Recently, someone close to me was diagnosed with an incurable condition. I listened and supported with ease. But something was wrong. I got off the phone and thought: Ok, I can deal with this. Everything's fine. I'll be fine, I can support this person. Been there before, can do it again. For a few days, I went about my business of listening, researching and saying all the right things.
And then suddenly I wasn't able to deal with it, everything wasn't fine, I didn't think I could support this person one hundred percent. I had done it before and I don't think I'm capable of doing it again. How selfish, how terrible but how true. My jug that I stored all things emotional, was filling up to capacity again and I could feel it about to overflow.
And yet, I was stoic. I kept up the pace. There were other needs within my family that also required my full attention. I began to prioritise and then I began to dissemble. When more negative knowledge was presented to me from now two people within my environs, my jug of emotional water began to overflow. So much so, that I felt myself distancing. A part of me, when another shockwave would hit, would simply move a couple of steps out of reach. I could almost visualise myself separating. Downstairs in the space I'm inhabiting I look calm, I have allowed my emotional self to leave the building so to speak. She is safe. I have protected her. But if I left her there, what would happen to her?
I booked myself into a psychologist who specialises in EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing therapy. Because that incurable sentence for someone close had triggered a trauma response that I realised I had never dealt with - the death of my husband and during the worsening of his cancer, the death of my best friend, my mother. I was brought to my knees. Stoicism was keeping me from remaining in my bed but the effort to get up, get out and get going, was huge.
How ridiculous, I thought; I have grieved, I'm sure I had. Or had I? I had convinced myself that I had anticipatory grief during the eleven years after my husband's diagnosis. I am good at convincing myself. I realise now that I had lied. I lied because after my husband's death, I didn't have time to grieve. There was a lot to be done, I had a homeschool teenage daughter and I was trying to work out how to get out of debt and keep everything afloat.
When my friend was diagnosed, I started to grieve my husband but because I had protected my emotional self and put her out of danger, I realised during a therapy session, that I didn't know how to get her back, nor did she want to come. But that is another story. Even now writing this, I feel uneasy but I am writing this for all the women I know that have been handed down stoicism from the mother and her mother and her mother before her. It's so ingrained in women's DNA that some of us lose the ability to access our emotional self any more. And when this part of us can't be accessed, we lose our joy, our ability to be happy, to function above or below a straight line of nothingness that we inhabit because it is safe and we can be there for people who need us without losing our minds. We lose our colour.
I will continue this post but I just wanted you to think about this and wonder if you too, at some point in your life, have done this. Have you?
PS. This isn't a poor little me post, it's about recognising trauma and how it can silence you. I'm getting help for it but I was told that writing about it is also therapeutic so even though this is hard to release into the world, maybe people will connect and recognise their own escapism. I'm going to hit publish and see where this leads. Feel free to comment.
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