During My Childhood, I lived on an Emotional Island

Photo by Amevi Wisdom on Unsplash

In reading about Iraq veterans and PTSD, I identified immediately with the social isolation. I have done this all my life. Although I am a loner and am suspicious of anyone not content being alone, extreme isolation leads me to paranoia and discontent. I am learning a balance finally because I have now freed myself to talk about these feelings. I have also identified the brain chemistry associated with my codependency.

While I was exploring the connection between codependency and post traumatic stress disorder–PTSD, I was shocked while reading ‘The Last Tour”, an article in The New Yorker, to discover a paragraph that I completely identified with emotionally. “The Last Tour” is an article about Staff Sergeant Travis Twiggs who may have committed suicide by cop.

“Travis and Willard Twiggs were not in trouble with the law. Willard, thirty-eight, was a former maritime-logistics specialist in New Orleans. He had been working construction, intermittently, since Hurricane Katrina. Travis, thirty-six, was a Marine Corps staff sergeant stationed in Quantico, Virginia. He was a decorated combat veteran with one tour of duty in Afghanistan and four tours in Iraq. In January, 2008, he had created a minor stir by writing, in the Marine Corps Gazette, an article about his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

The paragraph that rocked me was:

“What is broken, what is lost, above all, with complex P.T.S.D. is social trust, according to Jonathan Shay, one of its most astute analysts. Wounded warriors come home and feel that they can trust nobody — not even their spouses. Under the pressure of constant, violent, involuntary psychic contraction (terror, self-loathing) and expansion (rage, grandiosity, mania), character itself shrivels. With loyal, troubled, self-destructive Will, Travis may have felt that he had found the one person he could trust, who would stay beside him to the end.”

I finally understood my life of emotional isolation. Although I have always worked and interacted with others, I had kept my emotional life very barren and devoid of a lot of close companions. I grew up in a family of two parents at continual war. My sisters and I had to choose sides. So sometimes I was on my mother’s “side” and sometimes I was on my father’s “side”. The experience that taught me that I could trust no one other than myself was when they joined sides to reject me. They had designated me the arbitrator and sometimes I had to be put in my place. I was the youngest parent. I lived on an emotional island.