For a bit over five and half years now I have successfully been masking, disassociating, distancing, denying, ignoring <insert any other words that mean I haven’t dealt with> the trauma of watching Pete effectively die in front of me.
Another word for that is: survival.
The problem with that is, turns out it is unsustainable.
All my challenges of the panic attacks, the overwhelm, enduring The Fuckening… all of that can pretty much be directly linked back to the fact my body and brain had taken that trauma and shoved it away into a void to ensure I could keep operating.
Periodically some of it has seeped out and its appeared in the form of those panic attacks and overwhelm.
It’s perfectly normal, apparently.
But what undealt-with trauma also means, is that no matter how many days I have off work, how much money I throw at things (aka: shoes, food and wine) or how many hours I spend trying to coerce myself into or out of things, none of it or me will work properly until I deal with the day Pete died and what I experienced myself in that situation, those places, and at that time.
I took a month off work thinking work was the problem, and what I figured out was: it wasn’t work that was causing the overwhelm.
The reality of being a solo parent of 4 kids (or, 1 adult child, 2 teens and a tween) meant that in a total of 5 weeks off work I had the grand total of one day without a child under my care (thanks Influenza A) or an appointment or job to do for myself or someone else.
I had one.day.to.myself.
In five weeks.
And so, turns out, work isn’t the problem.
My life and my capacity to handle it is.
And even then, it’s not a problem, as such.
The ‘problem’ is that to handle what I have needed to in the last five-and-a-half years, I needed to shove that trauma away, but now the time has come, that for me to be able to continue to handle my work and my life, I need let myself accept and deal with what I experienced to make enough space in my life and body and head and heart to deal with the next bit of life.
And what that all means is: I need to face up to and deal with trauma of Pete dying.
Not just dying, but collapsing on me, lying in front of me why we waited for an ambulance, the whole hospital scenes and conversations I had on the day, the hours I sat alone or with one of the strangest oddest attempting to care people I’ve ever met with Pete’s dead body in a room with us, conversations with police, conversations with family, kissing goodbye a dead body…
I often repeat it all, I've been super open with people about it all, but often I brush over the challenge of it, laugh off the enormity of it, scoff at the hardness of it…
Apparently all of that is also not actually dealing with it.
The challenge is, of course, is that I have very successfully placed that trauma behind an awful lot of barriers to protect myself and other people from needing to deal with it in its full force.
It is behind the armour of make up and clothes.
It is behind the getting out of bed every day and going to work and doing all the things.
It is behind the ‘busy’ of parenting and running around sports and avoiding housework and ignoring washing that needs folding.
It is behind humour.
It is behind dismissing.
It is behind self depreciation and self sabotage.
It is definitely behind and under a lot cheese and wine.
And I know this. Because they are tried and true methods of coping. Healthy or otherwise.
It doesn’t mean I have forgotten any of the actual trauma around it. If I ever want to, I can find it … because I know where and why it’s buried nice and deeply behind all the things…. because my brain and body absolutely how truly totally and utterly awful, life alteringly scary and devastating that whole event was.
So why dig it up now?
Accordingly to my educated psychologist if I leave it leave - buried deeply and unattended to - it’s going to do that thing that un-dealt-with trauma does. It will periodically resurface and fuck everything on the surface up before sinking back down again and repeating the process at expected and unexpected times all the rest of your life.
Plenty of people live like that forever and they are fine.
But I won’t be. Because my psychologist has witnessed it surface a few times, has seen the blood drain from my face when I recount bits, seen my demeaner change, and few other fairly significant pointers that indicate my trauma now comes with an (un)healthy dose of PTSD from the day.
And if I want to stop annually paying medical service providers for unnecessary ultrasounds to remind my brain I don’t have DVT every anniversary, if I ever want to sleep properly, or if I ever want to get to a point where I can choose to enjoy cheese and wine and chocolate and food and shopping for what they are - fun and good - and not for coping dopamine hits, then I need to do this.
Also, apparently, if I want to forgive myself around some of the things that happened I need to get excavating. Not as in I did something wrong forgive myself - but moreso, if I want to forgive / accept how I dealt with it at that point in time and for making the jokes with Pete while he was lying on the ground, for always wishing I'd said I love you to him as he was dying rather than making the joke, for not chiding the ambulance driver for suggesting Pete was being combative when he was panicking about not being able to breathe and was actually dying in front of us all but they were more concerned he was difficult to put an oxygen mask on, for joking with the doctor when they came to tell me he was dead, for not saying yes to people offering to help me, for not saying no to people who made my world harder, for trying to make other people feel better and more comfortable when my world had been destroyed, for so many things that people reading this will say: how can you possibly feel like any of that needs explaining when you were dealing with what you were?
*Welcome to my brain ... *
And I probably also owe it to the kids (and Pete) and mostly myself to realise that it was awful and I did what I did to cope, but now I actually need to deal with and accept all of that rather continuing to replay it, and flog myself over the head with it, and assuming it will just fade away.
Because in over 5.5 years it hasn’t faded away.
Not even a little bit.
And it takes merely the right series of questions from my psychologist to turn me into a shaking, crying, mess standing in that exact location at 4.26pm on January 20, 2019 and the hour leading up to that.
And it’s as awful now as it was then.
Maybe even worse, because back then I didn’t know the outcome.
Now I know the outcome, the reality, and all the things in between then and now.
So here we go.
The chipping away has started.
Annoyingly, the psychologist smiles nicely at my disparaging comments, the jokes, the hand waves and everything I’ve created as masking techniques to enable me to get around directly talking about it, and continues to dig.
The heavy digging and complete excavation comes now.
Will I think it will solve all my problems - absolutely not - I've been pretty good at not forgiving myself for stuff and glossing over it for literally years now!
What it will hopefully mean, is that am, deep down, ok.
That I have had this trauma occur but I am not that trauma.
That what happened, happened, but it won’t forever be this ball and chain dragging me back under the surface. It will be something that was. And is. But it won’t cripple me. And drown me.
And I can get back to being the ringmaster of 4 kids, 2 dogs and 3 cats ... with a lot more self acceptance ... because that is circus enough on its own.
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