When Misunderstanding Becomes Evidence About My Worth

[TheBigBlue]

I had a rough week after a small rupture set off a string of emotional flashbacks. Writing this was how I tried to make sense of what was happening in me. I am sharing it here in case parts of it resonate.

It starts with something small. Someone I trust sets a reasonable boundary, or reads an email a different way than I meant it. Intellectually, I understand, I can even respect it. But underneath that understanding, something else happens at the same time. My jaw tightens. My eyes fill before I've decided to cry. Within minutes I am bracing for the end of a relationship, already grieving something that hasn't been lost.

For a long time I thought this meant I was overreacting. I don't think that anymore. What I understand now is that this isn't a failure of proportion. It's my nervous system, injured by developmental trauma, doing exactly what it had to learn in order to survive.

Young children depend entirely on their caregivers, not only for safety but for their earliest understanding of who they are. When a caregiver is inconsistent, frightening, or needs the child to manage the adult's emotions instead of the reverse, the child cannot realistically conclude that the person keeping her alive is unable to keep her safe. That conclusion leaves nowhere to go. So her mind reaches a different explanation instead, one that at least offers a way forward: it must be me. She can't leave. Blaming herself isn't naivety. It's the only strategy left that gives her any sense of control at all.

That belief doesn't stay in childhood, because my mind doesn't just remember what happened. It learns what to expect from what happened. Once it has learned that closeness can disappear without warning, it stops waiting to find out whether a relationship will go the way the earlier ones did. It starts expecting it to, automatically, before the facts are even in.

This is why, for me, the deepest injury usually isn't rejection alone, though rejection is a real wound too. It's being misunderstood. Because misunderstanding doesn't stay a communication problem the way it does for someone without my history. My mind stops treating it as something that happened between two people. It starts treating it as proof that something is wrong with me – that I am too much.

Right behind that old forecast, another part of me shows up: the one who wants to build the wall, leave, go quiet, become entirely self-sufficient so no one ever gets the chance to misread me again. For years I treated the protector as the enemy. I don't anymore. She learned, accurately, that closeness could hurt, and her strategy made complete sense in the world that built her. She just hasn't caught up to the fact that not every relationship carries the same danger the old ones did. Looking back, I no longer wish she had behaved differently. I wish she had lived in a world where she never needed to become who she became.

During a moment like this, I'm not confused about what's real. That's the strange part. I'm holding two completely convincing realities at once. One part of me knows the person has every right to their boundary, that nothing catastrophic has actually happened. The other part is five years old, to her danger is immanent, the relationship is already ending, and it's already her fault. Neither one is pretending. Staying present through both, without collapsing into either, is exhausting in a way that's hard to describe unless you've lived it.

That presence isn't free. It costs something to feel fully convinced a relationship is ending while also knowing, somewhere, that it probably isn't. It costs something to feel the urge to send an angry message and not send it, to sit with the certainty of catastrophe for hours while keeping myself from acting on it. Afterward I'm not just emotionally tired. My jaw aches from clenching. My temples hurt. My eyes are raw from crying I didn't fully understand while it was happening. That isn't incidental. It's what it costs to hold two realities open at once, for hours, without fully collapsing into either one.

What changes, slowly, isn't that the fear stops showing up. It's what happens after it does. The old fear still has to fire, fully, the way it always has. But this time, if the relationship survives it, if the misunderstanding gets cleared up instead of ending in silence, then something in me has to notice that the thing it was so sure would happen didn't happen. That gap between what it expected and what actually occurred doesn't just vanish. It counts. And enough of those moments, counted one at a time, is what it actually takes before an old, certain fear starts to loosen its grip.

None of this means the fear stops coming, or that I stop becoming that frightened five-year-old. She still shows up. She still believes, in the moment, that this is the one that ends everything. What's different now is what happens around her. The adult in me doesn't correct her. Doesn't argue her out of it. Doesn't try to prove the danger has passed. She just stays. That's changed what I think of as success. It isn't the day the flashback doesn't come. It's the day it comes in full force, and I still manage to wait until tomorrow before deciding anything is over.

Early in therapy, I described this to my therapist: a five-year-old under a table. She asked what the girl needed. I said she needed to be found. Then she asked what I could tell her. I knew she wanted me to say something like: "I am here with you". Instead I said the only thing that felt true at the time: "I told her that I will get you". Because that's what you do, you find an adult, and you tell them, and they make sure she's safe. I couldn't say it myself yet. I could only promise to go get someone who could. My therapist smiled and told me something I've carried since: "You still stayed. That counts. Over time, you'll be able to tell her yourself".

I still think of it that way. A table with a child underneath it, and a grown woman lowering herself onto the floor beside it. Not to pull her out. Not to explain why it's safe. Just to sit close enough that the child can feel someone is there. Some days she comes out on her own. Some days she doesn't, and the woman stays anyway, until the panic passes. That choosing, again and again, to get down on the floor, is the whole of what I mean by healing. Not a cure. Not an ending. A woman, on the floor, staying.

[Marcine]

Hi TBB,
I've heard it said that "the past is present."

And that when our nervous systems are activated, we react as if old stress is happening now.

It sounds like you are keenly aware of this process in real time, staying with yourself as you feel the old emotions AND as you think your way forward. "Holding two realities open", you wrote.

A therapist told me, "...so the past can be in the past and the present can be the present."

It can be an excruciating process to separate and sort the puzzle pieces. I hope you can be gentle with yourself as you are moving towards clarity and freedom.

[SenseOrgan]

Hi friend. I'm sorry you had a rough week. Have you come out of the EF?

Maybe it's still a little too raw for me to say this, but I think the way you're dealing with this is superb. Industrial strength awareness coupled with compassion. Pema Chödrön calls it learning to stay. This is where the alchemy happens. In that very difficult place where you're able to be for hours on end. Holding two completely convincing realities at once, without fully collapsing into either one. This is like a glitch in the matrix. The matrix that's made up of that early relational reality, which got overlayed onto what followed. Your life. A part of you is aware, seeing the code. Not absorbed by the past reality.

The belief/identity that something is wrong with you is the last line of defense against reality. The make-belief of an innocent, completely dependent child. Inhabiting your innate worth as a human being requires allowing that reality to be real. At your own pace. I think that's what learning to stay with the little girl is. She has been carrying what actually was real so early in your life for all these years. Everything she feels, those massively overwhelming and absolute emotions, gradually start to get a different meaning the more you can be with them. Even these aren't the end of you, nor are they forever. Underneath that identity you had to adopt to cope, you have always been lovable. That is the present the girl has for the adult you. That too has always been real already.

Much love 

[TheBigBlue]

Thank you so much for your support, Marcine and SO!

I am feeling a bit better this weekend. Writing helps me with the processing ... and sometimes I also visually process - like with the attached image below - inspired by SO's "glitch in the matrix".

 

[zen_racer]

Within minutes I am bracing for the end of a relationship, already grieving something that hasn't been lost.

I relate to this part so much it hurts.  Most of the friendships and relationships I've ever had have ended in me getting ghosted with never getting an explanation.  That's why before finding out about cptsd, I was deciding that I never wanted to allow anyone into my life again.  As painful as the solitude is, it's better than a constant demonstration that I will always be left behind by everyone.  The constant knowledge that I'm never enough of a person to even deserve knowing why it ended.  For a long time, it felt like I was just destined to be discarded, and never deserved to know what it was about me that drove people away so I could fix it.  I'm not sure that I feel any differently now.

[NarcKiddo]

 

Except that my method of dealing with that pain has generally been to end the relationship myself, at once. Sometimes, to my shame, even ghosting the other person. To me the slightest disagreement is already proof the whole thing is dead in the water and cannot be revived. Now I am trying to do things differently and totally resonate with the utter pain and exhaustion of fully believing the relationship is dead while still holding space for the possibility that it might not be and allowing myself to risk feeling a little hope that something can be salvaged.

TBB - thank you for your post, and I am glad you are now feeling a little better.

 

[zen_racer]

Right behind that old forecast, another part of me shows up: the one who wants to build the wall, leave, go quiet, become entirely self-sufficient so no one ever gets the chance to misread me again. For years I treated the protector as the enemy. I don't anymore. She learned, accurately, that closeness could hurt, and her strategy made complete sense in the world that built her. She just hasn't caught up to the fact that not every relationship carries the same danger the old ones did. Looking back, I no longer wish she had behaved differently. I wish she had lived in a world where she never needed to become who she became.

I relate a lot to what you've written here, TheBigBlue.  Immediately jumping to knowing the relationship or friendship is ending before the facts are even in.  Ohhh, how many times it's killed me inside to keep hoping that it might not be gone, while expecting things to already be over, only to find out that it was already over.

I relate so much to what I quoted.  I've put up more and more walls the older I've gotten.  One of the last things that showed me that something was wrong and I needed help right before I found out about cptsd and found a therapist was having my "trauma informed" house cleaner ask me if I'd like to consider rearranging or decorating for eventually having a woman around.  I told her that I didn't see that happening, and that I really didn't want anyone in my life anymore.  No girlfriend's or partners, no more friends, just no one.  I told her that the stability of never having anyone around was better than ignoring how what's happened with every friendship and relationship I've had and continually going through the crash of it always ending.

I wish I had most examples to draw from that weren't "everyone always leaves".  That's a part of healing that I can't see a logical conclusion of.  After all the experiences of being abandoned, I can't see myself choosing to believe that it won't continue being true.

[TheBigBlue]

I initially wrote a 12-page essay about this experience and then shared only a condensed version here. I'm feeling calmer today, although also a bit exhausted.

My T asked me today what helped me get to this calmer place. I think my best guess is this:

-  Analyzing it and writing it up helped me organize my thoughts, separate the past from the present, recognize the progress I've made, find some self-compassion, and see that there really is a path out of the tunnel, even if it's slow and painful.

- And your feedback and support reminded me that I'm not the only one having these experiences. More simply: that I'm not alone.

NK: thank you for validating and resonating. 💛

ZR: I don't think anyone could repeatedly experience unexplained endings and not start expecting them. What stood out to me, though, is that despite believing "everyone always leaves," you're still showing up here, still letting people get to know you, and still allowing yourself to hope, even if only a little. I don't think that's a small thing.

[SenseOrgan]

Incredible work in the middle of the storm TBB! Really impressive that you managed to stay present and tap into your analytical power to dissect what's happening. I'm happy to hear you felt a bit better by the time of writing post #3 here, and hope it got even better since. I'm curious to see the image you shared, but I get a 403 message when I try to open it. Apparently the attachment is "awaiting approval". A build in safety measure, I guess. 

[Dalloway]

TheBigBlue,
thank you so much for sharing this. Your post made me think about and reflect on my own experience with attachment to other people. What you write deeply resonates with me. The fear of being abandoned and of a relationship ending because of a rapture in it is something I experience very often as a result of the unhealthy attachment style of my mother. When I was a kid and something upset her about my behaviour, she would simply withdraw and give me the silent treatment. I cannot define by words how heartbreaking this feels for a child that needs her caregiver to be there for her with a predictable and calm presence.
Her presence was very hectic and erratic, so I learned not to lean on her and not to expect anything from her. I became hyperindependent but it was only a compensation for what I lost. I also developed an anxious-avoidant attachment style, being constantly prepared for the worst so it wouldn´t hurt too much if I lost the connection. But it also means that I always expect the worst in every situation and believe that a rapture is not only a rapture but the end of the road.
I´m sorry that you were made to believe that you are worthless and that your experience led to this constant fear of abandonment. But I would also like to point out the deep wisdom inside you that makes you be aware of that happening in the moment, even though maybe you can´t do anything about it when it´s happening. That wisdom and awareness is in all of us, we possess it all our lives, we just need to find a way to unearth it and reach for it when we need it. I think by taking these steps on your healing journey, you´re doing exactly that.   

[TheBigBlue]

SO and Dalloway, thank you so much for your support!!!