Trigger Warning

Lightning

Triggers, by nature, are symbols of pain that prick at the surface and reverberate deep down into our very core of pain.  I think of it as a needle so long that it can pierce from head to toe.  Sometimes I’m paralyzed, other times pumped full of adrenaline—literally in split-second limbo of do I fight or flight or just melt down. 

Sometimes they pull up memories that are re-lived.  In detail, word-for-word, thought-for-thought, shame-hurt-helpless fear-helpless rage.  Sometimes they recall sensory memories, touch, sight, sound, smell.  Sometimes they flit in and out so fast they’re barely registered, like a familiar odor that passes by on the breeze and then is gone.  Other times, a tidal wave, drowning out everything in sight.

I’m used to navigating them.  I’m used to the familiar roadmarks, signs, warnings, and upside down cones that mark danger.  But just because we are aware of them, doesn’t always make them easier to live through. 

I can’t line them up in order of how to tackle them, especially the non-verbal sensory memories.  But I can try and make sense of them when they’re washing in with the tide.

It’s no use closing my eyes and wishing and hoping they will just go away.  Like my youngest daughter who gets bad dreams sometimes, and just wants me to lie down with her.  My sweet little sis, waking up in her bed, scared.  That was me as a child, too, tiptoeing out of my bed and just hoping my mom wouldn’t wake up and let me sleep at the foot of the bed.  Because only her room was the safe spot from the nameless fear I had back then.  So I can relate when DD2 has her bad dreams, too.

And that’s me, as an adult, suffering from insomnia, because of the trauma of the divorce.  How I long to be able to sleep through the night like I did years ago.

My ex is being “extra” these days.  He is holding onto his power and control and keeping our extended summer time hostage, because he can.  I reached out to the play therapist and co-parenting counselor for advice.  And finally, the attorney.  The attorney wants to write a letter.  Because that’s what attorneys do, but I know that will only cause him to dig deeper.  The co-parenting counselor we've seen over the years isn’t versed in domestic violence and does not have any conducive advice. She equates us both in her mind; which is akin to saying its “both sides’” faults when looking at a white supremacist inflicting violence by driving a car into protesters marching against racism.  It’s not ‘both sides’ when one is running over people in a crowd. (p.s. it’s taken me a week end to unpack that trigger).  And even if she was trained in DV, i'm not sure what she could do.

The play therapist has more understanding—but unfortunately, her help is--soon the kids will be 18 and you won’t have to be hostage to this type of thinking anymore.  At least she recognizes the power dynamic, even though she can’t do anything about it.

My coping mechanisms then—are:

1) writing about it and also /eyerolling about it instead of crumbling about it,

2) finding compassion for myself...and for him, wishing him free from suffering (compassion meditation, I'm trying something new),

3) therapy, lots of therapy, and 

4) doing my best to zen out and work around him.  I have to remember--I'll figure it out, I always do.  I’ll figure this one out eventually, too.

But the triggers, I’m back to the triggers of what it is to deal with him.  The world gives him a pass because he has a job and can be charming and educated.  That’s the world I live in.  I can create my world, but I still live in his—where he exerts control when he can, because he can, where my shortcomings are a laundry list that in his eyes victimize him.  The world where he never takes responsibility for the violence inflicted in my home.  The world where it’s okay for him to do all that he did and walk away with his power and control.

Those are the triggers I live with.  And I have to figure out how to transform them into lifting me up instead of holding me down.

I guess sometimes it’s okay to cry.  I’ll get to strength and love and light at some point.

Will I always be living with trauma?

(trauma)

First of all, Happy Birthday to my DD2!  She had a birthday this past week and when I put together pictures from when she was a baby until now, firmly settled into elementary school, I honestly can’t believe how fast time has flown.  I am so grateful that she is a bouncing, lively, loving, kind, hilarious, energetic kid full of love and laughter for the world.  (And also, how long I was doing the single mom thing and divorced parent and re-married world since she was one.  It’s mind boggling!!)

Despite learning that my ex is seemingly in a happier place with his new girlfriend—it is long distance, which I’m sure has its challenges—he has been quite “extra” lately.  Nitpicking every other email, demanding certain time sharing requirements, then when I ask for the same type of time sharing, responding that it’s a huge accommodation and he’ll have to think about it.  He spends a lot of time documenting all of my shortcomings.  And stressing out the girls about having to wait an hour for DD2’s birthday pizza and then refusing to take it and going to a different pizza place (meanwhile poor DD2 is hungry, it’s 8pm when they call me about it all), or telling the girls that they live in a ‘shack’ and so the girls come home telling me they live in a shack and DD2 is especially concerned about daddy not having enough money.  (You know, because they just flew first class to take a vacation over the break.)

In the midst of this, DD2 was sick and had to miss school.  I always wish that if DD2 is sick, it will be on mom time, so as to be less stress, no back and forth, she can just rest in peace.  However because a dad day fell within her sickness time, she had to embark on the back and forth, the texts/emails that come in demanding to know every single detail of temperature and the level down to the decimal.  (Of course when I inquired of her temperature he never responded.  /eyeroll).

Dealing with this crap is just the pits.  I was explaining it to someone who works in the field of child victims and witnesses of violent crime:  it just never ends.  I haven’t ‘escaped’ an abusive marriage.  I am joined to the hip with this person and constantly negotiating and unpacking the emotional baggage that he foists on them his implied version of all the things that I do wrong and my shortcomings (he’s crafty and doesn’t come out and say mom is awful, just mom should do this or that) and his worries about money and his emotional needs, and still being neutral and supporting them in their relationship with their dad, helping them know their feelings are their feelings and not their dad’s…it’s constant triggering, constant, constant, constant.

Will I always be living with trauma? 

Completely separate from these musings, I was reading a random, Y/A Garth Nix novel, and in it, one of the characters lost a ton of blood.  The character is unable to stand or walk.  And I suddenly remembered the night after DD2 was born, I tried to get up and remember walking slowly to the bathroom in our hospital room.  I was lightheaded—and then I remember feeling so relaxed and going toward this soft, white light and I couldn’t wait to open the door, I knew there were people waiting for me.  But something told me to turn around, and so I told the light, hang on, I’ll be right back.

The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital bed blinking into the faces of seven or eight people—the on call resident, nurses, and who knows who else.  I’d fainted due to hemorrhaging and blood loss, and while they caught it in time and had it temporarily under control, the next morning they had to excavate my womb for bits of placenta and after birth so I would stop bleeding (which was excruciatingly painful--they couldn’t give any pain meds and basically the nurse stuck her arm up my wahoo and dug out with her gloved hands the remains!  Sounds fun, right!  I would scream because it was the only way to live through the pain).  Anyway, they were mulling over whether or not I should get a blood transfusion, as whatever that number you’re supposed to be at, I was right on the in between.  (this is why birth is no joke, even though we make plenty of jokes about it, and why modern medicine, for all its bad rep for costs, etc, saves lives all the damn time, because if this had happened in the good old little house on the prairies days, you know this mama would have croaked).

Two days later, I was released to go home, along with a warning on how fatigued I would be due to the blood loss, and it would take 4-6 weeks to get my red blood count back up and energy level would be low until then.

And I remembered, with clarity, how awful and jerky the ex husband was to me after we got home.  The big dramatic sighs it was to ‘take care’ of me, by going up and down the stairs to bring me water or food.  Or when we ventured out into the world to pick up my medicine from the pharmacy (including lots of iron!), he parked at the parking spot far away from the door in order to protect the car from potential scratches (because, you know, someone might park like a jerk and hit our car with their car door), making the walk inside that much farther and more difficult for me.  The dramatic sighing if I said I was tired.  All while I was taking care of a newborn who was waking up every 2-3 hours to nurse, and also big sister who was 3.  Losing his temper and yelling at DD1 or stomping around for whatever he decided he was pissed off about (usually my mom, who was staying with us for a few weeks after DD2 was born).  My mom tried to talk to me about his awful behavior, but I wouldn’t hear it at the time.  I was too busy trying to keep the family “together” and relegated my mom’s observations as just over-worried and not understanding the pressure the ex was under in becoming a father times 2 (remembering “the dark time” of when DD1 was born). 

I realize this is a long drawn out description of something from years and years ago, but this is why I wonder if I will always live with trauma.  I was reading a completely random book, and got triggered into this crazy memory.  Honestly, describing it in writing is longer than it took for all of these thoughts to flit through my brain…

I’m going to therapy later today, because healing is a marathon.  Maybe I will always live with trauma, but hopefully I don’t have to be ruled by it.  Today is a good day—I’m not paralyzed with frustration like I was last week.  I don’t have to wear this familiar pain like a blanket.  It’s time to cast it off, damn it.  I can’t help that it keeps coming around, because I have to keep dealing with him on a regular basis.

When I’m enveloped by the triggers, especially the EXTRA emails/texts from him, at times I can be flooded with stress, uncertainty, fear.  Yet, I’ve always navigated through the difficulties in the past. I have to remember that I’ll navigate through them again.  That those momentary paralyzing moments will pass.  It’s hard to remember when you’re in them, though.

So I’ll go back to that mantra—I may live with trauma, but I don’t have to be ruled by it.  Here’s to hope and healing and living a better life.