How to become a person after "winning" at trauma?
September 30, 2021 7:52 PM   Subscribe

I was a depressed and anxious youngster with a lot going on. I threw myself into work + lots of coping strategies and tools. It worked too well and now I'm entering mid-life "stuff" with a weird lack of emotional-and-life landscape. I don't know what to call this? Snowflakes Inside.

I know the short answer is "therapy" but I feel like I need some help on how to frame and reason with all of this. I'll try and be concise.

My tweens-to-20's were a blur of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and misery. My parents are (according to the googles) Narcissists, and were often physically and emotionally abusive, but not entirely bad. I went through all of this "alone", not talking about it, and it only being visible when I was having a meltdown or due to visible injuries. I was punished for being an "emotional little faggot" when I did react (apologies for choice of words but it was repeated thousands of times).

My 30's were a see-saw of the same issues, extreme workaholism, and things like meditation training, therapy, and CBD. Things were better-ish but still pretty awful, swinging between "life is golden" to "inciting bar fights and making attempts on my own life" at different stages.

As I'm rolling into my 40's, my life is more stable, but: I might be a ghost. I don't have a connection to my family, I have no friends, no hobbies, no emotions, no goals, no insight into who or what I am. When I do feel something I reflexively "clamp it down" with mindfulness, meditation, and other tricks. My emotional range is numb with occasional bursts of rage or panic.

I have a pretty successful job (upper-middle-management in tech), but I can't remember the last time I had a genuine feeling or experience. I work around 60-80 hours a week. I feel like I wear a "People Mask" all day, and when I'm alone I just "disappear" until it's time to work again.

Recently my parents have started to age and decline, and it struck me that I feel...nothing, apart from tiny slivers of sudden sadness, anger, and fear at random intervals. I think I wish that this was a chance to engage with them, experience this thing, rediscover myself and my emotions, but it's more likely I'll just stare it down and one day they'll be dead and gone; and I'll keep turning up to work.

Where to from here? I don't feel any incentive to change because I don't feel like I can relate to comfort, passion, or joy anymore as an incentive. But I know "impatiently waiting to die" isn't a plan either. All inputs appreciated.
posted by mah-flaming-alt to Human Relations (12 answers total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
being raised by two abusive narcissists is a pretty significant developmental trauma...and being in a state of constant dissociation, feeling like you're not really engaged in your own life or can feel things, that is a very common, absolutely normal response to long term developmental trauma.

the thing about doing cognitive therapy or meditation when you have developmental trauma is that it doesn't work. it makes you feel like you're treatment resistant, because it doesn't help your nervous system feel safe before it starts trying to change your thinking. no amount of willpower around changing your thinking is effective when your nervous system/emotional center of your brain is in a constant survival mode, leading to dissociation. the nervous system is operating on a chemical, instinctive level, subconsciously, below and before your frontal lobe thinking "calm down" or "be happy" or "be nice"

work with the nervous system first before using cognitive tools. somatic psychotherapy, emdr, bodywork, medications are some ways to do this. imo you're so high functioning at work that it might be difficult to convince providers you even need trauma therapy. bring a copy of this question to your appointment. i had a similar problem and was actually turned away by a team of people doing emdr because i apparently function too well to need it :(

i hope that makes sense? its been a long day but i read your question and i had to answer it. i can think of three people i know right now who would also use the language "numb with occasional bursts of rage or panic" to describe themselves prior to getting trauma therapy. its not hopeless and you're not alone.

getting on some medication might help. its not like a switch will flip and you will be happy instantly, of course, but having more dopamine and serotonin flowing might make it easier for you to engage with your feelings and notice a wider range of emotional responses, especially good ones.

you don't have to be happy about dealing with this. just be curious. just be able to say, ok i'm going to try this just to see how it goes for a week, for a month. you don't need to be excited about it yet. just start the process and be curious.
posted by zdravo at 8:45 PM on September 30, 2021 [26 favorites]


You have already acknowledged that your upbringing was severely abusive. This is a very, very good thing -- farther than many people get -- even though it is painful.

I can relate to many of the symptoms that you describe, most likely because I grew up in an abusive, chaotic household where emotions were as combustible as nitroglycerine and the rules changed from one minute to the next. The numbness, the feeling like a ghost, the "people mask," the sense of utter detachment from humans.... all of that sounds very familiar to me. I remember quite clearly sitting on a metro train at the age of 20 and getting this eerie, uncanny feeling of my own ghostliness, as if there were some kind of invisible veil between me and everyone else on the train. I also recall a sensation of being an alien, and even today I still have great difficulty understanding and recognizing what feelings are as they arise. This is because I had to turn off my emotions in order to survive my childhood. I would have gone insane, killed myself, or just wasted away if I hadn't sealed all of my feelings away inside; I have come to believe that my life quite literally depended on it. I had to shut off the feelings to stay alive, and that habit is immensely strong once it is formed. The responses you mention sound quite consistent with a habituated response to prolonged emotional trauma inflicted when you were young, and perhaps continuing to the present if you are still in contact with your family.

Remember this: anyone, absolutely anyone, who was subjected to the same treatment that you received in your formative years would be thinking, feeling and acting much as you are right now. There is nothing wrong with you; in fact, you responded quite normally to a highly abnormal situation. I find that it is helpful to remind myself of this when I judge myself for being so shut off, or when other people have a problem with it. Those who don't know, don't know.

You say, "I don't feel like I can relate to comfort, passion, or joy anymore." I think therapy will help you with this, and it's probably going to need to be trauma-focused therapy. You have already acknowledged the trauma in a matter-of-fact way, but it is not the same as actually feeling those awful feelings. But I find hope in the notion that feeling the bad comes along with feeling the good. It always makes me think of Pandora's Box, and what a good metaphor that is for my sealed-off emotions.


And, PS:

Well that sounds pretty fucking bleak. What do you want? A partner, kids? A hobby? A connection with your aging parents?

I guess we could all give up and die, but apparently you don't want that, or you wouldn't be here asking about it.


Yo.... hate to cross-talk but can we avoid this snipey, tough-love sort of tone? I really think it is not very likely to help the asker.
posted by cubeb at 9:18 PM on September 30, 2021 [27 favorites]


One of the things I did when plauged by this chronic detachment stuff is start figuring out what I liked and kept a journal. I started with simple things like two foods. Do I like this one or that one more (having favorites was a super hard thing, that came later). ​Anyway, over time I was able to start connecting with activities I enjoy and eventually even people.

I had a hard time even recognizing when I simply has positive feelings about something because my window of acceptable emotions was too small.

In terms of therapy, I really suggest you find someone who had experience in disassociative disorders, because the narrowness of emotional experiences is hard to treat and the goal is to expand it and have tolerance for it. Not to calm down or appear like you are functioning fine. For many people meditation is great, breathing excersizes are great, that stuff is useful. But if you use them too soon, and never actually process, then you end up not able to experience a wide variety of feelings, which leads to what you are experiencing, at least in my experience. There were plenty of tools I was provided in my early therapy which just masked the severity of my trauma and made me presentable to the outside world instead of helping me process and develop a healthy mind.

It is possible to become more connected with the world, but it does take intention, time and practice.
posted by AlexiaSky at 9:24 PM on September 30, 2021 [16 favorites]


This is an oversimplification but it sounds like the things you've been forced to deal with are things that required you to react effectively to crises of varying intensity and duration. The negative side of getting so good at this sort of coping is that at the end of the day, all your time and energy has been directed by forces outside your control.

It might help to explore interests that restore a sense of “agency “ to your life. Maybe canoeing or kayaking - something that requires you to organize your resources so that you can experience nature in a safe, self-directed way?
posted by brachiopod at 12:12 AM on October 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


I've gone through this on a much milder level. My experience was that when the dissociation dissipated, a lot of emotion came flooding in and it was not easy to deal with. So just something to keep in mind - you might have a more gradual experience, but you might also have a very difficult one, which isn't to say you shouldn't do it, but that it might be worth processing a little in advance and even expecting. If you have any friends who you can talk to that might be able to serve as a support network should you need it, that might help a lot; if not, hopefully a therapist you really feel comfortable talking with and feel supported by. Maybe a dog you can hug, or something. You mention having made attempts on your own life, so setting up some support for yourself and sources of help should you need them, and finding people to work on this with that you trust, is really important.

Recently my parents have started to age and decline, and it struck me that I feel...nothing, apart from tiny slivers of sudden sadness, anger, and fear at random intervals. I think I wish that this was a chance to engage with them, experience this thing,

I'm not a trauma therapist and might well be wrong about this. But I think maybe going back to a dynamic where you're hoping for something from your parents that they can't give you, and giving them a chance to hurt you yet again, might not actually help you. They've already inspired so many emotions in you, which you might be able to unearth. And there are so many emotions out there to be had that don't have to do with people whose abuse once defined your world. You say you're trying to be a person again, to feel your own self. I think part of the challenge is to find out about your own self who is not connected to your parents. To process that older part of your life but let the new part, the one that comes after them, be the real one.
posted by trig at 12:45 AM on October 1, 2021 [5 favorites]


I think the priorities right here are to a) get some really excellent therapy from someone with experience with queer folks and chronic early life trauma, b) address the workaholism by working less, c) work on developing meaningful relationships in therapy, and d) work on developing the ability to feel pleasure and joy (which will, as your heart will lurch fearfully to remind you, also involve increasing your ability to feel all that other stuff you're locking down).

In the beginning, doing all this will feel like nothing, meaningless, pointless. Ignore that. Approach it like a list of tasks at work.

Most importantly, this?

Recently my parents have started to age and decline, and it struck me that I feel...nothing, apart from tiny slivers of sudden sadness, anger, and fear at random intervals. I think I wish that this was a chance to engage with them, experience this thing,

Don't do this. This way lies madness. Leave your parents to themselves. You'll get nothing from them, and they've stolen enough from you.
posted by shadygrove at 1:29 AM on October 1, 2021 [8 favorites]


For me, getting past largely uninvolved (except to punish or push) parents and ceaseless, ugly childhood bullying, there's been an element of "fake it 'til you make it" on learning to human. I wasn't explicitly taught how to feel things or how to interact, and I mostly didn't learn by osmosis because I was too isolated.

So I watched people who were better at humanning than I was, and I read books on humanning, and I tried out some of the behaviors I saw or learned about... and (perhaps this is the key part?) tried to incorporate them into my authentic self, what feels like "me."

It's helped. I think it's helped? Sometimes, yes, it does still feel like a mask... but at least I have places and people now where the mask comes off.

I'm not suggesting this in place of the other excellent suggestions you've gotten here -- just as a possible adjunct to them.
posted by humbug at 5:21 AM on October 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


Oh hey, hi! I am also a ghost. My worst dissociation is at night, in bed, because my brain is so fully out of sync that once the lights go out I have literally no evidence that there is even a world, much less that I'm a person in it. I haven't yet fully decided whether I want to become a recovering ghost? It's something I'm working on with my therapist.

Anyway per my therapist, who is lovely and competent, if I decide to consciously recover from ghostdom she feels I should seek out a practice that does somatic therapy, where the goal is to bypass the trauma shutdown and get the brain and body back into communication with each other. So that might be one place to start!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:45 AM on October 1, 2021 [5 favorites]


I think the therapy idea is a good one. Someone who works with trauma who can help you feel your feelings now that you are in a place of safety. I went through something similar and found it really helpful. There was intensive meditation, talk therapy, and even though sometimes I miss my old coping mechanism because it protected me from the low lows, I was missing out on the high highs of human existence. It is much happier to feel your feelings when you've cleared the upbringing disaster. Whether it makes sense to re-engage with your parents is something you can talk to the therapist about. Proceed with extreme caution.
posted by *s at 8:12 AM on October 1, 2021


my experience: i had a defensive posture. that was useful for quite a while. after working with a shrink for Quite A Long Time, i slowly began to see the physical threats were now absent, and the mental ones were mostly projection, a dreadful inner monologue, and a misunderstanding of my fellow humans own motivations and struggles.

it would take a lot of energy for the whole world to coordinate, agree what a shit person i might be, and continuosly try to break me. there's an odd kind of arrogance thinking i could be at the center of all that. or, that My Experience was applicable to others. fwiw.

maybe ask a therapist about self-image and cognitive distortion. and, as always move your body more and get some sun.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:09 AM on October 1, 2021 [2 favorites]


I was a ghost in my own life for many years, due to undiagnosed autism, involvement with a theist culty subgroup of a 12 step fellowship, and probably coping by cPTSD freezing / flight as well.

What helped:

1) getting out of fulltime tech work. I still am involved in tech adjacent work but not nearly 40 hours a week
2) leaving the geographic area where I got sober, because I knew many people in my 12 step groups would frown on the radical changes I needed to make
3) a diagnosis of autism and work with a therapist who is also autistic
4) travel to and stays in places that forced me to interact in my second language, where people are often materially much worse off than me
5) mindful self-compassion work (see books by Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer)
6) interaction in online communities for autistic women and nonbinary people (Facebook, Twitter, and channels of women in tech communities)

You needn't be autistic to benefit from similar changes, especially therapy and walking away from workaholism.

Note that community is very, very important here. You needn't make "the best friends of your life" or whatever the latest jargon is. You simply need to feel seen and understood.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 10:48 AM on October 2, 2021


Response by poster: Hello, and thank you! This has added a bunch of context and approaches I feel were missing from my thinking on this that I can take forward.

I also randomly stumbled on the concept of "Complex PTSD" on youtube (specifically: this video) which felt a bit like watching a life checklist. Just noticed on re-reading that Sheydem-tants had cPTSD there as well.

I'm not sure how to do you justice by way of replies, I'm definitely going to archive this thead and take it to someone who specialises in trauma, detachment, ptsd and hold it up like a refrigerator drawing and go "this", because as mentioned it puts a lot of surface area to something I had a mental blank on articulating.

The original poster deleted the entry that Cubeb has quoted above, but it is a really interesting talking point:

Well that sounds pretty fucking bleak. What do you want? A partner, kids? A hobby? A connection with your aging parents?

I guess we could all give up and die, but apparently you don't want that, or you wouldn't be here asking about it.


I think this is the essense of the problem: 100% agree with this reflection and reaction, but it's not the experience I'm having of the situation, hence the "ghost" label. It was an idea that came up in the "Complex PTSD" video above as well, the "limbo" of not entirely wanting to die, not having the gearing to create change, but feeling like the remainder of life is just too boring and too long to put up with.

To wrap a few things in bullet points:

- [ ] therapy, but with someone specialised across these topics
- [x] journalling
- [ ] hobbies and connections: faking it / treating it like a job (dig this one)
- [ ] Have a plan for when the gears start spinning again 'cause it could be rough
- [ ] Work less / consider the relationship and impact of workaholism
- [ ] Understand what "community" could look like here

I have to admit the framing of this being a "project" has me excited in the sense of "a pavlovian response to work" territory, but if it gets things moving, that's fine.

This has been a really interesting experience, and the first time I've expressed any of this "out loud" in a long time. Thanks again for your input!
posted by mah-flaming-alt at 1:08 PM on October 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


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