Complex Post-Traumatic Stress and Orangutan Rescue: What I Learned from YouTube During the Pandemic
It started with foxes, then slid into bats, finally fixing on orangutans. I am referring to my YouTube pandemic viewing habits during those late hours when I needed to entertain myself and nothing productive seemed worthwhile. I am an animal person, but I had never spent time with foxes, bats or orangutans in my earlier life. Cats and dogs had been the extent of it, and they were there throughout the pandemic in real form, comforting me and nuzzling me as I watched these other animals in other places. Weird, isn’t it, but it didn’t seem so.
And why Orangutans? I was embarrassed to be found by my husband, yet again on my iPad, staring at the hairy red apes in Borneo or Indonesia. For the record, they are the largest tree climbing mammals in the world. They brachiate, that is, they swing from tree to tree, bending one over from the top to reach another. We share an enormous amount of DNA with them. However, today they are facing extinction from loss of habitat thanks to deforestation, and the creation of massive palm oil plantations that reduce their natural world to zilch. Locals hunt the remaining orangutans when they find them, beat them, and steal the babies for the exotic animal trade.
This is hard on Orangutans who lead solitary lives, have few births, and need a lot of time with their mothers to learn everything they need to live independent lives at the top of the forest canopy. Luckily, there are very interesting and successful rescue efforts that provide Orangutans with surrogate people parents who take them into the forest and teach them many of the things their mothers would have taught them. Instead of a single parent, they become socialized through life in a lively cohort of Orangutans with similar age tasks on their plates, eventually, hopefully, able to be released into a suitable wild environment far from where the Palm Oil plantations are taking over.
How many Orangutan rescue videos did I watch? A lot. Realizing my habit had the hallmarks of an addiction, I tried to break myself of it, but my fixation continued. I came to know the names of many big-eyed baby apes who were saved and landed in one of the rescue centers, from Peanut and Tonduo to BiduBidu and Jelapat to Penenga. I watched them learn to climb, find termites in rotten wood, and splash in puddles on the way to their jungle classrooms. What could be wrong with this? But why was I doing it? What drew me in and kept me watching these animals that closely resembled humans, but definitely were not humans? What was I really trying to learn?
I did not imagine I was or had been an orangutan, but I empathized deeply with them, and my empathy had everything to do with Complex-Post Traumatic Stress (CPTSD). Both of us, the rescued orangutans and myself, had suffered trauma, rupture in the key early relationships, and both of us struggled with attachment as we went forward with this burden. Other caregivers offered themselves to us and we were able to make use of their support, but it was admittedly a partial and makeshift solution to a deep problem.
But more than any initial wounds I had experienced — I was in the middle of the pandemic, living in lock down for months, unable to meet with friends or see others except by virtual meeting. My CPTSD characteristics blossomed in this emotional hot house. I was lonely, isolated, terrified of catching Covid 19, and on a non-stop jag watching Orangutan rescue videos. In the end, three things stand out to me from this video marathon — the realness of trauma, the dangers of minimization, and the importance of attachment.
Trauma is real. If baby Orangutans feel it when being separated from their mothers and left to fend on their own without other Orangutans, well, then, wouldn’t humans also experience trauma? In other words, if orangutans have feelings and feel this pain then we, as humans, should also feel this kind of pain. For most people this will seem like a no-brainer, but not if you are struggling with CPTSD. As a card-carrying member of the CPTSD tribe, the orangutans verified or affirmed emotional trauma for me.
A key trait of CPTSD is minimization, and I often struggle to recall and feel a wound. “Did that really happen? Could it have been that bad?” I often ask myself, recalling painful childhood events. Watching these small creatures clinging to a parent downed in a burning field of trees, crying as they undergo their intake examination at a rescue center or hiding their heads in the shoulder of a new caregiver, reinforced my understanding that trauma is real, it does hurt, and its not a small deal. Orangutan rescue videos helped me to realize, not only that trauma is real and hurts, but that It’s not small, it’s big. Face it and feel it. Minimizing it doesn’t make it go away.
Finally, attachment seems to be everything in what goes wrong and what goes right for a rescued orangutan. I also had the chance to watch many happily re-located orangutan mother and baby pairs in the wild and could see how the mother offers unconditional affection and careful instruction in what it is to be an orangutan every moment of every day. I especially liked the way a mother’s big hands and long fingers provided a safety net for the baby’s explorations at the top of a tree where they rested in their leaf nest. For orangutans without mothers in the rescue centers, I saw how they reached out to each other, as I and my siblings had in our early years, one teaching the other how to do the important things we needed to know.
CPTSD is a disease that revels in twisting reality, making the real false and the false real. CPTSD leads us to minimize our distress, and, finally, CPTSD leaves us with longing for attachment that we lack. As a member of the CPTSD club, these issues have always been with me, with or without the pandemic or orangutan rescue videos on YouTube, but for some unknown reason circumstances conspired to lead me, late at night, to Orangutan rescue videos and an opportunity to affirm again what is true and what can help me to health as I struggle with CPTSD.
