I’ve been running a spiritual marathon.
20 years of emotional neglect and emotional abuse from my family.
23 years of emotional neglect, emotional abuse, control, sexual abuse and covert narcissistic abuse from my husband.
And right now, I’m sitting in a cloud of collapse. CPTSD. Severe emotional fatigue. Dorsal Vagal Collapse. I’ve been in survival mode for so long and this time alone has been freaking me out and until right now I didn’t know why.
I’ve written about it before, but as I’m still so shut down, glued to my couch, more indifferent about life than scared of it. I keep reading more and more about it, desperate for a solution. Every reason to live, every reason to get excited, everything that fueled me forward seems gone.
I don’t think this is classic depression, it’s something bigger. Different.
Today I found something fascinating. Learned Helplessness.
If you have been hurt over and over again, but you can’t make it stop, you are stuck, if you can’t LEAVE, you learn how to endure it.
Over time, you accept the pain and you don’t try to get out of it. It’s almost like you lose hope that things can get better. This is especially true if your trauma started in childhood where you had nowhere to go. You accept your fate.
You never knew a time when you felt safe or you could remove yourself from emotional pain. The pain is part of who you are.
How do we endure it? You don’t fight it. You detach. You freeze. You fawn. You don’t know how you can remove yourself so you COPE. You cope by disassociation, escaping into fantasy. And this right here, it fucks with you over time. You aren’t connected to your body or mind anymore… you are on another planet, where you are safe and loved.
So apparently the biggest issue with all of this is… you don’t think you can do anything about it. You do not feel like you have ANY power or a way to get yourself out of that situation. You just accept your lot in life and hope you get to the other side by checking out, mentally. You might actually be proud at how good you can disappear into fantasyland, it’s a super power.
Someone who knows they can get out of abuse will get out of it. They will teach others how to get out of it. But those of us who were shit on starting super early, we don’t believe we can get out of it. It’s in our bones to just hunker down and expect pain.
So, I get it. I acted helpless and turned the other cheek. I’m an adult now, but I’m STILL sticking around and expect abuse and I rarely fight back. I check out or believe I deserve it somehow. So what do I do?
- You must believe that you CAN enact change. That you CAN take control of the situation. You are no longer stuck. You are no longer that kid. You can leave, you can protect yourself, you don’t need to be treated like shit anymore, it’s not your lot in life.
- You reconnect to your own instincts. We were taught that our sense of right and wrong, our reality, our intuition… it was all wrong. Connect to yourself and start listening to your instincts. Even if it’s just checking in with yourself and seeing how you feel throughout the day. You honor your feelings and make them important. This is the opposite of silencing yourself, and that is what your caregivers did. You turned your feelings off to navigate life. You disconnected from feelings or rejected them. You must start listening to them now.
- When you feel flooded, sit with it. Don’t distract or numb out. Feel the feelings. Acknowledge that they are there. Your caregivers were supposed to help you co-regulate when you had big emotions, but it’s likely they didn’t do that. So you need to learn how to on your own and how to calm down. Because in this state, you freeze, fawn, fight or flee. So if your threshold for one of the F’s goes up, you’ll be able to stand up for yourself more easily and calmly.
- Your emotions tell you what is important to you. If you’ve turned them off your entire life, you don’t know who you are. You took on what was important to your caregivers instead (which is the definition of codependency). So, you MUST listen to yourself to know yourself. That’s the only way you’ll find YOUR purpose in life. Because if you are living for their purpose, for what makes THEM happy… you’ll find yourself in a puddle of misery.
- You MUST connect to your authentic self. That way your authentic self is what connects to the world. Not the scared, shrinking person that your caregivers turned you into.
- When the intrusive thoughts tell you that you deserve mistreatment, tell it “No, I deserved to be protected, I deserved to be safe.” Shut that voice down. Name it and tell it to take a hike.
- When you start to feel uneasy, when you feel an emotion start to take over, you ask yourself… What are you actually scared of? If you can figure this out, you’ll have less fear about expressing the real you. Get to know your feelings, get to know what your fear is trying to tell you.
- Tiny steps like getting exercise, dancing, getting in the sun or taking a shower can help ground you. They are tiny, but I always need a reminder.
Your caregivers are supposed to listen to you, mirror your feelings and validate them. Let’s say a loved one died, but the whole family pretended that this person didn’t die. They’re cracking jokes and ignoring the elephant in the room. But you want to cry, scream and mourn. They tell you that your desire to emote and have grief is WRONG, so you make your feelings go away. This is what you need to fix. You need to reclaim all the emotions you pushed away. You may even have to FEEL the emotions you hadn’t released. That can be a long process.
My mom ignored my needs masterfully. I would go to her with pain, sadness or some other big emotion. She would steer the conversation to how hard her life is or was, then I would be required to comfort her and all the sympathy went to her. My issue, my emotions never mattered. I never got to express or feel them. That is what I learned and I also did that in my marriage. I regulated him, I poured into him.
So as I sit here, going into month 3 of not truly participating in life (not returning phone calls, doing the bare minimum in my business etc) I realize that I’m feeling all the sadness, desperation, neglect, rejection, shame, guilt and anger I was supposed to feel all those years. A dam broke and here it is, in my living room… slapping me in the face.
Plus, since so little has gone my way when it comes to relationships, since 98% of the moments in my life with the key people in my life have been painful, I believe that I will always have this pain. That I deserve it, it’s my karma or this is what my soul came to Earth to endure. Constant abandonment and rejection. And a divorce where he keeps winning, my parents didn’t showing up for me in any context, friends scattering, old neighbors completely disappearing, that’s the proof that I was made to be kicked in the face. I was made to be thrown away. I had hope for four decades that things would get better, but they haven’t. And I’m numb. I tap out. I’m done trying. I’m done fantasizing about the future. All the work I did. All the relationships I carefully cultivated, all the labor I did to keep these humans and my husband happy. NONE OF IT matters. None of it is here anymore. It was a total and complete waste of my time.
So, in a sense… I’m waving the white flag. I told the universe that I give up. You can have me. I can’t stop the absolute shitstorm being thrown at me, I’m not even going to try to avoid it, escape it… you can have me, here I am. I totally and completely give up. The Borg can absorb me now. I’m so tired of feeling stressed, used, shit on, unheard, invisible, mocked, belittled and like a huge fucking failure or a freak of nature for having such intense feelings. Just take me.
So I sit on my couch feeling indifferent, bracing for impact. Bracing for it to be over. Expecting pain. The world is unsafe, people are untrustworthy and there’s no way out. I guess I’ll just brace for the final blow, the final boss in the video game, it has to be coming.
That’s the childhood trauma speaking. My family hated me, so the universe must feel the same way, my family punished me, so here comes Papa Universe, pulling his belt off and heading my way.
I wasn’t protected, I wasn’t soothed, I wasn’t believed and I was expected to endure. So I associated life, love, existing with punishment.
I’m still working through this, but now that I know what this is… I feel like I have the map now. And I can work on those little pointers and realize that I have POWER, maybe I can claw my way out of this.
Heidi Priebe to the rescue… this epiphany is made in part by this video:
