beforgiveness

Photo by George Bonev on Unsplash

I thought that what I wanted to talk about today was forgiveness. It isn’t. But I’ll get to that later.

One week ago today I received an apology I’ve been waiting ten years to hear. And it pissed me all the way off. Like, shut-down-disengage-if-I-open-my-mouth-lava-will-spew. Pissed. Off. I think I overuse the word rage, but I’ve become very familiar with that emotional response during my healing from trauma process, and this was a major trigger. My usual response to childhood trauma triggers looks a lot like going back in time:

1. Internal upheaval manifesting as anxious energy and irritability, or, in extreme cases, outright anger. I can best be described as the “oblivious bitch” at this stage. Something is badly wrong, but I don’t know what yet. I just really, really want to kick something in the tenders, metaphorically speaking. This is the teen stage.

2. When I finally stop and register that something is, indeed, wrong inside, I go kinda catatonic (which is probably an oxymoron, but whatever). This is my wounded child phase. I need to curl up somewhere comfy and be held by my husband and not have to talk or think until I can face life as an adult again. It can take an hour or more sometimes, but I’ve learned to let the phase play itself out. It’s important. (Shout out to the sweetest most patient man, who will wait in attentive silence with me for as long as I need. Nothing in life facilitates healing like a partner who is willing to learn your emotional needs alongside you).

3. When my child has been comforted I can become an adult again. At this point I transition to phase: “WHAT THE FUCK AND WHY”. This is when I send long, ranting texts to my best friend. We’ve been good friends for even longer than my husband and I have, and she knows when I just need to be heard out and when I need a change in perspective. Sometimes I text my cousin too, who has more experience with Internal Family Systems therapy than I do, and has undertaken the perilous adventure of babysitting me through the process. Many, many of my steps forward in healing have been born out of these text conversations and the internal processing that they have facilitated. I couldn’t be more grateful for both of them.

“Is there a time for NOT accepting an apology, even if it was genuine?” I wrote my bestie. It was the next day, and I was recovering from a bout of violent grieving triggered by the apology. Sometimes, my child needs to scream and cry before she can be quietly held, especially if it was one of my parents who triggered me. And it had been. And I was going to be seeing them again the next day because my girls were with them for a couple days and I was supposed to be meeting them halfway to pick my girls up. And, for my own sanity, I needed to get unreactive before then (preferably well before then, so I could actually enjoy the rest of my time alone in the house with my handsome man instead of crumpled in a puddle of tears and snot). Forgiveness seemed as unreachable as Mars right then: perhaps in another decade; I just didn’t have the tools to get there at the moment. Bestie pointed me back to our favorite Mama Cheetah’s podcast (We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle). I hadn’t listened to her in a while (Glennon, not Bestie), and after a few more fun days of Trigger Cycle on repeat, I finally did (to both of them). And to Dr. Galit Atlas, a guest on the episode I chose, titled: “Family Estrangement: Should You Repair of Run? with Dr. Galit Atlas.”

Dr. Atlas is the author of Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma, which is the hardest book I have ever yet read, and also one of the most helpful (for all it really, seriously sucked a lot of the time). In the book, Dr. Atlas taught me about the concept of “the dead mother,” and how a child will first try to bring their mother back to life, emotionally speaking, and if they are not successful will “kill” themselves, emotionally, in order to relate to their mother that way. She taught me about emotional inheritance; the way we carry the trauma of our parents and grandparents in our DNA, and how the work of trauma therapy is allowing our minds to remember what our bodies already know, so that our bodies can learn to forget¹. Her previous appearances on Glennon’s podcast had been equally helpful and a lot more entertaining, so it was with more hope than trepidation that I pushed the triangle. And almost immediately, as with all of Dr. Atlas’s work, began feeling very, very vulnerable.