Trauma Hangover

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Things caught up with me.

I moved.

Grades were due.

There was Halloween.

I had an observation by my principal.

I did not breeze through all of it, but I ate and slept, changed my clothes, practiced basic personal hygiene, and showed up to work. October was not a total fail.

But, in not completely losing my ability to function, I repeatedly had to box things up that would have been better to process.

As sometimes happens, getting through the day extended the period in which I felt slammed by memories and emotions. Halloween was okay. Last night–a full six days later–was not. Today is not okay either.

It’s hard to describe how I can’t sleep because l am gripped by the urge to cry or scream, and that this causes a real, physical pain in my body. Or that it’s so exhausting to control an impulse to self-harm it starts to seem easier just to allow it to happen.

It’s also hard for me to accept this as a necessary step in coming to terms with what happened. In order for the past to stop slamming into me like a train, I need to stay with my feelings and perceptions long enough to understand them and begin to attach them to thoughts and to a narrative. Because it’s so difficult to regulate the intensity of my memories, it sometimes means I need to stay with them for a long time–much longer than I wish I had to.

The core pain relates to being raised by people so narcissistic and, in my mother’s case, so oriented to the present and unable to think about consequences, that I could expect to be cared for only if I were immediately useful.

Of course, I’m partly talking about being trafficked. With the consolidation of at least part of the memory of Nata’s death, comes a need to accept the circumstances surrounding it: that I was with her because we were both being trafficked, that my father had something to do with this, and that she was murdered by our trafficker.

Thinking about this is so horrifying I want to somehow not have to. I want to be rescued from my own knowledge of it, for it not to be real or, at the very least, to be able to console myself in thinking it’s over with and I never have to think about. But it doesn’t work that way.

I have to do this.

The core pain is of being an object, with no value as a human being with thoughts and feelings of my own. I am sure everyone with a narcissistic parent experiences this pain, even if it manifests in some other more benign way, like pushing you into a career you don’t really like or telling you how many children you are allowed to have. It’s more palpable because of the physical horror and fear I felt at being repeatedly sexually abused by adult men. However, it’s not a category unto itself. Child trafficking is merely the most extreme version of narcissistic exploitation.

Someone recently said–I was nervous about my observation–I think there’s something wrong with you, because you are worried about what other people will think of you. In retrospect, this sounds rather unkind. I don’t think it was intended quite the way it sounded.

But the fact is there is something wrong.

Beyond the pain of being a commodity instead of a person, there is also a pain of fearing my internal experience of being trafficked will be rejected. Because, the fact is, if my trafficker had understood my experience and empathized with me, he couldn’t have continued to abuse me.

Memory as a moving target

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As you might remember, this is the worst time of year for me. Some years it’s better and some years it’s worse. Overall, it’s better than it used to be, but it’s still terrible.

I have started to realize there is a balance between holding it together and carrying in with life and trying to make sense of my experiences. This year, because I moved and because of my work load, the balance weighed heavily toward holding things together and I haven’t been able to process much of anything. For a while, this seemed promising. I was stressed, but coping and it began to seem as though this fall was going to be easy. But what happened instead was the pressure built up and I can’t really keep it together anymore. I need a space to think about what happened 35 years ago now and to try to make sense of it.

The event–Nata’s murder–is long in the past, but every year my understanding of the event needs to be reorganized in light of what I have learned about life or about myself. It does not stand still or remain the same. Strangely, memories are continually made.

There is a still a shock to her death that is deeply physical–tactile and animal: the way she felt different in my arms dead than she had when she was alive, a kind of subtle shift in weight between unconsciousness and death that was even more different from the energy and liveliness of her body when it was alive, and the overwhelming presence of blood.

It shocks me all over again to remember it. How could it be me that felt this? How could I have been the one so drenched in blood my shower afterward looked like dye flowing into the drain? How am I the same person?

But I struggle equally or maybe moreso with the social and psychological meanings of it for me. This, I think is also significant. How could the neglect be so extreme that I was even present at the time, 13 years old, in the parking lot of a brothel in the middle of the night? How was I a commodity rather than a person to my father?

The thing is that this isn’t a thought: it’s a feeling. Worthlessness feels like something: the loneliness of not having one’s internal state valued or considered is so intense as to feel crushing. The thought is bearable for me, but the emotions are not.

This is the other pain: when I left that place and those girls, I left the only people who understood how it felt to be trafficked or even recognized that it hurt. I lost, along with Nata, any model (good or bad) of how to cope with it. In getting out of danger, I lost the people who could see me

Self-object

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I came across this tidbit about attachment in an article about parts.  In anxious attachment, the self is weak, the object unreliable and the affect is anxious. In dismissive attachment, the self is competent, but unloveable, the object rejecting, and the affect is empty. In disorganised attachment, the self is bad, the object frightening and the affect is terror.

My transition back to the United States has been emotionally difficult for me, although so far physically all is well. I am often working primarily on not self-harming or on not being so overwhelmed by suicidality that it starts to seem the only option that makes sense. It has been a long time since I’ve been in such a psychologically fragile place. This hasn’t made the normal things that need to be done any easier. In fact, many of them have not gotten done even after being here for 6 months.

So I have been trying to track these emotional states (mentally–not on a kind of chart, but simply with words). My idea is that it’s not the fact of my emotions, but their intensity that’s so difficult. I also think in some way failing to imagine them–to mentalise–but instead being in them is what makes them so hard. So this  description of attachment states gives me one other way to imagine what I am going through and one more tool in my mentalising toolbox, and I have really found it helpful, especially since I can really see these descriptions as I struggle, because my hard times are times I am seeking attachment, and sometimes I’m flipping through different attachment strategies. In fact, my difficulty is sometimes that I don’t want to return to the flatness of dismissiveness in order to get things done.

However, what has really been enlightening for me is the image of disorganised attachment in conjunction with three other ideas: one is the splitting of the self and object as a result of abuse so that there is a bad self and a terrifying object sometimes and a good self and a nurturing object at others. Mostly these days I just experience the bad self, in part because the nurturing object seems like a trick–probably, in part, because it was. But it’s also reminiscent of borderline splitting, in which the self and others are either idealized or devalued and I think about this as I remember I was also my mother’s object–it is a dyad, despite the difference in power. So I was at times the terrifying object and my mother was equally in a state of fight-flight-freeze-fawn (4Fs).

The third idea is about how the 4Fs leak into social behaviour even when they are suppressed: fight ending up as narcissistic rage, criticism or blame; flight morphing into compulsive “busyness;” freeze translating into dissociation and numbing behaviours; and fawn as people-pleasing and codependence.

It seems to me my mother’s fight instinct translated into beatings or verbal tornadoes, but her own experience of herself as the bad self and me as the terrifying object led to self-harming and suicide attempts. In my mind, it explains feelings of guilt as I saw myself as frightening and malevolent in the eyes of my mother even if it was the result of a kind of flashback and I could not understand the reason for my “badness.”

There were other experiences of abuse in which my parents used a process of projective identification in order to attempt to externalise and gain control over their own sense of themselves as shameful and defective in an effort to circumvent their fragile mentalising capacity and compensate for a weak ability to symbolically represent themselves. This was mostly my father, at least the most horrifying of these experiences.

Maybe it also explains Yuri, who was also a kind of attachment figure in that I at times depended on him for survival.

In my mind, their pattern of intentionally humiliating and dehumanising treatment of me–the fact that I was literally sold–stems from rigidly retaining disorganised attachment self-object relations so that only terror and shame are possible in close relationships: better to be terrifying than ashamed.

This is helpful to me as I try to make sense of my most painful triggers which are often coloured with a sense of having no value and of worthlessness. My father was acting out his anger at his own experiences of being overwhelmed by submissiveness (shame) in response to terror so that he could see it rather than inhabit it, but it also allowed him to maintain a connection to his own abusive and mentally ill parents by identifying with them, thus creating a cycle of abuse, as he directed the consequent “fight” energy outward towards me rather than inward towards himself.

Codependence and Mental Illness

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I’m trying to bring together some understanding I may have gained from the intersection of my thoughts about my father’s bipolar disorder and my fits-and-starts attempt to reach out to new relationships post-Country X.

A parent’s mental illness consumes the child with anxiety about safety and about the availability of the parent. I feel this is my attachment hunger: I feel I have to keep checking on people. I don’t like it. It’s suffocating for everyone, but I have a lot more compassion for myself when I imagine I grew up needing to make sure my caretakers stayed in the real world, that they stayed emotionally stable and didn’t become irritable and punitive, that they didn’t become suicidal or suddenly die.

At the same time, I think my borderline mother felt this way too–extremely anxious and constantly needing to check on the availability of care, so that we felt on eggshells: were we caring for her?

In the end, the child ends up feeling guilty for expressing needs and desires, because they are at the expense of the parent’s need for care. The core problem is perhaps denial of the illness: nothing is enough to fix it so, of course, the child cannot fix it either.

I think my mother’s anxiety played into this: every happiness of someone else’s was a reminder of her dissatisfaction and depression, as though the happiness had been stolen directly from her.

The result in the child is both anxiety and guilt: I need to check whether my needs will be met or not, but I also can’t enjoy it when they are, because I am afraid of having something my mother wants. I’m constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even if no one snatches my happiness from me, I feel guilty and guilt blots out the joy.

I had a therapist who seemed to think you could simply not feel guilt when it didn’t make sense or you could be shamed out of it by revealing its sheer ridiculousness. I don’t know what works, but I am pretty sure her take on it doesn’t.

A few things happen: one of them is to conceal your needs and desires within those of other people’s. It can feel like a win-win: I get my needs met by meeting yours, but it’s not efficient. You end up chronically deprived without know why, since you don’t know which of your needs you were trying to meet anyway. It’s somehow manipulative rather than a genuine exchange.

It also means that some people look to others to meet needs they could be meeting themselves, because they are anxious about it or maybe because this creates an “approved” need. They may later feel guilty about it: I’m too needy, I ask for too much…setting them up to need more support and to repeat the cycle.

So I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to conceal my needs within other people’s. I want to address my feelings of guilt about getting my needs met or meeting my own needs. I don’t know exactly how to go about this, but it’s my plan.

Bipolar

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A few days ago, my brother-in-law happened to mention that my father has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and is currently being medicated for it. I think my brother-in-law mentioned this before, but I don’t always recognise it when people are talking about my parents. I think of them in the past tense and I forget that they still exist in the present.

Life kind of moved on after that, as it often does. I didn’t have time to think about it, but yesterday I did.

I don’t remember my dad especially having symptoms that would point to bipolar disorder: I remember clearly some of my mother’s borderline moments. I may remember my father’s sexual abuse, but it’s in that suppressed memory, was-that-real kind of way. My father functioned. He had a job. He didn’t lie, like my mother did, for way too long in bed. He didn’t get fired. Maybe he was already medicated before I was born and I just didn’t know. It’s hard to say.

What I do remember about my father’s abuse was a sense of weirdness, as though they were the result of delusions. Well, there you go, I suppose. Delusion is the end result of extreme states.

A read an article on the impact of bipolar disorder on the next generation and it made a lot of my own life make more sense, even if much of the impact is the same as my mother’s borderline personality disorder.

I spent a lot of time with my dad as a child, but not with my mother. I was trying to manage him.

It also made me think the element of unreality about some of my memories may stem from having a parent who did not live in reality himself. In ritual abuse, for example, children are sometimes traumatised by things that did not really happen, because the perpetrator created an illusion that they did. For a child still trying to learn the difference between fantasy and reality, there is no difference between an adult creating an illusion that another child is being murdered and actually doing it.

Attachment Hunger

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I don’t think I’ve mentioned I’ve been struggling with anxiety which seems to be over attachment recently.

I have been thinking for a long time that I am too isolated and too disconnected from other people for it to be healthy. By not healthy, I mean if I really had a serious problem, I don’t know who would be there for me, because I haven’t been good at cultivating caring relationships and I also mean as time goes on isolation could lead to stress-related diseases.

This is, in fact, a lot of the reason I’ve delved into terrifically challenging material. I need it processed a little before it’s triggered by relationships and I need to deal with trauma memories and living, breathing people at the same time. I still have a long way to go with that work in softening the trauma enough to make life in the present more manageable.

However, at this point in my life, where I am living with my sister and digging into a language perhaps connected to foster parents, attachment issues are nagging furiously away inside me.

I feel like Golem clinging to his ring: I want, I want, I want….when what I need to be doing is concentrating on a single task until it’s finished.

Because of my work on mentalising and recognising emotions, I’ve become at least aware of how this plays out in my disorganised attachment, because my reaction to this little Golem inside is not nice. It’s very angry and, although it happens so fast I don’t hear this voice actually speaking, the punitive parent within me attacks my sense of worth and efficacy, repeatedly bringing on painful states of helplessness and fear which further interfere with my already challenging productivity.

So I’ve been thinking about this. I have an understanding of it that feels helpful.

This needy, needy little greedy Golem is the result of an unavailable, unpredictable parent, so that I grew up feeling the constant impulse to check on my parent’s availability. But the catch was that asserting myself, attracting attention, or displaying my needs, desires or intentions opened me up to the possibility of abuse.

So the punitive voice within me blames the needy voice for the abuse, and the punitive voice is not wrong. Being silent led to less violence and harm. But it turns out in a child’s development, neglect is more damaging than abuse and the possibility of food, warmth, positive feelings, or the opportunity to learn social skills was actually more important than avoiding fear, pain, and injury.

My mother wanted a child who needed nurturing when she wanted to give it, but that isn’t what would have happened. She prepared me for a world that had to be nagged, and as a result I am left with a nagging inside.

I don’t think I feel it all the time, but isolation or resorting to controlling behaviours are not good alternatives to anxiety.

Still, I think understanding that, as an infant and toddler at least, clinging and being demanding were preferable to neglect in terms of my development has the potential to change the way in which I manage it.

It leads to less anger at myself: my parents, being who they were and given that I had little influence over them, had to be braved, but I understand better the dilemma of the child caught between need and fear.

I don’t know what to do about it exactly. I hope someday I will.

The Narrative

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I don’t feel settled about this. Maybe I’m wrong.

However, this is what I think about foster care. I think I may have been in care twice after two different catastrophes. But it’s also possible I had two different placements.

I was under five. Perhaps under three, but probably more than two.

I remember pieces of being taken away. They seem to belong to different experiences. I carried my clothes in a paper bag.

When I returned, I tried to hang myself in the closet.

In between, I remember the smell of oranges and being held–and apparently this word from a new language.

It may have made me confused about which direction we read, not with English, but in kindergarten, doing reading readiness activities that lacked context. I may have felt self-conscious afterwards about whether or not I was staying in code.

The hard part is not really what happened, but the feelings I had about it and still do.

Pieces

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I wonder–pretty incessantly–what really happened to me in my childhood. I don’t think I’m the only one to struggle with the slipperyness of memory. The very nature of trauma is that it is shocking and beyond the emotional resources of the family in which it occurs to cope with or to make sense of. So, in fact, we don’t.

Families who experience trauma have greater emotional demands on them and fewer resources with which to do it, and so they use more extreme coping mechanisms, including more avoidance and denial of problems.

In childhood, I seem to have two different lives: one prosaically violent (due to my mother’s mental illness) and that I know happened, but which plays out in my mind without any real feeling; and another brimming with feelings and images, but lacking coherence or narrative.

The problem with struggling to create a narrative is that I never know if the narrative I end up with is simply another way of creating a not-me that’s easier to face than whoever I am.

For example, I really feel Nata existed and also that she died, but things can feel real and still not be real. I may not ever know, and there are times I regret wanting a story so badly that I could have constructed one that may never be convincing to me.

I didn’t grow up in Brighton Beach or even Los Angeles. Was there really a Russian gangster–fat, tattooed, bald-headed and brutal, with eyes on his chest–operating sex tourism brothels full of underage Eastern European girls? It seems unbelievable.

And, yet, the proximity of the border made human trafficking easier. There were three military bases within driving distance. In the seventies and eighties, the Soviet Union emptied its jails by claiming dangerous criminals were Jewish. Yes, it ought to be believable that my father, with secret aspirations of toughness after a humiliating childhood of being raised as a girl by a schizophrenic mother (however briefly), somehow stumbled across this man and felt a connection in their shared rage at women.

I imagine a criminal organisation, but what I actually remember is one guy. Not a whole Russian enclave. Just the one guy, just Yuri. There could have been a guy.

It’s not unbelievable. Unusual, but not impossible.

So there is this other piece which is even more puzzling to me, more shrouded in the fantastic and unbelievable.

It begins with my name, which comes from a dream I had as a teenager, in which my art teacher revealed to me that I had this other, secret name.

It seems reasonable for a person from unmanageable trauma who has coped by creating other-mes to imagine, somehow, an authentic me, a “real me” because dissociating your identity creates a sense of unrealness. All of the other “mes” are never really me. So to dream of a real me when I don’t feel real most of the time is not anything strange for someone like me, trying to cope with a strange life.

At various points, I have wondered where the name came from, assuming it came from something in real life.

And then recently I discovered it’s a real word as well as a real name and that it sounds “correct” when pronounced by a native speaker. My ears prick up when I hear my name or even when I hear it used in a sentence.

The thing is it means what it ought to: something known or familiar, and by extension a person you feel connected to. This word figures in the sentence, “It’s nice to meet you.”

I wrote about this before, but since then I’ve been grappling with what it could mean. I thought once there might have been girls who spoke this language. I’m not sure anymore.

This other me, the apparent real me, doesn’t have the same feeling of pain as my memories of the girls do. I feel very difficult things, but they are different kinds of pain.

And so I wonder if it’s from a different kind of trauma–not trafficking and murder, but removal and loss and being taken into care. I wonder if it’s possible my foster care parents spoke this language and I heard it over a few weeks or months and I understood enough to know that I wanted to be recognised or to be known, but that these parents with their greater ability to process emotions, seemed to be able to see me in a way that my biological parents couldn’t. Because of that, recognising me seemed to be something that happened in another language and not in English.

It seems impossible–how many members of this language group were resettled in the county I grew up in? How many were resettled and then took in foster children?

More than zero?

But a part of me feels that I found my mommy. I understand this part of my past now, and the acceptance feels good.

Context

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Yesterday I was all right. Today I am not all right. Not at all.

What happens for me is not so much that I feel bad, but that I feel I have lost control of my mind.

It’s hard to describe this: lots of pictures in place of actual words, other thoughts reduced to telegraphic bursts of a single sentence suggesting rage or shame.

It’s really the impact of stress. I can’t communicate with myself anymore. I used to take these (very negative) thoughts as nonsense to be ignored. Now, I’ve started to think my dramatic inner world is still important. I’m trying desperately to bring attention to something I can’t articulate. All of the the negativity is my mixed feelings about giving that attention to myself.

I even think some of what I’m trying to bring my attention to is on-target. It’s just difficult to decipher and mixed up with maladaptive strategies for keeping self-control. (Punitiveness, for example.)

I imagine other things are going on, but a focus seems to be how to accommodate my shattered friendships, especially the one that seems to be over. I expected it might turn out this way, and I even thought it might hurt. I did not expect it to hurt so much.

The chaos seems to be centered around the contradictory impulses to distance myself from reminders of my ex-friend, which would certainly save me from pain, and also not wanting to let go.

The thing is I brought up the issue in the first place because it seemed we might have feelings for each other. It wasn’t my intention to have them, but it seemed that the question was there. Coming out put only me on the spot.

I was not sufficiently aware enough of the homophobic context in which she lives. This was my error in judgment. I did some insomniac reading up on this last night and scared myself to death. When I imagine what she might be going through if my sexuality brings up questions for her about herself, I understand it might be better if I remain available. If I understood her context better, it might feel less personal for me as well. As much as it is easier to feel betrayed that there seemed to be a condition to our friendship (just don’t be gay), and to focus on the anger I feel about that, it might be more helpful to understand her point of view, even if she did not articulate it fully to me. She’s never met a lesbian before. She didn’t fully understand they were real.

It took listening to screaming little parts all day to unravel that. This is why disorganised attachment is so hard: it’s not just about intimate relationships, but the way your brain can’t function under stress.

This isn’t the article that scared me, but it helped: I Don’t Want to Taint the Name of Islam.

Password Protected Posts

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I protect posts for many reasons. Sometimes, they are especially intense in terms of the content, and I would rather readers not stumble across them. Most of what I write is fairly intense anyway. Sometimes, they are written by dissociated parts, and I don’t want their private thoughts read by total strangers who are really interested in researching ways to die for a book they are writing. Sometimes, the posts are just more personal.

If you are interested in reading the password protected posts, you can. Just comment and I will email you the password.