The world feels sideways.

We are deep in one of the worst winters on record.

When the winds pummel my house and the ocean flows through my basement what am I thinking is, “I’m so glad I have flood insurance.” What I am feeling is help. I scared. I want my mommy. I want a daddy.

It’s hard to admit as a middle-aged woman (and feminist) how much the idea of rescue appeals. I have decades of experiential knowing that wishing is futile.

I know my craving for the present, stable and loving parents I never had is like wanting to snort, stab a needle, drink too much or inhale food. I know not to dive into the craving but I can’t pretend desire is gone.

It comes and comes back. Always. Even when it goes away it returns. Usually when I’m tired, sick or afraid.

2.

3.

The snow is up to the windows and that’s not at ground level.3.

I’m rattled by all the severe weather. The flood and snow drifts taller than me surrounding my home. Today, we got a blizzard warning for the coast where I am and who knows what’s coming next.

My once sanctuary no longer feels safe or warm. 

When my home feels cold and unsafe I feel cold and unsafe. The warmth is escaping.

It’s not that I can’t see how beautiful the snow is or how powerful Mother Nature is. Those things I know. What I feel is threat and fear.

Looking out at the ice on the ocean I think, “If that comes over the sea wall and down the street, we’re screwed.”

Dread during storms isn’t unique to survivors of childhood abuse or trauma. Everyone is worried about ice dams and more snow, getting to work or losing power. 

But last night while the wind howled I thought, “No one will rescue you. If it gets bad you will be on your own.” I’m in survival mode. It’s automatic. My hyper vigilance is on high. Always. Just more so in extreme weather.This doesn’t happen by choice.

4.

Now that I know about the long-term health impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) I wonder what the worry does to my body? Is it the corrosive toxin that hardens my arteries, increases anxiety and wears down my immune system? Am I a stroke or heart attack waiting to happen?

Is old pain like spilled oil which which came in with the flood water? No one knows the source so it can’t be cleaned but the house and the wood hold the stink, the smell gets worse when it’s warm. It’s not even my spill and I have to deal with clean up and call the DPW and Department of Environmental Protection. Oil is a taste I can’t brush from my teeth and tongue.

What I notice is how sleep is more difficult. I crave carbs and feel grumpy, sad and empty.  It’s awful, familiar, primal and bad.

These thoughts rarely make it into sentences or conversations. I may seem distracted but otherwise no one would even know I’ve gone away and am back in the fight. The fight is internal and the battle is with my body.

5.

I survived childhood by learning to ignore needs, wants, bodily sensations, pain, chaos and observations. How do I make my body home and a temple and not see it as the scene of the crime?

How, when afraid, do I keep my calm center?

Sometimes I don’t even realize I lost it. 

“Did you see the girl going around offering coffee to shovelers?” my friend and neighbor Margaret asked, adding, “I sent her your way.”

Uh oh, I think, feeling bad, remembering the me who greeted that girl with doubt.

I love coffee. I was out shoveling. But when I saw a stranger carrying a box of Dunkin Donuts cups I thought, “What does she want? Is she making money off the storm? Bitch. She’s not tricking me into drinking some and then charging me $5. I’m no sucker.”

She was giving the coffee away. For free. Just because. To be nice.

Kindness. It was a gift I haven’t learned how to receive.

Later, I liked photos neighbors posted to celebrate this stranger’s warmth. I could see it, but only later. In the moment, when I was cold and shoveling, I failed to recognize her goodness and warmth.

Is this why dangerous people will feel more familiar – because kindness, even when genuine, is received and is felt as suspect?

6. 

I don’t get anxiety attacks, flashbacks or nightmares anymore (YAHOO). However, I still go into this place where I know the world is cold and harsh and cruel.

I am tempted to give the finger to all the snowflakes that fall and think this:

“You seem all innocent and pretty but I know you are up to no good.”

I know that’s crazy town but it feels like I’m in a battle with Mother Nature who has the upper hand. Mother Nature can crush me to death.

In other words, I’m taking the brutal winter storms personally. This means I’m not just stressed – I’m post-traumatically stressed. I am feeling abandoned and unloved by the earth, the cosmos and Father Time too.

Ancient feelings are as deep as bone marrow and impossible to shake. Even though I’m an adult. 

The past is a place impossible to move away from. Fleas from the old rugs get in the clothes and are carried to the next place.

7. 

I go from being in my sanctuary to thinking bad things always happen. You got soft, cheery – weak. You forgot no one will prevent or protect or respond to tragedy. Stay alert and aware and keep down and low. You forgot anyone can stab you in the back. Everyone will throw you under the bus if doing so will save their skin. You’ll be gutted like a fish if you are in the path of someone hungry or depraved.

That is what i think and I also say, in the car, on the way to school, “People are good and helpful and nice. We are so lucky.” Does she hear my words, feel my undercurrent or both?

The sunshine in my heart gets cloudy and overcast. Visibility drops to nothing. The wind is beating open all the doors of doubt and dread.

This is what being triggered actually feels like and there’s no trigger warning that prevents this.

There’s no detector that beeps out that you’re stuck in survival mode and in a stiff defensive posture against life itself. Writing helps me catch myself.

Writing helps me right myself.

8.

I remind myself that though the world feels unsafe it isn’t – at least not always.

“You won’t feel this way when you don’t feel this way,” I say, which is my post-traumatic mantra. It doesn’t help too much except that I have the memory of having said it before, which means even then, when I didn’t believe it, it was true, so that means nw though I don’t believe it – it will be true.

If the house gets cold I can turn up the heat, go to the gas fireplace I had installed for just such a storm. If disaster strikes I can call the fire department. If our home floods we can crawl to the roof with blankets, cell phones and prayers.

But we aren’t actually in a disaster and so I can stop living in the what if catastrophe.

That too I have to remind myself of.

I make a list in my journal of what I actually know to be factually true. It will take time for that knowledge to seep into my bones, breath and self.

Optimism and hope are like words stored on a page, legible, but trapped. I don’t know how to turn them into music I can hear, tap my foot to and that invites me to hum or dance.

“You can say ‘I am safe now. I am safe in this moment,” my friend Kathy said.”

Art by Margaret Bellafiore

“That’s a good idea,” I tell her, and she’s right but that doesn’t feel possible, at least at first. The most I can do it get to the Double mint gum and chew. Chew. Chew.” Affirmations and assurances won’t get in until I can get still and quiet and feel firm. 

This knowledge disappears when I’m afraid. I’ve stopped believing I will remember and this will never happen again. Now, I have to let my loved ones remind me and then I will come of survival mode more quickly.

This, for me, is what healing is all about. This is the work of breaking the cycle.

The cycle isn’t a wishbone that can be dried out and cracked once on a holiday. It must be broken over and over and over.

 9.What would help me feel more safe or less unsafe? I write that in my journal and search for the answer.

I hear a soothing voice from guided imagery and ingest and swallow and let words wrap me up. Self-care is a second language I am attempting and it still conversational more than fluent. 

Cheri Huber said how you talk to others is who you are and how you talk to yourself is how you were parented.

It rings true. I borrow the kind voice of others (Belleruth Naparstek. Pema Chodron. Cheri Huber and Rick Hanson) as though they are like clothes in a closet I can pull out and put on.

I feel helpless. I am not helpless. I am reminded of the past. I am not in the past.

I can buy a snow thrower, a battery pack for the car so I can jump it myself if it dies in the cold. I can stay with a loved one so we’re not in danger. 

It takes a while for my body to feel, know and believe I am safe while scared and rattled. Not because I’m stupid or can’t get over the past but because childhood lasted almost two decades. That marinade got cooked into the meat of my muscles and can’t be rinsed off under cold water. I  was tenderized with shame and salted with pain. There’s no undo or going back to raw to try to cook up another version of the adult I would have become had things been different.

There’s scrappy leftovers and new seasonings though. And I can write the words out of my body and see what is happening.

It takes energy NOT to sink into fighting for life mode. It takes effort not to see the world through the eyes of trauma. 

10.

The remnants of being unmothered and unfathered remain long after we forgive or outlive our actual mothers and fathers. It’s not that we long to return to the womb or the safety of childhood. It’s that we live in a world where that never existed.

The impact of abuse and neglect isn’t the scars that were left but the holes never filled.

I crave the blanket I never owned which would have warmed me against the cold. At least now I know I deserved that.

It is the absence of good not the presence of bad that makes adverse childhood experiences so brutally complex to recover from.

I can and will get up and buy ice salt and make coffee and get my daughter to her Dad’s where there’s a back up generator and no ocean. I will watch the news, have candles and hope we don’t lose power.

Inhabits can be strong and stuck in structures or childhoods that are compromised.

Suck soup simmers on the back burner like a skunk odor so strong I’m trying not to taste it. Even now, at close to 50, I have to remind myself I’m in a tough season of cold and winter like everyone else and that Mother Nature isn’t dumping on me.

The wind is ripping at my siding and shingles and psyche. Old pains are caught in the stiff neck muscles tired from shoveling the snow and getting out from under the past. I’m tired. Worn. Fatigued.

11.

I know I’m not alone and that others feel this too. The desire to be loved, hugged, wrapped and held in loving arms, by someone who wants to see and care for me may never go away.

It’s not that I can’t and haven’t made my daughter a life, hot chocolate and a home. I have. I will. 

I have an army of friends and family members I’m close to as well. I have a loving boyfriend, wonderful neighbors and creativity abounds. I am grateful to be aware and awake. Or will be. 

But how the old losses blow through my wintery bones and home as news reports warn of 75 mph winds and moderate flood risks.

At 3 a.m. when I’m alone and scared, I will take a box of Apple Jacks to bed with me because the act of chewing soothes me enough to go back to sleep. My own powdery cheeks will greet me in the mirror.

Eventually, I will thank the storms for showing me what in me still needs tending to, nurturing and blanketing. But first, the storm will have to pass. First, I will need to feel safe.

Til then, the truth is the best I can do admitting how it actually feels and seems and is experienced. I will write the stress right out of my ody with words.

Saying all of this will actually help me feel buoyant, real and resilient.

It’s turns the words into lyrics which will search for song.

You Matter Mantras

• Trauma sucks. You don't.
• Write to express not to impress.
• It's not trauma informed if it's not informed by trauma survivors.
• Breathing isn't optional.

You Are Invited Too & To:

• Heal Write Now on Facebook
• Parenting with ACEs at the ACEsConectionNetwork
• The #FacesOfPTSD campaign.
• When I'm not post-traumatically pissed or stressed I try to Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest.