The marathon:

aloneness, shame and god-foresakenness components of trauma

Growing up, I just loved the movie with Sandra Bullock, While You Were Sleeping. I see it now as a cheesy and unrealistic rom-com. But one of the most poignant lines for me was when the character, Lucy, said to the character, Jack:

“But you have no idea what it’s like to be alone.”

Even as a teenager, that line stuck with me. I thought that sounded like such a sad, isolated, hellish reality she was living.

Of course, I’m very extroverted and was modeled co-dependency.

Ironically, I now resonate with that a lot.

I have some truly amazing friends, who are my cultivated and chosen family, and I nurture those relationships. I also a few select relatives, but with everyone in my immediate family dead, and with how they each exited this life, it reinforces the loneliness.

I think it also reinforces the wounds of shame and feeling at times “God-forsaken.” I recently heard Dr. van der Kolk describe the aspect of this deep-filled emotion of shame associated with trauma. Bessel van der Kolk, the trauma expert, and one who got PTSD coined as a diagnosis, and wrote the Body Keeps Score.

I think the god-forsakenness also puts a name to the social and religious taboo that those who complete suicide are forever doomed to hell—even my mother felt that way about my dad. Such is the religious trauma and teaching. I believe in a God that understands depression and mental illness, so I don’t agree. I don’t know that God. But I am also glad that—for her sake—she wasn’t around when Jeremie took his life.

So, I’ve been sitting with what it means to be alone.

And truly, I long to be someone who loves to be alone. I wish I was introverted, often, I really do. I think I would do better in a communal or collectivist culture, with a more tight-knit and supportive extended family.

And yet also, I’m glad she family is gone and truthfully, in some ways it is much easier without them.

I heard the following quote on a podcast:

“I feel that I exist the most when I’m alone.”

Part of my somatic healing work and trauma-healing work is to help my body to neutralize the memories, doing the work so that I feel myself to be safe in my own body, an embodied whole again, rather than full of holes.

It’s a process, all this grieving, two steps forward and a few back. It’s been more challenging lately, a balancing act, as I’ve weaned myself off a medication that causes weight gain only to stop sleeping. So I am resuming that again. Better to be able to sleep and have to adjust diet, exercise and be a little tubby.

Because while we use the phrase ‘insomnia’ loosely, to apply to all sorts of varieties of the condition, for me, when I stop sleeping, I do so almost entirely. And, of course, turn into a nonfunctional zombie. So, I’m adjusting and doing what I need to do in order to be able to function and focus on that.

I have the hope that one day enough trauma healing work with yoga, psychedelics, EMDR will help me to heal to my body so that I no longer have to rely on medications.

In the meantime, step by step. It’s a journey, definitely a marathon, not a sprint.