Therapy Revelations for Zombies.

I need to start writing again, even if it’s privately, to keep track of things. Work through things, if you will. I know this blog served me well in the art of inflection and self sabotage so many times in the past and for that reason I really have withdrawn from faux-anonymous transparency and honestly I’m sure I’ve lost whatever edge I ever had when it comes to writing as a form of self expression.

As with most of the things I consider art-for-survival at this point, it really did get washed away.

I’m the zombie.

I’ve been married for almost 7 years now to yet another sociopath. This one deviant in his own way, one far different from the one before, and just as invisible until he wasn’t and scarier because he was. I’m working through why this has happened again and genuinely have come to some pretty serious revelations about what cPTSD looks like and how it masquerades in plain sight. I’m kind of shattering my OWN stigma about domestic violence and what even I have lazily dubbed patterned behavior in victims who seem to “keep picking the bad ones” or “keep attracting the wrong people.”

I will not delve into the particulars for reasons that are both personally humiliating and legally detrimental as very much of this involves an open criminal case, but I will say this… it will never happen again. Under any guise, on any planet, in any emotional state. Ever.

I’m once again in therapy, but under a much different set of boundaries than before. A conversation was had up front about the ways in which I was utilized by my psychiatrist and how damaging the break down of that doctor patient confidentiality was to whatever shred of me that longed to heal back then. Assurances were made, and with those and my own understanding that trusting those assurances and being confident that once again this could never happen is foolish on my part, I return to the scene of the crime both jaded and guarded but still needing to do this despite it. So, just as I made this mistake before and destroyed my own sanity and any trust whatsoever I had in psychiatry, I will again blog my way through this because I feel like it may help someone else someday.

{In fact, if my CURRENT therapist(s) is reading this, I honestly hope that the things that I forget to say during our sessions still find their way into your studies. For science. I’ll never be an oblivious guinea pig again regardless.}

I am looking at this from an angle that is no longer about “understanding” and picking apart the significance of everything that I could deem the cause for ending up where I am in this moment, or for my children ending up here along side me, and instead focusing on something larger and more ambitious than surviving and moving on with life donning an armor of self-awareness that is somehow supposed to break a mythical cycle. Sure, the repetition of abusive relationships and trauma are not being dismissed… but they are also not a part of some unavoidable cycle that can only be hindered by grinding down to rubble and figuring out why it’s all my fault.

What the heck am I even talking about? I’m talking about the fact that I am NOT ignoring red flags, or attracted to toxic people because “they feel right” or “it feels normal” and likely if you were dropped into this sticky room by the talons of a #triggerword and you’re one who is caught in a similar holding pattern that you’ve dubbed a vicious cycle… you aren’t doing it either.

We can do hard things, boys and girls. Inflection is exacting. Open wounds are agonizing. Sewing those up while continuously poking raw guts back through the seams is like battling a hydra made of sinew. Bearing those scars and fighting the need to explain them to anyone that you ever get close to is taxing. Hiding them feels like betrayal to self and is of the loneliest places. These are all “hard” things. These are all the things that we think we must do to survive.

But what if… what if we don’t have to survive?

What if the person who all of that burning hurt belonged to actually succumbed?

What if by dedicating whatever of ourselves that we are able to bring to this futile fight, we are allocating that dwindling flame to light a room devoid of oxygen?

As good at it as I know I’d be, I’m not writing a song to suit the chord of melancholy… I’m saying what if we really ARE just dummies about this whole thing?

I am not a doctor, I am not a scientist -however mad- and I am just throwing this out there as hard as I can for my own notetaking.

WHAT IF THE WEIGHT WE FELT SO UNBEARABLE, THE HURT SO UNSURVIVABLE THAT WE THOUGHT ALL WAS LOST AND WE’D NEVER BE OK AGAIN… KILLED US?

By “us” I mean who we were… not our bodies. Visibly scarred or not, are we actually trying to resurrect corpses and calling this surviving?

This isn’t some boastful little rant about being further along in my journey to heal than anyone. I’m not any better off than I was when I was sitting in a chair being triggered and prodded into remembering repressed horrendous things about being sexually abused as a child, or raped, or the epiphanies that would burst forth from the aptly named by my former self’s “fuck-shaped-boxes” when I learned what gaslighting was. It’s not me popping out of a DeLorean in a wizard hat and spurs with the freaking recipe for moonshine and the secret to complete and total spiritual well-being. I’m completely without a lamp to light this path… but I think I might know where some matches are stashed.

All of the aforementioned parts of what we have convinced ourselves is what most of us are taught comes next after trauma. Surviving it and healing as best we can and being as “normal” as we can while we try to never end up back in that hell are “hard.” As much as I have always wanted to believe it, they aren’t just that way because of they effort and energy they demand; they are that way because they are actually IMPOSSIBLE things to accomplish. It’s like picking up limbs from a minefield and zapping a monster composed of the blown apart pieces because it’s supposed to be able to raise kids and hold a job without being a burden or making anyone else uncomfortable. Anyone who’s been through severe trauma of any kind knows that they’ve been blown to proverbial pieces. We may not be able to pin it down yet, or ever, but we know we aren’t who we were before. Neither is the monster. Everything’s there, but it’s no longer the vessel of who it was before it tripped, tippy toed, or titty slapped that detonator.

So why, then, have I always felt like I was SUPPOSED to resurrect the corpse of the girl who existed before it all only to have her walk through the rest of her life a zombie? Eating and functioning to a degree but surviving on instinct alone. Not LIVING.

That’s what I’ve come to feel like maybe cPTSD really is. It’s the sum of parts that are pointlessly being held together just so they can keep moving around as they are supposed to, but being perpetually reminded that they aren’t. They are constantly afraid that it’s obvious to everyone else and completely certain that they aren’t whole anymore. Metaphorically, we can’t do the hardest thing of all if we can’t look down at what we’ve reassembled and know it is dead. Step out of it. Let it fall to the ground and rot as it should. We can’t do that because we don’t feel like we deserve an actual do-over. We don’t deserve a brand new life and we can never have one because we are broken now.

Guys. Let’s just get really dumb, since we are zombies or whatever, and take all of that imagination that we dedicate daily to the LITERAL BULLSHIT that we can’t have or don’t deserve something because we’ve got so many scars and just re-allocate the huge amount of bandwidth used maintaining a totally fictional set of rules fueled by self deprecation and imagine a reality where we are actual phoenixes and not just people who use metaphors when we feel tough or are trying to convince others that we SURVIVED.

YOU AREN’T THE PERSON THAT YOU WERE BEFORE TRAUMA.

YOU ALSO AREN’T THE PERSON YOU WERE AFTER WHO’S SURVIVED AND IS NOW FIGURING OUT HOW TO LIVE AS NORMALLY AS YOU CAN.

“YOU” DIED. The you that all of that happened to, they died too. Stop walking around in their bodies. Do the hardest thing at all and love yourself enough to be a mad scientist that isn’t trying over and over to breath life into a cadaver. That’s the real cycle. There’s the real insanity, by definition. Instead be the doctor who’s literally fixing your own injured brain so that it’s no longer convinced that it lives in that body. Then look in the damn mirror and see the brand new person who exists as of that exact moment and be who that person would be if they never met the other one and if anyone in THIS person’s life wants to keep calling them by the dead one’s name you tell them once, then never let them make you feel the need to tell them again.

YOU ARE REINCARNATED.

INCARNATE OR WHATEVER.

LIVE.