trauma

The loss of safety

~ KJ ~ 7 Comments

I am still living my life as a runaway.

I am still living my life in constant fear.

Every time the doorbell rings, I panic. Sometimes, I freeze. Other times, I barricade my bedroom door and hide in the closet. Never I am able to just see who is at the door. The thought alone is terrifying. Why? Because I am so afraid that my mother will be at the door. I’m so afraid she will find me and take me back to prison.

Many times I go to therapy in fear that my mother will find me there. I’ll sit on the chair at the farthest end of the waiting room. I’ll sit on the farthest end of the couch in my therapist’s office. The farther I am away from the door, the more time I have to hide.

Every time my phone rings, I am overcome with panic. She’s found out I told. I’m in trouble now. I worry that any number that appears on my phone could be hers, so I don’t answer. I never answer.

Every time someone calls me by my birth name in just such a way, I am filled with fear and anxiety. Nothing good ever came from being called in that way. It has always been a precedent for pain.

Every bump in the night startles me awake and I freeze with fear. She’s coming for me. I’m never safe. Because I never felt safe as a child, and I’m reliving that still as an adult. I am still, in many ways, a scared child living in an adult body.

I thought it would get better by now, but it hasn’t. I live on high alert. I never feel safe. I have never felt safe a day in my life. Why can’t I get past this? I am in a better place now, but am I really? My feet are in safe zone, but my mind is still locked away in prison, and my mother holds the keys.

I’ve been trying to work through the fear and safety issues in therapy, but they are still coming up. My therapist wrote me a note to help me remind myself that I am here now, and away from that hell. I carry it in pocket everywhere I go.

You are safe now.  You got out.

You survived places and people that were physically and emotionally dangerous, and it made you feel that the whole world was dangerous — that you would never be free. 
But with your adult understanding and resources, you proved that philosophy wrong.  You escaped, and you are now free.

Those who harmed you are not here.  You are separate from them.

If they were here, you could lock the door and tell them to leave.  If they didn’t listen to you, you could call law enforcement and they would make them leave.  You have power now.  You get to make the decisions.  They can’t hurt you anymore.  
You can find safe environments and surround yourself with safe people.

You can care for yourself and protect yourself.  And you should.

Every day, you can choose freedom again.
When the world feels frightening, remind yourself that you got out.  And you are safe now.

How can I feel safe when they took that sense of safety away from me? They stole it. I need it back.

 

When pain becomes your normal

~ KJ ~ 9 Comments

When you’ve been hurt repeatedly for so long, that hurt becomes normal, almost natural, to you.

Wake up, feel pain. Breathe air, feel pain.

You learn to anticipate it. You wake up every day as a child and know that you’re going to be hurt in some way; you just don’t know exactly how and when. But you find a sick sort of comfort in knowing that it’s coming. The familiarity with routine makes you feel more secure. You’re unsure of yourself, you’re unsure of the people around you, but you are sure you’re going to be hurt.

The hurt becomes so much your normal that when you go so long without it, you start to panic. They let me off easy today. Something isn’t right. It’s as if you’re hoping for that pain just to feel yourself again. And sure enough, the pain comes, and everything is back to normal.

Then you become desensitized. You get to a point where you become an expert at hiding the pain from the world. You smile and laugh to cover your crying. You wear clothes to cover the marks left behind. No evidence of pain. They can’t see it, so it must not be there.

But the pain has always been there, like a best friend that never leaves your side. It knows everything that goes on. It holds all of your secrets. You hold on to it, because you need it to survive. It’s the only constant in your life, the only stability in your unstable world. Pain becomes as much a part of your life as food and water.

Then your life changes. You finally get away from those who were causing you pain. You are free. But you can’t be  free from the pain. The emotional damage is still there, deeply rooted in your heart and soul, still killing you from the inside.

Pain has always been your normal. It has become a part of you so strongly that you need it to survive. So you become your own abuser. You find a sense of comfort and release in feeling normal again. You become so blinded with feeling the pain, that you don’t even realize what’s happening. You are perpetuating the cycle of your own abuse.

You can’t run away from yourself. Now you’ve become your own worst enemy.

Polyfragmented

~ KJ ~ 13 Comments

I have been avoiding my DID again. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. In therapy, the topic has barely been brought up because I always have so many issues going on, that managing my DID drops down on the priority list.

I think that it is clear, given the events of the last few weeks, that DID is a problem, and a problem that isn’t going away.

My therapist used a metaphor of a daycare to explain what was going on inside. There are some daycare centers that are clean, organized, running on a schedule, and everyone knows what to do. Then there are daycare centers that are a mess, with no planning in place, children running around screaming, and poop on the walls (I contributed to that part).

My system is like that second daycare. There’s no order, just chaos. My parts are running around, confused and out of control. The caretakers have left the building. It’s a mess. My system is a mess. But it doesn’t have to be, and I know that. I am just so incredibly exhausted from life that I don’t have any energy left to work on myself.

My therapist asked about my long-term goals, if I wanted integration or to live as a multiple. The choice was completely up to me, and my therapist has worked with people successfully on both sides. I hadn’t really thought about it enough, because I still like to wake up and tell myself I don’t have DID, so then I won’t have to think about these things.

I just want to be normal, but I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed at this point.

At one point, my therapist asked me how many parts I thought I had. “Dozens, hundreds, thousands?”

My immediate (denial) reaction in my head was well, I don’t have any parts.

I found myself say out loud, “hundreds…”, but not as an answer. I was surprised that hundreds was even an option. Why does this woman think I have parts at all?

Before I could finish my thought statement, my therapist confirmed, “Hundreds? Okay.”

She said it like she wasn’t surprised at all that I would have hundreds of parts. She confirmed it like it was a normal, expected answer.

I quickly jumped on the defensive. “No, no, I don’t have hundreds of parts. I’m not polyfragmented. I’m not that bad.” Polyfragmented DID results from prolonged, systematic, severe trauma. I didn’t go through that. My life wasn’t that bad. I don’t have any parts. I am not broken. Having that many parts means you are just that much more broken. I’m okay.

I can’t help but wonder why my therapist was so quick to accept my statement as reality. Does she think I am so broken? Does she know more than I do?

I don’t want to be fragmented. I want to be whole.

The return home, Part 3

~ KJ ~ 4 Comments

I think my head-banging and a large iced coffee may have ended up saving my life.

By the time I got on the train, my headache was excruciating. I just sat there the whole time, looking at the seat ahead of me. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t think of any of the ways I could have fucked myself up by knocking on my mother’s door. I couldn’t do anything.

By the time I arrived and my friend picked me up, I was exhausted. I took a pill, which helped a little bit with the pain in my head, but it was still very much there. I decided to pick up some food and just stay in while my friend went out for a few hours. I was still processing my emotions from earlier in the day. I wrote for a little, trying to get out some of my feelings. Then I just laid on the couch and stared at the ceiling, in some sort of numb state.

Despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t sleep well. I ended up passing out after midnight and waking up some time after 3 AM, unable to fall back to sleep. The massive headache was still there. In a few hours, we were out the door and on the way to the test site so I could take my GRE, which ended up being a disaster. I was running on no breakfast, very little sleep, and a massive headache. I think I read each question three or four times and I still didn’t understand half the shit that was being asked. I sat there for four hours completely mentally dead. I couldn’t even answer all of the questions in time. I’m not even sure I really cared.

I walked to a coffee shop to wait for my friend to get out of work and pick me up. I ordered a large iced coffee, because I knew I had to kill a lot of time waiting. I watched dozens of people walk in and out. I saw teenagers come in, by themselves, and walk out, by themselves. Then I thought about how I never had that freedom before. Here I was, sitting by myself, in a coffee shop, completely free to do whatever I wanted to do. There was no one with me. There was no one outside waiting in the car, watching every thing that I did. I was free.

After a couple of hours, my friend picked me up. As he was driving, we passed by the place where I used to live. I froze for a minute, and then I started to cry. There was my prison. The place I spent more than 29 years of my life, 29+ years of pain and hurt. If I were living there, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy that iced coffee I just drank two hours before, alone, with no one watching over me. I wouldn’t have been free.

So while I made the return to my home city of origin, that ended up being the closest I got to that place that was once called home. In that moment, I realized I couldn’t give up the freedom I finally had. While I may at one point need to return to that same city, I could never return to that building. I would be much better without a home at all, then back in the prison my parents believed home should be.

The return home, Part 1

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

Last Friday, I took a train back to the  city I fled 11 months ago.

I didn’t have much of a choice. The graduate schools I am applying to require the GRE for admission – I had never taken it before because it wasn’t required for my first graduate school. The application deadlines are fast approaching (and in one case, very much past) and I needed to take the exam as soon as possible. I tried registering online, only to find out that almost every test location was either closed down, or did not have any available test dates for the next three months. The only option left just happened to be the farthest from my current location, and the closest to my home of origin.

Scrambling, I tried to figure out a way I could even get there. I asked an old friend, out of desperation, if he could take me. He agreed. Because of timing (the test appointment was at 8:00 AM Saturday morning) and distance (an additional 30+ minutes of travel), I had to take the train the day before and stay overnight. It definitely caused some panic.

I was worried about my arrival, because I would be stopping in the center of the city, where all of the buses pass through. Many of my former coworkers travel by bus, and a few of them live in the area. I was worried about someone seeing me and alerting  my mother. But during my therapy session last Monday, my therapist reassured me that the likelihood that someone would recognize me was low. My hair was completely different, and I had lost a significant amount of weight. She encouraged me to work out a plan so I would be out in the open as little as possible. I felt a little better, and less panicked.

And then my week went to shit. Tuesday, I withdrew from graduate school and essentially lost my dream of being a counselor. I was denied for a personal loan, one that I needed in order to get through the summer until I started a new graduate school in the Fall. I had a realization that the people I thought I could depend on were not dependable at all; actually, they ended up hurting me more. I wanted just to go to sleep to avoid the pain, but even that ended up impossible because I was startled awake by nonsense going on close by.

So I spent Tuesday night into Wednesday morning crying. I felt my life crumbling around me. At that point, I decided I should just go home for good. I’m losing everything in the life I was building here, so what else could I do? I decided. Friday, we were going home, and we weren’t coming back.

I walked to work early and sat outside, crying. I felt lost. I was also exhausted, and crying only magnified that exhaustion. I couldn’t deal with the emotional pain combined with the physical pain I am still in, and I ended up leaving work early. Then, cue my emotional break and dissociative chaos I wrote about here.

Somehow I managed to get myself to therapy on Thursday, though I will admit I am not even sure if it was all me. I was a mess. I tried (and failed) to hold it together.

My therapist and I went over what happened in the days leading up to session. I told her how I ended up the closet, which is something that has happened quite a few times before. I reluctantly told her about my plan to return home. I knew it could go one of two ways. My mother would take me in and help me, and I’d have a home and family again. Or she would kill me. That’s what I really wanted. I wanted to go home so my mother would kill me, and I wouldn’t have to worry about doing it myself.

I reached the point of dire hopelessness. There was nothing else left to lose.

Now I’m like him

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

As I’m dealing with this throbbing headache (caused by my own doing), I keep wondering how my brother felt after his “incident”.

About 15 or so years ago, my brother had what I consider to be an emotional breakdown. He locked himself in the bathroom, crying uncontrollably and bashing his head against the wall for what seemed like hours.

I remember sitting in the living room, and for the first time, really seeing and understanding the pain my brother was in. The pain he could never verbalize, because he was never very good at verbalizing much anyway. The pain we were never allowed to show the world.

I was used to the pain. But up until that point, I assumed my brother just handled our torture in a different way. He never seemed bothered by it, at least not in very outward ways that I could recognize (keep in mind, I was just a young teenager at the time). But here he was, in very obvious pain.

Once he came out of the bathroom, bruised and bloody, life just continued as if the entire incident never happened. Move along now, nothing to see here. Looking back at it now, I see how fucking bizarre it was. Your son just locked himself up in the bathroom and gave himself significant head injuries and a concussion, and you go back to watching television and getting ready for dinner, like it was just a normal day.

I wish I knew how they explained the very obvious injuries to my brother’s face. I’m sure, whatever it was, it wasn’t the truth. That would tarnish my mother’s “mother-of-the-year” image. But how did no one wonder what the fuck was going on?

Of course now, I feel like I channeled that same pain when I continually banged my head yesterday. The only difference was that I chose the table instead of the wall, and I didn’t do it hard enough to bleed. The emotion behind it was surely the same. 

And now I’m telling myself that I’m just like him. Can’t say out loud what’s going on, so just bang the noise away. 

What a fucked up family.

11 months

~ KJ ~ 4 Comments

I’m not even sure if it is a good idea to write. My mind is all over the place. My heart is all over the place. Everything around me seems to be falling apart, and I am there, falling apart myself.

My head hurts. I couldn’t figure out why it hurt so bad this afternoon. Then, upon touching my forehead and a reminder from my coworker, I remembered I had banged my head against the table repeatedly just an hour or two before. It is still hurting. Thankfully it is not as swollen now as it was before, but I still have a noticeable mark. The mark of despair.

Today, 11 months to the day since I ran away from home, and feel the world falling apart around me.

I used to say it’s been so many months of freedom, but I don’t know if I can really call this freedom.  It doesn’t feel like freedom. I’m forever trapped in my own mind. I’m trapped in the past. I feel so damaged, damaged to the point that I will probably never be free.

My therapist suggested that I consider applying for SSDI. I don’t want to be disabled. I want to be abled. But the reality is that I can’t keep going on like this. I can’t handle working another job. I tried that and ended up having an emotional breakdown.

I’ve run down my savings trying to support myself and pay for therapy. Now that I don’t have financial aid to help me, I’m out of options until I start college again in the Fall. I have to consider stopping therapy, which is a terrifying thought. I have to realize that in the next couple of months, I may lose everything. Even if I get the SSDI, it won’t be approved in time – the process takes months.

I’ve lost a lot of support. I am having to cut ties with people I don’t really want to, because they were connections to my old life that I still held on to. But I am realizing that those ties are not benefiting me at all. They are just causing more heartbreak.

I’ve lost my school. I’ve lost my family. I’ve lost my roots. I’m losing my new life here.

I’m losing my mind.

Welcome to the closet

~ KJ ~ 17 Comments

I woke up early this morning and found myself snuggled away in the closet, with blankets and a pillow.

I don’t remember a lot of yesterday night. I spent most of Tuesday night crying, which carried into Wednesday morning crying. That was followed by work and intermittent crying, followed by leaving work early and more crying.

Then I found myself wandering the streets crying in the rain. Rain is good for hiding crying, because everyone just assumes it’s the rain on your face. I mean, you can’t really tell tears from raindrops. So I just let it out and no one noticed a thing.

And then I found my way home, feeling completely broken. Took a shower to get rid of the chill in my bones, and ended up holding myself up against the wall of the shower, crying.

I managed to eat, despite feeling like absolute shit. And then I retreated to my room, where my thoughts were going to horrible places. 

I thought about going home. My place of origin home. I didn’t think things could get any worse, anyway. I didn’t see any options left. I wanted to go home because I secretly wished that my mother would kill me. It would be much easier that way. I wouldn’t have to do it myself. What else do I have left? Nothing.

Later on, I heard knocking at the door. I started to panic. I locked my bedroom door and pushed my punching bag over in back of it, barricading myself in. The fear that my mother had found me was overtaking me. Then I started to lose it. And then the next thing I know, I’m laying in the closet.

The closet is not a comfortable space for a 30 year-old. But my other parts aren’t 30 years old, so they don’t know that. They just believe it’s safe in there, or safer I should say. I don’t believe they or I will ever feel completely safe anywhere we go.

Now I’m dealing with absolute chaos on the inside. Fear and panic have set in. Parts are scared that we’re going to see our mother. It’s absolute fucking chaos.

I’m running damage control and trying to convince everyone that we are safe, which is hard for me to do because I’m not even sure that we are. And even though I’m present, I’m still struggling with having a foot in the past. Any little noise or startle and I start to lose it again.

I’m exhausted.

Flee, Part 4

~ KJ ~ 5 Comments

As I was walking home after my therapy session, I put my ear buds in and turned my music up as loud as I could. Music is my method of release. And I needed to release.

The first song that came on  was Lie to Me (Denial) by Red. It’s a Christian rock band. Even though I’m nowhere near Christian, I like the music and tend to relate to a lot of the lyrics. This was no exception.

Although it was a song I heard many times before, one part of the song stuck out at me:

All your secrets crawl inside
You keep them safe, you let them hide
You feel them drinking in your pain to kill the memories
So close your eyes and let it hurt
The voice inside begins to stir
Are you reminded of all you used to be

All the pain you fed
Starts to grow inside
It lives again and you can’t let it die

Well, then. If the timing of that song wasn’t on point with what I just went through in therapy.

Hiding secrets. My whole life was spent hiding secrets, and here I was, still hiding secrets. And my parts are hiding secrets, too. They’re holding their own memories, safeguarding them from me and from the world. Until the time they come to the surface. Why is this memory now coming to the surface? Why am I being reminded of a past I don’t want to remember?

I think there’s still a part of me that believes if I just ignore it, it will go away. I made a similar mistake when I first started managing life with DID. I ignored my parts, hoping they would just go away. But ignoring them only makes it worse. They get louder. They get out of control, and then life gets chaotic.

If I ignore these memories, they won’t go away. They won’t die. They will only keep causing more and more pain. And I don’t need any more pain. I’ve had enough.

Then I started to wonder if it was fair to my parts to keep us from processing the trauma. I have to think I am experiencing these memories for a reason. The reason why, I don’t quite know, but I’m sure there has to be a reason. I’m not even sure the reason really matters.

It’s weird. In a way, dissociation itself is your mind’s way of fleeing from reality. You can’t physically escape the danger, so you mentally escape it. My parts took over for me to protect me. Maybe I don’t need so much protection anymore. Maybe they need to be protected now. I don’t know.

I wish I wasn’t still running from the truth. Why can’t I find my voice? Why can’t I say out loud what happened to me? Why is it so hard? And why does it hurt so much? I know why it hurts so much. Because speaking the truth out loud makes it real. And I don’t want it to be real.

I want my father to be a real father. I’ve always rationalized his physical and emotional abuse, normalizing it as something fathers just do. He was better because he wasn’t abusing me like my mother was. Maybe he just didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t understand what was going on. All of these years, I held on to that belief that he was just oblivious. He would’ve helped me if he knew.

I can’t hold on to that hope anymore.

Because as my mother was abusing me, I turned to him, crying, and he turned away. He turned away. He knew what was happening.

How do you turn away from someone in pain? How could you turn away from your own child?

My heart is still hurting. I still don’t want to admit it out loud. I don’t want to admit rejection. That is what hurts more than what my mother was doing to me. And I don’t know how to get over that.

I don’t want to be stuck anymore.

Flee, Part 3

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

“I think we’ve reached an impasse.”

Those are the words no client ever wants to hear. It’s a fancy way of saying therapy isn’t working. Inside, I’m thinking that’s it, she’s giving up on me. I’m so damaged that not even she can fix me. No one can fix me.

The educated counselor in me understood what she was talking about. I knew exactly how I was stuck. I’ve been in therapy ever since I escaped just shy of 11 months ago. I go multiple times per week; I’ve never been your standard once-a-week client. But the people who go to therapy as much as me, they are working through and processing really intense trauma.

I’m still struggling through the basics of safety and stabilization. We can’t work through any trauma until I have a grasp on the basics. Any time we try to work through something, I shut down. I can’t get through it.

And every time a trauma emerges, my safety and stabilization goes to shit. I don’t eat right. I don’t sleep. I become self-destructive. I need to work on the trauma in order to move past it, but I can’t work on the trauma because I’m neglecting the very basic necessities of my physical and emotional health. It’s a seemingly endless, fucked up cycle of making no progress.

Something has to change. My therapist brought up changing our sessions, going less than I am now (especially since I am in a financial bind until I am back in school again). That possibility was terrifying to me.  “No, I can’t handle that. I don’t even feel like this is enough. I feel like I need therapy every day.”

And I just proved her point. I’m still struggling with everyday things. My therapist can’t be there for me every day. It’s why she suggested inpatient some time ago. I could sense her going in that direction again. But I can’t do inpatient. Financially, I can’t be out of work. I’m also in the midst of an educational transition that has to be done within the next month if I want to start by the Fall. I have a lot going on. I can’t just put my life on pause to spend weeks in a hospital. A hospital is not real life. How will it help me with real life?

I’m not perfect, but I’m also not completely dysfunctional. I wake myself up every day and go to work. I’ve been going to the doctor. I’ve been getting my schooling back on track. I’ve been functioning like any other person. Yea, I’m crying in the bathroom, and on the bus, and over the phone. But I’m still getting shit done. Isn’t that enough?

“You need to decide if we still need to work on this (safety/stabilization) in therapy, or can we work on the more intensive stuff and you can work on this outside of therapy.”

I want to work on the trauma. I need to. But I don’t know how to not shut down. I told her, “You’ve already told me all you could about this stuff. I already know it. I think either something is wrong with me or I’m stubborn, but I should be able to handle this on my own.”

My therapist told me nothing was wrong with me. She did agree that I was stubborn. But she also said that stubbornness helped get me where I am today. That stubbornness protected me from my mother. That stubbornness kept me alive, because I refused to believe my mother’s lies. That stubbornness helped me flee from prison.