I stood frozen to the spot as the words slammed into me, knocking my breath out of my chest and flooding me with the dark heat of shame.  I started to disassociate which allowed me to make a joke, to pretend it meant nothing.

She may have had no idea how her words would land. Or maybe she did, because, from the vestiges of my trauma, I had hurt her.

I have no way of knowing intent, only effect.

What I do know is that the person who spoke those words to me was one of the few people I trusted completely. She had seen me curled in a ball on the bathroom floor, fighting the waves of panic slamming into my body. She had helped me apply the electrodes of the TENS unit to my abdomen, sending electrical current through my body to counteract the pain caused by invasive physical therapy. She is one of five people who knows the names of both of my abusers.

But that day she walked away. My trauma was too emotionally expensive, my break downs unattractive. There were other people out there who had far less to manage.

Everyone has trauma. It’s part of the process of living, of sharing space with others.

When the trauma is particularly complex or was mixed in with other traumas or occurred in secret, it has longer lasting effects. Trying to understand that sort of trauma when you’re someone who has not experienced it like trying to understand starvation when you have always had enough to eat. You believe it exists. You’ve seen the skeletal children on television documentaries. You may even cry a bit. But your pantry is still full of food.

One of the hardest realities I’ve had to face is the judgement from others when trauma rears its ugly head. People get tired of the dark days, the behaviours that keep tripping me up, the pain that comes seemingly out of nowhere. They know someone else who “had a hard time”—past tense—but “got over it”—past tense again. This is said in order to spur me on to do the same as quickly as possible. Strangely, no one wants this more than I do for myself. And no one feels the shame of failure more intensely on the days when I fall sideways in my healing journey.

Shame permeates everything about sexual assault, like the shame of not fighting back enough or being somewhere you “shouldn’t” have been. It makes sense, then, that childhood sexual molestation, has even more shame attached to it if it occurred over a long period of time in secret. While an adult survivor of rape may be able to call on a community of friends and family as a support system, as a counter to the shame, allowing them to be resilient, children who are molested generally do not have access to that sort of system. Instead, we have the long-term physical and emotional consequences of the abuse., and, as studies have shown, secrets cause pathophysiological consequences that are still being explored.

Given the havoc it wreaks on our professional and personal lives, most of us would be thrilled to put it behind us and never think about it again. We would never again be overwhelmed by memories and sensations, never fight dissociation, never need to take another shower to cope with the feelings of dirtiness and shame.

As I stood there, my back against a rented Toyota Corolla, being told that I was too expensive, the inky black shame of my childhood crept out of its hiding place. Shame that I had allowed myself to be hurt in the first place. Shame that I hadn’t managed better, healed faster, been stronger. Shame that I had ever shared my story.

Shame whispered to me, “You are damaged. You will always be damaged. No one can love damaged things.”

At its heart, as Brene Brown often reminds us, shame is tied to unworthiness. Shame tells us we are flawed and we do not deserve love or belonging or connection. Shame is a powerful tool, because it keeps us from building a support system we can rely on. And it keeps us in silence and alone.

Caught in the moment, but with my adult self not present in any way, my child self showed up. Alone and vulnerable, she accepted again that she was flawed, that her only value was what her body had to offer. She was definitely not worth the price of having to deal with her trauma.

I would like to say this story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. The person I trusted wanted more light, less darkness. She wanted easier conversations, fewer unexpected triggers. She had the ability to walk away, so she did.

My child self did not have that option and neither does my adult self. As the saying goes, wherever I go, there I am. The shame will likely always haunt me, and I will often be tempted to accept it as truth. I will drive myself hard to be more than enough to make up for what I think I lack. The problem is that shame thrives in the dark places, becoming ever more monstrous the longer it floats beneath the surface.

What I wish my adult self had been mindful enough to tell my child self at that moment in time was that no one was more worthy of love and belonging than she was, because she had nothing to be ashamed of regardless of what someone else spoke over her.

Part of my work in the aftermath has been digging deeply into the shame that has always lurked inside of me, stealing my joy. As tends to be my case, I found solace in art, particularly in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, when a friend sent me a link to an exhibition at the Met. According to the curator, in the 15th century artists began turning broken pottery into artistic masterpieces instead of discarding them. Carefully placing the pieces together, an artist seals the cracks with an epoxy laced with gold, silver or platinum. The final result is not the original piece, but instead of hiding the breaks, keeping them out of sight because they are ugly, they become beautiful and are put on display.

This has given me hope, because it tells me that the work I do, the shame I battle, is not for nothing. If I can find a way to see the broken places as an invitation to become more beautiful, what was once ugly is transformed. In the Reformed tradition of Christianity, they would see Kintsugi as a form of redemption. As much as I shy away from religious terminology, there is something about redemption that can still move me, because it holds within it the notion that nothing broken is ever lost, just transformed into something even more beautiful.

Grappling with my trauma, taking responsibility for its effects, comes out of my deep desire to shield LA from its repercussions as much as possible. That includes being honest with him about it whenever I can be, and being honest with those around me so they can help me protect him. Most of all, it means I have to accept I am not my trauma, but it is a part of who I am. My faith is that constant, persistent work will lead to a sort of redemption out of which, I hope, will come someone more beautiful, someone he can be proud to have as a mommy and someone I can be proud to hold out into the light.

The post Speaking of Trauma and BMWs first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

“Victim” is a charged word. A 2020 article in Time pointed out the complexities surrounding the term, noting that the tendency is to prefer the word “survivor.” We like that word, because it connotates being alive, having some power and control. As the author, Kate Harding, points out, the origin of the word victim does not signify anything other than someone who had a bad experience that was not in any way deserved. Nevertheless, in contemporary parlance, the term victim became a negative, pushing us to self-designate as survivors. 

Being both survivors of sexual assault, my relationship with CP (from friendship to relationship to co-parenting) has had to deal with questions of victimhood in serious ways. Early on, we would get in horrible fights which, in retrospect, we now know were due to unconscious triggers that we had not yet learned to identify as such. Although emotions would run high, the fights would play out in a surprisingly systematic fashion, like two chess players facing each other across the board. Attack. Defend. We would find ourselves locked in a vicious spiral where neither of us was acting as a rational adult. Instead, our child selves would glare at each other across the living room, brandishing any verbal weapon available from the arsenal in order to inflict maximum emotional damage.

When we reached the point where both were so triggered that every single instinct we had honed to survive our childhoods was on alert, and our minds were bent on self-preservation at any cost, someone’s voice would run cold, their eyes narrow and they would throw down, “Stop being a victim.” Checkmate. By throwing out the word “victim,” you won, guaranteeing your own safety at the expense of the other person you claimed to love and, ultimately, to the detriment of your relationship. 

Despite preferring to call myself a survivor, before becoming one, I was a victim. No wording can change that. I was a victim for years. Until I made my peace with this, before I consciously explored what it meant psychologically to have been a victim for so long, I repeatedly engaged in destructive patterns that meant I would be a victimized again. 

One particular pattern took me through multiple relationships, each ripping my heart to pieces as I stood in its wake, alone, exhausted and sobbing. That was the pattern of learned helplessness. One of the classic psychological studies on trauma that explains this concept came from research in the 1970s by a man named Martin E.P. Seligman. While animal experimentation makes my blood run cold, his studies established the connection between resilience to trauma and questions of control. What he discovered is that dogs who were repeatedly subjected to traumatic situations without being given an option to escape, gave up to the point where, even when a way of escape was eventually offered, they were incapable of taking the way out. Although later studies have nuanced these findings, there are some key components to learned helplessness that particularly apply to those of us who survived childhood abuse. 

We are all aware of what is like to be helpless, to have a complete inability to control one’s circumstances. Babies are helpless, for example. Studies have shown that evolutionarily, we are neurologically wired to see babies as adorable, to have a surge of desire to protect and care for them. That’s what helps the species survive. Children continue to be mainly dependent on their caregivers as they grow, asking for their needs to be met the best way they know how, aware that they depend on their caregivers for survival. The psychologist Ross Buck discovered that children whose caregivers ignore or punish them when they ask for a need to be met tend to shut down. This does not mean they stop needing or feeling stress. It merely means they stop expressing their needs, knowing they will not be met anyway. The consequences of this are long-lasting, similar to what was found in the studies with the dogs. 

When a child is repeatedly subjected to abuse or neglect, they shut down. The stress remains the same, but they cease to request assistance. Not only that, but they can get to the point where they become so accustomed to being helpless, they are not capable of seeing anything else. This mechanism, when it persists into adulthood, can lead to an ongoing state of learned helplessness which Gabor Maté defines in his book, When the Body Says No, as “a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so.” 

In my case, as a result of living my childhood in a situation where any type of independence was deemed rebellious, where God was interpreted through the lens of patriarchy and authoritarianism, where ongoing sexual assaults could not be addressed for fear of the consequences, I learned that when it came to control over my body or over important life decisions, I was helpless. This lingered for years. It covered everything from choosing a career—because there was so much pressure to not make a mistake and choose the “wrong” one—to relationships where the other person defined who I was, where my needs were secondary because I did not realize I could say “no” without paying the price. My first serious relationship told me flat out that we had to have sex regardless of my feelings on the matter, because it was the only way he could express how he loved me. No sex meant no relationship. Naturally, I complied, because deep down I did not believe I had any other options. 

Looking back, I often felt trapped against a wall when there was a door wide open to the side. I could not see it. I kept playing the same opening gambit, and I kept being checkmated. Staring at yet another loss, I would ask myself why I had to suffer so much, why I kept being in so much pain. It took years of therapy before I realized that the only way to avoid the loss was to stop playing that gambit, to learn a new strategy. I wasn’t helpless. I just felt helpless. I had to learn to see my other options.

I’m not the only one who keeps playing the same opening and hoping for a better outcome. There is no blame in this, because we are unconsciously pulled to the familiar, to the same gambits. Until we become conscious. Until we take steps to learn a new way of functioning that breaks the cycle. 

The post Queen’s Gambit first appeared on Mindful Mommying.