Trauma makes you feel unsafe

in relationships, atmospheres, your mind and body....

Trauma makes you feel unsafe, everywhere, all the time. Or perhaps, better stated—at any time.

I set with this truth that I’ve heard from Levine, van der Kolk and Mate, and I think about how true it has been for me and for a long time. Whether this is because I jump out of my skin when someone startles me with a hello or beeps a horn to greet me, or my body is tense and anxious, unable to sleep because I am in constant vigilance and hyper fight or flight mode, or because I am on edge, waiting for the next catastrophe to happen, the next shoe to drop.

I don’t feel that way now, at least not regularly. I certainly have my moments.

I experience an internal struggle where this is concerned, because I don’t want to be someone who believes that shit is about to go down, constantly.

My mother was like that, and it was really challenging to be around that. Not that she didn’t have a reason to be with her depression and what I now believe to be her trauma and abandonment issues. However, as a child, it felt so dismal and dark when she would forecast whatever was not going to work out, etc, etc.

It felt like toxin, venumous poisons.

I strived not to be like that.

She asked me one time as a child,” Don’t you think that I ever had dreams?”

I paused to think about it.

I guess I had not.

Now that makes me sad, realizing that my mother, the young bride at 19, had so many simple dreams for middle class life and a nice home and stable family that would not come to be, but I also think this—

After all that went on with my family, I too felt like that. Like, aww, fuck, what’s next?

I explained it to my current partner this way:

“My life for a series of several years was a constant circle of….oh but wait, there’s more!” Beyond what I could ever have imagined.

It was hard not to feel deep depression, dark, cynical, negative, positive.

I tried to recalibrate my brain, with all those positive affirmations, creating new neural pathways.

I recall stating “Everything is working out for me” and then pausing, and bursting into laughter.

It was so ironic and stupid.

Now, I am blessed in many ways. Yet, it seemed so ironic that someone with two active suicides and one passive one in my immediate family would be saying this.

Is everything working out for me?

So, I strove for neutrality. That was the best I could do. Not to forecast sunshine and rainbows, but realistic neutrality; I tried to be objective.

I am thankful that I am now where I am on my journey, where I can say I am often positive, even hopeful, now. I think things may turn out for me. I am in a much better place, mentally.

But I have had to do a lot of work to make this happen, to create shifts in how I think. I have had to exercise my brain and habits, engaging in exercise to treat my mental health.

And yet still, when I don’t hear from my partner, I worry he is dead in a ditch. Or, when a chair wants to talk to me, I am anxious about being in trouble or fired.

I can and do talk myself down. But still, I stifle the momentary anxiety.

I have trauma. I don’t feel safe.

By all accounts, I am safe:

I am single, middle-class, childless. I don’t make a ton of money but I have a nice home and car and office. More importantly, I work very little and enjoy my work, for the most part. I find it fulfilling and I have a lot of time to think and read and write on my own.

I don’t have much family, but my family made me feel less safe. Sadly. So it is easier in many ways that they are gone.

Still, though—

There are many moments I have fear, panic, anxiety, that it is not going to be okay, that I am not going to be okay.

To people who don’t struggle with anxiety, mental illness or trauma—whatever you call it, this may sound irrational and senseless.

“Of course you’re okay. Did you die?”

No, that is true. I didn’t.

And yet, I am heavily scarred. Emotionally wounded.

It is partly the suicides and my mother’s break, but it is also growing up in a volatile, condemned, working poor home with an alcoholic and a hoarder, two very mentally ill people.

That said, I also realize that it is on me now, it is all on me, to be my own safe person, to cultivate my own sense of safety. In my dwellings—both my residence and in my mind and body.

Sometimes it comes easy, at others, not so much.

I take heart reading that those with C-PTSD (Complex-PTSD) often repeat cycles of trauma and stumble on their healing journeys. The path is not linear, as with grieving. The movement forward, the regressions backward.

It sometimes feels like a bad hokey pokey, this dance of life I am in, this journey toward healing.

But I have to remind myself, at least I am moving, at least I am trying, confronting my wounds.

I am reminded of some people very close to me in the past who were unable/unwilling to do so.

I also must practice grace to myself and allow for self compassion, because of the shame of trauma. And because I tend to be quite hard on myself and want to be highly functional and thriving all the time.

Unfortunately, healing from PTSD and C-PTSD, when you have diagnoses of anxiety and depression, are not like that. It is slow. It is painful. It is necessary. It is complicated.

I am so much stronger, resilient, capable, independent and intelligent than I give myself credit for, though.

My life’s balance seems to be demanding higher and more of myself, which is important and why/how I rose to getting a doctorate and being an English professor from my hometown and family, and yet also—

Grace and love and self compassion, investment and maintenance that I have also been through a hell of a journey. And I will bear my wounds and have my scars.

May we all give ourselves a bit more grace as needed.