisted. I fought. I did not give up, I did not abandon, because I could always count on my natural optimism, and on my husband. I could have decided to stop working, to settle into the quiet status of “expat wife”. But that was never on the cards. When we agreed to move to Bangalore ten years ago, the deal with my husband was: yes to an expatriation in Bangalore, on condition that I keep working. I managed it, and I am rather proud of that!
The misadventure of my daughter Lilou, dropped in the middle of the countryside by the school bus driver when she was seven and did not speak a word of English, could have ended tragically. Today I feel I did not give it enough weight. We decided to give her a mobile phone, even though her school forbade it. Lilou has always told these stories to her friends laughing; all the same, she tells them often.
Back in France, I took her to a therapist for a few EMDR sessions that did her good. At the start of the therapy, the psychologist asked to speak to me alone. She literally reproached me for having given a mobile phone to my eight-year-old daughter. Once again I was guilty: an unworthy mother, irresponsible, thoughtless and immature. That time I did not justify myself, and I lost my temper. But once again, what a feeling of humiliation!
How lucky!
The other gaze, which I also take rather badly, is that of the people around me: “You’re going to India?! That’s wonderful! How lucky!” And on my return: “You must have feasted on Indian food! Did you go shopping?” They do not know that I ate every meal at the hotel and did a bit of shopping at the airport duty-free… Others suggest I extend my stay to travel around the country. I try to explain that no, a woman alone does not do tourism in India, and that no, India is not a dream destination. Impossible to make them understand that when I am there I want only one thing: to go home to Paris!
Here too, social injunctions die hard: for Westerners like us, a business trip abroad is necessarily good news. How could one not accept such a gift? So I come across as ungrateful, capricious, an immature girl who dares to bite the hand that feeds her.
My work in supervision
My supervision sessions allowed me to bring to light and identify the traumatic events I lived through during my expatriation in India. During my five years there I was subjected to genuine harassment, with its main ingredients: repeated aggression, guilt-tripping, insinuation, accusation, belittling. Fortunately my husband was always supportive and served as a benevolent witness. Without that outside witness, I would not have come through so well.
My sense of humour did the rest. Every time I came back to Paris, alone in front of my Parisian friends, I staged these absurd, unimaginable situations, played them as comedies, to make them laugh and so that they would find again the funny, sparkling Céline they love. Backstage, on the other side of the border, there was the other Céline, the invisible Céline that Indian society ordered me to be. I held firm thanks to two strengths: my husband as my passport, my humour as my residence permit.
Excerpt
— “I’m fine. But that’s exactly what I wanted to work on today in supervision. I’ve taken time to write; I’m on my fourth book. It’s the sequel to the Tribulations, and I realise that everything I write is much less funny.
The Tribulations had a burlesque side, a broadly light tone. Now that’s no longer the case. All the cases I bring are heavier. We’d already talked about it in supervision, and at one point my supervisor used the word ‘turbulence’. That word left a mark on me. There’s something around that, around the turbulence in my life, in my practice as a coach, with the clients I meet.
And then there’s India. I’m going back to India for my big contract. I didn’t want to go back, and yet I’m going back. I went twice last year, and I’ll go twice this year. So I started writing a case around that, and a question came to me: ‘Did my four years in India leave a trace, a trauma?’
It isn’t a one-off shock. It isn’t a drama. It’s something that seeps in. A diffuse impact. A repetition. There isn’t much, but it’s all the time, all the time, all the time. I want to put words on that. I’d like to understand.”
— “This reflection began a year and a half ago, when another client offered me a mission in India. I didn’t want to go. Instead of saying no, I negotiated a rate so high that I knew they would refuse. And they said no. In the moment I felt relief. But another thought crossed my mind: ‘Why didn’t you just say no, Céline?’ Then came this contract. India was back again. I didn’t really want to look at it closely. And then a first signal appeared.
I had to do my visa online. I found myself in front of my computer and there — panic. Impossible to type my surname, my first name, my date of birth. Elementary things. I told myself: ‘If I make a spelling mistake, if I forget an accent, they’ll refuse my visa and it’ll be hell.’ My brain froze. To the point that I had to call my husband. He did it. And I buried that somewhere, telling myself: ‘It’s only a form. Céline, what’s the matter with you?’
— “I forgot. Until I wrote.”
— “And there, while writing, the question came back?” my supervisor asks.
— “Yes. I wondered whether…”
I break off.
— “I don’t know if it’s a trauma. But there’s a load, something that has built up. Like a tiredness that won’t go away.”
— “What did you live through over there that might explain it?”
I think.
— “What threw me was that nothing goes as planned. I feel I lived in permanent uncertainty. A simple appointment could turn into a headache. I remember an appointment at the eye doctor’s: normally a thirty-minute journey. It took us three hours. I couldn’t drive, so every morning I didn’t even know whether my driver would be there. Whether I’d be able to go out. Whether I’d be able to do what was planned.”
— “And in those moments, what did you feel?”
— “Anguish. And it’s the same now: I tell myself the plane will explode, the taxi will be late, it’ll take three hours… In my head — well, in my heart — I feel my life is in danger.”
— “And is that imprint tied to India, or could it attach to something else?”
— “I don’t know. Actually… it must have started before. Before agreeing to go to India, we did an exploratory trip. And as the calendars fell, I was on a mission in Argentina just before. Believe it or not, I flew Buenos Aires–Paris, then Paris–Bangalore to join Ben. And that trip… lots of things happened. My phone was stolen at Roissy, in the departure lounge, right after customs. And arriving over there… It eats me up to talk about it again. It definitely started there.”
— “What started there?”
— “My husband was late. There was traffic. It took him three hours instead of two to get to the airport. And I… had no way of reaching him. No way of reaching him and… I remember the first instant of panic when I stepped out of the airport. There were people… but crowds, crowds, crowds… It was two in the morning, Air France flight, normal. I scan the crowd. He isn’t there. I scan again. He still isn’t there. And then I thought: damn, I’m alone in the world. I wanted to go back into the airport, but I couldn’t. Once you’re out, you need a ticket to get back in. So I ended up at the little refreshment stand opposite… waiting… with no way of telling him where I was. It lasted 45 minutes. Afterwards it felt like ten years. Then I started to think. I grabbed a security guard, asked for his phone, tried to call. No answer.”
— “What went through you at that moment?”
— “In my head it was: loneliness. … The driver, sometimes, would take off. Normally he was supposed to be there in case of need. But sometimes he vanished. I fired him later.”
— “Those who are supposed to be there… are not there.”
— “Yes.”
— If you stay with it, if you let that sentence resonate — what other kind of experience in your history might it send you back to?
I tell her
— “And if you look at these situations… what do they have in common?”
— “I’m waiting for someone. And that person isn’t there.”
— “And so you, possibly, from what you’ve just told me — what you did was lock your fear away. You introjected strength. The one who isn’t afraid — that’s you.”
— “If you look at her today… that fear, that part of you that locked it away… what would you want to say to her?”
— “Maybe that part of me… I’ve locked away lots of things, but… she has the right to exist. But at the same time… I’m in contrast with myself. There are times when I’m scared stiff and I know I shouldn’t be. And others when I’m right to be afraid. There are times when I mustn’t be afraid. But there are also times when it’s completely normal. A three-hour traffic jam never killed anyone. So being afraid then isn’t normal. But when the bus arrives and my daughter isn’t on it… Yes. Then it’s normal to be afraid.”
— “And now, what do you tell yourself?”
— “That I told myself a false story.”
— “Which one?”
— “That I’m too afraid for nothing.”
— “And what if it were… something else?”
— “It’s OK to be afraid. But fear isn’t all or nothing. There are degrees. There’s a small fear. A big fear. A fright. A terror. A whole range.”
— “That’s interesting. Because by telling yourself ‘I’m too afraid for nothing’, you go on denying something, don’t you? It’s as if, every time you say that, you reinforce the dissociation.”
— “Yes…”
— “Because that fear, the one you muzzled, hasn’t gone. It’s still there.”
— “Yes.”
— “That little girl who learned not to be afraid… she did something heroic. She forgot herself so that the others could stay standing. But if today you, the adult, could welcome those fears… what would happen?”
— “I’m staying with the word heroic. I don’t know — going to India, am I being heroic? Or am I forgetting myself once again?”
— “So here’s what we have. This anguish you call your paranoia… it isn’t paranoia. It’s anguish. An anguish that the plane will explode, that things will go wrong… And that anguish is the reactivation of a part of you that was muzzled. For your own good. For the good of others. That part switches on a bit like an energy that is trying to make itself heard.”
— “How do you feel, right now?”
— “It suits me to unfold all this a little. And bringing it into awareness does me good.”
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“Reflective competence in the service of practice”
Reflective competence is the capacity to turn back on oneself to analyse what one feels in front of a client or a group situation. The habit of working on oneself gives this reflective practice a solid base, and recourse to supervision consolidates it. The supervision space must be dedicated to this stepping back. It strengthens reflective competence and lets you progress in your professional practice. It is of great value, and benefits the client directly.
The social injunction to appear happy when you land an assignment abroad led me to question the impossibility of explaining that the assignment in question is not entirely good news. What to do, how to behave? Keep quiet? Try to explain? Lie? None of these attitudes is like me. An inner conflict of loyalty, a watershed between my professional self and my private self. Whereas in my practice I make a point of connecting and harmonising the two, of being accurate and sincere.
Reflecting on this experience has served me in my work; it opened up an extra place of curiosity towards my clients. Now I ask the question: what you are telling me (this post at a major luxury brand, for instance) — is it good news or bad news? In doing so I offer the person a safe space to say that no, deep down, they are not delighted about that future post, even though they know they must announce it with pride and joy to conform to the social norm. Like a false self.
TO TICKLE YOUR PRACTICE
Look closely at a situation that activates you — in fear, or in anxiety, for example
- What past events may have influenced your reaction to that situation?
- How does your body react when you think back to that experience?
- What protective mechanisms do you put in place to cope with it?
- What is the underlying fear that inhabits you in that situation?
- If you could give that fear a voice, what would it tell you?
- How do you tell your intuition, or a trauma, from a mere anxious scenario taking control?
- What are your internal signals that tell you you are tipping into a state of intense anxiety?
GOING FURTHER
- The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk. This book explores how trauma is written into body and mind.
- Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm — Thich Nhat Hanh. The renowned Buddhist monk approaches fear from a spiritual and meditative angle.
- Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship — Laurence Heller & Aline LaPierre. This book presents the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), a therapeutic approach that helps understand and heal childhood trauma and its impact on our adult lives.
