I’ve had a hell of a month or so.  If I equate my daily life with traveling down a river in a boat, then these last few weeks have been the equivalent of class 5 white water rapids that very nearly drowned me.  However, I’m still not sure if it was life itself that tried to drown me, or my own brain’s reaction to those real life circumstances.  I’m still learning about how my brain and body react to trauma, especially because those reactions keep changing with time, growth, and healing.

What happened?  It started last month with my effort to get clear of harmful substances and their associated habits.  I did pretty well for a couple of weeks with attending meetings, but after a while I got frustrated for a variety of reasons.  For one, there wasn’t much interaction in the meetings and I was looking for more feedback.  For two, most of them were online, and I tend to fall asleep during Zoom meetings, especially later in the day.  This meant I kept dozing off during meditation.  And thirdly, tech problems at about half the meetings really frustrated me and caused me to leave several early.

Then at the beginning of the month, I had to give my son food money.  At the same time, the weather really warmed up after a wet spell, giving the lawn a huge growth boost.  This meant it needed mowing, but I had no money to pay the neighbor boy as we usually do.  The HOA noticed and complained to our property manager, who gave us the weekend to correct the problem before he issued a lease violation.  Unfortunately it didn’t get taken care of properly on time for reasons I’m still trying to suss out, and we were threatened with eviction.

This threw me into a panic, understandably.  If we didn’t have the money to mow the lawn, we certainly didn’t have the money to find a new place to live, not to mention that doing so would be next to impossible with four cats and a bad reference.  My mind, which already tends towards anxiety and paranoia, took this situation and blew it up into an internal volcano that spewed panic, rage, and terror.

We still had the opportunity to correct the lawn situation, we were just more pressed for time and would need to submit to an inspection, something else that threw me into a panic because I didn’t know what that would entail.  In the meantime, we discovered  from property owning friends at church that it’s actually extremely difficult to evict people in the state we live in.  You basically have to be cooking meth in the garage or doing something else horribly illegal, and we weren’t.  All we had to do was make the lawn look nice, which we were finally able to do with the neighbor’s help.

Nevertheless, despite these reassurances, I spent that week tied in knots, envisioning the most horrible scenarios in my head.  I was certain that the property manager would somehow be mean and judgmental and the kind of person who would find a problem just to throw us out.  Amidst all this, I was blaming myself for the entire situation, tracing it all back to the mismanagement of some windfall money we had gotten earlier in the Spring.  I do this every time we have money trouble: immediately go back to the last time I spent any money at all and then flog myself for any perceived misspending.

I was also angry at my husband, since he’s primarily responsible for managing the lawn care, and I was angry at us as a couple for not working better together to manage our money, a long-standing problem in our relationship.  I was angry at a world that cares more about an unmowed lawn than it does about whether my kid has food money.  I was angry at my kid for not having a job and taking better care of himself.

So great was my distress that I was suicidal and contemplating having my husband just take me to a hospital in the event that we were evicted, because I knew I couldn’t handle the prospect of finding a new place to live and would probably just kill myself.  We had several days to deep clean the house before the property manager’s inspection, and I distracted myself with that as best I could.  When I was taking a break and resting, though, my head spun like a tornado with fear, and I caved and wound up using harmful substances to deal with my bad feelings again.

This simultaneously made me feel better, yet worse, because this whole situation was caused by a lack of money, and here I was spending money I couldn’t afford.  I justified it by telling myself that it was either this or death.  The substance I use (nitrous oxide) also has a tendency to speed up my brain as an aftereffect, which was not what I needed.  Not only did I waste money I didn’t have, I actually wound up making myself feel worse later on.

The house was cleaned to spotlessness, and the property manager came for the inspection, which was incredibly brief.  He must have seen the look on my face and asked how I was, to which I replied that I had been better.  He asked what was wrong and I explained that I was terrified we were about to get thrown out of our house, and he was immediately sympathetic and apologetic for having stressed us out.  The inspection was merely a formality for the HOA and the owners, something that happens whenever there’s a lease violation, even a minor one.  He took his photos, declared the situation resolved, and left.

I spent the next five days getting back to a state of relative normalcy.  I had spent the previous week feeling like an electrified hand was wrapped around my spine and heart, such was my anxiety and paranoia, and I had spent the entire time essentially screaming inside.  I’m surprised I didn’t have a heart attack.  I was also dealing with a huge load of shame, guilt, and self-loathing and internally beating myself, hard.

Slowly, with some deep breathing, walking, and thousands of words of journaling, I restabilized.  Only yesterday did I wake up feeling relatively normal and mostly free of the incredible tension of the last week.  In the wake of it all, I’m seeing how my own mind amplified a situation that was merely stressful into something that it perceived as life-threatening.  It leapt to the worst conclusions in a single bound and would not be budged from this opinion despite many reassurances from others with experience in these matters.

Part of the problem was that I was still in “Texas mode”, which is a place where property managers and landlords can, will, and do throw people out on their ear with little to no warning for even minor infractions.  There simply aren’t the same kinds of protections for tenants there as there are where I live now.  I am still adjusting to living in a place where the law works for the people, instead of for wealthy interests.  For instance, my house cannot be sold out from beneath me.  If the owners want to sell, they have to offer it to us first.

In the past, I probably wouldn’t have freaked out.  I would have gone into crisis mode, in which I shunt all emotions into my unconscious or off to the side somewhere they’re not going to be in the way so I can tend to the problem at hand.  In fact, if this had happened to my Old Self and you asked me how I was feeling, I would probably have said everything was fine and gone about my business.  Unfortunately, as I now know after six years of therapy, crisis feelings don’t go away, they just hide until your nervous system feels like it’s safe to let them out, even if that’s years later.

Now that I do have six years of trauma therapy under my belt, my system no longer hides crisis feelings, it puts them right up in front of my face where I must deal with them in the moment.  I don’t know if this is because my system thinks I can handle crises and their emotions simultaneously, or if my system simply no longer has the capacity to hide the emotions and I therefore have no choice but to deal with them as they occur.

Whichever is the case, it’s extremely unpleasant, although from one perspective it’s good to get the emotional processing overwith sooner rather than later.  It’s better for the nervous system not to subconsciously store all that negative energy where it can manifest as body and mental troubles.  My therapist says it’s good that my system can feel stress in the moment now rather than shunting it to the future as it used to.  It means that on some level, I feel safer.

Now I’m engaged in what I call the four Rs: refocus, reorient, reframe, and redirect.  It’s a technique I developed six years ago after my awakening as a way to reground and restabilize when my mind had drifted too far afield or was moving too much.  I refocus so that I can see what’s around me, I reorient to something familiar and stay fixed on it, I reframe my situation to something positive, and then redirect myself in that new direction.

In this instance, I’m refocusing on what’s good in my life and reorienting to it, attempting to reframe negativity in a more positive light by zooming out for a bigger picture, and redirecting my activities to cultivate positivity.  I’m also doing my best to suspend judgment, which came crashing back into my psyche with the perception that this entire situation was completely my fault, which it wasn’t.  Self-blame is a perennial problem of mine.

Still, the situation had the effect of highlighting problem areas in my life, some of which have been festering for decades.  I was made painfully aware of things I’ve tried to ignore or suppress for a very long time and can no longer do so for the sake of my own sanity and the preservation of my marriage.  As I am now 52, I understand why women reach the age of menopause and suddenly seem to go insane to everyone around them as they reach their breaking point regarding the cultural and social expectations that have been laid on them since birth.

I do not mean to throw my husband under the bus here, he is a fine man and I am very lucky to have him.  Yet he is a member of this culture and society just as I am, and is therefore subject to the same forces I am, just in different ways.  We are equally victims of patriarchal, misogynistic thinking and behaviors and we each express this programming in unexpected ways we probably do not intend or may even be aware of.  It is this cultural programming that I truly blame for our recent situation and any marital problems we may have.

However, I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, nor make mountains out of molehills, and the latter is what my mind tends to do with stressful situations in a fit of overkill to keep me safe.  I am hoping that this tendency abates with further trauma work.  If I had had a normal reaction to my situation and had been able to listen to the people telling us that everything was going to be okay, I wouldn’t have spent a week in sheer terror fearing for my life and thinking about dying.  That was totally unnecessary, although I am trying not to judge myself for it, knowing that I was having an automatic trauma reaction.

And I tried to fight it internally, I really did.  I tried so hard to get my intellect to talk to my emotional side, to convince it that everything would be fine, but when I’m like that, my emotional side is huge and screaming, and my intellectual side is tiny and distant and so hard to hear.  I had other Voices in my head as I sometimes do, and they were also reassuring me that everything would be fine, but I wouldn’t listen to them either, being completely unable to trust Myself or anything else as a Source.  All I could feel was terror.

It may take me a bit more time to recover from this shock to the system, although because my body and mind did not suppress the experience, hopefully that means I will not have to deal with the other problems that can occur when emotions are suppressed.  I have clearly acquired psychological and spiritual tools over the last six years that make it easier for me to handle stress in the moment, although sometimes that stress still comes out later in the form of a mental episode.  We’ll see, I’m hoping I can avoid that this time.

In the meantime, I should return to the support group meetings and make more of an effort to get established there.  I feel like if I had made more of an effort the first time around last month, then maybe I wouldn’t have caved and lost my clarity in the midst of stress, but again, I’m not going to judge myself.  Everything turned out alright, I’m just short a few hundred bucks and had to put off paying my therapist, who must be one of the most gracious men in the Universe.  As the Zen Buddhists say, “fall down seven times, get up eight”.  I just fell down is all, and now I’m getting back up again, just like I always do.