Perfectionist Rehab

I’m perpetually stuck in the cycle of emotional suppression. I shove my feelings down. I swallow my pride. I breathe through discomfort. I rationalize away my pain. I douse my excitement. I ignore my gratitude.

I achieve calmness, serenity, and neutrality. I abandon my opinions and allow my compassion to speak before I do.

I give my power away to those who don’t deserve it.

I write to discover how I’m feeling.

Separate from pretenses and cordiality. Isolated from the services I provide to my community. Distinct from the roles that adorn my person.

Who am I?

I’m a verbal processor. I’m someone who requires words to feel emotions. It’s like they’re corked within my body, the bottle, and it’s only through language the pressure pops and the emotions erupt.

I crave neutrality.

Possibly the most complicated aspect of my healing journey has been learning to accept my own humanity. I learned early on that my safety was in direct proportion to how unrufflable I appeared. Unphased. Calm. Silent.

Life is messy, though. The best parts of life ripple the waters just as much as the worst experiences. That’s what’s complicated about CPTSD – when you’re oversensitive to stress, even positive stress takes its toll.

Neurologically speaking there are two forms of stress: distress and eustress.

Eustress is positive stress, and fundamentally less discussed. The butterflies in your stomach as a child on Christmas Eve, so amped on adrenaline that you can’t sleep. The anticipation leading up to a first date, or a college acceptance letter. Orgasms, achievements, and all manners of elation that result in oxytocin, adrenaline, and dopamine can all fall under this category.

Distress is negative stress, and often what people refer to when they say they’re feeling ‘stressed out’. Tension, frustration, exhaustion, and chronic pain. Avoidance, procrastination, and coping mechanisms. Distress correlates to adrenaline and cortisol dumps that are the cause of illness and disease.

When you have complex post traumatic stress disorder, eustress and distress feel the same. They both amp you up, and they both make you feel exposed. Vulnerable. Scared.

It’s difficult to live with this injury. I must regulate myself throughout the day to stop my heart from jumping out of my chest over any surprising sound. When I’m tired, I’m far jumpier. Skittish. Nervous.

Last week my husband and I were on the couch watching the Mummy. We spent the entire day frolicking in a little seaport town, had a delicious lunch, went into beautiful little shops, and generally just wasted time.

I think that life is mostly about wasting time with people you love.

We were snuggled in with cups of tea, watching my favorite movie. We spent the day together, just us, for the first time in over a year. We were content, and the house was calm.

That’s when my heart started racing. My palms became uncomfortably hot. Sweat beaded my upper lip, the nape of my neck, and my knee pits.

I started twiddling my fingers together.

“Everything okay over there?” my husband asked.

“Everything’s great, why?”

“You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“You always mess with your fingers when your brain starts going. What are you thinking about?”

I hadn’t the foggiest idea.

I was perturbed and unnerved. I wasn’t sure what my problem was, to be honest.

And then it hit me.

I can’t relax.

I don’t know how.

Listen, I’ve heard people joke about the “mother who can’t take a break” trope. I’m sure that’s part of what I’m experiencing, but it’s not the full story. I’m traumatized too, remember?

When things are calm, I’m filled with existential dread. The anticipation of the next problem. The shouting. The slamming. The messes. The accusations.

And in that moment, I had let myself fully relax. My body simply didn’t trust that I could.

What a terrible thing to deal with.

This entire weekend was gorgeous. We had bright blue skies, it was sunny, and the temperatures felt like early summer instead of the middle of spring. The pollen dropped from the trees, my lilacs perfumed the air, butterflies kissed the wildflowers in the yard, and my children smelled like popsicles and sunblock.

And I was tense the entire time.

I do my best to shove these feelings down because I don’t want my children to be raised with a ‘stressed out’ mom. I want them shielded from my turmoil. I want them to be insulated from my grief. I want them to be free to have a normal fucking childhood.

I hate my humanity.

I hate that I get stressed out watching them push each other over. I hate that I need to take deep breaths every time I hear joyful screaming. I hate my visceral reactions over the fifth excremental accident, because my four-year-old decided to have a potty-training regression two years later.

I hate that the reason I feel stressed is because my body still expects that I’ll get in trouble if my children don’t act the way I was expected to behave.

I hate that the reason for my suffering is because I allow my children to be children.

I hate that I’m triggered because my children are happy.

I don’t let any of this show. That’s part of why I’m in so much pain by the end of the day – the emotional suppression is taking its toll on me.

I don’t want my kids to have to heal from me, so I put this immense pressure on myself to try to be perfect. I know it’s unreasonable, but I also can’t stop. What good is self-awareness anyway, since it doesn’t stop the behavior?

I never expected that I would live in fear like this. I didn’t realize that my trauma would grow and metamorphosize based on the seasons of my life. I thought the events that wounded me were suspended in the past – I never anticipated that it would continue to impale me years later.

My children are loud, rambunctious, hilarious, kind, and wild. They roughhouse and run and dance. They scream and giggle and sing and never stop talking.

I did it. Their childhood is nothing like my own.

Little did I ever expect the grief that came with it. My foster mother’s voice constantly screaming in my head that I’ve spoiled them.

You’re a terrible mother, you know that?