The Origins of Fear and the Memory of Trauma

 

In exploring some of my unprocessed trauma from the various health problems and close calls in family, I've discovered some interesting things.

I have discovered that I remember Dad coming into my room to tell me the OPP had called and Mom had been in an accident. I remember the entryway into the Almonte Emergency. I remember seeing Mom with all the fresh traumatic injury, bruising, broken bones, blood, and bones sticking out where one should never see them. I remember the team of docs all up and over my Mom trying to get the bleeding from her nose stopped to prevent exanguination while keeping her breathing.

What I don't recall is the drive in to Ottawa following Dad in the ambulance that night. I don't recall the hours waiting while she underwent emergency surgery or the conversation with the surgeon. That just seems not to be there or isn't accessible.

I remember taking care of Dad's leg for four months while Mom was in the hospital. I remember dealing with the dressings for the gory leg 3-4 times a day. I remember the pain that went on and on and nothing touched, the pointless trips into Emergency in Perth and the trips that didn't happen because of despair and the agony, and I remember being asked several times to get a gun for Dad so he could end the misery. And looking back, I remember never being able to cry or breakdown because he needed me, but being so heartsick and wounded by how much pain he was in and how helpless I was to do anything much for him.

I remember how the infections and the pain would trigger his heart and everytime he had a bad bout of chest pain, you didn't know if you needed to take him to the hospital or it would just end right then and there. I remember the dread and not being able to allow myself to breakdown from the horror of it because I was needed. I remember the helpless, hopeless feeling and the fear of losing him, of Mom losing him and then probably going herself, and of me being alone.

Even writing this few paragraphs, trying to be strictly factual, I can feel the tears lurking at the back of my eyes, the iron fist squeezing my heart, the tightness in my chest, the shallowed breathing, the nausea, and the churning in my stomach. It's not easy to even briefly revisit or touch upon, let alone to actually open up and process.

The fear of being not able to cope in a big, cold, lonely world is with all of us to some extent. For my part, I never had any siblings. My Mom had to have dual mastectomies when I was maybe in grade 3 or 4 and she had about a 10% chance of making it outside of six months. I remember having to be strong about this, but I believe I was in shock and that shock simply masked a great dread and fear. I never had a role modelling of how to experience and process the fear, the sense of loss, the deep grief, and the fact I'm probably non-neurotypical and process emotions more deeply as a Highly Sensitive Person (neurologically, I'm not claiming any special gift of emotional sensitivity for the most part) meant I really needed that sort of guidance more than most.

Then, as a teenager, social situations were so uncomfortable (as in the sort with girls) and I was a four-eyed, uncoordinated chubby kid with acne, sweaty and stinky to boot. So I just sort of retreated into books and science and fiction and other sorts of things. I've never went to a dance with a girl or woman. I've never went to a prom or dance with a female with whom I've been in a serious relationship. Sometime at University I realized I had an interest in the fairer sex, but realized how retarded my development in the mechanics of pursuing this was. I also realized I was busy failing out of my chosen life-path, so I really wasn't in any position to offer anything good to anyone else. So again, I shrunk back. So I was alone in one very significant sense through some of the most traumatic parts of my academic career.

As an adult, I dated. But my passage through the work world has been a bit bumpy; I work hard and do good quality work, but I've let myself work too hard and burn out. I've failed to push back on excessive overtime demands and I've sacrificed myself for an illusionary "Team" as portrayed by HR staff. So even here, I wasn't in the best place to be starting successful relationships. Some were fairly lengthy, but that just made the trauma at the end worse. In a bunch of cases, it was someone picking another co-worker over me after a time (good for the self-esteem) and in the last and most heavily emotionally invested case, it was someone picking no-one over me (self-esteem Hiroshima).

During these times, my folks were going through their health crises too. And I was left alone at nights, very lonely and miserable, with plenty of time to do nothing but think about the prospects of having to face the next grinding day and fearing I would not have the energy because I was pushing myself too hard because everyone seemed to need that from me. I also had to face that I was growing old alone and that people were choosing loneliness over me. That fed my already existing fears of ending up alone and desolate.

I can't say exactly what the fear has cost me directly. The fears, the trauma, some of the behaviours stemming from this, and the enervation of energy as a result of all of this have definitely cost me some success at work (the success I have had has been perversely limited by how hard I've pushed myself getting there), in relationships (bringing fears and an emotionally unsettled mindset to a relationship tends to unfairly burden a new one) of all sorts, and has cost me money and health because of depression and just not having enough energy left to cope with necessary things (bureaucracy particularly sucks the life out of me).

I've learned that once you are in a fragile state, everything takes far more energy to initiate. Fears make the prospect of even opening a tax folder or calling RevCan for some critical piece of paperwork a huge effort because first you have to overcome the nausea and the panic. And then when you do reach out for help, like to an accountant, and they can't or don't bother to understand your difficulty, you've expended so much energy even to get that far and it collapses, you tend to not be able to face that file again for a bunch more time because you just can't muster the courage/energy/whatever. So things languish and the situation worsens and you don't respond to things and so it goes in a spiral and the people who are supposed to be helping you get mad too because you aren't able to meet the same expectations as everyone else.

I have simple taxes, yet I struggle to get them done. I don't understand them and my accountants have been little help; They may be good accountants but in terms of managing to meet my needs (email communication or phone calls, no snailmail, having them do mostly everything including talking to RevCan for paperwork, etc...), they have been a disaster. But giving them the boot and finding a new one... I've tried several times by asking others for some recommendations, and that too has failed. And thus, things languish. It has never been about the money. It's about the fear and ignorance and the massive effort it takes just to reopen this file each time.

I have many loving friends, but at night, I'm still alone. The touch of another human being, even just to hold hands or for a hug, makes a huge difference. We all have this sort of need, but due to the fears of abandonment and being alone and due to the years of being so awfully alone, this is a huge thing for me. It makes living alone a real trial. However, that said, being in that state makes any relationship a trial since other people can't be accountable for meeting your emotional needs; That sets up an unfair pressure on them but also it establishes a dependence. So that's something that needs a lot of work, but doing that work when fighting that deep aloneness daily is slow, hard work.

I can and do perform excellent work. But I need to not be exhausted, not be afraid, not be stressed out to the point where a little work stress leaves me wiped out or willing to do anything the employer wants just to avoid uncomfortable situations. The fear of being alone from watching parents fight and from the near-loss experiences and the anxieties about that constant risk has bred a critical aversion to fights, even necessary ones, and I've allowed myself to be used as a doormat and to be exploited at work. The employers may have had some responsibility, but I allowed it to happen because the anxiety of the conflict to stand up for myself was too great because of that awful trauma and fear lurking inside.

Now, this all sounds really awful. I know that. In one way, if you look at the years gone by, the places I stumbled or wasn't able to succeed, the ways I beat myself up for every failure far more extensively than any external critic could, etc. then you might say it is pretty awful. But what was awful was being in the states of fear, stress, loneliness, heartbreak, and exploitation without having any idea why or any idea that it could be fixed to allow life to continue in a whole-hearted fashion that was healthy and sustainable and to know that there are ways to defuse the fears.

That knowledge makes a huge difference. It's the difference between hope and hopelessness. It's the difference between judging yourself as a not worthwhile person and a failure and understanding that you went through awful times that scarred and damaged you and the face-plants you did along the way were inevitable consequences of that damage, rather than a judgment on your worth as a human being. That difference is the difference between being in the deepest, coldest, loneliest blackness and being in a room to which you know there is a door from which you can see fragments of light and hear happy sounds and which you know you can walk towards, feeling better as you go.

I have two friends in a life-long fight with Post-Traumatic Stress. Their stories make mine seem positively trivial. I would not have survived what they have endured and certainly would not be doing as well as either of them are today. They both go through periods of doubting themselves, of two steps forward/one and a half back, and of feeling poorly about themselves and being unkind to themselves. This is some of the legacy of the sorts of things in their past that did them harm. They sometimes can't see that every day they are on their feet and functioning, even a little bit, is a victory of large importance. They sometimes can't feel that they are as incredible as they are. But to me, each day I struggle with my stuff, I look to their example.

I don't look to that example because they don't have bad days. I don't look to that example because their every decision is some fantastic ideal of success or progress (unrealistic as such a thing would be). I look to their example because they both face the world with kindness, compassion, and with the intention to try to heal and to get back on the best footing they can without giving in to anger and without giving up. Bad days go with their sort of experience, but the miracle is the days they manage that are good and the way they keep moving ahead, growing, learning, and working to be whole again.

That's where I find my inspiration.

I will have bad days, I will not be the person old patterns still try to convince me I should be (an unrealistic one, people-pleasing, trying to meet all external needs and expectations, ignoring my own needs and limits), and I will have times the fears make me sick to my stomach. I will have times I feel really lousy about what a lousy friend I've become or lousy child of aging parents. All this is true, but I can still move forward despite the failures, I can still heal, I can still try to build a better life inside me and outside me and with the people who care enough to understand and come along. That's a powerful source of strength.

A friend once said to me, and I hold it to be very important:

Those that Mind don't Matter, those that Matter don't Mind.

Discovering Your True Self

 

It amazes me that one can live with oneself for decades and not see some things inside oneself. We have myopias in certain areas and they exist for a variety of reasons, many of which are a low-intelligence form of self-protection our brain uses to try to protect us, albeit in ways which are more focused on the short term at the expense of the long term.

I have recently discovered that I may have a fair sized well of unprocessed traumatic stress. I have been through repeated health scares with my parents, some very gory, some with repeated ongoing life-or-death stresses and fears for months or years, and some involving me providing front line care. I thought dealing with this was just surviving it, but I have learned now that all the emotion that needed to be processed may have ended up down inside in a large well of grief that now feeds accelerant into today's emotionally challenging situations, like gasoline on a fire.

This sort of deeply buried emotional trauma is the kind of stuff people with PTSD have sustained (I suspect mine is lesser, but that's a pointless distinction since it still has functional impacts on my life that I wasn't aware of). This sort of stuff is also something individuals will inevitably have a hard time dealing with and processing on their own without a proper therapeutic intervention because it is triggered by emotional shocks that literally overwhelm our existing ability to cope. It requires the help of a third-party, ideally a well-trained one, to work through and process. I'm guessing it's more challenging too when many traumas have added up and when years have elapsed with this stuff buried deep.

The amazing part to me is I have been reading a lot of books about Trauma lately and have even read lists of symptoms that would qualify people for a PTSD diagnosis and there with things on those lists I had experienced, but when I read those lists, I hadn't the faintest mental connection of my life events to those listed causes. I just didn't have any reason to suspect these tough times I had survived had left an emotionally destructive tumor inside me, I thought they were through, passed, over and done with, no longer anything more than a historical footnote. I NEVER imagined they might be a problem in the here and now.

I made some great progress on self-esteem, on getting out of my mental pit about relationships and my ability to have them, and about being enough and loving myself for who I am in September. Now, at the start of November, I have discovered another area of my head and my emotional makeup that desperately needs me to do some hard and emotional work to reach a better place.

I was warned, with this work that I am undertaking, depression and euphoria and mood swings are quite likely as may be disturbed sleep or dreams. Mind you, if I am having any dreams, I don't recall them when I awake anymore (been like that for years). I am tried enough I am sleeping, though I probably need to add a nap to each day and try to sleep at least 8-10 hours a day.

This is all very positive, even if it comes with some serious work and sadness. I have been finding some fearful responses and tensions in me and even after rationally understanding they were not true to reality, I was still finding my emotional reaction very strong. Now I understand that they are being fed and are strongly tied to this reservoir of internal sadness, grief, and pain. That's a great revelation (and it felt so obvious and true when it was mentioned, I found it hard to imagine how I had not seen it but I'm told that is normal because the brain is trying to protect us from seeing that grief again even to process it).

Knowing that there is a reason that my some tensions and fears evoked such emotional depth helps a lot. I was getting quite mad at myself for knowing the fears were not based in current reality ('what is') but still not being able to keep the emotional reaction appropriately mild or short-lived (or even to respond rather than react and not have the feeling reaction based on those fears).

Now that I understand there is something internally (big well of unprocessed grief and fear of loss) dumping gasoline on the fire (the fears), it feels like I will be able to work my way to a point where this deep reaction becomes a much more limited reaction then finally to a thoughtful, chosen response. This means there is a very positive outlook for taking overblown and stressful responses from relatively minor relationship bumps. That's a great relief to me and it will also allow me to be kinder to myself and not be mad at me for not having all of this in hand already.

Unrelatedly, I'm down to 220.8 pounds from a high of 258.0 pounds. My next goal is 210 pounds, then 200. If I can get down on the low side of 200, I'll be quite pleased and it will be much easier on my joints and facilitate activities. I'm already happy to be down to 220! My most successful diet ever only got me to 218 so I'm only two pounds off my record success and this one is coming a lot easier. My mom had a similar thing happen to her at 35 (I'm a bit slower apparently) where she just found it not so hard to take the weight off unlike the times before.

Learning yourself and helping heal yourself isn't the easiest path, but I'm already seeing the benefits and I am looking forward to the work.