Note: This article was first posted on Medium under The Taoist Online publication. Around spring 2025, that publication removed itself from Medium and my article with it. Below is the article as it was originally published.
December 19, 2023
Sorry, Some of Us Will Never Heal From Our Trauma
As much as we want completion, the realistic goal of our lives is process.
It can’t be her.
I studied the lady’s copper-brown hair.
It’s not her. Trudy must have a twin.
We were both staring intensely: she at the enamel pins at my vendor booth, I at the mole on her face.
The odds that Trudy had a twin were pretty slim. And if this lady were her twin, what are the odds that she and Trudy dyed their hair the same color?
“I’ll take this one,” she said, pulling a pack of pins out of my basket.
Say something to her, damn it.
“Are you Trudy?” I blurted.
She was either going to say “no” (awkward but forgivable), or she was going to say “yes” (mortifying and, well, mortifying).
She lively nodded her head as if to say, “Surprise! You win! It’s me, your little ol’ therapist.”
We had had seven sessions, the most recent about a week earlier, yet her face didn’t register with me, at least not fully. What made me feel even worse was that it didn’t phase her at all. I didn’t deserve that kind of forgiveness.
“I am so sorry I didn’t recognize you,” I said.
“Oh, it’s okay!”
As I wrote up the sales slip, I tried to figure out how to explain my brain freeze. I needed to rationalize it, and at the same time I needed to convince Trudy it wasn’t about her, but me. Ultimately, it was an attempt to cover my ass.
“It just goes to show how I’m so in my world when I’m talking to you.”
“We all are,” she smiled.
The faux pas knocked the fog out of my head, and I crash-landed onto this realm called Earth. This “fog” of mine is what psychiatrists refer to as disassociation, and I’ve been disassociating from the world since childhood. Not just here and there, but every moment of my life. At work. At home. At Walmart. And especially any event that requires socializing, like this holiday bazaar I was participating in.
When my mind is in a fog, I can see and hear everything around me, but I go into a self-imposed “no one can see me” state, as if I were a ghost. Kind of like when kids cover their faces during a game of hide-and-seek rather than actually hiding.
Instead of covering my face, I don’t engage with anyone. I feel like I’m an alien among normal, well-adjusted people, and I figure they don’t want anything to do with a loser anyway. I just observe the scene like a spider in a corner. Sometimes I simply block it all out and talk to myself in my head.
This is how I’ve protected myself from potential rejection from other people. Shut them out before they can shut me out. It works like a charm.
Disassociation is a short-term coping mechanism that helps you get through a difficult situation. For some people like me, that situation is life.
But disassociation doesn’t help me live a happier life. It actually enables negative patterns. When I survive yet another day through disassociation, I subconsciously think, “Hey, this works, so I’ll do it again,” rather than trying to fix the real problems. So, those problems keep flaring back up—because that’s what they do—and the existence I want to escape replays itself when I get out of bed. Every. Single. Morning.
Ironically, when I was jarred into reality at the holiday bazaar, I actually felt a bit of comfort. I had to own my mistake, so I had to own myself. As I owned myself, I owned my body and the space it occupied in the environment around me. The disassociation spell was broken.
Though I carried a ton of guilt for not recognizing Trudy, my chronic anxiety was gone because I had stepped out of my head where three stooges—anger, fear, and resentment—are always yelling from a soapbox, telling me that everyone hates me and I should hate them back. When I’m in my head, I believe them.
I wish I could throw away my debilitating coping mechanisms as easily as I did after my incident with Trudy, but that wasn’t my own doing, really. It was circumstance. Until I consciously break my patterns, I always slip back into them.
I’m past mid-life. Breaking patterns is extremely hard. I’ve made improvements in some areas, and some people say they’ve completely recovered. But I’m beginning to believe that some of us will never fully heal. At best, we’ll use these coping tactics less frequently over time, as long as we constantly practice the anti-habits to undo the habits we developed as trauma responses. But even with that constant practice every day, all the time, will I die as a clean slate, like the baby I was at birth? I don’t think so.
They say creative projects are all about the process. Well, I guess I’m a creative project. I’d like to think I can one day take a step back and admire myself as a finished piece, the girl who dumped her baggage, the girl who finally killed her insane patterns.
But no.
I am on a path of small improvements. I might never be a completed project, and I am sad for that.