Twelve trauma responses in a trenchcoat
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Before we get started on today’s letter, I want to report in from my Year of Writing Magically workshop. We started drafting our novels on April 30, and right now I sit with 8,331 words, including about 3,000 words I wrote during Discovery that started the story. I’ve also come up with a placeholder title; Nothing is Ever Always.
Twenty-one other writers are doing their work alongside me and we check in with each other every day, and write together in Discord and during live class sessions. I don’t mind saying; this is the best writing workshop ever for anyone who wants to get a long-form fiction project done in one year. If you’d like to be a part of the YOWM 2024 cohort, be sure to get on the mailing list so you’ll be the first to know when applications open.
Okay… and now on to the letter.
Dear Writer,
I’m not gonna lie to you; I’m smug as hell about my marriage.
Here’s the thing; as someone who has fucked up a marriage well and proper once, and then hopped straight from that frying pan to marry a fire that eventually charred me and my kids, I should be smug about exactly nothing with regard to relationships or marriage or decision-making or… well… anything, really.
But I am. I’m so smug, it’s kinda shameful. You could angle your head and squint and say that maybe because I've had those difficult experiences that I learned a lot and went into this new relationship with a hard-earned wisdom that makes it all run smoothly.
Nope. I can’t even take credit for how good my marriage is. It’s because I married a man who will not rest if there is anything—literally, anything—that we might need to talk about.
You know that old story, The Princess and the Pea? I remember it vaguely, but basically it was about this girl coming to the castle claiming she was the lost princess and the only way to prove that she was really the princess would be to let her sleep on a pile of mattresses with one pea stuffed under the bottom mattress. If she could feel the pea, she was the princess.
My husband is that princess. If there is a pea anywhere in the relationship, he’ll feel it. He may not know what it is, but he’ll feel it and he’ll sit me down and we’ll talk until we figure it out. Even if it’s not about the relationship, he just knows. He knows if I have a pea under my mattresses before I do.
I’m not gonna lie… it’s amazing. As a result, the maintenance on our relationship is done with frequency and efficiency, and it’s wonderful, but there’s a downside, and that is that when I’m forced to deal with my peas as they present themselves, I’m beginning to realize where my own toxicity lies.
Look, when you grow up in trauma, your personality basically becomes twelve trauma responses in a trench coat. Trauma responses are there to make you feel safe, and they work. Which is why we hold onto them long after the initial source of the trauma is gone.
My trauma responses are pretty much the standard set of toxic traits; people-pleasing, self sacrifice, self-loathing, perpetual apologizing, fixing everything for everyone, keeping the voice of the abuser ever-present in my own head, and a constant delivery of both shame and guilt chemicals polluting my bloodstream.
Now here’s the thing; when you start working through your peas and eliminating them one by one, you stop performing those trauma responses. And it’s great; I’m not gonna lie. You finally stop feeling unsafe all the time, and the abuse calls stop coming from inside the house. But if you’ve been using those trauma responses since you were a baby child, as I have, and then fail to weed them out in your late forties, as I did, you come to realize that you have no idea what your true personality actually is.
And you have no fucking clue how to behave around people.
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What do I do if I’m not constantly apologizing? How do I handle things when I actually do make a mistake and owe someone a legitimate apology? What, do I only apologize once, like a monster? Do I let the guilt just go then? Who does that?
Oh. Emotionally healthy people, you say? Huh. How does that work?
I’m at the point now where I’m feeling really healthy and happy and smug as hell due to no great virtue of my own. I’m awkward around everyone because I never know if the things I’m doing or saying are okay or if I’m being super weird. I recognize from a perspective outside of myself that I was always super weird because trauma responses present as weird to other people, but now I’m aware that I’m weird and it’s all just… well…
Weird.
But the good part is that I’ve managed to eradicate, through my own work and being married to a pea princess, most of my toxic trait trauma responses.
Except one.
I will run, manage and fix everything for you whether you’ve asked me to or not and whether you want me to or not. And if I cannot run, manage and fix stuff for absolutely everyone I know, I will have a minor emotional breakdown.
For some reason, and I don’t know why…
…possibly because this is the toxic trait that has paid off the most for me over the years with many successful ventures managed at the minor cost of my emotional health and the personal autonomy of the people around me…
…this has been the hardest of my toxic traits to get rid of. Probably because it’s so damn useful. But at the same time, it makes it appear to everyone around me as though I think they are incompetent at worst, and at best just not as good as I am at organizing their shit.
This is not true at all. I know that most of the people around me are very capable of handling their own shit. It’s just that if I let them handle their own shit while I am in the vicinity with any mental or emotional bandwidth available with which I might handle their shit for them, I feel like I’m somehow being lazy and letting them do my job for me.
Which I’m not. Because handling their shit is fundamentally not my job. Not my business. Not my beeswax.
So after having a conversation about this with my princess, for whom I will do everything I can at any possible moment and it’s patently annoying, I am trying to sit on my hands and not fix anyone’s shit.
And it’s driving me crazy.
Luckily, I have a lot of writing to do during these next two months to distract me. There is nothing better for an addicted fixer than a mess of a manuscript.
Everything,
L