The one that got away

I’ve started working again, but I’m not sure how long it will last. I’ve already called in sick a few times, which did not make the boss happy.

I’m also not sure how long I can physically and mentally keep doing the work. At the end of my short day teaching last week, even while noticing the tension throughout the lessons, I came out of there with rock-hard neck and shoulder muscles. I can’t remember the last time I had such a strong physical response to stress. Other than the neurodermatitis I had for 3 months, which is starting to come back. And the IBS. But the last time my muscles reacted to anxiety in this way was a very long time ago, so long ago that I can’t remember.

However, this was my normal way of being when I was growing up. This is how I lived in my parents’ home, in this posture of fear, the hunched shoulders and raised eyebrows (I had wrinkles on my forehead by age 10) that never really relaxed until, at 20, I started yoga and realized any of this was even happening. I’ll never forget the first time, after I’d been doing yoga, that I went to my parents’ house and noticed this psychosomatic process. I was standing in the kitchen and I suddenly became aware of how my entire trapezius had tensed up. I wasn’t able to stop it, but I noticed it for the first time. I was shocked.

Soon after I started the weekly yoga class, the headaches that I’d been having since age 9 stopped. I’d had them almost every day, but after a few weeks of yoga they went away, never to return in that chronic form. I now have more awareness of my body and notice right away when something’s off. Thank you, yoga.

This means that I couldn’t not notice the tension that entered my muscles during teaching last week, and I couldn’t not make the connection between teaching these classes and growing up in my parents’ home. I immediately knew that connection was the trauma stored in my nervous system, the fear I experienced on a daily basis since babyhood.

What was I so scared of? One particular memory says it best. When I was four years old, my mother took my brother, me, and the family dog to see her parents. At some point during the four-hour drive, over mile after mile of mountainous highway, I stepped on my dog’s tail. I don’t remember if it was an accident or not. All I remember is that he reacted by jumping out of the window of the moving car, and we never saw him again.

Just a few years ago, my mother revealed to me that she had made sure never to tell my father what had actually happened to his beloved dog, for fear of what Dad would do to me. How beloved the dog actually was, though, is an open question. Mom says when it was a puppy, Dad caught it chewing his shoes and threw it against the wall.

The next dog we got didn’t have it much better. My sister remembers me at, I think, age 13, crying, looking in the phone book for the number for animal welfare because our dad was beating our dog. Mom claimed the sounds we heard behind the closed basement door were not the sounds of my dad hitting the dog. Yes, he was yelling at the dog, sometimes for long periods of time, for some minor infraction like not being able to hold its business while we were out of the house for 8 hours and it was trapped in the basement. But that hitting sound we were hearing was not Dad hitting the dog, just slapping a rolled newspaper or magazine against his hand or the table, Mom said. To scare the dog. As if that’s much better?

This second dog had a stroke once when we left it at the kennel for a few weeks. He was never the same after that. In my mind, his fragile nervous system is connected with the abuse he suffered. Poor doggie. It’s no wonder he was always trying to run away.

I also fantasized about running away, but I didn’t know how to do it. There was a halfway house for abused teenagers that I knew about. I didn’t think my situation was drastic enough for that, though. Little did I know that “children who experience emotional neglect, according to some findings, suffer worse mental health consequences than children suffering both emotional neglect and physical abuse.” Now I wish I had gone. I wonder how my life would have turned out differently if I had taken myself seriously back then and removed myself from my parents’ home. It would have been a weird situation for an honor roll student and high school newspaper editor. I was too high-achieving to think I had any real problems.


I taught again yesterday and am now preparing for next week’s lesson. I’m starting to understand why I have this job, how it is part of my healing process. At the beginning of this year, I received the career guidance to only take on work that brings me forward professionally at the same time as paying me well. In other words, it has to be about more than just the money.

I’m at a critical period in my life in which I now have several decades of professional experience under my belt and have a couple more decades of work ahead of me. Midlife. It can be a pinnacle, a turning point, a crisis. Mine has been particularly critical because it has coincided with becoming a mother. Most people do that earlier in life, but for me it was relatively late.

And now all these things are coming together, and I’m having to learn how to balance it all: my energy throughout the day; professional commitments with personal ones; my family life with my solitary life. Both my husband and I enjoy spending significant amounts of time alone. Being thrust into constant contact with our new “roommate,” as we affectionately call our child, has been a huge upheaval for us. I must say he is doing better with the lack of private time than I am.

With the convergence of these multiple trajectories, I am having (I mean “getting,” right?) to learn how to navigate life from a constantly fresh and renewing standpoint. The ground is moving under my feet as I attempt to balance, just like my son must have felt last year when he was learning to walk and everything must have seemed like it was swimming to him, or like he was swimming because his leg muscles were more like jelly than tree trunks, at the beginning.

Now an additional ingredient has been added to the mix, and I have a commitment outside the home which also requires working from home, so that it bleeds easily into my daily life. There’s no real way to separate the work I’m getting paid for from all the other things I do all day long. It’s constantly present: in my email inbox, in my memory as my mind drifts to what happened in class yesterday, in the planning of the next lesson that is always in the back of my thoughts until the lesson has been taught (and then the planning for the next one begins).

Since the case of extreme muscle tension that I experienced last week, I have been trying to figure out if I made the wrong choice by applying for this job. My last workday was better, though. I managed my energy well and didn’t experience the same stress.

I noticed that what bothered me the most during class was that I took on my students’ projections, just like I did when I was child and didn’t know any better and was told all sorts of horrible things about myself, and believed them. This is a really hard pattern for me to break because I feel what other people feel. I don’t want to, it just happens.

Having relationships with good boundaries is perhaps my greatest challenge as a person who experienced ongoing emotional abuse her whole childhood. Because I’m human, I need relationships. I am no yogi in a cave, nor would I want to be. I actually know a yogi in a cave, and he’s on Facebook all the time, so he also has relationships. It’s human. We need each other.

Unfortunately, for me human relationships are the hardest thing. I am learning, finally, how they work because I have a son now, and he is teaching me.

Mama Healing Trauma

Written by

mama.healing.trauma@gmail.com

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