Convincing Myself I'm Not Actually Going to Die

On constant attempts to freaking chill out a little bit

A lot of things have struck me as I’ve listened to Bessel A. van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score. It’s been over two months — it’s a lot to get through and casts a somber shadow, a place I resist hanging out in for too long.

You’ve probably heard about the book, and might have even read it. Maybe, like me, you’re getting through it very, very slowly.

The basic premise, as the title says, is that what ails us mentally and emotionally permeates us at the deepest physical level as well, often without us even realizing it, and nearly always without us realizing the mechanism by which it does so. It’s (maddeningly) as if our bodies and minds had “minds” of their own that had little to do with our logical selves.

This connection is obvious to most of us occupying human bodies: we can feel how our hearts start beating fast and our stomachs sink when we’re startled, our systems flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. Under normal circumstaces, this should only happen momentarily, and dissipate when things return to normal. Unfortunately, there are so, so many ways to get stuck in a loop without consciously trying to. The result is that our brains and bodies often feel 100% sure that we need to be protected from danger that isn’t actually there.

We really are obsessive, dramatic creatures.

The responses are natural, an evolutionary gift meant to keep us safe. But trauma — especially from early on in one’s life, but that can certainly happen later — can wreak havoc on those systems, causing them to get so sensitive that pretty much anything will cause them to go off when we’re poked in one of our many Achile’s heels. When this happens, it can cause us to move into and get stuck in a hypervigilant state, sure that nothing and no one is safe. This state might not even be percieved by the conscious mind, and if it is, we might very well designate ourselves as crazy or even just plain defective.

Though we can know logically that things are fine, obliging our emotions or our bodies to truly know it, too, is a Herculean task.

***

This week…was a rough week. I cried a lot. Maybe it was hormones, which have been stubbornly jerking me around for one week a month ever since Lisa was born. They’re not lying when they say you get a brand new body after having a baby, but I also suspect it’s cosmic punishment for all the snide remarks I made in my teens implying lots of girls just wanted an excuse to be grouchy and waited on. Sure, I was young and dumb, but sin is sin.

Maybe it was the result of weening off of my depression medication (yes, under the guidance of a doctor), my body suddenly thrown off by yet another chemical change.

Or maybe I’m just exhausted from the frustration, as any normal human would be, of the impotence I feel before a system that only values people and provides what’s needed to live if you’re proving yourself productive in whatever stupid way it thinks is worth money these days.

By the time I had my therapy appointment with the psycho-traumatologist (yes, that’s still going on — it was my third!), I was a big mess of tears. But it did help me come to a sort of revalation that’s given me a sense of calm since, but that I’m embarrassed to admit: basically any kind of criticism, however small, sends me off the deep end.

Whoa. How did I never understand that simple fact before? But no matter. This is a problem that needs to be solved, because going off said deep end frequently is no way to live or function in the world. What am I, five? Being able to say either “Okay thank you for pointing this out so I can do better because I care about doing better” or, alternatively, “Whatever, fuck you,” is an important skill, and I need to learn to learn to actually feel it pronto.

For now, I’m kind of a baby about it. If the criticism is deserved, I feel devastated and vaguely panicked, despite the absence of any real threat to either my job (I hope) or my person. If it’s not deserved, then I’m angry and defensive, which I guess is better than good old-fashioned internalized hatred.

For whatever reason, I’ve realized that criticism sends me into fight or flight mode. But why?

In some ways, this kind of reaction makes sense simply as a social animal: the most basic fear of all humans, I believe, is to be left by oneself, abandonned by those we depend on for survival and support.

But as an adult that logically knows that abandonment is usually not imminent, even after having just disappointed someone, why would it turn me into an emotional wreck while others can simply shrug it off?

After all, I was never abandoned as a kid. My parents loved me and took care of me as best as they could, and were never unkind to me; in fact, pretty much no one was unkind to me.

But I’ve always been sensitive to and hypervigilant of others’ reactions to me. And this week, I haven’t been able to let go of the idea that perhaps that’s the root of my natural quiet shyness as a kid and complete and total loyalty to the idea of always being “good”: if you don’t say anything, you can’t expose yourself as being wrong or contemptible.

Still, though, it’s tough to believe that there’s no reason for that tendancy other than in-born temperament. After all, we believe things because we learn to believe them. So how did I “learn” that I had to be perfect, or at least that I had to get others to believe I was perfect?

One idea that, to me, has always seemed “out there” is that trauma can actually be passed down, like, genetically. It’s always seemed to me a dubious claim, but I’m seriously running out of ideas. I mean, you can’t solve a problem you can’t identify, right? And this panicked reaction to criticism is something I definitely want to solve.

I’ll admit that it would make some sense and seems to be, if not the smoking gun, a smoking gun in addition to the one I don’t want to give too much weight to: the fact that my mom, besides being kind and loving, was severely depressed and felt compelled to rest constantly though she never wound up feeling well-rested.

My mother is still, to this day, the most traumatized person I’ve personally known. After a hellish childhood of constant sexual, physical, and emotional abuse that she only escaped from upon turning 18 and moving out of the house, she’d experienced enough bad juju for 50 lifetimes by the time she had me. Was I somehow born with her coping mechanisms of trying to always be a quiet, good girl (as if my life depended on it!) without knowing why?

Because for her, criticism did signify a too-close proximity to life or death situations: truly dire consequences for making mistakes — check. Punished for even the slightest perceived slight or failure — check. Left alone to fend for herself, abandoned by those who felt too impotent to intervene when she needed it most — check.

Knowing how much she was constantly hurting, I did whatever I could not to hurt her more…she was so close to broken that even as a child, I was careful not to do anything that might push the vase of her, already teetering on the edge, all the way off the table. But as I’ve learned now with a kid of my own, kids being super considerate of their parents’ feelings is not actually a thing; I certainly haven’t gotten anywhere near the same treatment from my own kid, which I guess is healthy but sometimes feels like a raw deal.

So perhaps what makes me feel so scared in the face of criticism (and of angry people, whether directed at me or not) is simply a vague sense of how people could respond, or how they’re capable of responding, without having experienced those awful responses myself, my mother’s scars having somehow wound up underneath my own skin.

So…that’s that, I guess. Mystery kind of solved. All I know is that it’s time to dig out the rot, and hope I can do it successfully.

But for now, right this minute, it’s time for some good old-fashioned distraction. Naval-gazing has officially bored me, but hey — I’ve got plenty of material for my next therapy session.