The last exposure session with Dr. Mandolin was a repeat of the one prior. Both were gut-wrenching recounts of a horrible incident in my past. The first recount was significantly worse than the second. The details of the actual event are here.
Part of exposure therapy is to continue to talk about a traumatic event until it loses its hold on you. As a participant, the process has decidedly few steps. Close your eyes, deep breaths, and then you talk about the experience in first person, present day language. For the practitioner, I’m not sure. If Dr. Mandolin’s MO holds, she’s feverishly taking notes about what I’m saying, my body language, any other behaviors of note, and taking my SUDS score. Stupid fucking bubbles.
Dr. Mandolin explained that this process allows your current mind to process past events. I think that’s what she said. Rather than saying, “I was 5 when X happened, and I was scared” you say, “I am 5 years old and X is happening, I’m scared.” It’s a way to straddle two realities; and because you have one foot in the now, it provides some sense of safety from the events. Fooling your mind, maybe, with the use of language and visualization. I don’t have my PhD in psychology so I can’t be sure. And you do it over and over and over until the cows come. Or something. I’m not entirely certain about anything other than the cows need to get their asses home and hit the barn post haste.
What I do know is this: during my first exposure session, I recounted the event that occurred with my mom twice. The first time felt like someone took a weed rototiller and stuck it right in my chest. On full throttle. With each rotation of the blade, a new memory sliced out of my past and went splat into the present. The process was physically painful in ways I can’t yet articulate. And that says a lot because I love words.
Shit was flying out of me at high speed. And it was messy. At one point I wondered if I had lost touch with reality, if the events were real, and why new details kept popping up. It all felt very bizarre. Like I had gone crazy, and I hate that word. The flood of emotions I experienced is inexplicable. The damn broke and I was stuck in my adult body, feeling all the feels of a child that had been physically and psychologically damaged by her mom.
Even though my eyes were closed, I sought anonymity and safety by covering my face. But I never consciously thought, “I need to hide” I just did it and I’m not sure why. I don’t think I was seeking safety, but I do know I was mortified. Deeply embarrassed, but not the current me…the younger me. I couldn’t see Dr. Mandolin with my eyes closed, but I didn’t want her to see me. At all. It was the most raw, exposed, and vulnerable I have been since I left the old Stuart behind. But this felt worse somehow. I willingly went to a place of extraordinary pain and let an outsider see my weaknesses, and I never do that. Forcing myself to sit in it and tell a relative stranger, though highly qualified and professional, all about it doesn’t rank highly in my list of experiences. I’d rather have my eyeballs sewn to my head. 0 out 5 stars. Don’t recommend.
It was probably the ugliest cry I have ever had. My sweatshirt was covered in snot, my eyes had opened their faucets to full blast, I couldn’t breathe, and I was shaking worse than ever before. All of the sinus goo and eye fluids conspired to clog up my ears and one tear duct. This was like a panic attack on speed. Only it wasn’t panic. It was a fear attack, if such a thing even exists. Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction to be made between the former and the later.
Panic, for me, is an abstract worry of something bad happening. Worry about worry about worry. Or catastrophizing events that could happen and playing them out in my head to their natural conclusion…someone dies. It’s like I’m a screenplay writer in my head and I’m crafting outlandish and highly unlikely scenes to scare the crap out of myself. The more far-fetched, the better. Bring on the panic. Once it starts, the panic runs away with me. Then I become a knotted mess and don’t know what I was worried about in the first place. Forget the whole story I’d conjured up in my head, I’m a disaster. It’s not like I want to be thinking of the man at Costco who was staring intently at a bag of flower as an assassin with covert ties, I just do. And at any moment, that flour is going to blow up the entire store. It’s twisted when you think about it, your brain taking you down the rabbit hole like Alice is on LSD and the rabbit has fangs. Wonderland is a shit show when panic is your escort.
Conversely, fear is live, real-time adrenaline dumping because the threat is palpable, it’s now, and it’s got eyes on you. It’s go time, fight-or-flight mode. And, believe it or not, I have never experienced it before. At least I don’t think I have. You see, I’m great under pressure. I’m the one you want with you when shit gets real. I don’t get scared in the moment. I’m painfully pragmatic, clear thinking, and rather ballsy if I’m honest. Need to walk across a tightrope with a baby strapped to your back, over a pool of sharks, in the rain? No problem. Let’s go. Once things settle, I come unhinged.
But here’s the thing, the emotions in the aftermath aren’t fear and they aren’t a recount of sharks and babies and rain. They are a complex potion of emotions like confusion, vigilance, racing nonsensical thoughts, and disillusionment. My body expels the pinned-up angst with aches and pains and next-level shaking. Crying, headaches, visual disturbances, ringing ears, and more. So, during a fear-inducing event, I don’t feel afraid. After the event I feel panic, but not fear. And they are vanilla panic attacks about things unrelated to the fearful event. I should note that these panic attacks are next level for the ordinary person; but they are my normal. I’ve never felt fear about the things I should; I seem to have preoccupied myself with abstractions. The panic isn’t about the terrifying event that just happened, it’s about completely random events. I know, it’s tough to make sense of.
As I was recounting the events to Dr. Mandolin, I realized that I wasn’t scared when my mom was torturing me. I was confused, sad, and in pain. But I was bereft of fear. Of course I can acknowledge that I was scared in the moments I was enduring hell, but not in the way you’d expect. I was scared because I didn’t understand what was happening. My fear was rooted in confusion and unpredictability. What was happening next?
The kind of fear that I experienced recounting the events with Dr. Mandolin was akin to running from an axe murderer in a dark alley, with a broken stiletto heel, and your hands are full of Nordstrom bags. In the rain. Doom. Death is imminent. You know your moments are numbered and everything is distorted. I could taste fear, feel sounds, smell the sensations on my skin, hear my heart, and see my breath. It’s like my brain was misfiring or something. I was completely confused but simultaneously totally certain of the threat.
At nearly 50 years old, I felt real fear that my mother was going to kill me that night. It had never crossed my mind before. I couldn’t discern it at 7 because I was experiencing the events with youthful rose colored glasses. I just didn’t understand why my mommy was hurting me and I wanted it to stop. The perspective of an adult sucks. I saw the event with my current knowledge, reasoning, and logic. No rose colored glasses. It was fucking terrifying. My mother was dancing and chanting around me in a circle, dead chickens were in my midst, and she was holding a machete. The stuff of a Stephen King novel.
In my adult brain, all of the minute details were glaringly obvious to me. I could see where small distractions here or there saved my ass. How me losing control of my bodily functions must have somehow snapped Pearl out of her delusion and brought her back to the reality of motherhood. It’s terrifying to be able to see all the close calls. Near misses. The night I could have died was full of near misses and my life today feels borrowed.
I also see how my mind held on to other small but captivating details, like the reflection of candles through a small glasses of water. People have always told me I pay great attention to details and can explain what I see with razor-like precision. The funny thing is that my memory is generally horrible, and I cannot tell you what I ate for breakfast today. Nevertheless, I can make words come to life and dance on paper and now I know why. It’s because, in the moment, those hyper-focused moments were coping mechanisms. Ways to keep my brain from overheating while processing the current shitshow I was enduring. It’s like a short pause on the suffering, just enough to power through a little longer. Words became my safety blanket and buffered me from my reality.
Here’s an interesting twist, though. I have thought about this event several times in my life. Each time, my words about the event become more precise. In focusing on explaining the scenario in better detail with each mental pass through, it seems I was changing the shape of the events. Not the event itself, but how I perceived it. The memory is sort of like thick cream. It’s a flat liquid when it starts, but whip it fast enough and for a long enough duration, and you’ve got whipped creme. In essence, the same thing. But after it’s been manipulated enough, you can make shapes with it and it’s prettier. It cooperates. Much easier to handle. Also, the whipped creme is cooler to look at and a great distraction from what it once was. While you’d think these intellectual word games could have been considered “dealing with” my trauma, that would be wrong. I was only making the events linguistically captivating, toying with them in a way where I thought I was in control rather than being controlled. Alas, I was wrong. I wasn’t dealing with it and I was giving it more power as time went on.
Back to Dr. Mandolin. When I was engaged in this exposure session, I feared for my life with the mind and intellect of an adult but with the eyes, innocence, and body of a little girl. It’s a fucked up dynamic. My mind knew what was happening (remember, I was recounting the events in the present) but my little body was tapped out. I was stuck but not stuck, in control but not, confused but completely comprehending the events. It’s an awareness of a surreal reality that nobody should have to endure. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
In a bizarre way, the process is almost like an out-of-body experience. I was watching the events unfold and impacting a person that wasn’t me, but it was entirely me. Enigmatic is a good way to describe it. I wasn’t out of my body, I was inside my current body. The younger Stuart was in there too, alongside the current me. In those moments with Dr. Mandolin, I simultaneously carried my current knowledge but it was burdened by my youthful naivety. Regardless, I felt fear like I’ve never felt it before.
It occurs to me that maybe I’ve never let myself feel it. Real fear. Instead, I think my brain is using proxy fear, that is to say panic attacks, to feign coping. This sounds completely nuts and I understand that. My brain has been holding on to all of the crap for so long and I’ve never properly processed it. Sorta like a box stuck in customs. It has to be processed and eventually it will be, whether that’s now or later is entirely up to the person managing the situation. But stinky cheese inside the box is rotting regardless and is seeping its way out whether you like it or not.
The problem with this whole exposure therapy hullabaloo is the aftermath. I am completely without ability to make sense of it all, to get to the place I need to go. I feel existentially lost. No feelings for or against anyone or anything. And having experienced anhedonia before, I can tell you that this was absolutely not the same. Anhedonia is a vacancy of emotions, like my slate has been wiped clean, and I don’t care about the emptiness of it all. It’s a place where I am the gray void and never look for anything because there is no horizon. I don’t know where I stop and the grayness begins.
Now, though, I know what the emotions are but can’t tap into them. I’m moving in the grayness, rather than embodying it. The slog through it feels like swimming in toothpaste and I think feelings are there, but off in the distance. I can’t quite make out what each emotion is because my perspective is nearsighted and always changing. All of my focus and energy is on the swim. If I keep paddling forward, finally getting close enough to grab hold of a feeling, it moves further out. My emotions are like mystical creatures with a life all their own and they constantly outdistance and out maneuver me. It is fucking exhausting because Crest toothpaste isn’t meant for swimming through.
The world of Stuart 2.0 is a completely different experience. I don’t even know where my emotional bank is because it keeps moving and I don’t really know what it is I seek. This is lost. I think I know what joy and sadness are, but only theoretically. Or I thought I knew what they were. Regardless, it’s clear I’ve not felt real versions of many emotions throughout my life, because I’ve never had the freedom to. Or maybe I didn’t allow myself. That’s a question for Dr. Mandolin.
Try as I might to grasp onto something, I still can’t elicit a connection. Nothing feels right or good, but not particularly bad or uncomfortable either. I don’t think I’m experiencing anything in the appropriate manner. I feel like I have to earn the right by navigating a mental health gridiron, proving I’m worthy of life, feelings, and happiness. And that’s fucked up because I’ve already paid a very steep price to get here.
Maybe when I have spent enough time walking in little Stuart’s shoes and picking up the remnants of her life, I’ll be able to feel something real. Until then, I need to be satisfied with the hope that a life worth living is waiting for me when I’m able to live in the present tense, not straddling two realities in a little girl’s shoes.
Because it’s not fun being a 50ish 7-year old all alone in the gray.
