Double life

When you are a trauma survivor, especially someone recovering from PTSD, you may feel like you have no choice but to lead a double life. On one side, you stand up as the whole you, your trauma truth has already been revealed and your friends and family have the information they need to comprehend your behaviors and feelings. This doesn’t guarantee a proper response, but at least your people know what happened. But on the other side – let’s call it the dark side – the truth is definitely not out there. There are things you keep tucked away in the shadows. Your behaviors and feelings – even the worst of your trauma symptoms – are still there, but without the possibility of understanding from folks around you.

While it’s your right to share your story with anyone and everyone, most trauma survivors don’t. Instead they choose a double life. And I get it. I’m right there with you. There are times and places that it feels highly uncomfortable or even inappropriate to lay down your burden. But let’s be honest, what happened is a major part of your life and it can be a relief to talk about it so that those around you understand your actions. Or you may be motivated to bare you soul so that other survivors don’t feel like they must hide their own terrible scars. It can be a difficult balance to maintain – the choice is not always clear.

For me, this secret life is buried just below the surface when I’m at work. While a few of my co-workers do know the truth about how my second marriage and my entire life shattered overnight, not everyone does. And those who do know don’t all have the same bits of information. This makes for an interesting dance at work – especially during the past year when the #MeToo movement has come up in conversation.

Most of the time, I am confident in my ability to control my history. I choose who to tell, when to tell, and what to say. But, from time to time, it feels too enormous, too consuming, too unruly – as if it might burst out of my mouth at any moment, scorching the ears of anyone forced to hear those ugly words.

My husband molested my son.

That is how I say it when I am willing to tell everything. I want to make sure the perpetrator gets all the attention for the horror he unleashed. For those of you who don’t recall your English grammar, today’s your lucky day – click here. In last week’s post, I threw in a mini-English lesson for free! And, as an added bonus, I provided crime trauma examples so that you might find the words you need to explain your tragedy to others in the voice that makes the most sense for you.

But back to my story, there have been some days when I spent my entire 8-hour shift worried that I might blurt out those words at any moment. As you might imagine, this is very distracting. And I get that it sounds crazy – really, really crazy. What’s so weird is that when someone trusts me enough to tell me about the scary things buried in their past or the glorious news that they aren’t ready to share with the rest of the world, I lock up their words and throw away the key. I pride myself on the ability to keep my mouth shut, so why do I sometimes feel compelled to blurt out my own trauma details?

I’ve tried to make sense of this feeling since the very beginning. In those earliest moments, when I was dazed and bewildered, I felt like I might spew the horror to everyone I encountered. And I do mean everyone. From friends and family to random strangers at the grocery store, the words and feelings felt too big and unpredictable to corral within the fences of my own brain.

What I’ve come up with is this – there was about a year, starting the moment my child first told me what his step-father had done, when fear and chaos and uncertainty ruled every moment of my day. It didn’t matter if I was awake or asleep – I was terrified. I was alert and waiting for the next bad thing to happen while simultaneously being bombarded by repeated memories of the trauma. I could not turn off the stress – even for a second.

For those of you who do not have PTSD, I want you to think about an experience of yours that involved extreme stress – maybe the initial seconds after a car accident, the time your child fell and was bleeding everywhere, or something else that made all of your alarms go off at once. Think about how your body responded, how your brain focused in on the scary stuff so clearly, but completely jettisoned any extraneous information – even the kinds of details you might normally pick up and remember. Maybe your heart was beating so hard you felt like it might jump out of your chest, or you screamed at the triage nurse because he told you it would be a few minutes before anyone could see to your child, or you cried uncontrollably or could not stop shaking. Maybe a day or two later the memories replayed on a never-ending loop through your mind or you startled every time you recalled what happened. Now imagine that the feeling doesn’t go away by the end of the week – even though the threat is over. Instead it drags on and on and on – day after day, for months or even years. That, my friends, is PTSD. It’s overwhelming and all encompassing. It’s too enormous to contain. And that is why I sometimes feel like my experiences might come tumbling out of my mouth unchecked.

Sometimes, the betrayal and the fear and the knee-buckling pain bubble up until it seems impossible that the details aren’t written in my eyes for all to read. Or it feels like I must have the letters P-T-S-D hanging above my head in a cartoon speech bubble, or emblazoned across my chest like a scarlet letter A. In those moments, maintaining my double life is so exhausting that I yearn for a day when everyone already knows.

In reality, no matter how much I wish I didn’t have to, I understand that I will always lead a double life. There will always be people who don’t know. Just as there will always be days when it seems impossible to keep my trauma to myself. Always.

But I have hope. It’s not as difficult as it was just a few months ago. The days of feeling overwhelmed and out of control are now the exception instead of the norm. As I move forward, no longer on constant alert or terrified of what new monster might be lurking just around the corner, I am confident that I am walking the right path and making the right choices. It feels good. And I feel free.

It’s definitely fall in the Pacific Northwest, so today’s photos are from a past autumn adventure with Mr. C in Sleepy Hollow, New York. I miss the massive number of changing leaves, but do not miss the raking. Stay tuned for more of these photos in an upcoming post. I saved the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery shots for next time!