Therapy appointment has me gut punched
Growing is so hard
I respond to criticism more deeply than most … it is a body memory … it is stored in my body
I asked my therapist, Chari, if the alcoholic obsession that we experience as nondrinking alcoholics, where we reach for other things like food, gambling, a partner, shopping, workaholism, any obsession that we can focus on, etc, when our mind is spinning, and we want to feel better using something obsessively like we used to use alcohol or drugs, is the same as the PTSD obsession … I told her it felt different to me …
When I want to gamble or eat my feelings away it feels more compulsive, yes obsessive too, but when I am triggered in my PTSD with criticism, or being talked down to, it can last for months on end … up to 18 months or more … I feel like Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man walking around befuddled, repeating over & over & over again the criticism in my head not being able to sort it out, hurt over and over again … it’s debilitating …
Alcoholic Obsession vs. PTSD Obsession
She said it IS different because the PTSD trauma/obsession is attached to the soul …
That hit deep … I instantly KNEW it was true …
Then she praised me for being able to FEEL the difference … I was proud of myself too … proud because I have ignored my body and what it needs or feels over the years … turns out that is typical in childhood trauma … feelings of being disconnected and detached …
The alcoholic make-me-feel-better-now obsession is tied to fantasy a lot … ties to a reality that is make believe … we believe the object of our obsession will make me feel better … it might for a little while, but ultimately it is an empty solution for filling the emotional/spiritual hole we are trying to fill … God is the answer to our empty hole … we must seek Him for answers …
The PTSD Obsession is unfinished business … the pain tells us something is wrong … recoiling from the pain is a built-in mechanism to help us survive … the biggest trigger for me is criticism … it is the original wound … being talked down to, being made to feel stupid or being doubted all the time, even by myself! Also, not being seen or heard or allowed to have my own feelings, I was not allowed to have my own voice (I can go into shock just thinking about it right now … the silent survivor … freezing in place to survive the chaos and madness) … these areas are all scar tissue and are the wounds that keep getting opened daily, now especially that I have been digging deep to work on all this trauma … My Sponsor says that after so much work on the subject that she finally cracked open and what had been buried so deep, for so many years, now all rose to the surface, it felt raw and sensitive, and was ready to heal … I identified with this scenario so much … My God, it is excruciatingly painful … finally looking the original wound in the face and giving it a big hug …
I wish I could time travel back to the MANY traumatic childhood incidences to calm and sooth my young self … make me feel safe … I can, in a sense, by picturing it in my mind … Time traveling back to heal the hurt … talking to my little girl that we grew up and I am now here to protect her and take care of her …
Chari explained that survivors of childhood trauma, like my own, that our nervous system has a very low tolerance for the criticism … where most people have a normal tolerance to criticism, ours is much tighter … We are vulnerable to criticism to a greater degree than most, it never goes away, it may lessen, but doesn’t disappear entirely … our tolerance for criticism is greatly reduced and even distorted … shame is not far behind as we feel shame for not being able to ‘do it right’, whatever ‘it’ is, but there is hope for healing … we can expand our tolerance given help, time and patience …
As I work on this with my therapist and my sponsor, it is all coming to the surface, and it is barely tolerable … I can barely walk out my front door without being triggered by someone … it can even happen in my own home, and I live alone!
I had a computer guy come to my home, and he laughed at the way I use my computer by keeping many PDFs open at once … I told him that happens a lot when I am working as many PDFs get opened and then I get busy and don’t close them … he explained it slows my computer down, but he was laughing about it … it felt like he was laughing at me … it triggered me …
I triggered for several reasons …
1. Mom used to laugh at me and make fun of me, made me feel stupid and talked down to … she acted like I didn’t know how to do the simplest of tasks and would berate me … Mom’s criticism … the original wound
2. Dad also made fun of me as well, but it was much more subtle, and I did not even realize it until I was sober many years and saw him doing it to others, then realized he was doing it to me as well
3. The contractors in my home during the flood told me I didn’t know what I was doing a lot (I am a property manager of 32 years, I know my shit…) that traumatized me to be told in my own home, my safe spot, that I was stupid … and again, being talked down too by misogynistic contractors who think no women can know anything about contracting … fuckers …
4. My home is my safety zone, so the feeling of being ‘attacked’ in my own home is beyond words to express the violation I feel of someone walking into MY space, that I own, and come at me … FUCK!! ((Oh, I guess I did find a word that expresses it!))
5. Many people in the world talk to people like this … so it triggers me constantly … It makes me feel that I am stupid, and I don’t know what I am doing … that they have need to tell me how to do basic stuff … like pour a cup of coffee … true story, happened the other night at a meeting … I went off on the guy so hard it was embarrassing … in the end we talked it out … he apologized for upsetting me & I apologized for my overreaction …
6. My Brothers Mental Illness can trigger me on the daily, depending on his current state of affairs, but when he is in the hospital (as he is right now) and we are trying to save his feet from being amputated due to the diabetic wounds and he is fighting us all to even look at his feet because he is convinced they want to just chop them off because it would be easier for them to do that then to heal them, I tend to get a pit in my stomach more often that takes a while to get rid of … so that is constantly running like a program in the background of my anxiety spectrum …
This incident with the computer guy happened the night after the how-to-pour-a-cup-of-coffee-correctly guy and two nights after visiting my brother in the hospital under #6 circumstances … bam, bam, bam … then two nights later, another bam …
A dear friend merrily crossing a clearly set boundary, totally clueless as to why I would set such a boundary … et tu Brute? Total anxiety when I had to stand my ground and hurt her, but save me … double bind … I either hurt her, or hurt me … no win situation … FUCK … Again, still … I chose me this time … I had to … HAD to … to survive … to set the new pattern for myself of choosing me amidst the trauma trigger … Painful, but necessary … I felt validated when this happened as it showed me that what I had been asking for, and needing, from this friend had been ignored so many times before … she couldn’t hear me …
The computer guy and I, like coffee guy and I, also talked our incident out when it happened, but he brought it up several times again as we had follow up visits … he is very young … in his mid-20s I’d say, I am 56 … I finally told him today that communication is good, as he had explained to me that he giggles at a lot of things, and I realized he is a nervous giggler … so I understood better that that is his way … I explained a bit about PTSD to him that I had been triggered and now he knows I am sensitive to that … he apologized that he said he knows things that he thinks other people should know and they don’t, so he laughed that I didn’t know about the PDFs slowing my computer down and said that he would be aware of laughing at matters in the future …. I also acknowledged that I do that too … I have a wealth of knowledge from living a lot of life and I can also do the same thing … talk down to people who don’t know what I know
WOW … did I just acknowledge that out loud?! And put it in writing?! Well of course I inherited that trait from my mother, but I have been practicing it for so long I did not realize it on some level … it took this sweet kid to bring it to my attention in a new light … in a way I could see it from a different angle and understand the damage I am doing with this inherited trait … but since I had been disconnected from it for so long, I could not acknowledge it as mine to own … how can I see something that has been so deeply buried in anxiety and shame?! Now that it is at the surface, in my face, I can see it straight on …
We do not know, what we know, until we know it … We can’t know it before we know it …
I do not like it being done to me, and yet, I am doing it to others … not intentionally, it is a part of my make up from childhood, part of my DNA passed down from Mom, probably from Grandma, and probably her mom before her … it is possible to reprogram this in me and I am starting today on it … I realized as I walked this young man out of my office building and was walking back to my office this very revelation described above, that I indeed was the very culprit I try to avoid and get triggered by … yikes! Oops! Shit! Oh Well …
I know I have been aware of that on some level, but not enough to be completely honest with myself about it and want to change it … I am now willing to change it … asking God to help me …
Ok … back into the fray here …
I get triggered by criticism, being talked down to, being told what to do, yelling, shouting, sudden crashes, angry people, and/or loud noise in general … I also get triggered by my brother’s mental illness, his manic ravings, demands and crazy requests and then his wrath and two-year-old-pout when he doesn’t get his way and the whole broken health care system that is absolutely insane itself …
When I get triggered, I try to “figure” it out all the time … I try to think it through … but that is not where the answer lies … the answers are in my body, in my feelings … that is what Chari, my therapist, is saying … “You try to figure it out with that brilliant mind of yours, but the answer is in your body”
When reexperiencing the childhood trauma as adults, we disconnect from our body, we can not think it though … the brain engages trying to help, but the body holds the key … it’s in the feelings … they are the warning signs of the trauma being relived …
When triggered, there is an adrenaline rush that cuts off the logic in the brain so the memory portion of the brain cannot access the logic … logic can not be accessed in that moment … memory takes over and the feeling of ‘IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN!!!’ prevails. There is a surge to protect oneself from the danger … it is a visceral reaction … I feel it so hard when this happens and I can not think straight, say what I need to say, do what I need to do to stay/feel safe … this is when Flight, Fight, Freeze or Fawn kicks in and I will do one, or a combination of these, to prevent collateral damage …
1. Flight – Make a run for it! Get out of there … run, run, run … run far, run fast, run now!
2. Fight – Let’s go Motherfucker … Stand my ground and rip the offender a new one and cut them in two with my words … I am a pro at this … I do not want to do this anymore as it does not make me feel good about myself …
3. Freeze – This happens the most when I am being yelled at or criticized, I can’t even talk, there are no words, I just sit and take the verbal beating until it is done, don’t disturb the disturbed any more … hoping it will be over soon … trying to become small & invisible.
4. Fawn – Trying to placate the person who is attacking me verbally, or shouting, trying to smooth it over by kissing their ass hoping to sooth them and calm them down so they will stop the madness
It is a never-ending cycle of misery … one that my mother never escaped … I do not want to be doomed to such an end …
But there is hope … yes there is … I have been diligently working on this for many years and there is progress … slowly, but surely, I am gaining ground … but not before trial by fire …
Living amongst people in general can be triggering … they, people, are everywhere! Saying and doing stupid shit! Just being themselves, most not meaning any harm, just living their lives, trying to be helpful and dragging around their own shit that collides with my shit and BAM … CRASH … BOOM … it all blows up in various ways …
Chari notices that I put the focus on the other person when I am triggered, because I have been ‘other oriented’ my entire life … watching and waiting to see what they’ll do or say to defend myself from another onslaught … and then when it all goes down and ends in yet one more devastation, I look at the other person, and what they did, to have caused the crash … it is in my DNA to do this … retreating into myself … we are working on me paying attention to what I feel, not what they are doing or saying …
Also, my attentiveness/hyper-vilgilance to the other person is part of me trying to “figure them out” studying their moves so I can somehow avoid them doing that again in the future, good luck girl! There is no way to stop people from doing what they are going to do … but as a little girl, I did not know this, so I tried to figure out how to avoid the strike a million different ways … eventually I learned there was no winning, no matter how hard I tried, but I would still try, hoping against hope, because hope was all I had, that somehow I could stop it or change it … It became my defense mechanism, so engrained in me that I did not know it was not working well into adulthood because it had always been there, I did not know how to do it differently or that a different way could work until I could trust someone else enough to try a different way … but when you have been triggered your entire life, it is hard to trust someone else … anyone else … it took a long time … a … very … long … fucking … time …
BUT … its here now … a different way to do it … Thank God!
Now, as an adult, I am tending to me and my needs as these needs were not met as a child … I was not tended to when threats came my way, in fact, my protector was my threat along with not tending to my safety, at least that is how it felt as a little girl, when I was scared or hurt and ran to my mom for help or safety, she would tell me to shut up I was making too much noise … So, I ran to my older brother, who was always there for me, at least until his mental illness took him from us 38 years ago, he is still alive, but not really, he is either a medicated zombie or a manic mad man … so what are you gonna do?! Find ways to heal now … to overcome …
The power differential plays a part too … If I see someone as some sort of an authority figure in my life, if they are talking down to me, then I flight, fight, freeze or fawn and I can’t access my logic so it is about protecting myself in that moment, but now I am becoming more aware of all this, since working on it for so long, so I am able to grasp at some straws of how to behave differently now … it will take lots of practice to turn this thing around … good and bad news … there will be PLENTY of practice as I get triggered daily anymore … it is that – ‘at the surface sensitive’ – right now …
My Sponsor has been through this and has made it to the other side … so I know it can get better … I am following her lead …
I need to focus on the feelings in my body … not the other person … up until now, this has been impossible for me … Chari says it’s how the brain works, if it is focused on one thing only, it will not see the other things around it …
I have been swallowing this shit whole for so many years … taking it on the chin … taking whatever has been handed up to me … I fight back a lot, a lot, but that is draining, and ultimately, it takes its toll on me one way or the other … either me not feeling good about myself and beating myself up for the way I responded, or I take it out on others, which just starts the cycle over again …
Another aspect of this is that I have doubted myself my whole life …
My mother was a gas lighter … she would literally say something and then swear she did not say it … so I doubted my own reality.
Example … she would say “turn right”, so I would turn right, and she would scream at me “I said turn left!” I would argue with her, “you said turn right?!” … her reply, “I did not!” … I’d think to myself, I swear she said turn right … then I would replay it all and doubt what I had heard …
Try doing that a few thousand times … I promise you, you will doubt yourself constantly for the rest of your life …
It was not until much later in life, towards the end of her life, that I caught her in the act, more than once, but this one I remember well … she wanted to look at nursing homes … so I set out to explore nursing homes and see what they had to offer … took a lot of my time and effort to do this … drug her to several of them to take a look … this took months of effort … I went back to her with the full report … she said she had never asked to look at nursing homes … WTF?! Typical … but that is when I saw it with a clearer mind, realizing this had been her MO from the start …
At least I was on to her now! But the damage had been done … it will take a lot of undoing … that’s the way life goes sometimes … yes it sucks … yes it hurts … but what else am I going to do at this point? Move forward and keep healing is what I am determined to do …
I still find it hard to express myself verbally … I can do it much better in writing when I have time to think it through … that is probably why I love to write so much, because my true self can come out …
That is why I started this blog, to be able to express myself how I needed to without restriction … without worrying about what someone would say, feel or react when I write it all out … but there are still a few restrictions … there always are … just in case “they” ever read this, I can not talk about some situations … but at least it is accomplishing my needs for the most part … I am grateful for that …
I hope to give hope where there might not be any, encouragement where it is needed, a voice to the voiceless, understanding to anyone who is willing to understand … I hope it helps someone … I know it is helping me and that is the one that counts the most in my world …
I have always had this notion of recycling the pain … that the pain will all be worth it if it can help someone else … God is in charge of that aspect of it … SO, I hand it over to Him to distribute as He sees fit …
I hope this finds you and helps in some way …
Love you
FIC