"There it is again." When trauma just keeps showing up at your door

I have a friend that I've been running with this past year-and-a-bit. Our pandemic ritual has been getting outside three or four times a week and, with each foot hitting the pavement, we sort through our lives. She is brutally honest with me and has incredible, rare insight.

I recently confided to her that I was struggling with my eldest, who had unleashed on me the day before. My daughter, as longtime readers know, struggles with mental health issues, although to the world she is beautiful and smart and a high achiever, although perhaps a bit moody. She is all those things to me too but she is also more than a bit moody and, far too often recently, suicidal. My mother, too, attempted suicide. A few times.

Despite plenty of therapy and trauma work, any mention of wishing to be dead remains terrifying to me. I’m not sure I can ever “therapize” myself out of the trauma it induces.

Which surprises me. I thought I was long past the trauma of my childhood, of my mother’s addiction, her suicidal ideation. 

And so, when my daughter stopped taking her medication for bipolar, when it was clear to everyone that she was spiralling despite declaring that she felt "great", when I felt myself tense whenever I didn't know where she was, or who she with, or what she was doing, I got angry with myself. Because there was nothing I could but wait for the inevitable crash. And doing nothing but wait is, for me, the worst feeling in the world. 

My urge is always to fix. 

To find the right  book. To find the right course. To find the right expert. To find the right words. If only I can do that, my distorted thinking goes, I can fix whatever is wrong.

My friend reminded me that I was acting out a trauma response. She pointed out that my daughter always always reaches out when she’s in crisis. Your job, she said to me, isn’t to fix your daughter, it’s to love her. And it’s to learn to manage your own emotions.

I’ve come to learn that we’re never “fixed”. We simply learn to acknowledge the boulder that lodges in our gut when we come across a trigger. “There it is again,” we learn to say. 

If we’re lucky. If we’ve done the work.

If we’re not so lucky, if, despite the work we’ve done, we still get blindsided by our response to a trigger, we’re more likely to react. To not recognize the boulder but rather to act out our trauma response. Each of us likely has our favorite. Fight. Flee. Freeze. Fix.

There it is. For me: Fix.

My daughter is struggling? I swing into fix-it mode. I call doctors. I Google. I buy books. I make suggestions.

My husband cheated? Fix it. Therapy for both of us. Google for online help. Buy books. Occasionally realize that I'm not actually fixing anything and collapse in grief. Rinse. Repeat.

You can imagine just how annoying I am. Cause despite my best intentions, I can't fix other people. Not my husband. Not my daughter. Each is responsible for themselves.

I am responsible for myself. And I need to learn how to manage my response to my daughter's health issues.

That includes stopping trying to fix it.

Or, more to the point, stopping trying to fix her. 

I can see just how awful my response is when I put it in print. Fix her. As if she’s a broken vase. A car in need of repairs. But she’s a human being. Not to be fixed.

My task is the exact same as it was when I first learned of my husband’s infidelity. To learn how to heal myself. To learn how to manage my own feelings so that I respond from a place of self-love and self-compassion, as well as compassion for those around me.

Don’t get me wrong. Responding with compassion for your partner is never to be confused with tolerating his hurtful or abusive behaviour. Responding with compassion is acknowledging his humanness. His flaws. And then taking steps to keep yourself emotionally and physically safe. The two responses are not mutually exclusive. They complement each other. Compassion. Boundaries.

I know this. And yet…I fix. Or I try to.

I’m learning. 

To take a breath before I react. To trust my daughter to ask for help from the experts when she needs it. To acknowledge that I am not, in fact, an expert.

It isn't easy for me. So much of my childhood wired me for the trauma-response to fix. Parents fighting? Step in and referee. Mom's drunk? Put her to bed. 

Husband cheated? Calmly tell the other woman to stay out of our lives then give my husband an ultimatum: Either get your act together or get out. 

Inside, of course, I was terrified. Terrified of being abandoned. Terrified that he would, in fact, take the option to leave. Terrified that I would wind up destitute, that my children would suffer. Terrified of so many vague things that basically amounted to the fear that had governed my life: That I was not worthy of being loved and loyal to. That I was not enough. That if I couldn't fix people, that I would lose them.

That continues to be my work. To push back against that belief. To stop myself when the impulse is to fix. To not act out the trauma but to learn to say, "There it is again. Hello."