It’s very clearly stated that avoidance of places, activities and anything else that recalls the trauma is a common part of PTSD. Before my abusive marriage and throughout much of it I was very physically active and loved to jog, bike, hike, camp. He took control over all of that, and filled so many activities with trauma that I want nothing to do with them now. After trying to make that feeling go away I have accepted it. The aversion is not so irrational: as many survivor-moms know post-separation life is hard and limiting, and I do not have the option of moving far away from him. This means I live with the risk of running into him and his cohorts anywhere. So I pour myself into things where that risk is low.
I wanted to go kayaking last summer – I’ve only been a couple of times near my home in the five years since separation. The abuser pretended during courtship to like the water, but later this turned out not to be true. So I’m not going to run into him renting a kayak. No problem – right?
On my way there I started to be bombarded by memories, and that same vague foreboding which I am used to. I have techniques to calm them and keep my nervous system steady – music, audiobooks, podcasts, a lot of it electronic. This is not avoidance. I am very well acquainted with the memories that inundate me: they’re nothing new, they come unbidden, and they are not generally beliefs or negative self-talk. They are ugly memories, sensations, or segments of nightmares. I need the techniques I use to be able to think about other things, stay emotionally even.
Out on the water it is lovely, safe, quiet, and my abuser is simply nowhere near me. So why that incessant feeling of dread? I’m starting to get frustrated with myself. Instead I stop, and let the memory in that has been insistently knocking at the door. On a beautiful Saturday morning during the last year of my marriage, when my kids aren’t home, I suggest we go kayaking. We are on the patio; he has a coffee and is reading the paper. At this point I was already getting beatings and I tiptoed around in a fog of fear all the time. Apparently I didn’t know that kayaking was an outrage, an insult, or I definitely wouldn’t have suggested it. “You selfish cunt!” he screams, and I run inside, as he follows me repeating the words “selfish cunt” over and over. I run upstairs and lock the door; I am learning not to try to reason with him. He comes upstairs and at some point later I unlock the door. I don’t remember now if this eventually turned into a physical assault, but weekends when my kids weren’t home were incredibly dangerous for me.
OK, I tell the now-kayaking me five years later. I wish that I was in the Oprah or Brene Brown version of this scenario, and I could be out here rejoicing in my freedom from abuse and ability to say “kayak” without getting screamed at. But that’s not how it’s playing out, for good reason. The fear that his rage inflicted on my battered-woman nervous system was strong enough that it is still telling me that to kayak anywhere near the city where he lives is dangerous. There’s been enough post-separation abuse for me to sense that he owns every tree and blade of grass around me. It’s his world. These aren’t as much beliefs as internal alarm-feelings.
He used to scream at me and belittle me all the time, so the fact that I remember this instance so clearly must have some significance. Maybe it was so outrageous that it brought me a sharp sense of living in a house of horrors – having passed through an invisible wall into hell and having no sense of what I needed to do to get back to humanity again. I do remember that sensation as I sat in bed and he knocked at the door, and I dared for the moment not to answer. I acknowledge to myself, allowing my feet to just trail in the water, that these things happened to me, that I did not do them to myself, and it is not surprising that they still effect me.
Then I consider how to give myself a break from the thinking and relax. I meditated and did a lot of mindfulness WHILE I was being abused and in order to get through it, so they are not always so helpful now. But I decide to try some:
- “State Changes:” alternating periods of quiet with periods of physical activity – in this case pulling on shore, getting out of the boat and swimming along side it for a little while, floating in the water, then getting back in. I’m not sure if this happens to anyone else, but a high heart rate from exercise makes me feel like I’m having a panic attack, so I avoid it. But moderate exercise is very good.
- HAITEMOBA: How am I experiencing this exact moment of being? I bring myself back to the present with that phrase, and i feel the sun on my skin, listen to the birds. I do not try to make this last too long, or it breaks down. Maybe five minutes at a time. One clarification: I almost never think I’m in the past, as a lot of trauma-talk seems to assume. I know where and when I’m at; I just don’t find that to mean safety or well being.
- I tell myself very clearly that I am in the driver’s seat: I am going to float around aimlessly with no actual destination, swimming and sunbathing and whatever else, and I will not be criticized or hit for it. To my abuser, or even my father, that would have been laziness. But they’re not here and they don’t matter. I do have to consciously say this to myself, but not incessantly.
- The memory comes back, with others, and I just let them be there, until it feels like too much and I get back in the water.
- Over a couple of hours the feeling of dread fades, and I am peaceful, a little happy. That’s good.
I am not what I think or think about. My thoughts are frequently not in my control. I negotiate them and negotiate with them. Healing from trauma is not a project like building a house or earning a degree. It’s a dance, and to learn the steps and moves that will help you specifically, you have to pay attention to your own internal rhythm, no judgement other than that of not doing harm to innocents. And there’s no timeline.
Facing Down the Dementor 