Connection conundrum

This blog post mirrors my last one. It's coming from the other side though. With knowledge of the after. Five years later.

Before I knew I had C-PTSD the world, and the humans in it, felt very jagged to me. Everything felt high stakes for reasons I didn't understand and could not uncover, even with as much introspection and counselling as I could manage. Over time, this high stakes feeling led me to seek more and more help. My reactions felt so disproportionate. Relationships would deteriorate and suddenly snap in the face of my struggle to not feel everything at once or not to make small things into massive things. I felt like I had a compound fracture when to others it looked like a paper cut. I would get completely overwhelmed at a certain point so I would often have to withdraw, sometimes permanently (or what felt like it). I would snap. I've described the feeling before as a door opening beside me in the face of trouble. The door would reveal every past conflict, trauma or difficulty crowding around me and they would yell and yell and yell. It was like being surrounded by hundreds of shrieking, furious ghosts. It was very overwhelming to try to figure out what was happening in front of me, separating the now from the past. Often I would shut down, for days. That door doesn't exist any longer. It's not just that I closed it I demolished it. Instead, I have an inner me dedicated to pep-talks and getting me through the hard stuff. It's a different vibe altogether.

I tried a lot of things during the first 41 years of my life to handle how debilitating it was having C-PTSD and how hard it made relationships. I got a lot of counselling. I read many books. I talked to many people. I started out thinking it was just depression and anxiety but it never really fit with what I experienced. Over time I did develop strategies and they worked best with my most intimate relationship. We could spend enough time together and loved each other at a level where it meant we would just keep on trying, keep on repairing from ruptures. It is so much harder when you don't spend a lot of time with someone to develop intimacy around rupture and repair. Trust is a lot more tenuous when you can't just get naked and snuggle through whatever is happening. Or at least for me, that's the case. Maybe you manage it just fine. I struggled in the past. I struggle still in different ways. To me there's nothing quite like skin to skin co-regulation. My struggles were further complicated by the fact the romantic dyad does have a kind of playbook. There are things we roughly agree can happen. You can be sad if you break up with a "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" or "partner". We have some ideas of what initiating that type of connection looks like. We talk about monogamy and exclusivity. There are so many topics we can cover, together. But when it comes to family and friends the rules are either different or non-existent. Perhaps implicit but implicit means very hard to grasp, for me. Or perhaps hard to trust. I can tell the implicit rule is there but why can't we just talk about it? Language is slippery enough without something being unspoken! For family the expectation is you must be good and in your place. For friendship who knows. The framing I take on this is pākehā framing. In Te Ao Māori (and other cultures) this is likely very different and I want to make sure you know my location in this is as a roughly 45 year old pākehā non-binary, neurodivergent, non-mongamous person in a long-term relationship of 20+ years. I guess also importantly when I was younger I thought of myself as a lesbian and intense friendships of the do-I want-to-be-her-or-fuck-her variety seem slightly more common in the wlw world, which could explain some of my confusion about where everything goes and how everyone acts.

Probably the two biggest intimacy issues for me were not being able to handle conflict gently, and thinking I was irredeemable and horribly unattractive. Together they formed this unholy duo that meant I acted strangely and sometimes savagely. I did not know my own interpersonal strength. I could not see anything good about myself. I felt so worthless I didn't understand how other people could be hurt by me, an inconsequential being. I lived my entire life in fight, flight or freeze. In 2021 I got some trauma therapy and there was a point at which I felt relaxed and realised I had heretofore never been relaxed. I thought I had, but I simply had never. I was 41 when this happened.

F O R T Y O N E.

I overstate the emphasis on relational difficulty, perhaps. Often relationships were fun and intimate and energetic, of course until they weren't. In my recent experience almost everyone finds relationships challenging, at least at times. I also perhaps overstate what it felt like to other people, so impossible to know. For some of them maybe it was fine and normal, how our relationship was. One prior partner would call my intense freezes, silent treatment. These two things aren't the same but they do look the same. So I can't really blame them for thinking it even if I do wish they had a little more compassion for me as an individual, a person they supposedly loved. I wasn't trying to hurt them by withdrawing I was kind of just fighting to exist. I don't get to control what other people think about me. I don't want to. It is actually quite joyful to not be too impacted by neither negative nor positive opinions of other people. And it's natural (but not great) when a relationship ends to want there to be a good side and a bad side. Under stress I know I have a tendency toward controlling behaviour both because of C-PTSD and the environment and people I was raised by. This behaviour gives only the illusion of control, of course. This tendency is balanced within me as I also have an absolutely intense need never to be controlled. I don't want to do that to other people. It's also balanced by the fact that people do appreciate my decisive nature. I often take a lot of the decision load or the organisational load in relationships. I contain multitudes, what can I say. It is hard to be a meat-bag with feelings.

But also can I ever really see myself? Introspection feels to me like acrobatics or contortion. I can never tell what angle I'm seeing things from or how I'm slicing the view. What am I missing? I got to a point where I was looking at myself so much, being so hypervigilant about my own possible abusive behaviour my therapist told me to cut it out. When I first started understanding relationships I was in a binary of healthy vs abusive behaviour. Like most of my thinking on any topic I find binaries reductive and not super useful. The wider view is my preference and it has taken me a long time to see the nuances between abusive behaviour and the wide spectrum of human abilities in self control and emotional regulation. What felt like the final piece for me was realising how many people aren't prepared to tell you what they really think, or even say no to things they do not want. I love the word no. I can't imagine telling anything but the situationally appropriate truth. I love people saying they're not comfortable with something. I love it when people resist my ideas in favour of their own. It's not always easy, but it makes me feel safe hearing a hard truth someone had to work to say. There are a few relationships in my life when in their deterioration revealed the other party was holding back, or was saying an obligatory yes. I always get such a sick feeling in those situations. I don't want to be tolerated, or obliged. I overthink how I shouldn't have trusted a yes. What else could I have seen? What else could I have done? Yes, I try really hard to make it obvious I care about us both getting what we want. I try to create space for no. And I try not to think there's something about me particularly that makes it hard to say no to me. It's at least 50% to do with what the other party thinks and feels. It's hard work holding all those thoughts at once. My innate tendency is to ascribe blame to myself for everything. Even as I'm writing this blog post my brain is definitely not happy I'm writing this down, admitting to these thoughts, "everyone will know you're awful". It's more like a little fly buzzing tho. It used to be like the voice of god. Omnipresent, ridiculous, but extremely believable.

I have many people in my life who love me and see me in the fullness of my humanity. Which is to call back to how we're all weird little guys (if you want to be included, I don't really think guys is gender neutral. It's just a good phrase). I have my bullshit. I have things I'm not good at and things I probably can't even see. And there are also a lot of reasons to enjoy hanging out with me. There's still a kernel inside of me that thinks in order to deserve love I must only be good, really, really good, 100% of the time. But good isn't half the story and it isn't even that interesting. I would rather be consistently ethical, I think. Consistently in charge of a spine? Consistently living my values? So many words or phrases I could use here. Being ethical means sometimes doing things that aren't "good". Goodness sounds like a different sort of moral directive given to a child. I'm not a child and I'm not interested in being good (even tho there are many younger versions of me that were and they're still part of me). I think a focus on being good leads to an inability to be properly self reflective. It's a binary view of the world again. You're good or you're bad. I'm not into it. My favourite series of Survivor was the All Stars series Heroes vs. Villans. It aired in 2010 and revealed how in a setting where cheating, lying and deception are the way to win, a position as a hero really made it very hard to do anything. It became a limiting self belief for the heroes. I have to move on from the idea of goodness. Of being perfect for the invisible parent in my mind. (It's my Dad). I don't want to be good but I do want to be kind, to be gentle, to meet people where they are. I want to be lots of generative things but goodness is not generative, for me it shuts things down.

Grey areas are generative. I used to often write people off after one or two "bad" interactions. I used to categorise them into that binary of good vs. bad. Attempting to recover from all the ways my brain thought it was keeping me safe involves letting there be a sort of porridge of humanity in my mind, we're all porridge. Does this even make sense? There are reasons I find some people very difficult. But in that difficulty I can still practice thinking of them as full humans I may not have full access to. There's a lot I don't know about all the people I interact with on the daily. There's not really a binary in porridge, theres the water and the oats (and the salt!) but they blend together, they become porridge when cooked. My last serious heartbreak happened in 2019 and it has taken SO LONG to recover from. I am slow at it. I find it hard to detach, to let go from this particular hurt. That heartbreak broke up a friend group too (or well caused me to leave it) and in the way of my traditional C-PTSD brain I haven't willingly spoken to many of those people again. I think that sometimes there has to be a line too, on what and who a person wants to be around. I had outgrown this friend group. I had outgrown this relationship. I couldn't recognise it at the time. Only later. That too is a natural part of human relationships. We change, we develop. These people aren't bad people, none of them. They're just not the people I want to be around any longer. They are still porridge, just not in my bowl. Maybe they're in your bowl. Am I stretching this metaphor too far? Are we getting into Goldilocks territory! My brain has shut down on the possibility for relationships to be restored there. I've reached my limit. I think that's an ok limit. It doesn't feel like the snap of a C-PTSD emotional limit. It feels like a decision I've actively made about who it is right to spend time with.

I have been able to restore many other relationships from the time where I was more at the mercy of C-PTSD and my instinctive choices. I have had multiple vulnerable reconnection conversations. Some of those have turned back into close relationships, some of them turned into temporary connections, and some of them went nowhere. All of them are successes to me. They represent the extremely huge evolution I've been able to go through with therapy and thinking and time. They involved me taking accountability for my actions and others being accountable to their own actions. Imagine that. Imagine it. I loved it. It is this process that gives me hope for the future. I have changed so much in the last ten years that I think I'm kind of unrecognisable. I'm still the same collection of selves over time, there are a few more of me now. I feel like a quilt, repaired with different fabrics, extended with a new border, all of it made up of thousands of careful stitches.