Anhedonia & Alexythmia
I’ve recently read about the above two terms and I’ve been thinking about how accurately they describe my mother.
My mother—plagued by major depression/major bouts with extreme depressive disorder throughout her lifetime.
She would frequently be asked how she felt and she was unable to articulate. She told me more than once that she had a difficult time parsing out or ascertaining what was mental pain and which was physical like chronic fatigue. She had real difficulty articulating what she was feeling.
I think she was numb. That she shut down. I think my mother lived in a perpetual state of freeze/fawn.
As a result of her major depression, she also frequently experienced anhedonia—a lack of joy in life’s pleasures. She would hoard and buy things, like craft projects, knitting or books or scrapbooks or cookbooks, but then she would often times leave them in bags and unattended. Until they piled up in mounds around her.
It was overwhelming to live that way. I was completely floored at how bad it had gotten when I returned home from Indonesia, exhausted and overwhelmed by reverse culture shock.
Now though, in how I’ve grown and read and healed and evolved, when I think about my mother all I feel is a deep sense of compassion and pity that she lived in such a perpetual state of trauma and abandonment. My mother was smart enough and she had insight and helped so many others, friends and students, her kids, and even those she counseled in the Salamanca Center for Family Unity.
Though I know that my mother and I shared some similar genetics traits, epigenetically, with altered DNA and emotional inheritance/intergenerational trauma, I also know that I can’t know what it was like to have been her, lived her life, in her lived, embodied experiences.
Because I had her, as a mother. She did not have her as a mother.
Because I had college education and no children and could work on myself. She could not. I was able to heal and evolve and transform, for her, as I know she would have always wanted me to be able to do.
Part of what we do in intergenerational trauma healing is to also heal our ancestors and bloodline.
Both it is my belief in my faith and my belief in that profound truth that gives me comfort in knowing that my beloved mother is finally at rest, free of depression, trauma, abandonment, a dys-regulated nervous system, anhedonia, and alexythmia.
