Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War” Triggered My PTSD
(Or: Would Someone Please Give Tony Stark a Hug)
“I know that road.”
I don’t get triggered.
No no, I take that back — I’m trying to do this thing where I cut the shit, but it’s hard. I’ve spent the last twenty years creating an impenetrable suit of performative armor around myself, which has enabled me to become a wünderkind at being absolutely not okay while fooling everyone into thinking I am 100% fine.
Or, as the Tumblr tag says: “I am Tony Stark.”
So let’s try that again: I don’t get triggered easily.
I can ride passenger in a Grand Cherokee without having violent flashbacks. Driving along a winding road for too long might spark some anxiety, but nothing I can’t quash with some deep breathing exercises. Seeing a car crash in a movie, like the one in the opening scene of Captain America: Civil War, won’t even make me twitch.
The number of times I’ve been sent spiraling and ended up a clammy, nervous wreck over something crash-related can be counted on one strong, hobbit-sized hand. Before last Thursday night, the worst happened during college while I was visiting family in Portland.
I was driving back to my best friend’s house with her mom in the passenger seat. It was the first time I’d driven a car in Portland. I must have been eighteen — fourteen years between me and the accident — and the official diagnosis was right over the horizon, the most debilitating months of psychological hell still to come.
Best Friend’s Mom said we could either take Patton Road or some other street (I don’t remember the name of it and it doesn’t matter). She thought I remembered Patton Road and what it meant, which makes sense considering I remember everything else about the accident.
I decided to take Patton. Shorter drive, less traffic, no problem. For all of my history with and connection to World War II, I often forget about the critical one I share with that old bastard, General George.
The drive was leisurely and uneventful. There are trees all along that route, and eventually they all start to blur together. BFM and I talked and talked in our usual way. I thought I half-recognized some spots as we drove but didn’t linger on any of them. This was Portland, after all, the city where I was born (but not raised), and so much of it always looked the same to me.
We were halfway back to the house when I drove over the crash site. Didn’t even realize where we were until the moment I felt the car go over the dip in the road and I saw the traffic lights at the top of the hill, and then my whole world bottomed out.
I keep trying to come up with ways to describe the feeling, but words lack. Sometimes there are no words. Thankfully, I have Tony Stark.
So no, I don’t get triggered easily. But when I do, it’s cata-fucking-strophic.
Real talk: I’ve been in therapy for two and a half years. Three if you count summer 2010 and the three-and-a-half months I spent back home in Oregon treating the one-two punch of depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with concentrated meditative therapy.
I’ve made more progress than eighteen-year-old Rachel — a girl on the brink, who didn’t know what was wrong with her and, when she walked into a student counselor’s office in April 2010, collapsed into heaving sobs before she even made it to the couch — could’ve ever imagined.
My experience with trauma up to that point was like a cat when he’s sick: He won’t let on that something is terribly wrong until it’s almost too late. In some cases, there is no “almost.” Throughout my freshman year of college — most of which was lost to the insurmountable, dissociative blur of depression — I felt constantly on the verge of being one of the no-almost’s.
“Unfortunately, the device that is keeping you alive is also killing you.”
It’s a horrendous thing to write in 2016 when life is hard, granted, but livable, full of promise and terror and joy in all the ways it should be for someone my age. But for most of my life, I didn’t see myself living to see the age of 24. If I tried imagining a life beyond that point, all I got was a black abyss, a void that was somehow solid and impassable, but also infinite in its emptiness. I still have no explanation as to why 24. That was the number trauma chose, and I accepted it.
A lifetime of that and it becomes your standard measure of normal. I never thought there was anything wrong with me, per se, because I’d grown up feeling that way. It was just…how I was. It’s why I didn’t seek out help earlier. Plus I was a stubborn teenager who adamantly rejected the very thought that something might be off in my head.
Mercifully, the wall has since come down. Friends, family, and therapists reliably got it through to me that my status of living with these horrifying thoughts and feelings — my normal — was really not quo.
I turn 25 in less than a month. And the things that hinder me psychologically are at an all-time low. The trick, I learned with therapy, was acknowledging the accident as something part of me. It cannot be got over, or pushed out, nor can it be allowed to consume me. But it can be incorporated.
Some facts — like the memories themselves — are unalterable. I will never forget seeing my mother slumped over the airbag. I will never forget my last words to her, or hers to me, or the words that clattered around in my four-year-old head but didn’t say as I watched her be loaded into the ambulance after me. Words I wished I’d said. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I had said them, but the what-ifs plague as much as the memories, themselves. You spend your days wondering if even the smallest thing could have made a difference, especially when you’re the one who survived.
So the task becomes not letting the accident, the trauma, be all of me — to find the balance between not letting myself shut it out and not letting it shut me down. To make room for it. It’s a shockingly thin line to walk, and most days I still lean precipitously toward the former, because that’s what I did for almost fifteen years before being diagnosed, and damn if it isn’t a hard habit to break.
But I’m working on it. That one summer of meditative therapy turned what was a full-blown, surround-sound, 360-degree 3D IMAX traumatic memory experience into an itty bitty silent movie. Talk therapy gets me that much closer to stability; it’s the meta analysis on the movie as it plays in the background, helping me make some sense of an altogether senseless thing.
But a life with mental illness is a long slog up a steep hill with no summit. There is no Iwo Jima of depression and PTSD, no hard-won peak on which to raise a triumphant flag that flaps in the breeze. That’s what makes treatment — and life itself — feel Sisyphean. All you can do is stay in treatment and strengthen your coping muscles enough to keep you moving up that hill with your burden for the rest of your life.
But sometimes those muscles give out, and down you come tumbling. On the way to rock bottom you wonder bitterly why you thought you could get better in the first place, or why you thought you deserved to. And sometimes, right after you hit the ground, you wonder if you shouldn’t just stay there.
Fiction is my coping mechanism. Always has been. After mom died I started writing because I couldn’t verbalize everything that was wrong in my little kid brain. I could tell the story of the accident, embellish over the gaps in memory to create a narrative, but I couldn’t speak words to the effects the crash had on me psychologically. I wonder, every time I sit down to work, if I would have become a writer had mom not died.
While stories have proven to be a resource for healing over the years, there was always a missing piece. A touchstone absent from the whole. I think everyone at some point in their lives hopes to find the one thing that makes them feel less alone in the universe. We crave meaning, recognition, representation; we want to be seen and understood. It’s why stories exist.
Enter Tony Stark.
Tony Stark was the first fictional character I could point to and say, “There I am.” Here was a dark-haired, brown-eyed, left-handed Gemini with depression, anxiety, PTSD, abandonment issues, no sense of self-worth and a mother who died in a car accident.
I looked at Tony and thought, here’s someone who uses false confidence and flair to conceal his low self-esteem. Who cares too much but doesn’t want to let on in case someone decides to use it against him. Who thinks he isn’t enough. Who deflects. Who loves his friends but in his deepest darkest mind fears they’ll get wise to the bullshit and leave him. Who refuses to acknowledge his own trauma until it bites him in the ass. Who struggles with emotional intimacy. Whose ego is just a clever disguise. Who pretends he isn’t hurting. Whose survivor’s guilt casts its own shadow. Who feels safest when he’s alone while pretending he isn’t lonely. Who loves others easily but hates himself.
It’s embarrassing, frankly, how long the list of similarities is. Positive and negative. Basically, with the exception of him being a filthy rich socialite/CEO and Certifiable Genius with a flying suit of armor (and, y’know, a man), it’s uncanny, like looking in a (particularly flattering) mirror. But regardless of that, the tether I have to this character has done what nothing else has:
It’s made me feel less alone in the universe.
It doesn’t help that Tony’s first appearance in Captain America: Civil War is as a hologram of himself at twenty years old, reliving his last moments with his parents before they died. It is a memory, but a modified one — a Binaurally-Augmented Retro-Framed version of events specifically designed to help Tony process twenty-plus years of trauma and grief.
“That’s how I wish it happened.”
How many times have I thought that? In those exact words?
At its beefy heart, Captain America: Civil War is a movie about grief, trauma, fear, loss, and sadness. Between the big laughs and action set pieces and heist movie/buddy cop antics, it is nothing if not a study on what trauma does to different people. This movie was intelligently designed to make me hurt.
Nearly every one of Tony’s scenes in Captain America: Civil War is hard for me to watch. His best friend almost dies in a fall because he couldn’t get to him in time. His found-family disintegrates because of miscommunication and a lack of trust. He shoulders the blame (and an unholy amount of guilt) for every bad thing the Avengers have done as a team, from the creation of Ultron to civilian deaths in Sokovia. He’s backed into a corner, wounded, emotionally distraught, alone; he’s having heart troubles. And just when Tony thinks he might be able to salvage something good from the burning, scattered pieces of an unbearably shitty situation, he watches his parents die.
There is a car crash. Tony knows the details of the accident — he knows that road — but there is a piece missing from the equation he was given twenty-four years ago: Howard and Maria Stark were murdered on December 16th, 1991. By the man Tony has come to help, standing not six feet away from him. And to twist the knife, Steve Rogers — his teammate, a man Tony absolutely considered his friend — knew.
Watching Tony suffer through this movie was hard enough. But seeing him watch that footage did more than hit close to home. Watching Tony watch his parents die tore me apart.
This is where things get messy for me.
Anger and I are strangers who parted ways around the time of the accident, somewhere in the months between me being put in a body cast and the day I started writing. Or maybe we didn’t part ways, but like the trauma, I smothered it so that it never saw the light of day. It too was an emotion my mind couldn’t make sense of, so I buried it.
Post-diagnosis, anger was no longer satisfied with being interred, and New York City became the shovel trying to dig it up. Nowadays, getting me to the point of white-hot rage doesn’t take much, which is scary. Not having a sufficient outlet for it is scary. Writing war fiction helps: It channels the worst of what I feel into work of some meaning, but the physical manifestation stays locked inside with nowhere to go.
I fear hurting someone, physically, at that moment of peak rage. I once smacked a kid in fifth grade because he got too close to my face and yelled at me (in my defense, he was being a little shit with no respect for personal space, but I digress).
That fear is real. But I can’t deny that watching Tony Stark lose all semblance of self-control and start tearing into both Steve Rogers, who kept the secret of his parents’ deaths from him, and Bucky Barnes, who killed them (while brainwashed) was every violent, awful, righteously angry fantasy I’ve ever had about the woman who crashed into us painted in broad, super-powered strokes on the big screen.
“This isn’t going to change what happened.”
“I don’t care. He killed my mom.”
People have been exhausting the question of whether or not Tony was justified in his reaction. If he was justified in losing his last shred of control after seeing his parents murdered. I’ve watched the arguments volley back and forth, seen people write things like “If that were me” and “If I were in Tony’s place” and “If I’d just watched my mom die…”
There is no if for me.
This is what spilled out the moment I got home from seeing the movie that first time:
I’m not proud of this. It scares me. But this was my truth in that moment. Having my PTSD triggered by a goddamn superhero movie is hard to explain away to people who don’t identify with fictional characters, who don’t rely on them to cope with mental illness. I’ve gotten funny looks and been scoffed at. The day after I saw the movie, a coworker asked me why it upset me so much. I couldn’t answer her and almost burst into tears.
They’re superheroes. It’s fiction.
Sure, but it’s my lived experience. Or close enough to hit me where it hurts. And I’ll take my coping mechanisms where I can find them, thank you very much.
I cried through all 45 minutes of my therapy session last Friday. He watched his parents die. He heard his mother’s last words. Tony finally broke. 12/16/1991. “He killed my mom.” It’s all a bit of a jumble, which makes sense — being triggered doesn’t lend itself to cognitive equilibrium. You’re left exposed to every possible emotion, each one liable to raze you if it so much as brushes your arm.
The night of the midnight showing, I went home a shaking, silent mess. The following three days at work were a nightmare. On Sunday I came so close to slipping into a severe dissociative state I had to step off the floor and hide in the bathroom until it passed. The usual undercurrent of anxiety has become a solid weight in the middle of my chest. I saw the movie, my third time, on Mothers Day. I was shaking through That Scene and only avoided a panic attack through sheer force of will.
Friends who know the nitty gritty text me after they see the movie to ask if I’m okay. In those moments, it would be so easy to go into Tony-mode, to deflect and pretend. Distract them from everything wrong with me with a bit of the old razzle-dazzle.
But I’m trying to be honest about this stuff. So no, right now I’m not okay. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sit through That Scene and not feel the electric pulse of my own trauma echoing Tony’s and vice versa. I watched it again last night (because I’m a masochist, and I needed to know if this post still held weight) and almost threw up.
I have to remind myself that not being okay isn’t permanent. It is a transitory state of being, like Mercury in retrograde: It sucks, and it messes with everything in your life, and it feels like it’ll last forever but it won’t.
Yesterday I saw a gifset that rocked my world. Here’s 1/7, but please do yourself a favor and look at the whole thing:
This mad, wonderful person combined Samwise Gamgee’s speech from The Two Towers with Tony Stark and I just had to sit there in a state of awe and sadness, wondering how anything so lovely could hurt so much. But then, that’s Tony Stark for you. There’s some good in this world…and it’s worth fighting for.
It means something to me to see Tony make mistakes, to screw up and find the courage to own up to it. Tony’s humanity gives me hope, because after the fighting is done, he musters enough strength to keep going, no matter how much he wants to fall to pieces.
Tony Stark gets compared to Icarus a lot. Pretty obvious parallel: Iron Man, the larger-than-life Golden Avenger who flies too close to the sun and burns, et cetera. But when I look at him out of the armor — when it’s just Tony with two feet on the ground — I see Sisyphus, who struggles every day of his life and keeps going. He fights for the good in the world, even at the expense of himself. He doesn’t just strive to be good — he tries to do good. That’s what my hero is made of. If he stumbles and falls he gets back on his feet and starts up that hill again, summit or no.
At some of my lowest points, just thinking about Tony Stark has gotten me out of bed in the morning. It’s gotten me through days when all I want to do is disappear off the face of the earth. The Tony Stark School of False Self-Confidence forced me into having a modicum of actual self-confidence. The number of things being a Tony Stark fan has done for me might actually be longer than the list of things he and I have in common.
I also listen to an inordinate amount of classic rock these days.
I think it’s in our nature to derive strength, wisdom, and understanding from incorporeal things. For a lot of people, it’s religion, which isn’t my thing. But I suppose if fiction is anything, it’s my religion — it guides my understanding of the world and the people in it, gives me knowledge and helps me become a better person by making me more empathetic, more aware of the complexity of all the people around me. It reminds me that I’m fallible and imperfect like everyone else.
Seeing so much of myself in Tony Stark has made me a stronger person, because loving him demands that I love myself. The negative traits we share require my regular attention as I strive to become a person worthy of the people who love me (while simultaneously unlearning the idea that a person has to be worthy to be loved. Like there’s a benchmark. I’m not Thor’s hammer, for pete’s sake).
Seeing so much of myself in Tony Stark also led to my being triggered.
When I watched Tony watch his parents die — when I watched him fall apart and fly into a rage — I fell apart with him. Between the car crash, the date of the accident, the trees along the road, the sound of a mother dying, the brown eyes and brown hair and that look of absolute devastation, a look I know I’ve worn…it was like seeing myself up there on that screen.
It felt like driving over the site of the accident all over again.
I watched my most intimate trauma in IMAX 3D, and I never saw it coming. I couldn’t contain it. This awful thing that was always mine was suddenly being lived by the character I love most in the world, and I was powerless to stop it. I couldn’t protect Tony from experiencing that trauma (how could I?), which meant having to watch it go through him before coming back to me.
It’s been a week. The shaking and the crying and the worst of the flashbacks have stopped. The nightmares and anxiety dreams are losing ground and I’m almost back to sleeping through the night. I only almost threw up the one time. But there’s still the matter of this half-healed wound.
The thing is, I’m grateful, and that’s the hardest thing to wrap my mind around. I’m grateful because while this experience was the sensory equivalent of a Brillo pad to the hippocampus, I can tell I’ve got a better handle on my mental health than when I was eighteen and drove over the crash site, when my brain decided to forgo processing (like healthy brains do) and instead opted for opening-shot-from-Apocalypse-Now levels of scorched earth.
But I’m grateful, despite how agonizing this week has been, to know that Tony Stark and I share this. That I can reach out in these moments — when an old trauma is made to feel new and every edge is jagged — and find common ground with a superhero.
Tony Stark may have the advantage of genius, repulsor tech, and six hundred-plus pounds of gold titanium alloy, but he is still pushing that giant rock up an endless hill, gets back up when he falls or loses ground and does it all over again. He is so quintessentially human. Like me he tries not to think about futility. Like me he chooses, in spite of it all, to dream and grow and do better, think bigger, be more.
There is no cutting out the trauma, which means we have to make room for it. In the words of James Rhodes, it’s a bad beat, and some days will be harder than others. Some days, it will be unbearable.
But if I am anything like Tony Stark, I know I am the stronger for it.
