Confessions From A Month in Seattle

If we don't heal in silos and are biologically wired for community, how do traumatized people step out of isolation and toward intimacy when closeness feels like a crisis so much of the time?

I've spent the last not quite month in Seattle, mostly staying with friends in their homes for the holidays. I have been paradoxically full with gratitude and discomfort. I’ve been sitting with a string of curiosities: About my attachments. About the impact of childhood trauma on my ability to feel secure in shared space without hyper attuning to others for signs of distress, for signs of not being wanted, for signs that it is time to flee. About not being sure what the lines are between needing my own space as an act of self care and when my smallest self is simply caught in her habitual cycles of shut down and retreat. 

I have been afraid that some unanticipated landmine will shatter the relationships of care that I have built. That too much intimacy will result in abandonment and recoil. And perhaps worse, that I will have earned it. If my vulnerabilities make me human there are days I would rather be a machine… okay not really but yes my smallest self is that dramatic. 

Intellectually, I know that hyper attunement to others is a trauma response and that the landmines I so fear are remnants of a volatile past in which I no longer live but. 

But my body has not caught up yet. 

But my smallest self still struggles to decenter the narrative that if others shift energetically or in tone it is in direct response to my own wrongness of being. Unsurprisingly there have been spirals and overwhelms… but quiet ones, ones I have tried to conceal from view.

Intellectually, I know that I feel most secure when I know what people's needs are. When I don’t have to attune or guess because I know the boundaries and that if I respect them I am doing my part to enable relationships to continue with minimal harm. Enabling relationships to continue in ways that feel better for both parties. Knowing this, however, has not been enough for me to engage vulnerably in the conversations required to glean this information or even introduce the possibility of navigating it together. Instead I've been engaged in an elaborate dance of leaning in and then stepping away. Of deep togetherness and then separation. Of engagement and then silence. There is an intimacy to being in people's homes, a sense of seeing what I would not typically see. A pulse of sorts. An ongoing feedback loop in the form of other living breathing human beings. And I have been afraid. 

That I do not actually know how to love the people I love in the “right” ways. That my intonation when I said that thing the other day landed out of alignment with my intention. That I am too close for comfort and totally inept. I've been unsure of the lines between boundaries and the necessary expression of care. I’ve been too slow in untangling my triggered places. I’ve been trying not to run. 

If we don't heal in silos and are biologically wired for community, how do traumatized people step out of isolation and toward intimacy when closeness feels like a crisis so much of the time? When our smallest selves are screaming “not safe not safe not safe?” 

Someone once told me that I have an obsessive personality, among other things. At the time I laughed it off but from my insomnia in the night I combed the internet. I think they meant that it's clear I was socialized in environments where a level of perfection was a condition to being loved and held in regard. I know (head place), perfection is not even real and yet I want to get so many things right so badly. I care a lot, about how I show up, about the quality of my work, about how I make others feel, and I’m also a black woman. The standards for me are different.

It's silly I know, but I still want to believe that I can just know how to best show up. That I can respect boundaries right the first time, even when people dont even know how to communicate what their boundaries are. That I can just know when to disappear and give space, or when not to see/hear what someone would probably prefer I didn't. I want to show up for others in ways that leave them feeling supported and respected. Mostly I want someone smarter than me to give me a crash course in the rules so I can evade the messy/scary/risky, trial and error or being in relationships with others. 

Until some expert provides me with a solution. I will keep reminding myself that most things are not about something that I have done. When people communicate how I have impacted them I will respond in the integrity of my care even when there are activations and projections because I am activated too. Mostly I will work to interrupt my spiraling mind, to assure my smallest self that she is worthy of more than recoil, that she is perhaps even wanted. Mostly I will try to be tender with myself through imperfection because trying is better than fleeing into the isolation I have known so intimately and for so long. 

I read somewhere (the body keeps the score), that people recovering trauma need to have new experiences that oppose their existing traumas. That's not possible if I can't breathe through my relationships for long enough to stick with them instead of running. Does not work if I am not willing to risk the discomfort of getting so much wrong.

The truth is also that I am still patiently waiting for the day when being cared for ceases to cause me confusion and discomfort. Patiently waiting for the exhale of breath that allows me to receive openly from the people who love me. Until then, I am in gratitude to the brilliant people who continue to love me in so many practical ways. By sharing their spaces with me, with home cooked meals and laughter, with so much softness. Thank you for a holiday season with so much silliness and laughter, with art and fancy cocktails, with silly little mental health walks, and almost tears. Thank you for letting me read you hilarious and then tender poems (Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be - Ross Gay) and ask curious questions. Thank you for picking me up from the airport and making me tea or coffee with milk to sip in your kitchens. For the dancing and the hugs. These relationships are healing me, however slowly.