Imagine you are a warrior that just arrived from war. Not a 5 year war, but a decades long war. You came back, not with PTSD but with CPTSD. Not only that, but it didn’t start in your adulthood but before you were born. There is no “before the trauma”. This is all you know. War, in a weird way, feels like home. It hurts like hell, but home. But this has been exhausting. In fact, the word exhausting doesn’t do true justice. For as long as you exist, you’ve been doing barely anything else than surviving – getting by on (emotional) breadcrumbs, your nervous system molding itself into coping with frequent terrors, unpredictability, scarcity (of love). Your thinking changing to better predict all this weirdness. A form of trying to minimize the total pain of the situation. It works, as best as it can, considering there’s no winning this war anyway. Since it’s an inescapable war, you had to adapt. And you did great. You’re still here. And this exhaustion, you don’t even know what it’s like not to have it. In fact, it doesn’t feel like it should be named exhaustion from the inside perspective, it just feels like life itself is extremely draining, always has been, and it’s just part of being alive.
And then the inevitable comparison. The feelings of worthlessness for not being able to be as good, relaxed, light-hearted, full of vitality as the people who stayed home, the ones who experienced no war. But we don’t know that. We were born in war, nobody has told us that is not normal, and so we assume everyone else must have a similar experience well. How can they be so happy? How is it all so easy for them? How are they so light? What’s wrong with me for feeling so awful?
But how can it ever be a fair comparison to see only two groups of people as they are now without taking into account the vast difference in their paths from start to now?
The ones who were lucky to stay home and not go to this war, they have been properly fed. They are full of energy because they were lucky to have been born in a prosperous war-free environment. Oh… how energetic would you be as well had you been in their place… They have all their “emotional limbs” intact and healthy because they didn’t have to deal with emotional mines and beatings.
How many bruises, scars, broken bones, malnourishment needs, do you, on the other hand, carry? So now, when you’re put back into war-free zones, others say you have “distorted thinking”, you have “maladaptive behaviors” and maybe even are disordered. Why not call it what it is: wounds,… injuries?
When you see children who are emotionally deprived, and how their focus quickly shifts from playfulness, creativity, curiosity, optimism and willingness to explore the world to one of caution, fear, protection, pessimism and suspicion, you quickly realize there is nothing and I mean nothing, wrong with you. The difference is not subtle! You are like those children, to a greater or lesser extent. That is the result of trauma. Why would anyone expect that when those children grow up, somehow those severe wounds would just vanish? There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, the only thing wrong here, is the injuries that were caused to you by either emotional torture – abuse – or malnourishment – neglect.
In the present, this is what we are. We are now a wounded adult still living in survival mode marked by, adapted to our mournful past experiences. Our battle scars hinder us, hurt us, a daily reminder of the tormented past we had to endure. There was no escape because we depended on the ones who failed us. How could we have energy to be happy? Our energy is better spent looking for danger, preventing further damage, trying to heal as best as we can. Is it any surprise that someone becomes an anxious hypervigilant adult if they spent their childhood among bombs, explosions trying to find danger and run or protect from it? Our energy has been spent developing defensive strategies, combative strategies, to get some food (love/attention/validation/feeling of importance), otherwise we would die of starvation (and we barely did).
Why would our bodies think all of this suddenly changed, when it’s all we’ve ever known? And our body is tired of fighting, of being on high alert mode, it’s full of scars, full of twitches and automatic reactions to danger. In some cases our body might express its tiredness through sickness and other physical symptoms.
How can anyone be playful, happy or authentic like that?
I used to think normal people were just better than me. That I was defective somehow, lacking in something. Lack of social skills? “Social anxiety”? Introversion? Brain defect? Bad genes? A combination of all of that? I had no idea. But I know now. And I know because it’s only after knowing this that for the first time I actually feel change, even though I tried hard as heck before. Well, how could anyone ever be confident, lively and happy, if they’ve known nothing but being told or shown by actions or inactions how incompetent, wrong, weak, pathetic, worthless or stupid they are their whole lives?
How can anyone who has been born amidst an environment of fear, betrayal, confusion, submission, subservience, invalidation, and where the only constant was inconsistency, feel stable, calm and confident? How can we be full of love that we were never given? How can we feel happy with so much sadness and pain in us? So much grieving need to be fulfilled? How can we have an identity when whenever we expressed ours it was dismissed and mocked? Or another was forced upon us? How can we feel relaxed when there was always an outburst waiting to happen? When the fear of abandonment was real?
Nah. Untraumatized people had it good and easy. And that’s how it should be. So it’s no fair comparison to place both us and them side by side and be surprised they are “better”. It’s not possible to feel and be normal when you were raised in abnormal conditions. It’s like telling a person whose leg was blown up in war to go run a marathon and expect them to perform just as well as fully healthy legged people.
So I don’t see anyone else as better anymore. They, the ones who stayed home and didn’t experience war, are just lucky (or us unlucky). That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. And I’m happy for them. But there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever for us to feel worse than anybody. They would be equally messed up, insecure if we switched places, and we would be confident, happy and authentic.
There is absolutely nothing between us that make one better than the other except trauma. Nothing. We are wounded, injured, tortured or malnourished. It’s just not visible like a missing leg or a huge scar. So please don’t look up to “normal” people anymore or feel inferior, or superior. You are survivor of a severe emotional war and carry the wounds that are the result of living through it, that now drag you down. That is it, the only it.