On Thanksgiving, I had a major triggering event. You’ll have to forgive me for not going into details, but suffice it to say it was basically deja vu of my childhood trauma (funny how that can happen even when your family is thousands of miles away). So I thought I’d try to describe what the effects of trauma can feel like.
My initial reaction was crisis mode: Things needed to be done and said, so I went to that place where everything is calm and rational and devoid of feeling. I did what needed to be done. Before I started recovery, this state would be both my first and last reaction — until I went into a depressive episodes several days later, anyway.
Now, several steps down the road to recovery and with just enough progress that I recognize dissociation for what it is, I don’t have the luxury of not feeling. I know that’s a blessing, but that day it felt like a curse. I sat there, hugging my best friend/recovery buddy, shaking slightly, thinking Any minute now all of this will recede, I’ll straighten up and be ready to go to Thanksgiving dinner. It didn’t happen.
When the tears came, it was like each one had to force its way between my eyelids. Each breath tore out of my throat in a ragged gasp, stalling at the height of my exhale like my diaphragm had spasmed and caught. Like the force of denial and emotions, all mixed up and unidentifiable, was trying to punch its way out of my lungs. I was stuck there, noncommittally crying, dragging my lungs through each stuttering breath, thinking What happens now? and I think I’m supposed to let myself feel things, but I don’t know how, until my best friend took control and told me “We’re going to go in the other room, lie down and cry for as long as you need to.”
As soon as we curled up on the bed, the tears came in earnest, but my mind was still an obliterated blank. In the last few months, I’ve fought off my obsessive need for control so many times. I’ve climbed over mental walls and liberated emotions like stolen princesses. I have let myself cry. But this was the real deal. This was a tendril from my past. This was a real test.
I’m not sure I passed.
I tried to open up to what I was feeling, but damn those old habits are deeply ingrained when push comes to shove. I felt the edges cracking, and I tried and tried to tell my recovery buddy what was going on in my head, but I could barely even begin to pull apart the threads.
The moment started to get fuzzy around the edges, distant, like I wasn’t in my body or in that moment in time. But for once, my emotions didn’t lift and separate. They become more real, and as they loomed bigger and bigger, everything else become less so. I looked around my home, and it was like looking at a backdrop. I stared down at my hands, wiggling my fingers, and they were completely alien.
And then the flashbacks came.
I told my best friend it was like I was experiencing every moment of my life at the same time. Old, traumatic memories slipped through my head and some stuck, as real to me as the present even though I wasn’t experiencing them with my senses. For a little while, I was a scared 14-year-old girl again.
End note: Eventually, things settled enough that I could go enjoy our Thanksgiving festivities. I still couldn’t tell you what emotions I was experiencing that day, and since then I’ve been fairly solidly dissociated. But I’m grateful for the coping mechanism. For now, I’m focusing on self-care, finals and doing whatever I can to ward off the uncomfortable feeling of unreality.
Everything is Tigers 