Help! I’m Living in a Trauma Response

I can’t stop seeing it. It’s everywhere around us. Do you see it too?

Photo by Olesya Yemets on Unsplash

“When did we agree to live and lie and die in embers of a cold old fire nobody remembers?”— Lankum

I’m doing that thing again. That thing I still seem to keep doing even when I know it’s hurting me, hurting other people. I can’t stop. I entered into the pattern unconsciously, like always. It was a reaction to pain, pain whose origins I don’t even remember. Seems like I’ve always been in pain, always been reacting to something, always feeling this void and filling it in and finding it empty again as soon as I turn my back.

I’ve been doing this a long, long time.

You have yours too: your thing, your pattern, your cycle. Takes one to know one. Our quick fix that leaves us broken, our binge that leaves us hungrier, our scratch that makes us itch. Yours may look different from mine but the void inside looks the same. You have yours because you’re hurting too. We’re doing that thing again, all of us, all the time.

We’ve been doing this a long, long time.

I’m not sure when I recognized it. The awareness came in gradually, drip by drip, until it rushed in all at once: I awoke to this dizzying, terrifying recognition that every facet of my…