I Don’t Want to Be A Good Team Player Anymore
Especially Not If It Means Leaving Myself Out of the Game
Ever felt like this image? Maybe you don’t want to be “a good team player” any more either.
Have you spent a lifetime struggling with (and trying to mask) complex PTSD from narcissistic abuse?
Maybe you already know what I mean.
If so, maybe you can identify with this opening image. If not, but you’re curious, come on in.
Just please DO NOT try to correct me with your comments. I don’t want or need any correction for what’s true for me. Not now. How about never again?
Writing Now Feels Like Climbing the Steps to the High Dive.
I’ve been a writer since I was seven. But not for myself. For other people. Always for other people.
Putting my own words onto the truth that I’ve kept silent feels, at first, like shivering naked, gnarled toes hanging over the front edge of the high dive in a high wind. Fucking terrifying.
Once I jump, though, and then surface from the shock of the beginning, I do notice I start to feel more like Gretel dropping cookie crumbs, wending my way through the dark wood where I have been an unwitting captive of narcissistic parental and spousal abuse.
But only for my entire life.
Writing is now going to be my method for finding the gate that leads out of the dark wood. I have no confidence I’m going to succeed. (This lack of confidence is a disability I have lived with from birth, rendered by having my basic human needs consistently ignored or denied and my judgment continuously undermined so that my narcissistic parents only had to deal with me when they wanted to hurt me to make themselves feel bigger. The rest of the time my job was to remain invisible to them — or to suffer outright assault.)
Nevertheless, I’m going to forge ahead, despite there being no signposts in the dark wood.
I know if I don’t write like this — if I don’t keep leaving myself some tracks through my own thinking — I could easily continue running in circles for the rest of my life.
I don’t want to. The circling has to stop. I want some peace before it’s over.
What I’ve Got to Work With.
The resources I’ve got to work with today are recent memories of a couple of deep experiences I had on a facilitated psilocybin journey. Vivid new memories. And a couple of therapists.
The therapists, so far, feel like trustable resources for my work integrating an ecstatic experience. At 73.
I don’t honestly know if they’re trustable. I never know. I’ve fallen prey so many dozens of times to tricks, manipulations and outright assaults by people who called themselves friends, counselors, “healers.” (Again, the continual process of my parents undermining my judgment and contradicting my thoughts molded me into easy prey for all manner of “experts” who assured me that they knew better than I did how to stop the pain. And I always wanted out of the pain.)
Whether or not the therapists turn out to be trustable in the long run, talking and listening to myself like this on paper — without instruction or interruption or contradiction — is helping me trust my own body/mind and the voice that’s willing to write. It’s giving me longer and longer glimpses of the problems I have had relating to myself in my own life.
I want to heal the relationship I have with myself before I’m dead. For real.
Besides the mushrooms, the therapists, and the voice in my head that’s willing to write for myself, what also helps is finding other writers who are thrashing their way through complex PTSD, trauma and narcissistic abuse here in Medium and on Substack. Reading others’ voices hacking and thrashing their way through the woods, I feel less frightened and less alone.
For all these things, I’m immensely grateful.
So, Yesterday Was Just Like Being Home with Mom and Dad.
When I woke this morning I had a raw, bitter-sour taste in my mouth. Disappointment lodged in my solar plexus. Hard, fat knot in my stomach. Deep sighs heaving through me, one after another.
In my mind’s eye an image loomed large of me closing and locking a door between me and some people who had been participating in a day-long group project meeting I attended yesterday.
I got up, made some coffee, and sat for a while, waiting to get clear about my bodily sensations, the image of the separating door, and the thoughts and feelings whirling around those things.
I’ve only been doing this “sitting with” practice for a week after working for the first time with the Somatic Experiencing therapist.
What came from the “sitting with” was, eventually, a sweet and tender awareness that when I do things together with other people, I need to be seen and heard and valued for my participation. Otherwise, I’d rather just be alone with Josh, my dog.
But I had little to no experience of that need being met yesterday.
Not on the 90-minute drives up and back to the meeting with one of my team members. Not during the day-long project meeting.
Instead, the whole day felt a lot like being home with Mom and Dad.
(No wonder I had the bad taste in my mouth, the disappointment in my solar plexus. The hard knot in my stomach. No wonder I kept sighing. No wonder I had the image of closing the door between me and the others to separate myself from them.)
On the 90-minute drives to and from the meeting, instead of having a two-way conversation, my ride talked 75% of the time I was in his presence. He ranted on about his work experiences before he retired, his abstract ideas about the world, his recent travel with his wife and children, and his lifelong struggle to validate himself because he is a second-generation immigrant. He’s a man with money who’s retired, itchy to do something with his time, and needs badly to talk about himself out loud.
It was a battle to get any of my own thoughts out — even those that were direct responses to his narratives — before he interrupted me. Again and again. And again.
Once we arrived at the project meeting, the group we joined was force-fed a stream of process lectures, shuttled through a series of 5-minute “interactive games” that had to be “debriefed,” locked into a lunch-time lecture, and then released into teams where my teammates talked over me — and one another — for what was called a “planning session” that permitted no time or space for basic human conversation. We generated a ridiculous pile of post-it notes.
A grand total of nothing was accomplished, the food was horrendous, and we adjourned “until next time.”
The experts told us what was what and what to do and we played along because there was no other choice, except to make a scene.
It was just like being home with Mom and Dad.
Excruciating Small, Slow Steps
So, this morning was a new experience for me. Waking up feeling like hell but making a choice to go slow enough to give myself an an experience of relating to myself feeling like hell. I saw and heard and felt and appreciated the experience I had had and why I felt the way I did. (I waited for morning to do this because I was so wound up and exhausted by the noise that I couldn’t do much but eat and go to sleep with my dear little dog, Josh.)
What I did to step over the trauma responses and meet my own needs was simply to sit with quiet curiosity, allowing myself to absorb my sensations, listen to what they were telling me, and decide to give myself some self-seeing, self-hearing and self-valuing, by putting these words on a page.
Not rocket science. Not dangerous. Didn’t hurt. What a breakthrough!
I apologize if all this sounds infantile. I’m aware it is actually that — infantile. I’m also aware — with compassion for myself — that what I’m doing is starting from scratch and taking a whole new direction, very slowly, so I can stay in relationship with my own body/mind and begin a new life before I’m dead.
Do you know what I mean? Then you must be another survivor of narcissistic parental abuse who’s beginning to heal.
There’s More to Say About How This Went On, But I’m Stopping Now.
If you’re interested in my process, come back. I’ll post some more shortly.
For right now, I’m tired and I need to make something to eat.
I’m feeling satisfied that I used my own attention and my own words to give myself some visibility and to appreciate myself for taking the exceedingly small and slow step of checking in with myself about what I feel and think and see instead of running from a trauma response.
Doing so enabled me to decide this evening to drop out of the painful volunteer project so I can reclaim my time and energy to do things with others that meet their needs and mine.
Making this simple choice (and sharing my process in public) sends me 180 degrees away from my lifelong trajectory of hiding and/or numbing myself to escape pain and frustration, rushing to find someone to gossip with and complain and gather sympathy for my suffering … all the while leaving myself out of my own experience.
I can’t start a new life without making new and different trauma-informed choices.
