It’s Not Fair
5 Reasons Recovery is Not Fair & 3 Things You Can Do About It
During the past ten years, I have been on a recovery journey full of miracles and pain which surpassed my greatest imagination. And over the past three years, I have worked with many survivors of trauma who are taking their own trek to find a better way of living. I have learned many lessons about life from my own journey and the journeys of others. But there is one life lesson that rises to the top.
It’s not fair!
That may sound like the ranting of a two-year-old, but it’s also true. There is nothing particularly fair about this life. And when it comes to a childhood of trauma, it is the most unfair. What do I mean? I thought you would never ask. I’ve been creating a list just to prove my point.
- We have to treat our inner parts like nobody ever treated us. You may have heard of the term “re-parenting” during your recovery journey. It may have even triggered you. How dare anyone suggest that you have to do the job your parents never did. It isn’t fair that we have to be compassionate, accepting and loving to our inner parts when we never experienced it. How are we supposed to do that? How do we express love we never had? Where do we start?
- There was nobody to save us in childhood and there is nobody to save us now. Despite our deep longing for a savior, human beings are not capable of saving another. They may be able to do it for a while, but it is not sustainable. It is not sustainable because it is a lie. Our only path forward is to recognize the power within us, the fact that we are meant to save ourselves. How do we recognize a power we lost so many years ago at the hands of abusers? How do we find it again?
- We have to trust to heal, but we rarely knew anyone we could trust. After years of relational abuse, the idea of trusting others is absurd. It is also highly unlikely to be fruitful in the early years of recovery. We are still holding too much inner turmoil to attract trustworthy people. But after some time in recovery, we have to dip our toe in the deep, scary waters of trust. How are we supposed to trust after years and years of abuse, manipulation and victimization? How do we allow it?
- We have to experience the same cycle of pain in adulthood until we heal. When it comes to healing, we can ignore it all we want. But it isn’t going anywhere. We will spend a lifetime in the patterns of our childhood until we recognize we have healing to do. I affectionately refer to these patterns as baseball bats from the universe. And they hit harder as we ignore them. But when our trauma is unconscious, it feels like we are being victimized over and over with no explanation. How do we see what we have trained ourselves not to see?
- We were abused in isolation and we must heal in isolation. Recovery is a lonely experience. It is rare that we find others in recovery. If we do, they may or may not be prepared to take their recovery as deep as we are willing to go. And the people who prefer our pre-recovery self are almost never safe as we explore healing. Not to mention, society has very little patience for expressing emotions and truth. This leads to invalidating experiences at every turn. It can become necessary to go it alone if we want to avoid triggering invalidation from others. Once we become grounded in our new truth and have built positive relationships with our inner parts, we can start attracting healthy and validating people in to our lives, but it seems like too little too late. Why can’t we have validation when we need it most? Why can’t we feel less isolated in recovery?
Recovery is Complicated
Recovery is complicated. I know I am not saying anything new. You already get this. You would not read my blog if you had not determined this for yourself. But I feel the need to say it today. Today is a tough day because I have to face my “humanness”. I have to face my shame. I am not talking about the unwarranted shame. That shame is different. I am good at talking with my inner parts about that. I can have the inner conversation about how the abusers handed us their shame. I can talk about handing it back to them. We can let that go now.
This shame is harder. This shame is justified to a point. This shame is coming from my parts who have done bad things to good people in an attempt to stay safe. It might not have been blatant. It might have been very passive. But that doesn’t make it better. My inner parts have learned some interpersonal skills that are disturbing at best. They learned them because of a horrible past. They learned them from people who were supposed to care but never did. And it is important to understand that. But they used these skills at the wrong times with the wrong people. They used these skills in adulthood after safety had been established.
And while my job is to understand and accept my inner parts as much as possible, I have moments where I have to cringe. I have to ask my inner parts the question, “Really guys?” “Maybe that was overkill. Maybe we could have found another way. Maybe you could have left me in charge.” In reality, I know why they couldn’t. There were triggers. They were not small. But my initial response is to judge them. My initial response is to wonder why the hell I have been given the gift of D.I.D. even if it did keep me alive.
Today I left a voicemail for someone who was affected by several of these moments. I don’t know if she will respond. I have interacted with her since the incidents in question, but I was not consciously aware of how damaging my behavior had been. She was pretty darn kind considering what I know now. But that may have been forced. I would not be surprised if I didn’t hear from her. I can’t help but think two things. read more…
Getting Ahead
In the past year, life has been a little less predictable than I prefer. I can sense my controller screaming under the surface of my daily life. She is very unhappy about the direction I have taken my life. From her perspective, she considers it to be a decline in circumstances. I have gone from a well-paying corporate job with a 401K and quality health insurance to self-employment, no savings and intermittent health insurance. I am living day by day, week by week, month by month. And my controller hates it.
She lectures me every day about where the income will be to cover the next bills or the next emergency. She reminds me of how mean the universe has always been to me. She tells me I am crazy to trust my intuition when I have no proof it will work. She considers my higher self to be another untrustworthy partner. She believes I am being tricked and manipulated once again. She is furious with my naiveté and inability to ensure safety at all costs.
Several years ago, when this conversation first started, I had no proof this plan would work. The conversation was much different then. All I could say was, “Let’s try it. We can always choose to stop before it is too late.” My controller thought that was stupid, but was willing to let me “waste away” my savings in the pursuit of stupidity. But as the money diminished with very little proof of sustainability, she became more and more furious. She considered it irresponsible and childish to “chase dreams” like this. I was an adult and I needed to act like one. I needed to stop playing with life in this way and get down to business. I had responsibilities and I needed to attend to those. For God’s sake, what would happen to my children if we were homeless?
I heard her loud and clear, but I kept going. There were many sleepless nights listening to her tell me the world was ending. And I’ll be honest, many times, I thought it was me. It sounded like me. The controller is pretty smart and logical in the scheme of things. Everything she had to say sounded just like what society reinforces. And that made it harder not to take the rants seriously. read more…
The Shutdown Switch
I refer to the end of the calendar year as the Trifecta. I don’t know why I call it a Trifecta because it isn’t. There are actually four major events in October, November and December creating chaos in this single mother’s life. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and my twins’ birthday, which is today, create a perfect storm of far too much to get done. In addition to all of the personal aspects of life as a single mother, my business is growing. I want to be clear, I am NOT complaining about that. I am also not complaining about my children having another birthday today. I love those little buggers and am eternally grateful for them. But I am thankful to be trained in project management right now, which is allowing me to hold things together just barely.
Needless to say, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment. I’m making lists in the shower and scheduling my day down to the minute. I can do that though. I have been using excessive busyness as a defense mechanism for years. I know how to be busy. But these days, I am noticing something different. I am sure it was always there, but it is just now coming to my awareness. It is a current of terror that runs underneath the overwhelm. It isn’t just the feeling that things are busy and I have to manage them closely. It is the feeling that mismanagement will result in dire consequences.
I understand that when I was a child, my need to keep everything straight and maintain my perfection mask was coming from a place of life or death. It wasn’t acceptable to mess up. I understand that. I have known that for years. My controller inner part was developed to achieve this particular goal in life. And my controller does her job well. But this year, on Thanksgiving Day, I was introduced to my back-up plan. read more…
The Complexities of Gratitude
It’s November. And in the United States, that means the focus has shifted from spooky and scary stuff to family and gratitude. For survivors of trauma, there’s nothing scarier than family and gratitude. I have discussed the triggers coming from the endless Hallmark commercials focusing on family, but today, I will discuss gratitude. But I want to start with a caveat. I get the importance of gratitude. I get the power of manifestation that it brings. I am not discounting that. My goal is to highlight the complexities. For survivors of trauma, it is not as simple as an affirmation or list in a journal. It is much more complicated than that. Why? Gratitude doesn’t come from the mind. It comes from the body. And our unresolved trauma resides in our body.
This morning, I was standing in my bathroom and something dawned on me. My children have not been sick in a while. They have had the sniffles and maybe a cough that didn’t last long, but there have been no major illnesses to stop us in our tracks this fall. As I began to state and feel gratitude for this, I heard a voice loud and clear. “NOOOOOOOOOOO!! Don’t say that. Are you crazy? You have just invited the wrath of hell to rain down upon you.” While I have known for some time that my inner parts are not huge fans of the universe in general, this was a blatant interruption that left me dumbfounded in the moment.
So I used this as an opportunity to examine the ways my inner parts are not lining up with the whole gratitude thing. I have to admit, there were quite a few examples. Here are some statements my inner parts shared with me: read more…
Dear God
Dear God,
I have tried to believe in you. I really have. I desperately want you to be there. If you aren’t there, it would be difficult for me to have the hope I need to keep going, to push through the darkest days of recovery and life in general. But I’m going to be honest with you. I haven’t had the kind of life which encourages undying faith. With inescapable trauma plaguing my entire childhood, creating painful patterns in my adulthood, it didn’t promote a general appreciation for the beauty that is life. I know I innately have it. But it is so marred in trauma, I can’t see it.
And I’ll be even more honest, the people didn’t help very much. When I was growing up, religion was used against me all the time. My abusers made it clear that I was to honor my father and mother. They used guilt, so much guilt, to keep me under their control. They let me know that God likes girls who fall in line, do as their told and never speak up. They let me know God believes men are more important than women, even that women are here for the benefit and pleasure of men. They quoted the Bible just to prove they were right. Honestly, I didn’t understand who wrote the Bible until I was older. I always thought you did. I didn’t know that men did.
And I’ll be honest again. Other people weren’t much better. They told me that I should just believe in you and everything would be okay. They told me to pray and things would work out. They told me prayer would fix everything. But it never fixed anything. And they never took any action. They never did anything to help me, save me or change my circumstances. So I thought I wasn’t praying right. Or maybe, even worse, you weren’t interested in what I had to say. Maybe it worked for everyone but me.
So when I grew up, I have to admit, I wasn’t too convinced you were on my side. I mean, I couldn’t see how you had been on my side. Maybe you were. Maybe you kept me alive. But honestly, that didn’t seem like a huge favor at the time. And when those abusive patterns continued, even after my desperate attempts to escape and live a better life, it didn’t help our relationship. Honestly, you were equated to my abusers in my unconscious mind. I just thought your goal was to continue the pain and punishment. It was the only way I could explain those patterns. At the time, I didn’t know what else could be causing them. read more…
It Is Different Because I Am Different
Dear Inner Parts,
You don’t live in the past anymore. You don’t have to be scared anymore. I am an adult and I am here to help and protect you when you need it. We live in a different world now. We have more power to make change. We have more options than we used to. We are no longer powerless.
Oh yeah. Who says? How do you know for sure? That mean friend treated us horribly yesterday. It was the same betrayal. It was the same lack of empathy. It was the same horrible treatment as the family. It was just one more person in a line of mean bullies. How is it different?
It is different because I am different. I don’t have to be controlled by them. I don’t have to compromise myself to make them happy. I don’t have to be someone I am not. They don’t put the roof over my head. They don’t feed me. If they aren’t comfortable with my boundaries, they can leave. And if they leave, I will not die.
Oh yeah. What about all those bad things that keep happening? It is just like before. There are always bad things. They never stop. Every time we get our feet on the ground, there is some new disaster, a new mess to clean up. How is it different? read more…
We Are ALL Narcissists
This isn’t going to be one of those easy-to-read blog posts. Honestly, most of my writing is difficult to read. But today I am going to focus on our selfishness. It is easy to talk about the selfishness of others, but I would not be doing my job if I did not encourage you to take responsibility for your behavior. Most of the time, we are taught there are victims and perpetrators. There are co-dependents and narcissists. But in reality, it doesn’t work like that. Nothing is black and white, even if our inner parts want us to believe it is.
I share many articles on my Facebook page about narcissists and how they treat others. I do this because I want to raise awareness about relational trauma and how it plays out. I don’t share it because I like labels. As a matter of a fact, I hate labels. Defining ourselves based on societal labels is dangerous. Once we accept them, it can be incredibly painful to let them go. And they are rarely true anyway.
I used to subscribe to the belief that I was a victim and a codependent. I was attached to the notion that I was a giver who was always taken advantage of by selfish people. It certainly made sense in childhood. When I was a child, this was clearly the scenario. But in adulthood, it wasn’t true. I remember when I came to understand things differently. Not surprisingly, it was in my therapist’s office. I was explaining a particular situation in my marriage. I was touting my efforts to give my husband whatever he wanted and complaining about how he was never happy about it. She said something that might have seemed fairly innocuous in other circumstances, but it rocked my world
“It sounds like your motivation was to get your needs met.” read more…
You Might Be On Time, But Are You In Time?
I have been thinking about time these past few days. To give credit where credit is due, I have been thinking about time because I have a client who has been thinking about time. Our discussions have reminded me of my own struggles with time. I have struggled with time as if I am looking for a formula for how to spend it. If I find that perfect formula, I won’t feel so rushed, so overwhelmed or so confused about priorities. But it doesn’t work that way. There is no formula.
The way we spend our time is supposed to be an intuitive and present process. But for those of us who struggle with the impacts of trauma, we have lost touch with both. We can’t be truly intuitive because our trauma is in the way. We don’t have access to our true purpose. We don’t have access to the next step. They are marred with self-doubt, self-hatred and anger-fueled anxiety.
And we aren’t present either. We can’t sit in this moment. We can spend time. We can be on time. But we can’t spend time in the now. We can’t be in time. If we are in time, if we are present, the flashbacks, emotions and other intrusions come flooding back. So we avoid the present moment. But there is a nagging feeling that time is escaping us. There is this whisper underneath the surface that says we are missing the point, making us feel worse.
So we go through the days trying to prioritize our time with no real access to the information we need to do it. We spend time with others because we think we should. The Hallmark commercials tell us to. But we aren’t really there. We know we aren’t truly doing what the commercials say to do. So the shame takes over. We want to do the right thing, but we can’t. We want to spend time in the moment with others, but we can’t. So there must be something wrong with us. read more…
The Imaginary Foe
We often talk about triggers as if they are catastrophic events which leave us (and everyone in our vicinity) reeling from the retraumatization. Many believe that a trigger has to be something so closely linked to our trauma there is no mistaking the pattern in place. This can lead us to the false belief that trigger avoidance is a feasible strategy for life after trauma. This also leads us to the false belief we will know when our past trauma is triggered.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been some huge triggers in my life. When my children’s father abandoned our family, the resulting emotional wreckage was clear and intensely painful. While I didn’t have my memories back yet, I knew the impact on my life was significant. I knew it was a reminder of something. I just didn’t know what.
But most of my triggers are not the proverbial “baseball bat from the universe”. They are whispers. And they leave me with a general sense that things aren’t right. They leave me with the sense that I am trying to fix the unfixable, to live a life that wasn’t mine to live. Most of my triggers seem to be saying, “You are fighting a losing battle.” In reality, I am not fighting a battle at all. But my inner parts don’t know that. They believe this life is all about the fight. They are fighting to stay alive. They are fighting for resources. They are fighting to get the love they want.
And when a series of things goes wrong or doesn’t work the way I planned, the feeling sets in. Why are they fighting so hard when it doesn’t work? Why are they exhausting themselves for nothing? The world is against them. It would be better to give up. read more…
