I am beginning writing this at 3:08am on January 3rd, 2016. I woke up 2 hours ago with what felt like a single fist blow pounding on my chest, like what an EMT would give to someone whose heart had stopped beating. In my case, the feeling was completely internal. Suddenly, wham and wide awake. A total adrenaline bath in my body.
This is an experience that I have had many nights as an adult. It usually happened between 1am and 2:15am. I try to lay there quietly, but as I do my mind begins to think about the things that need to be done, and it gathers steam and speed. Certainly the stress and load demands of a growing business and responsibilities exacerbate this problem. There is always something more to do. Thankfully, says I. Something to put my mind on, to give it focus, to take it away from the darkness of the night.
Stress brings to the surface many parts of myself that I am not proud of, but stress is not the reason I wake up at this particular time. I realized this morning for the first time that my mind is not the only thing engaged. My stomach is in a knot. The internal tension I feel is intense. Anxiety?
The cycle is brutal too. I wake up then I either get up and start working on something, or I put on ear phones and listen to music. Over days and weeks, I get more and more tired from lack of sleep. More and more irritable. More and more task focused. More and more of my worst self comes out: sharp words, harsh reactions, dominating control of circumstances, intolerance of dissent. Life becomes a battle and waking hours become battle planning. As Kiersey-Bates identifies in Please Understand Me, my ENTJ personality type of field marshall displays its dark side of commandant. I suppose, for many, even “field marshall” is not a positive expression. But it is as good as it gets for me in these times.
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Fast forward to 2019. Three years have gone by since I wrote the above, and I’m just getting back to completing this. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge and over the dam in those three years. I’ve done deep belly breathing, practiced the “5 Senses Drill (future chapter),” added in stress reducing structures in my life, such as I stop answering the phone at (4)pm, and absolutely stop working at (5)pm, and don’t start answering the phone until 9am. Caffeinated coffee and sugar are gone from my diet. I’ve lost 40 pounds. All great steps and I am much healthier, but a long way from healthy. How did I get here?
It has been a long, hard road, that began in a loving home turned upside down by death. My dad came home for lunch one day, put my second born sister Linda in her crib, had lunch with mom, then when he was leaving to go back to work, he and mom found her dead in her crib. They did not have a phone to call 911, so my mom ran to her mother’s several blocks away to call.
The chaos, grief and pain never really healed or ended after that. Linda my sister died from a heart defect, but that didn’t stop guilt from wrapping itself around the deep anguish my parents felt, nor keep them from lashing out and blaming each other in their pain. It happened at Christmas time, and colored my mom’s fearful approach to Christmas and all holidays ever after: don’t make a big deal about it, because you could be painfully disappointed. Like happens to so many couples, they couldn’t cope, got divorced and my dad went off to war in Korea.
But then something unexpected happened. My mom tells the story of a car wreck she was in with my oldest brother in the car, and it being a life-changing experience that sent her back to my dad. They were married again, had my sister and me, and then, in a short two years when I was eight years old two of my dad’s brothers and mother died. I never heard him talk about it, but he communicated his heart break by working two jobs, as a manual laborer or mover’s assistant during the day, as a printing pressman swing shift until 11pm, then hitting the bars, and stumbling in drunk most nights around 2am. When I wake up now.
That’s when the fights began. My mom would have been crying and carrying on for hours, venting her pain. When dad stumbled in, she would yell at him, throw things at him, and there was scene upon scene of broken plates, overturned furniture, a shotgun pointed at his head more than once. She begged him to tell her what she had done wrong to deserve this treatment. He didn’t say much, but would occasionally say, “It is not you. It is me within myself.” Truer words were never spoken, but I could see why my mom took it so personally and found it so traumatic.
Where was I when the fights broke out? In my bed, usually awake from my mom’s carrying on. But, when my mom started in on him, I would put a pillow over my head, tuck the flaps of my ears in and hold my hands over my ears. That usually was not enough to stop the sound in our small, wood-floored house with my hollow core door, so I learned—somehow—to vibrate my eardrums. That would block out all words and sound until it stopped or I fell asleep from exhaustion. I can still vibrate my eardrums to this day, just by thinking about it. It sounds like the treble drum I played in marching band later.
Mom and dad eventually went all the way through the divorce process again, but for some reason never finalized it. They stayed together, and eventually things got better. I don’t know why or how since they never talked about it. They always seemed to get under each other’s skin each day, but the wars were over and their daily skirmishes were nothing to speak of or remember by comparison of the intensity of the battles they used to fight.
A half century later I can still vibrate my eardrums. I have a lot of other quirks, knee-jerks and reptilian responses that make no sense to others, but make all the sense in the world if you walked a mile in my moccasins. There is a reason why some people will flinch even if it makes no sense to you–the loud noise or sudden movement that caused them to flinch is exactly like the horrible memory imprinted on them from some past bad memory or worse, past trauma.
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Fast forward to 2024: I no longer wake up like a heart attack due to the above trauma. Airing it out, talking about it, becoming aware of it and processing it has diffused it. There is real hope for those who have been traumatized, and we can and do heal. The entries that follow are reflections on skills and wisdom I have learned from others that have helped me heal. I hope they help you too.
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