No Moral Here

Photo I took in 2017.

Did you know that overexplaining can be a symptom of trauma? When a person grows accustomed, over a long time, to being criticised and/or disregarded, they learn that if they just explain as much as they possibly can, perhaps, just perhaps, someone might at last listen. Truly listen. It doesn’t work though, instead people tune out if you talk too much.  

Did you know that oversharing can be a symptom of trauma? Profound loneliness breeds a need to be seen. Feeling monstrous creates a need to confess. It doesn’t work, though, because one day you realise you’ve exposed everything to everyone, not everyone should be trusted and your truth becomes weaponised. Then you become afraid of sharing anything at all.

Did you know that trauma is somatic? Even if you come to understand the why and how of something, as a dear friend once said to me “the body doesn’t speak English” and our nervous system is trained from childhood. Conventional wisdom says not to live in the past, mindfulness practices help us sit in the present, but what if the past planted something painful so deep inside you that sitting in the present can be a practice of sitting with a deep, aching and ancient feeling of loneliness?

Did you know that suicidal ideation can become a habit? If, for example, you’ve imagined ending your own life since the age of 11, these thoughts and desires create grooves in your brain so deep that you can’t imagine how it must feel to be a creature who only wants to live.

Did you know how pathetic it can feel to be climbing towards 40 and to still struggle with that sinking feeling that often makes going to bed a miserable affair and getting out of bed even more challenging?

Do you know how much work it takes to try to pep talk yourself into putting one foot in front of the other when the world is on fire? And as much as you try not to live in the future, this too is a habit so deep that you’re forever sitting at a point in time where everything hurts and everything ends.

Do you know how hard it feels to fit the shape of yourself into a world that rewards people with thick, callous skin? You watch all the ones you love struggle, you watch the world suffer and it seems as if the only ones who are able to pay their bills are the people eating others alive. How do the Jeff Bezos of the world live with themselves knowing they have the power to change the world for the better… but they don’t?

I want to leave this writing with something positive, something hopeful… but I don’t feel that today. As I age, I want to be wiser. As I age, I want to be stronger. But perhaps this isn’t how it works, perhaps we only build ourselves up for a time before we start to crumble. Perhaps the only thing we can do is practice self-compassion, communicate our suffering and offer each other empathy. The warmth of company as we grow, change and then start to fade like flowers, like stars, like the sun.

Perhaps the hopeful thing here is this: This evening, I saw a knife in the kitchen and flirted, for a moment, with the slightest penetration of my skin. Just a scratch. But. Instead of going further, I instead came here to write and you know what? Giving myself the space to express my emotions has actually calmed me down. I used to write in my old livejournal freely as a teenager and it helped keep me alive. Perhaps that’s a strategy that anyone of any age should be allowed, my inclination is to judge myself for being so angsty, maudlin and childish but the fact is that I felt utterly despairing when I sat down to write this and now I feel a little better and a little calmer.

Did you know that emotional dysregulation is a symptom of trauma? If in childhood, we did not have our emotions validated and were not taught how to process them, perhaps instead being told not to whinge or “dwell” on things, we may find ourselves as adults who are afraid and ashamed of our feelings. Feelings don’t respond well to judgement and shame, they need space for validation, compassion and healthy expression without the person feeling they are “wrong” for feeling what they feel. If, as an adult, we contain a wounded child who hurts as a child does, one of the most important strategies suggested by psychologists and Buddhists alike is to offer that wounded child authentic and heartfelt compassion.

So maybe there’s something positive to this writing after all: Life is full of misery and suffering, it’s ok to feel this, it’s ok to be affected by it and it’s ok to express it.

Then again, maybe I’m just looking for the positives because I feel as if I’m supposed to.

Fuck it. Morals are for fairy tales. I’m going to bed and, as with every night for the past 36 years, I shall not be killing myself. Not a bad track record, come to think of it.

Twice Shy

I’ve been thinking about the long-lasting effects of emotional abuse and my own story in context of that. For the last few years since it happened, I’ve worked on developing a better kindness towards myself, realizing how deeply I am inclined to be invalidating towards my own emotions and experiences. I’ve been unpacking some of my childhood trauma, having recently read Pete Walker’s incredible book on CPTSD and realizing how my experiences in the formative years of my life left me with some fawning type behaviors, specifically, a habit of not listening to my emotional needs, putting those of others above my own. I also discovered how powerful my inner critic was, so that instead of having defenses against the emotional abuse I experienced, I felt every word my ex said as “truth”.

Honestly, there are still days where those words of his still sting and my partner, Wes, pointed out that since that time I have a new way of beating myself up, the words “I’m a worthless piece of shit” became a regular refrain inside my head and I often have had to request reassurance from my two partners that I am not, in fact, a worthless piece of shit. However, my partners comforting me is a temporary salve, to truly heal I am unlearning habits built over a lifetime and coming to find a healthy adult voice in myself who is less critical and more nurturing.

That said, learning to be better towards oneself and unpacking trauma isn’t the sort of thing where you do it once and everything is fixed. It’s a process and an ongoing project, potentially without a specific end but a slow unravelling, a gradual changing of old habits, rewiring of deep neural pathways so the result is a slow sort of transforming, over time, into not exactly someone else but definitely a self who is kinder so that you come to hold your memories and emotions in a different way, a way that is more compassionate and containing the wisdom that only comes with time and hindsight.

But then as time and life bring new experiences, there is also the discovery that old wounds have created new problems, problems you may not even realise are there, so thoroughly have they incorporated into your sense of self.

Dani and I have been partners for approximately two years now and for the past half year, Wes, Dani and I have lived in the same rental property that is only ten minutes down the road from Wes’s other partner. Learning to live with a new partner has not been without its challenges but overall, things have been profoundly harmonious. My connection with Dani is growing in importance, as has Wes’s with his partner so we no longer use the term “primary partners” as the relationships have grown in equal importance, all vital, each with its own unique and irreplaceable value. I couldn’t imagine my life without either of them, they are the loves of my life. I’m pretty damn happy and grateful for this abundance of love and so I cannot help but feel a connection to the concept of polyamorous family utopia. For all the challenges life has thrown our way – and there have been many – we are so lucky.

Though Dani and I have only been together for two short years, I already feel it to be a lifetime partnership with the sort of certainty that is rare for me. Of course we all grow and change but there is a depth to our connection that is not just due to our D/s dynamic, but the immensity of our ability to understand one another in the realms of art, emotions, values, dreamscapes… in fact, looking at this blog, I realize how infrequently I’ve written recently and I believe that’s because for awhile now, my storytelling has happened while lying in bed in Dani’s arms, the late night conversations where you rediscover the stories of your past through new eyes and so your self-perception starts to shift. I like who I am when I’m with Dani, I genuinely like who I am.

But he often has expressed to me, over time, how he sometimes felt there was someone else in our relationship and that someone else was my ex. I couldn’t quite understand what Dani meant and frankly felt a little defensive, yes I would bring up my experiences with my ex on a regular basis but this was because I’m a talker and I like to use words as a means of unpacking my emotions and behaviours so that I might gain greater clarity. In truth though, I was also seeking reassurance that Dani is different, that the way he sees me is different to how my ex saw me, that I could trust my experience and judgements. It’s been frustrating for me though, in so many ways I feel as if I am “over” my ex to the point where I’m sick of thinking about him and sick of talking about him, it has often been the case, now, where my only feelings I have towards him now are frustration and anger. Get the fuck out of my mind. But it’s not that. Not really.

Recently I had a breakthrough in understanding the reasons for why things were so traumatic with my ex. One of these reasons is the suddenness of his appalling treatment of me. Yes, in hindsight there were red flags and moments of bad behavior on his part, yet those two weeks in New York were a shock and a profound trauma because in fact his behavior did change dramatically when we were overseas together. Perhaps the intensity of being elsewhere overwhelmed him, he was, as he told me several times, regretting bringing me overseas with him as travel was “his thing” and I wasn’t doing his thing the way he wanted me to. In any case, the loving partner I’d believed him to be was replaced with this critical, angry, moody man who I was unable to please and was actually afraid of. The whole holiday had such a feeling of nightmarish altered reality that it wasn’t until last night, several years later, that I was able to really grasp how that whole fucking holiday was traumatic for me. Not a few isolated incidents, but the entire experience of being so profoundly emotionally violated, destabilised and routinely criticised while away from my support networks. Even the good bits were not as vibrant as I painted them to be – I was simply overemphasizing them as they were buoys that I clung to so as not to drown.

After returning home, my trust in love and my own judgement was so thoroughly shaken that I even found myself having complete breakdowns when Wes so much as changed his tone of voice a little. Wes and I had been together for over a decade and the man only has a track record of being a wonderfully supportive, kind and giving person, yet I had become afraid that his love for me contained resentment just below the surface, resentment which could bubble up and explode at any moment. Someone once described my ex’s treatment of me as “emotional rape” and something about that resonated with me so much that I even went so far as to email my ex while I was intoxicated and tell him this is what he’d done. (Yes, I know, don’t ever email your ex when you’re drunk. I know. I have few regrets in life but that’s one of them.) In any case, whatever you’d call the experience, it was profoundly traumatic and as anyone who has been through trauma tends to do, I had developed a flinch.

What I hadn’t realised was that I had also constructed defensive barriers deep within myself. Some of these blocks were obvious – for the first six months after ending things with my ex, I couldn’t orgasm without breaking down crying. But some defense mechanisms have gone so deep that I haven’t even known they are there until they’ve crumbled and fallen away. Like a week ago when Dani and I entered a new phase of our D/s dynamic and I felt what I can only describe in physical terms as if my ribs opened like a gateway and there it all was; was my heart, my guts, the internal stuff of me exposed, vulnerable and painful. It wasn’t a bad thing, in fact it was beautiful and I realized then what Dani has meant when he spoke of my ex being the third person in our relationship because for all that I’ve been deeply in love with Dani and shown so much of myself to him, there was a protective layer in front of my heart that I couldn’t even see.

A regular feeling I’ve had towards my ex has been frustrated, impotent rage. A desire to scream at him and somehow make him pay for what happened because I felt so strongly as if I lost something during that time and perhaps I’d never get it back. In fact, I’d lost it so completely that I didn’t even know what it was. It made me feel insane and I’ve had this despairing fury howling in my heart and a compassion towards every person who ever felt that someone else’s violence stole something from them. I would look at photos of myself before New York and I would swear I looked so much younger. I had, in my heart, a sort of hardness that I didn’t want there, a callous had formed and it was blocking… something. I felt old.

The other night with Dani, I felt a softening and an opening and he felt it too. If I had to put one word to that feeling, I might call it “trust”. Trust like a child loves their parents, trust like I loved everyone until I discovered that love can be weaponized and used against you. It wasn’t just trust in Dani, though, it was trust in myself, in my heart, in my judgement about choosing who to give myself to.

Adjusting to this feeling of radical softness is going to take time and I’m currently feeling pretty vulnerable. That said, I also know that over these past few years, I have learned to be much better to myself, much more capable of setting and asserting boundaries, much more compassionate towards myself and subsequently far more resilient. Perhaps it is these boundaries that have allowed me to re-access my softness, perhaps love like this should take time and of course that’s true but it isn’t just that. It’s…

The best comparison I can draw is when we’ve adopted cats who have had anxiety around people that has caused them to react in fear to sudden movements, sounds, strangers and such. Over the years of living with us, our cats have learned that they are safe, they have consistency, security and cuddles on a daily basis and so they have become calmer, more loving and more bonded to us. We’re all the same us animals, once bitten twice shy. Trauma puts your nervous system into high alert and truly believing you are safe, enough so that your nervous system can relax and your body can soften and open… this takes time and gentle, compassionate, consistent love.

I feel such a tender sadness towards myself who’s been on high alert for so long and an ever deepening alarm at the global and hidden pandemic that is abuse and domestic violence. I think about the profound trauma being done to so many people on a daily basis, I think about the relative size of my own trauma and how long it’s taken to heal from that and my heart sinks. I can’t stop thinking about this article about why calls to domestic violence hotlines are plummeting during coronavirus and I’m so terrified for all the women and children who are trapped, isolated and with nowhere to go. I think about how we are tribal animals and about how safety comes in strong community ties and the danger lies in isolation. Lately I’m thinking a lot about that.

My experience has taught me not to confuse healing with being “fixed”, I don’t ever expect to be exactly the same but I’ve been incorporating my experiences into my identity in ways that are feeling increasingly harmonious and right now I’d just feeling so lucky to be in a place of relative safety, where I can nurture my softness and open, ever deeper, to love.

I Forgive Him I Don’t Forgive Him

Thoughts on Forgiveness

I’ve had some recent breakthroughs with my amazing psychologist and conversations with amazing partners in regards to forgiveness. I’m really understanding that when it comes to forgiving someone who has done something horrible to you, it’s a process and should never be a requirement. Often, when someone has deeply wounded us with their bad behaviour, we need to be allowed to be furious with them, disgusted with them, we need the freedom to never have to forgive them. I have a feeling telling victims that they should forgive those who have hurt them has the real potential of inhibiting their healing process because it is projecting your own morals and ideals onto the ways in which they work through their trauma.

Forgiveness is a deeply personal and internal process, forgiveness may mean never forgiving the adult who left you wounded and scarred, it may only mean forgiving the hurting child in them who left you wounded. I believe that healing requires the freedom to never have to forgive someone when they have done deep and violent damage and then left you to pick up the pieces alone. Forgiveness cannot be demanded of the victim who is left to deal with the aftermath of bad behaviour. Only the victim can feel forgiveness, if and when they are ready. They may never be ready because some hurts go deep and some last a lifetime.

It’s also important to recognise that forgiveness is not about forgetting – some things you will never forget; they leave you with sore spots and triggers that colour the ways you navigate future relationships and so forgetting really isn’t a possibility.

My personal forgiveness has come in waves. In the early days, I felt too much of it and needed to access my rage, my disgust, my loathing. When the trauma I experienced as a result of emotional abuse left me with a complex soup of emotional problems, I needed access to my truth. I’ve been through much of that process and am now at a point in my healing and moving on where I feel forgiveness and sadness for the person who really hurt me coming back into my heart but even this forgiveness comes in waves; some days I still loathe the bastard, others I only wish him well.

Early on, forgiveness was unhealthy for me because it contained the risk of me returning to the person who hurt me and not giving my trauma the safety and space it needed. In love as I was with my ex, I needed hate and rage to keep me safe. Now, having been through that process, I can feel the same love towards him that I feel for all hurting creatures. I never wish to see him again for as long as I live, but I can now access the sorrow I feel for all beautiful things which trauma, pain and anger destroy.

Reflections on Broken Love

The other day, I showed my new Dom a love letter that I had asked my previous Dom to write me towards the end of our relationship. I’d asked for this because after my ex Dom had spent so much time telling me all the reasons he thought I was a piece of shit, I needed to find a way to believe it when he also constantly told me I was the love of his life. He wrote the love letter, as requested, but it didn’t help. In fact, it made me feel worse as I felt it read like a shopping list of things I gave him, rather than a love for who and what I am.

The reason I showed it to my new Dom is that I realised my experiences of emotional abuse with my previous Dom had fundamentally shaken my ability to trust the words “I love you”. When my first Dom said “I love you” I had believed and felt those words with all my heart, and so when he said “you’re just a worthless piece of shit to me right now” I also felt those words as truth. And then when he was absent and distant while I was suicidal and traumatised from the experience in New York, his “I love you” felt empty. The words “I love you” became something I could no longer trust.

When I left my first Dom, people were telling me he didn’t love me and this became the story I told myself for quite some time. The other story I told myself, to protect myself and distance myself, was that he was a hateful, spiteful, cruel and cold bastard who was fundamentally incapable of love. This perception of him helped create enough coldness and distance in my heart for me to connect to the rage and disgust that would protect me long enough to help me heal. I needed, for a long time, to hate him. Truly, deeply, hate him.

But recently that hate has started to feel like a rut I’m trapped in. Recently, writing more publically about my experiences with my emotionally abusive ex Dom has shifted something in me, like clearing out the cobwebs. I’ve felt more space inside myself and a desire to move forward, especially as I fall more deeply in love with my two current partners. I want to move forward into life with my two loves and start to leave my old pains in the past as much as possible (though I never want to entirely let them go as my own experiences have left me with a wisdom and compassion for other people that I would never trade away). So perhaps that’s also why I showed my new Dom my old love letter.

“I can see why this letter left you unhappy,” he said. “It made me feel sad for both of you. I can see that he did really love you.”

I started crying. “Thank you for saying that. I didn’t know how much I needed to hear that. He did love me. We really did love each other. He hated me and he loved me.”

“I can see that. And it makes sense. It must have been so painful when you left him, you must have felt so much grief.”

I started sobbing. “Yes I did. It was the most fucking painful decision I’ve ever made in my life. And everyone around me just hated him and was glad I left him and that’s good because I needed to leave him – his behaviour was dangerous for me. But my heart was completely fucking broken and I never really got sympathy for that.”

I sobbed and was hugged. I felt, for the first time in a long time, the memories of all the good times with my first Dom flooding back into my heart and this time they no longer felt dangerous, like they could hurt me. For the first time in over two years, those memories felt safe. And beautiful. And I felt my heart break in sorrow for my first Dom who truly did love me but who was too hurt and broken inside to love me properly.

The next day, I told my psychologist about my experience. He talked about different types of love, he mentioned infatuation, lust; early stage types of love. But this didn’t connect with me. I told him that I actually felt myself and my Dom had formed a very deeply bonded sort of love. All up, we had spent three years together, slowly revealing our deep traumas, our vulnerabilities, learning to talk, learning to love. I felt we had truly loved one another, and to heal I needed that truth acknowledged.

My psychologist said he didn’t like to diagnose people he’s never met but we both had independently come to suspect that my ex might have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). He said that when he saw clients with NPD, his heart broke for them because it is such a profoundly difficult disorder for people to have. Now please take everything I am about to say with a grain of salt as I am not a trained psychologist, only a regular person with an interest in how people work. Disclaimer aside, here are my thoughts on trauma, schemas and NPD. As far as I understand, NPD stems from childhood traumas and dysfunctional schemas that cause them to have a deep belief in their own fundamental unlovableness. They compensate for this by becoming self-aggrandising, ego-centric and superficial with their relationships. Intimacy is profoundly difficult because when someone loves them, it confronts their deeply held belief that they are worthless.

When we are children, we are creatures of ego. When children are traumatised and abused, they feel it must be because of something about them. If a child is neglected and deprived of love, they may come to believe that this is because they are fundamentally unlovable. People with narcissistic personality traits were often deprived of love in their childhood and so they had to be self-sufficient from the start. They may come to view their self-sufficiency as a sign of their superiority to others. I suspect this may in fact be the reason that so many men seem to have traits of NPD and go on to become abusive – because we, as a culture, tend far too often to deprive young boys of their need for love, safety and a place to be vulnerable. A culture that doesn’t let boys be soft and loved is like a factory that produces narcissistic, abusive men.

The view we have of ourselves is largely formed in our childhood, and if our childhood didn’t contain the love, consistency, validation and safety we needed, we form faulty views about ourselves, or “schemas”. These schemas are powerful; they are deeply held and are very difficult to challenge or shift. They are not impossible to work on but it requires a lot of work, a lot of therapy, a lot of patience and a lot of mistakes.

If your childhood schemas include the idea that you are worthless and unlovable, then when somebody loves you it puts these schemas into a profound state of shock and confusion. Schemas will try anything to maintain their “truth” and so they will tell you that the person who loves you must have something wrong with them. And when that person doesn’t behave the way you think they should, this will put you into a critic mode; a horrible, judgemental, cruel critic mode. You will start to find all the things “wrong” with the person who loves you. And then, if you feel the person who loves you is seeing the real you, the worthless and unlovable you, this will put you into attack mode.

A person with narcissistic traits in attack mode is not a pretty thing. My memories of the man who had held me and whispered “I love you babe” contrast so deeply with my memory of the same person looking at me with pure disgust in his eyes and saying “you’re a worthless piece of shit”. For so long it was impossible for me to understand. Had he tricked me? Was he a sociopath who was incapable of love? Was I insane? Was I a fool for believing him when he said “you’re the love of my life”?

I wasn’t. He did love me. The healthy, evolving, adult in him loved me. The child in him who needs love, like we all do, loved me.

And then… he didn’t love me. When his schemas were triggered, he reverted to a childlike ego state and in that state, he despised me as much as he despised himself. In attack mode, he wanted to destroy me and he used all my vulnerabilities as weapons against me.

So the truth, as I now believe it, is that he loved me and then he didn’t. And then he loved me again but he couldn’t face the consequences of his actions so instead he started to shut down and push me from his heart.

How heartbreaking for both of us. How deeply, fundamentally tragic that his childhood traumas destroyed the beautiful, precious, irreplaceable thing that we had together.

Because it was beautiful. It was imperfect and there were many unhealthy aspects to it which I was not experienced or wise enough to see. But there were so many truly beautiful, profound, bonding moments that we had together. That those beautiful times have forever had a shadow cast upon them is… devastating. It still breaks my heart.

My Forgiveness

About a year ago while I was intoxicated, I sent my ex Dom, who I no longer speak to, a sloppy email telling him that I would never forgive him but that he should forgive himself. However, I said that first he needed to look in the mirror and face the fact of how appalling his behaviour was. I also said a lot of stupid shit about how I was going to become a feminist porn star – ha! I never got a response and to be honest, I would never have sent that email sober.

I never saw him take accountability for his actions and perhaps he never will. This is the reason I had to remove him from my life and this is the reason I needed to connect to my rage and disgust, because he wounded me and then I had to do all the recovery work by myself. Yes, while we were together he had suggested that we get couples therapy, but he expected me to do all the work to find a therapist, and underlying this was his belief that I was overreacting; that dealing with it was my responsibility, not his.

I will never forgive that. I forgive the child he once was who never received the love he needed. I forgive the adult he is who still needs love but may never be capable of holding onto it. I forgive the person who held me in his arms and whispered “babe, I need you.” But I will never forgive the adult who shrugged when I was suicidal, who abandoned me to the trauma he caused me, who said “sorry” but had no idea how little that meant when he continued to justify his behaviour and attack me. The pain of his attacks was tremendous and traumatic but his indifference to my pain in the following months was the most wounding thing of all. That was the biggest betrayal of our love.

This made his words “babe, I’ve got you” hollow and painful.
Now that I can sit with some of the beautiful memories we once shared I can see the complexity of the truth. None of this could come from trying to force myself into a narrative that others felt about how I should relate to my experience, though of course their thoughts, emotions and opinions helped me gain better clarity on my own. Ultimately, I needed ownership over the specificities of my story and the complexities of my truth. None of this can be simplified or put into trite statements about forgiveness.

He loved me, he didn’t love me. I forgive him, I don’t forgive him.

That’s how I feel today. All of this may be different tomorrow.

That’s ok.

Intergenerational Trauma

I’ve been thinking a lot about intergenerational trauma. Like how someone might be abusive because his father was abusive because HIS father had untreated PTSD from going to war as a teenager.

Then I think, as I often have, about how a privileged person might look at a population of indigenous people and wonder why they “haven’t got their act together” without taking into account what might happen to a people when they have, in recent history, the collective trauma of an entire stolen generation.

I think about how I am someone who has had a relatively stable, middle class upbringing, with access to books, family, love, a roof over their head… and how those things can give one a belief in their right to love, to education, to a voice that should be listened to. I think about someone who has been through a broken home, poverty and homelessness and how that might cause them to believe that they are unworthy of education, of security, of love.

I think about how our self-perceptions inform our decisions and how the outcomes of our decisions inform our self-perceptions. I think about poverty traps. I think about the ways in which we discuss the privileges of money, gender, race and so on… but what about the privilege of love? What about those who haven’t had love in their childhood? Isn’t love a privilege that not everyone is given?

Those who go unloved, or are badly abused or neglected when they are small, when their beautiful brains are still developing… what an incredible, long-lasting trauma that must be. What a tremendous setback at the very start of your life, like the race has begun and your legs are already tied together. How hard that must be, how brave and resilient such people are for pushing onward.

I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion and empathy. How undervalued it is. How desperately we need to cultivate more of it. How many more discussions we have to engage in about the way pain breeds more pain. How someone’s bad decisions might be the result of the only coping mechanisms they were capable of coming to when they were small and vulnerable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much healthier we’d all be if we funded better mental health care, if we listened to more stories of people who aren’t the same as us, if we simply sat with ourselves and practiced loving kindness directed both outwards and in.

When I see someone behaving in ways that seem stupid, baffling, or infuriating, I try to ask myself where that comes from. So often, the answer is pain. There is so much pain residing in the hearts of our species, I hope never to close to it but to remain open, to sit besides it with empathy and compassion.