Trauma Brain

July 7, 2023

Okay, FINE, I'll try to sort this.

I have fucked up trauma brain. Sometimes this manifests in helpful ways, like driving me to be intentionally kind, or working to be mindful of my ability to accidentally hurt others, particularly in emotionally heightened times. And other times it just sucks. Like, there's no reason at all to justify trauma, it didn't make me stronger or more compassionate, the actually useful things I happened to learn through trauma did NOT have to be learned only through trauma, I don't want to lay out any apologetics. I am not better for my trauma.

Mostly I'm just in pain and exhausted.

I've been away from my abusers for a little over two years, now. Which is great. I've been healing, and I am way, way better, which is also great. But way better than "I need to get out of here by any means necessary, even that one," is not necessarily the same as "good". I'm still very much not good.

I have a bad issue with feeling useless and worthless. I still tell myself every day that I should kill myself. On days that I'm doing pretty okay, these thoughts are mostly annoying, but on bad days, they start to feel more insidious. The claws prick, and start to get purchase, start penetrating. And the weirdest part is, the whole useless/worthless thing doesn't even align with my values. Even when it is getting through, it doesn't feel like it's a part of my so much as an echo ringing through me. So, I guess I should unpack these things.

I don't believe anyone or anything is worthless. I think just being is perfectly enough. I think we can celebrate ecological niches, admire how interconnected everything is, acknowledge that there's more an individual or species could do that we aren't even aware of in how it interacts with homeostasis, but even if something had no job it fulfilled, it would still belong. It would still deserve to exist. So why can't I feel that way about myself?

"Deserve" is probably doing something there. My abusive parents were likewise traumatized themselves, in ways I was and am under equipped to examine closely. But once, when I was drinking with my parents and their friends, and I was chatting with the friend-wife about MBTi, since she was a coach and I'd spent the past several months hyperfixating, my mom hopped into the conversation thread. She started getting Myers-Briggs 101ed, but as we were explaining introvert vs. extrovert, my drunk mom started crying, because she "didn't feel she deserved to be either." And our drunk asses were super confused, since MBTi is pretty value neutral in its assertion that everyone's one or the other.

So I know she was carrying her own load of shame and self loathing, and ostensibly felt she didn't "deserve" things. Presumably I picked up more of these patterns unconsciously than I realize. It's clearly scaffolded by christian shit, specifically the flavor of midwestern protestant evangelical ass butter they immersed us in. All that garbage about "worthiness" and "sin" and being fucking disgusting.

The thoughts don't feel like they come from inside me. They don't feel like they're being interjected in, either. It's more like they snuck in before the garage door was closed, and they're still just bouncing around in there.