Overcoming Trauma

I'm a pattern seeker.  I always have been.  My brain has always been wired for puzzles, and they've consequently always been fun and relatively easy for me.  My upbringing fine-tuned my ability to pick up clues to patterns as well, creating that intuitive sense that all survivors of abuse and trauma seem to develop on some level, just in order to see the crazy train bearing down the tracks at us.  Seeing patterns intuitively is partly based in the ability to anticipate, I think, which is also grounded in sensitive observation skills.

In a childhood world where a slammed door means something far, far greater (and often more ominous,) than a gusting wind, we learn to pick up supersonic behavioral clues and subtle hints about the direction of the atmosphere.  I see how this has translated into my adult life; I'm always on the hunt for answers, usually before a question has even been posed.  In moderation, this serves me well, as I can often see a pattern - whether of data or behavior - forming long before my peers or colleagues see it.

Lately, I've noticed a pattern in the conversations that I'm having with the people around me - from my daughters to my bosses, from newcomers to my alcoholism recovery support groups to the distant coworker that I recently sat next to on the plane, from friends of friends to co-workers grabbing a coffee in the break room.  Everyone's asking me this on some level,

"What's the secret to overcoming trauma?"

Dalai Lama, Yoda-type I ain't.
But I know a little something about how to move on from pain.

So here it is, straight from me to you, the best trick I know to overcome trauma...

It takes ACTION.

Unfortunately, the first action that anyone has to take in order to overcome trauma, I believe, is to face the trauma.  I'm not a big fan of pop-psych ways to do this.  I believe that I would bodily harm anyone who tried to wrap me in a warm and fuzzy blanket to simulate the womb.  I don't think that setting the stage to re-live a trauma is necessary, but it does have to be remembered, acknowledged, brought forth into the light.

It's ugly, it's painful, it's shameful, it's embarrassing and it goes against our very natures, but I believe that this action of exposure has to happen.  How, after all, can one overcome something that is fuzzy around the edges?  How can I overcome fear if I'm not entirely sure what it is that I'm afraid of.

I used to think that I was afraid of the dark.
It was a vague, faceless, anonymous fear.
I looked at it and I thought about it and I wrote down specifics and I touched it and I danced with it and I examined it and analyzed it.
Guess what?  I'm not afraid of the dark.
I'm afraid of the abuse that happened to me in the dark.
Ahhhhh...
What's the antidote to that fear?  Well, there's a whole list of ways that I can keep myself safe from that very specific fear, starting (and often ending too,) with this:  don't allow the people who abused me in the dark into my life, house or head.  And if that doesn't work?  Turn on a night-light, know my surroundings and the people in it, have a plan (turning on the light in the room I'm entering before I turn off the light in the room I just left,) and a contingency plan (flashlight on the nightstand,) and I could go on and on and on.

I can take action to at best banish, at worst delay that fear.  Either way, I'm progressing - taking action.

I used to spend a lot of time reading self-help books.  Some of them were pretty good, especially the ones that made me stop my ingrained thought cycle and attempt to re-think it.  I can't honestly say that I learned anything I didn't already know, but the process of attempting to seek self-improvement DID get me out of my own thinking long enough to look at myself and my behavior from a different angle.  And that is an action.

Maybe I don't know how to act or react.  Maybe my training as an abused child and as a scapegoat prevented me from learning how to handle myself, sure.  Survivors of trauma often don't know how they should move on, we just know that we don't want the pain that we've already had anymore. But I always have a baseline, and that ground zero is this: I know definitively how NOT to act.  I know what causes pain to others and to myself, so I know what I don't want.

Holding on to that negative has been a crux of action that I've returned to over and over again; "Well, I won't do that," has been the jumping off point for me so many times of trying... well, anything BUT that.  I've gone full pendulum swing to the opposite ends of the earth before in an attempt to get my emotional bearings in the world post-abuser, and I've tried everything on the spectrum in between.  Sometimes it's worked and sometimes not, but I've learned more and more about how to act and react appropriately (and non-abusively,) every single time.   So that, too, has been action.

So I've taken the actions to identify the trauma, I've taken the action to rethink the trauma and how it affects my life today, and I've taken the action to determine how I will avoid the trauma in the future and how I will act differently.  Doing this over and over and over again has helped me to face, overcome and move on from trauma.

Lastly, and this is my favorite action, I make it a point to attempt to do something good every single day.  I find at least one moment each and every day in which I can take some action that pleases me, or that I can enjoy, or that makes me smile or laugh - often this involves kindness and humor to another living soul.  This is an annuity based action.  I get a moment of pleasure today, AND I've just set myself up for success down the road.  Six months from now, when I have that moment of relived trauma that pops up out of nowhere and attempts to side-swipe me, I will also have a well of good moments to draw from to counterbalance that painful memory.  I create good future memories every day partly so that I will have them in the future when I need them -but mostly because it feels good to do good.

When the memory of NM telling me that I'm the most selfish person on the face of the planet surfaces and attempts to derail me, I'm going to remember, too, that I just gave a homeless veteran every single cash money bill in my wallet, and that when he looked at me like he was going to cry and said, "How can I repay you?" my honest, authentic and sincere answer to him was, "You already have sir, thank you for your service."  Is that the action of a selfish person?  I think not.  But it is action.

These are all great tools, and I can honestly say that these principles are some of the main reasons that I'm still ambulatory and have made it through so much trauma with my sanity - relatively - intact.

But the greatest action I've taken and that I continue to take in order to overcome trauma is this:
I stay the fuck away from the people and places that cause me trauma in the first place.

Love,
Vanci

Explanatory Style

In the comments of my Disinfecting a Poisoned Well post, blogger jessie asked me if I still had the lists of questions that my counselor asked me to ask and answer before, during and after conversations with my Crazymakers when I was in the long process of disentangling from the web of obligation of my NFOO.

It's been awhile now, and that period of time was so chaotic due to the stress and complications that I had to go through to come out the other side into NC that I've largely forgotten details.  New day, new tools.  I went looking, though, and found some very interesting notes and writing.  I even found the fourteen page, handwritten missive of condemnation that NSis sent to me about three months after I declared that I would not speak with NM outside of a counselor's office (which, of course, in CLASSIC Clan style, meant that I had also declared the same boundary with everyone else in the family.)  That'll be a post for another day, though.

I didn't find all of the lists - I'm not a saver for a lot of reasons, but the main one is that when I reached the point of doneness, I was well done.  Blackened, sooty and smoking.  Burnt to a crisp AND bloody as hell (a l'il bit o' Pulp Fiction for ya there, racefans.)  When I hit the point of being done with the Bad Uns, I was done baby done, and I got rid of most of the shit that reminded me of them, including the letters that I didn't ever want to read again.  Some of these I burned, page by bloody page.  It felt good, it was a ritual to mark the passing of an era, the hope of a new start.  I felt cleaner when the nasty baubles were gone.

I kept some things; pictures, mostly, of the family in falsely happier seeming times, that live in a picture box in a deep, dark closet and that I haven't even thought of in ages.  I kept the letter from NSis because I'd thought that at some point I would want to respond to it, not necessarily to her but to myself.  Who knows, maybe I still will.

What I did find of my notes, though, was my scribbled explanation of explanatory style.  This was a massively helpful tool to me in beginning to separate my thoughts from my training, so I'll outline my version of it here.  It was a bit of a revelation to me at the time, I'll admit.  Looking back on it, it seems so simple, so logical, but at the time it was an epiphany.  Which says a lot, I think, about how ever loving hard it is to break out of a destructive way of life that's been so ingrained from such an early age.  I mean, this stuff just all makes sense, right?  But I'd believed differently under the influence and pressure of the Narcs, so I needed for someone else to explain it to me.
Here's what I understand this concept to be.

Explanatory style is simply the manner in which I explain something to myself, my way of thinking about an event and understanding it.

An example of two different types of explanatory style:
DH and I buy a new car.  It's shiny.  He says to me, "Vanci, when you go to the store, make sure that you park far away from everyone else.  That way, no one will park too close and scratch the paint on the new car."  I go to the store and park a reasonable distance away from everyone else, say two parking spaces from the nearest car.  Tralalalala I do my shopping.  I come back to the car and see that my car is now surrounded by cars AND there's a dent in the door of my shiny new car.

Style 1:
I am so stupid, I can't believe that I didn't park farther away.  DH is going to be mad at me.  I shouldn't have done this, I never do anything right.  He told me to park far away, why did I think that I was far enough, I was lazy.  This is all my fault.
Style 2:
Who the hell parks that close to another person's car?  I can't believe that somebody dented my car, what an awful thing for someone else to do.  I am within the boundaries of my parking space and this person in this other car has edged up close to me and obviously dented my car.  I have a right to be compensated for this and I will take action to make sure that I am.  I will take action to protect my asset.

This particular example is about fault.  Whose fault is it that the car is dented?

I was raised to believe that I was responsible for ... well, everything.  Especially bad things.  I don't recall any specific examples of the Nparents blaming me for bad weather, but I would not have been surprised if they did.  Whatever went wrong, regardless of what it was, I was at fault.  And if a child is told something about themselves enough, they will begin to believe it.  So naturally, I believed that I was at fault.

My explanatory style, my way of interpreting and understanding the world around me, was all sorts of screwed up, you see?
The person who perpetrates a crime or an offense is always the person who is at fault, never the victim.  I know this now, but I didn't then.  I had to stop and consciously go through every single step of an incident or a thought and learn how to explain it to myself in order to stop believing that I was at fault by default.

For years I would say, "I was sexually abused as a child."  Think about the structure of that sentence for a second.  Who and what are contained in that sentence?  Me, crime, me.  Victim, abuse, victim.  Who's missing from that sentence?  Only the person responsible.  After years of re-thinking, I changed that sentence in my vocabulary.  Now, I say this: "My father sexually abused me when I was a child."  Offender, crime, victim of said offender and crime.  It's a little thing, just a few words, but it was definitely a change in identification of fault for me.  Why was I leaving the offender out in the first place?  For me, it's indicative of how I thought about myself; responsible in some way for the crime itself.  It feels better to put the person responsible for it there, in his proper place; it's more true.

So, thinking of my explanatory style, prior to a scheduled phone call or meeting with any of the N's, I would ask myself these types of questions:
What specific action am I trying to accomplish?
And I'd write it down in simple words like this; do not call me.
(I was always tempted to elaborate, to put my reasons down in writing, but I discovered that this was counterproductive as I began to realize that it didn't matter what my reasons were because they'd only twist them anyway.  Much later in the process, I learned that I didn't have to give a reason, that I had a right to ask for what I was asking for, but like I said, that was much later.)

What response am I expecting?
Again, simple words, write it down:  agreement.
(Aaaaaannnnnnnddddd, this is the point in the process where I began to learn, again, later on, to stop and rethink.  Because I eventually learned that my expectations  - of sane, normal, civil responses were the point at which I might as well throw in the towel.  But early in the process, before I truly understood that I was sticking my hand into a den of scorpions and expecting them to invite me in for high tea rather than sting me, I really did expect such things as agreement, discourse, to be listened to.)

How will I know that I have accomplished what I am expecting?
Simple words, write it down: NM will say, "Yes, I will not call you anymore."
(Two guesses how that always went, but I can guarantee you that you'll only need one.)

I'd go through this process and I'd feel good about going into a conversation; grounded, centered, well prepared.

Of course, I was dealing with Narcissists, so the conversation almost always took a turn for a bad neighborhood around the time that I had the audacity, the sheer nerve, to let the Nfamily member know that I had a boundary or an expectation.  As DH said early and often, "How long are you going to keep expecting sane responses from insane people?"  But it was a process that I had to go through in order to even see the insanity.

After the conversation, I would ask and answer things like this:

Why didn't you accomplish what you'd set out to?
Simple words, write it down: She refused and told me that she'd call me whenever she wanted to and that I had no right to tell her not to as I was her child and "mothers never give up on their children."
(See how that works?  I was wrong for asking for space, I had no right to ask for space and the end result of my asking for space was two-fold; I would be given less space and it would be known that I was making her chase me, which she would translate to anyone willing to listen as - Oh my, look at what my daughter is doing to me and look at how hard I have to work... Woe is me, woe is me.)

How did the response you received differ from what you'd expected?
Simple words, write it down: It was the complete opposite.  She made it my fault for asking.
(Because that, in my opinion is the strongest weapon in most Narc's arsenal; they make any sane or healthy thing that we ask for appear to be wrong, wrong, wrong and hurtful of them.  They turn it around on us in a heartbeat, and they have the advantage because they are, after all, the people who set us up to fail by giving us a faulty explanatory style circuit board in the first place, so we are almost hard-wired to believe that it's our fault anyway.  All they have to do is hint and we fall in line to shoulder the blame.)

What would you do differently?
Simple words, write it down: ________________.
(I'm leaving this blank because I can't stand the thought of what I would have written down here.  The reality of the question is so clear to me know, looking back.  I couldn't have done anything differently. It wouldn't have mattered.  I'm sure at the time, I wrote something like "Don't get emotionally upset."  Or, "Have a third party on the phone with me."  Or some other futile thought or tool that I hoped beyond hope at the time would have kept the conversation on the right track.  But I know now that NOTHING would have changed these conversations.)

So I'd go through the process, usually repeatedly, and I'd take my little Q and A sheets to my counselor's office and we'd go through it.  I'd expected, of course, like the well-trained little monkey I still was in some ways (and I say that as endearingly as it is possible to say,) that these questions would help me to focus the conversation, to stay on the high road, to respond rather than react.  I'd expected that my approach and actions would have any effect on the conversation whatsoever.

What I learned is that the only way to have a nice, civil conversation with a Narcissist is to not have one at all, or possibly to draw a resemblance of the N's face on a sock, slip it over my hand and have a nice, civil conversation with the sock puppet while pretending that it was NM or ENF or NSis or GCYB.  (Ok, so I didn't really do that, but I'm confident that you understand my point.)

I did, however, learn some very valuable things about ME.
I learned that I am responsible for my end of the conversation, regardless of the other person's reaction.
I learned how to identify what it is that I need and will be asking for.
I learned what my limits are and how to set them with other people.
I learned that the importance of my setting boundaries was not contingent upon others honoring them.
I learned that I would never get anywhere talking to the N's in my life using reasonable tools.

Eventually, I learned that it was pointless to have these or any other conversations with the N's in my life, and MOST importantly, I learned that the deterioration of those conversations and relationships was not my fault, even though I'd always thought it was before.

That's made the biggest difference for me.  It's only one tool, but understanding and changing my explanatory style was helpful to me in beginning to understand that 'it' wasn't always my fault by default.  And led me to wondering why I thought that in the first place.  And that led me to understanding that this was just one more area in which I'd been abused.  And that led to the imperfect, flawed person that's writing this today, but also to my freedom in understanding that I can change the way I see the world at any time, and that I don't necessarily have to understand the why of a thing in order to know that I don't want it in my life.

Love,
Vanci