Watch first and return to read.
It's been 22 years since my brain decided to derail my life by revealing repressed memories, and if we take into consideration that I was 12 or 13 years old when I started reading up on psychology then it’s been about 38 years since I first recognized something was wrong with me. I was about 8 when I recognized something was wrong with my mother, and I named it momster. I remember telling a friend in high school that I began studying psychology to figure out what was wrong with me but all I learned was what was wrong with everyone around me. I spent years watching and evaluating people in my life from this lens. Even I recognized that sounded more narcissistic than ironic and so I went through all the work to evaluate myself for narcissism—multiple times.
(Narcissists never believe they are the problem and thus never seek to fix or understand themselves. The very act of investigating myself for narcissism cleared me but I over-thought myself out of that simple conclusion. What if I was manipulating myself to prove to myself, I’m not narcissistic—brutal cycle. I don’t recommend getting on it. If a narcissist is going to get evaluated it's usually by court order or they think they're smart enough to manipulate a licensed professional.)
Now I realize the reason I struggled to identify my own issues all these years is because I was repressing memories, and it was not that I was the only healthy person in my mother's family. Although, to some degree repressing memories and living life as if these events never occurred probably did make me the healthiest person in that family dynamic but that’s really not saying much considering where my momster set the bar. So, in 38 years I’ve filled my head with copious amounts of psychology, evaluated and reevaluated myself for every condition in the DSM and burned through several counselors who led me astray in one way or another in isolating the answer to a profound question for a 12-year-old “What is wrong with me?” Today, thanks to somatic shaking beginning in 2021, I know what’s wrong with me and I have the memories restored to understand what is wrong with me and why I do the things I do. It’s like taking steroids to boost self-awareness.
I have a highly disorganized attachment style, and I have complex PTSD and combined they have shaped most of my life secondary only to all the abuse, neglect, and trauma. I have known this for awhile but from an intellectualizing perspective. And that intellectualizing everything as a coping strategy is probably from a combination of CPTSD, my attachment style and autism. The problem with intellectualizing is I use it to stay in my head and disentangled from other people and my emotions. It’s easier to intellectualize my feelings than actually feel them most of the time.
So, after some months of 1:1 counseling with someone trained not only in trauma, attachment style and psychology but also the biological and chemical things that occur in the human body when people develop their attachment style, I finally received a link to a video that for the most part – maybe 80-90%-explains me socially. It’s really incredible to finally have tangible psych-speak that actually brings what is wrong with me to the table in a way I would never have been able to verbalize without second-guessing myself. It’s incredible to finally not only feel seen, heard, and understood but to see myself, hear myself from someone else’s words, and understand myself from their perspective. It goes beyond what is wrong with me and answers instead—who the fuck am I?
As he discusses the term associated often with women like me is the ice princess. It’s often based off of first impressions or following a triggering event. For me it always came out as people thought I was stuck up or thought I was better than everyone around me. Or the other way I’ve seen it come out in me is to be perceived as a know-it-all for answering questions directed at me. Why? Because I freeze in social situations and my autism makes me brutally honest and blunt. I would also get the shit beat out of me for answering with "I don't know" so I spent my entire life learning the answers to questions I didn't know to ask. I speak and write in matter-of-fact tone that I have spent years trying to mask or improve. Because if I’m around people I don’t know or if I am triggered, I am hypervigilantly scanning everyone for any sign chaos is about to ensue because that’s what I witnessed over and over again when people got together. And then there is the momma bear side of me when I am triggered on behalf of my children. My cut off when it comes to my kids is brutal. You can hurt me a million times and I’ll stand back up and take some more but my kids. No, I have very little tolerance for additional chances. I have made exceptions, but they are rare.
All of this explains why I became terrified when my grandmother patted my leg while sitting with me on her porch swing. I started to cry, and she asked me why and I told her it was because she spanked my leg, and I was overwhelmed trying to figure out what I did wrong just sitting beside her. She then explained to me the difference between a love pat and a spanking. She had to intellectualize the difference between love and punishment because my life at home was devoid of love. Disorganized attachment—everything, even an act of love, triggers fear or avoidance and especially internalized guilt, shame, and blame. That’s the day I remember attaching to my grandmother. I remember attaching to my father when he picked me up out of the gravel driveway when my leg gave out. It was the first time I wasn’t screamed at, hit and punished for falling. To this day, I have a terror response to almost falling. It’s why I freak out if someone tries to “grab” me to help me if say I’m walking across ice. I will do anything to my body but let myself fall even though the reason I was falling was corrected when I was 10. 40 years more or less since I last fell in that driveway, walking across unsteady rocks that would flip my knee out of socket and just the idea of falling sends me into a terror flashback. I literally had to stop writing to somatic shake just to stop reacting to the flashback even now.
What’s interesting about this video and his decision to separate disorganized attachment into two subcategories (quiet and loud) is he also let me know Scott probably isn’t dismissive avoidant but instead he’s also highly disorganized, like me but with a twist.
I am apparently a quiet dismissive avoidant where I quietly take the shit, whatever it is and I have to spend gobs amount of time formulating the best way to address my needs or issues (if I actually do) and Scott is the loud dismissive avoidant where he constantly expressed his stresses, found it acceptable to scream at me for simply asking him to sit down and talk to me, and that together as a couple we were triggering each other after the miscarriage because I swung fearful in most situations – afraid to add to his stress, afraid to push him away, afraid to share my reality of the miscarriage with him and he swung avoidant where he began moving back out immediately after the miscarriage, he refused to talk about it and threatened to break up with me if I brought it up again, and again after seeing his mom he begins expressing stress until he finally turns it on me, the cats, the kids, his job—anything but his root cause issues—until he explodes and leaves and leaves me and the kids completely blindsided and feeling like a grenade went off in our lives. He used the bar and work excuses to waste time while calling it “busy” to avoid being with me. He would talk about how great I was to others but could never answer why, if I were so great, he didn’t want to be at home with me. Hell, we even stopped going on dates. Everything involved us and the kids to avoid being close to me. I have gone through every single memory a million times or more trying to unfuck myself from this horror and I finally have peace.
The constant replaying of my life has stopped. My brain for the first time in decades is at peace, calm, satisfied with the answer and how that answer explains everything. My emotions are no longer in dysregulation. My hypervigilance is offline. My need to intellectualize my life rather than learning new things has flipped.
One of the things that happened chemically is my oxytocin receptors became blocked, and cortisol flooded my body leading to all these health problems – fibromyalgia, chronic pain, migraines, daily headaches, and weight gain in specific areas. When I worked in IT Quality, we had a tool called the 5-Why to drill down to root cause. Most problems can use this tool and drill down to root cause with just 5 layers of asking why. Mine is more like 20-Why but I am finally at root cause. Of course, the obvious answer is momster and that’s been clear for over two decades but for me it became “about her” and a way to avoid “about me”. I spent years intellectualizing my issues from the perspective of Momster’s daughter or Greg's ex-wife, Scott's ex-girlfriend, etc.. I am finally at this place where my focus is only on me and how I was affected and how I coped and more importantly how I feel—beyond pain and suffering. And then how those answers affected every relationship and decision in my life.
And what’s weird is from this perspective, I really like who all this bullshit shaped me to be at my core. I understand suffering and I don’t need someone to suffer like I did to empathize with them. I can’t count how many times someone would describe their problem and follow up with I know it’s nothing like you’re experiencing. My response was always the same—we’re not in a pain competition. Pain is pain and it should never be minimized just because our experiences with it aren’t exactly the same. They always looked shocked to hear that.
It explains why I can’t take OxyContin pain medications. They trigger phantom pain in me because my oxytocin receptors are dysregulated. And what is oxytocin used for? It’s the love hormone or the bonding hormone. Instead, I have an overproduction of cortisol the stress hormone. After I had my neck surgery, they gave me OxyContin and the pain increased so badly that I stopped taking pain medication all together. My surgeon called me and talked me into taking hydrocodone because he couldn’t handle the idea of me not taking a pain medication after rebuilding my neck with metal even though by then I had taken nothing for two or three days. It hurt less to take nothing than that.
Another weird thing is this explains why I have friends who understand me deeply and know there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for them while at the same time there has been people who know nothing about me hating me because I was in a freeze response and gave them a bad first impression. I never understood how anyone could think I was stuck up until I saw my children mimicking me in social situations. We’d get invited to birthday parties and I’d sit and monitor the room. In doing that I became aware of my kids doing the exact same thing—faces stoic, only engaging when specifically targeted by someone else. They were never rude. They always responded warmly and friendly but only if someone initiated the engagement first. I remember going to help with field day and my son’s friend’s mother also volunteered. Because I volunteered to be involved, I showed up ready to be involved. I didn’t have to read the room to know what to do. I signed myself up to just do. And that day she and I had a great experience. At the end of the day, she said I have to apologize to you. When I first met you, I thought you were stuck up and I’m sorry for judging you like that. You’re so nice and incredibly funny and it’s clear how much you love your children and their friends. I laughed and said it was fine and happens often. At the time I blamed it on resting bitch face, but the reality is I now see that I have quiet disorganized attachment and CPTSD that affects everything in my life.
Even in my career I was the Quality Hag or the Quality Fairy depending on how a person showed up to their job and interacted with me first.
One of the things he said in that video was that we, quiet disorganized attachers, can go through horrible experiences and be like okay whatever. Take me not walking for the last 2.5 years. People expected me to be angry, depressed, etc. and instead I decided to go back to school and give myself permission to stop abusing my body through ableism.
It’s also looking like I quit walking in July 2022 because of an issue with my lumbar spine. My thoracic spine needed surgery to resolve the car accident injury, but the lumbar spine issue has been a long time coming because of the way I walked. There were times I had trouble standing upright, I now remember, and I would lay on ice for three days straight and it would correct itself. This giant bulge on my spine would shrink back down.
In the last few months, I have been finally feeling that pain spot. Again, it showed up on a CT scan but because I wasn’t complaining about it (repressing it) they figured it wasn’t the problem. Clearly, I’m a terrible patient when it comes to advocating for myself. It’s a symptom of my attachment style. Like every fucking thing goes back to disorganized attachment or CPTSD.
I start new classes next week and then in April when they are completed, I’m taking the summer off from school to have this spot operated on and hopefully return to walking after 3 years. The reality is I quit walking before my thoracic spine surgery so if this were solely psoas syndrome, it wouldn’t have stopped my walking in the first place. What makes the most sense—now that I remember having difficulty standing upright when that disc would bulge, it makes sense that the spot on the CT scan is the culprit. Either way it hurts now, or I can feel it now, and should be resolved even if I don’t return to walking.
I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m finally allowing myself to feel my body, emotions, and experiences without all the fucking defense & coping mechanisms. And I finally understand why I needed to remember in 2003, if I was ever going to be me instead of Momster’s daughter, even if it stole two decades of my life to resolve. Something I never thought I’d believe is that I am me whether I can walk or not and I’m really okay with it. Momster did her best to destroy me and 100% failed and she’ll never get another chance before she falls off this planet and that in my opinion is pretty awesome. All the shit she planted in my head is finally silenced. I no longer feel responsible for all the shit people did to hurt me, too.
They say the deepest need of the Disorganized attacher is to feel seen, heard, and understood by others but I couldn't care less what others see, hear, or understand about me. What matters is what I see, hear and understand about myself. That's the person I am forced to live with.
