Method Acting
When trauma takes on a new starring role in your life
I am in hell.
This isn’t to say that it’s terrible down here all of the time. Yes, it’s a consistent 100+ degrees Fahrenheit, and you feel like you might burst into flames at any moment. The landscape is relatively barren, and relief only comes in the form of passing storms that tease you — torture you, really — with just few minutes of rain.
In some ways, you might assume I enjoy being in hell. I’ve frequented it so often that I could probably consider myself a local at this point. Hell, however, is a very vast, sprawling place. Depending on which circle you’re in and the door you entered through, you’re going to find new people—make new neighbors.
In past experiences, my mind has been responsible for the torment I’ve endured in hell. This time around, I’m being reminded that your neighbors can cause just as much distress—specifically while being held hostage by their own minds.
I have been spending far too much time thinking about the cyclical nature of human life, and I’ve barely lived 40 years of it up until now. As of late, the focus has been on the ending of my 15-year marriage. It’s had nothing to do with hard feelings or love lost, but rather the revelations coming to light in regards to my recovery from severe mental illness.
I owe much of my life — literally and figuratively — to my ex-spouse, who had the strength to withstand my behavior and symptoms from the very beginning while untreated. To have a person in your life empathize with your mental illness is one thing; to have a person consciously decide to stick by you while you are symptomatic to the point of serious danger and keep you safe is on another level.
I am now on the other side of this in many different ways, and I don’t just mean the relationship. Now that I’ve had some time and space, I can recognize how far along I am in my recovery, as well as where I still have room for improvement.
In the most horrific ways, however, I’ve only been able to gauge how much I’ve recovered by seeing my former self in the people around me.
I think that anyone who has undergone extensive treatment for trauma-related mental illness, in particular, would agree on a few things. First, it requires an admirable amount of bravery to opt into treatment for the sake of your mental health. Secondly, it’s an extremely grueling process with no definitive endpoint — you could become a functional member of society within months, or you may spend the rest of your life working hard, chasing that goal with only brief respites of relief.
By grueling, I mean both physically and emotionally. To process your trauma and recover means to dislodge the atrocious, damaging memories that are rooted deep in the cells of your body, and the pain is very real. From an emotional standpoint, you can expect your feelings to vary far and wide. If that sounds terrifying, it is. It’s why many people who attempt to recover from trauma exit the process early on.
If you stick it out, though — feel everything in your body that you were taught to fear, either by yourself or others — you wind up in my position. You become functional enough to blend in with people at the grocery store, the passengers on the bus, the locals at your public park. You know well enough to make time to pick up your medication at the pharmacy and pay for those pills that your life depends on; your only allies against your warped, self-destructive brain. You learn to use your instincts again; all of those reliable guide marks you shoveled out with blood, sweat, and tears from under a mountain of pain. For better or worse, you also become acutely aware of the route you took to get to where you are now, and in some cases, all it takes is one person; a mirror reflection of sorts.
The flashbacks don’t hit you all at once. At first, you’ll watch the unraveling of the individual from start to finish — the misfiring of neurons in their brain and the breakdown of the mind upon the attempted application of logic, followed by internal gaslighting and, ultimately, remorse. If you are close enough to be hit by shrapnel, the catalyst for the flashbacks confirm that everything feels familiar because you were once the one unraveling. There is a reason you can watch the sequence of events and predict each scene like a movie you’ve seen a dozen times. You used to play the starring role.
As more flashbacks surface from the depths of your mind, you hardly dread them. When you’ve made it as far as this, you know well enough that, equipped with knowledge, experience, and the tools of the trade, these uncomfortable memories will be little more than annoyances.
Instead, your mindset begins to shift without warning. The empathy you developed for others in the grip of trauma unexpectedly becomes shrouded when you inch too close to that mirror image—the comrade of sorts in the life-long battle to survive. Rather than fearing the flashbacks of your own mental illness, you start to fear the very real pain of the shrapnel that has been hitting you while you were remembering.
From what I’ve gathered from hours of therapy with multiple psychiatrists over the years, I am supposed to be proud of myself at this point in my recovery. The 2% of self-worth I’ve managed to develop after more than a decade of weekly appointments and antipsychotics is apparently a milestone to be celebrated. While I’ll admit that it’s helped me continue to refine my life (more specifically, my instincts to walk away from people/places/things that don’t serve my well-being), I worry that it has begun to harden me. The soft edges of my ego that once gave way to my insides have become sharp and threatening to others. The keys to the carefully locked door of my heart’s Control Center are now limited in availability. After years of working to understand how trauma shaped me into the distrusting, skeptical person I grew to become, I am now left to wonder just how much of that person is left in me.
When you become conscious of your progress, you cannot ignore your metamorphosis, which includes the shedding of the illness that once limited you to distrust and paranoia. Similarly, you can’t ignore the impact of others’ shrapnel. Suddenly, an internal war develops out of your options to either protect that 2% of self-worth or let it go in hope of retrieving all the empathy you can find—a war that can only be decided in the depths of hell; my own familiar backyard.
