When the Trauma of Right Now Intertwines with the Trauma of Yesterday
Mastering the art of resilience does much more than restore you to who you once thought you were. Rather, you emerge from the experience transformed into a truer expression of who you were really meant to be.
—Carol Osborn
» I teach about two things: the suffering that comes from emotional confusion and the freedom that comes from emotional intelligence. My mission on this planet is to help others discern the nature of our emotional lives—what our emotions are, why they are, how different emotions dynamically interact with each other, and, most importantly, that how we interact with them is everything. We have a relationship to each of our many emotional parts, and those relationships can either bring about a life-altering harmony or deepen a fog of distortion.
I’m an ideal candidate for the job, really. I’ve spent most of my life being upset in one way or another. Ask anyone who’s known me a while, and they’ll wince a little bit as they try to find a polite response. There was a time when all I ever did was act out my confusion, multiplying the hurt and anger I felt by inflicting it on others and myself. I didn’t know how to discern my feelings, how to stop and relate to them, or that I had a choice other than repressing them or letting them rule me. That I became obsessed with how our emotions work and the role they play in our lives is what I’ve had to do to resist psychic death. My work was born out of necessity—truly, as a means of survival.
In high school, I authored a DIY punk zine called No Fun—which was, sadly, not named after the Iggy Pop song (that would’ve been way cooler). Rather, “no fun” was what my friends constantly said about me. They endlessly reminded me that I was too enraged by racism, sexism, homophobia, and the myriad other forms of bigotry in the world. I was too intense about finding my place within an unjust society, too loud about it all.
Matters of identity have always been complex for me. First of all, I’m biracial. I grew up in a Mexican home with my full-blooded Mexican mom and sisters (who were technically half-sisters, but it never felt that way). That said, the Oklahoman Dutch blood in me is what has always shown through in my light skin. It gets even dicier when I try to pin down gender and sexuality. I was assigned male at birth and have always been comfortable in this male body. Gender identity is another story, though. Presented with the binary of “girls do this, and boys do that,” my answer has always been, “Huh?” I identify as a “gender dropout” because no other labels have resonance for me. “Genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “gender neutral,”…I’ve tried them on and they kindasorta worked, but my true position on the matter is simply, “I don’t get it and I don’t see why I should have to.” In terms of gender expression, however, I’ve been “feminine” as all get-out since birth and have paid dearly for it. Not the least of which were the several confused years when I dated men. My presentation had been mistaken for queerness growing up, and I had been called a fag (etc.) so many times that it blurred the lines of what I knew to be true. And yet the surprise ending for me was discovering that my sexual and romantic affinities belong to those who identify as women only. Which is to say, I walk in the world with straight, white, male privilege…and yet, my experience doesn’t match what those labels connote. Back in high school, I was figuring out that all of this really mattered but was lost as to how to process my experience.
I was bullied and beaten both in and out of school—penalties paid for my inability (and, at times, outright refusal) to perform normative masculinity. “Why are you so weird?” was forever echoing in my ears. At sixteen, I dropped out of high school and stopped going outside almost entirely for fear of getting jumped again. There was the pain and terror of the violence—that was the obvious part—but then there was also the hidden pain of not being able to understand why I’d been made a target just for not being like other boys. Today, I am thankful to have gone through it all, though. Primarily because I know what happened next.
Radical feminism was my first spiritual awakening. The narratives and theories I found in Riot Grrrl literature and antiestablishment, politically charged punk rock music were, for me, far more than just aesthetic. They named and unpacked my experience of the world with a precision I had never known. In my dawning awareness, I could finally see and describe how bullying came down to power, and how that power was really about safety versus vulnerability. I was being jumped because being a not-particularly-masculine boy made me look vulnerable, and other boys felt compelled to attack me so they could appear invulnerable (lest they become a target like me). This insight dawned as I considered, for the first time, the status and treatment of women in our society. To be able to draw parallels to my own experience helped me to finally feel seen. Meanwhile, to be exposed to the ways in which girls, women, and actual LGBTQAI+ people had it worse was righteously infuriating.
My eyes opened to the reality that my experience was a microcosm of dynamics playing out in innumerable and much more severe ways the world over. Here I was, traumatized to the point of acute isolation, and yet I was still one of the lucky ones. My brain exploded, as I first began to conceive of the abuses that are commonplace in our world. This sociopolitical awakening offered a pressure valve for a kettle on the boil for far too long. And so, my kettle shrieked its message—a message so charged with pent-up emotional energy that no one could hear it. And so, I was told I was overreacting, too dramatic—I needed to relax.
I was No Fun.
My friends were jerks. But it was also true that I ran around biting people’s heads off. For example, I would break into tears and scream at audience members at punk shows when I felt a band’s message was sexist. The articles in my zine and the lyrics I wrote in my own punk bands were barely coherent. They were appreciated by some, but only those who already felt the same way I did. It was helpful to connect with such kindred spirits, but the anger rarely translated into real action, real organizing—not to speak of actually reaching people outside our small circle.
It’s been said that the point of communication is to be heard. I wasn’t communicating. I was expressing. Both have value, but if you have an important message you think might help change the world, that’s a message that needs to be communicated. This isn’t to say that activists and change agents ought to water down their messages so as to be palatable to the masses. That’s another topic for another book. I want to point us in the direction of a different matter altogether. One that’s nearly universal in nature. One that’s germane to matters of resilience amid the struggle—to psychological clarity in the realm of psychic death.
I can see something important now that I wasn’t capable of seeing back then: the angst I was directing at sociopolitical realities predated me being bullied in school. The way that my outrage regarding racism and xenophobia manifested was very much informed by earlier experiences. My trauma history had begun with people much closer to me. Before I had developed anger at “the system,” I had experienced a different, much more intimate kind of system: my family. It’d be many years until I’d understand that my anger about, for instance, the president, was tangled up with anger about another kind of president: my dad. Both angers were valid; that they were tangled up did not negate or dilute either of them. But my emotional situation was unclear and confused, which is a recipe for neither empathic self-understanding nor effective community action.
REWRITING OUR HISTORIES
We’ve been told “the past is gone,” but this is scientifically untrue. The past is right here in our bodies. Research shows that the experiences we accrue are absorbed into our nervous systems, our cells, our fascia. This is especially true of our untended woundings, our unprocessed traumas, the model scenes of our lives (especially from childhood) that communicated more to our psyches than words ever could.
Our emotions are laced with the past. Our attitudes have been molded by yesterday. Our behaviors are most often an amalgam of things that were modeled for us by adults when we were small. And so much of this is held in our unconscious minds and memory systems that inform, to a great extent, our beliefs about what our life is worth, how we handle problems, how relationships work, and how societies operate. But our brains themselves don’t know that, just as our eyes cannot turn to see themselves. The past is not gone. The past is who and what we are now.
This is a promising truth. For if the past is not gone, it is not set in stone, either. We can change the way the past lives in our bodies. We can rewire our emotional patterns, and we can even, in deeper therapeutic processes, rewrite memories. We can retrieve parts of us that have been exiled and disavowed. We can mend what is fragmented and disharmonious in us. In this book, I will argue that doing such work is among the highest and most important gifts we can offer ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world.
A Story
CONTENT WARNING: child neglect, drunk driving, and violence
Summertime in Oklahoma. A moment in space and time when my child mind could get lost in simple pleasures. On this evening, the smell of the fresh river air rose up all around me. The sun had just fully set. Swarms of fireflies did not shy away from a full display of their otherworldly magic. The sound of the water rushing by accompanied the lazy swells washing over my small, eight-year-old feet, bare in the maroon sand lining the banks of the Red River.
I wish the story ended there. Moments like these were always haunted by a background of dread. Because if I was in Oklahoma, it was because I was visiting my dad. Which meant things could, and probably would, turn rotten at any moment. My dad was the first of many bullies in my life, and the first of many to invoke mortal fear in me.
My father was an openly abusive, flagrantly racist, abandoner of five children and seven (seven!) marriages—and, to boot, a feverishly proselytizing evangelical Christian through it all. My childhood home vibrated in the wake of his whiplash alcoholic episodes and his attempts to leave us homeless and destitute after his sudden disappearance. He eventually reappeared, living three states away. He invited me to visit, to rekindle the relationship. And kindling is what I got.
On this night at the Red River, my hand was burned in a campfire. Was it a first-degree burn? Second-degree? I don’t know because I wasn’t taken to a doctor. I went to my dad, panicked, to show him my actively blistering hand and was met by his retort, “What do you want me to do, kiss it and make it better?” His drinking buddies all laughed and went back to playing cards. His kiss-it-and-make-it-better comment amounted to him telling me to relax about a matter that was considerably urgent. And when I couldn’t relax, he let me know he thought I was overreacting again, this time in a much more terrifying way.
Though humiliated, I persisted in trying to get him to help me. I at least needed ice, and there wasn’t any around. My dad caved in. Angrily. What I didn’t know was that this meant he would drive us home while black-out drunk. As he sped down a narrow backwoods dirt road, furious with me for disrupting his evening, his pickup truck scraped against a tree. And then another tree. And then another. For fifteen full minutes, I sat frozen stiff, clutching my seat, with every drunk-driving scene I had ever witnessed in movies and TV and educational videos at school flashing through my mind. We sideswiped another tree, and it took the rearview mirror right next to me clean off. I was certain that we were going to die and helpless to do a thing about it.
I’ll never forget my dad cracking open a can of Old Milwaukee the next morning, looking out the window, saying, “What the hell happened to my truck?” Never mind what the hell had happened to his son.
Revisiting my dad’s reaction to my burned hand all these years later, I’m reminded of the matching T-shirts I saw a smiling couple wearing in 2016. The shirts read “Fuck Your Feelings.” The politically charged message was a staunch comment on “snowflakes,” a backlash against a generation with their hands in a campfire, trying to figure out what to do. The irony is, there is never a moment when human beings aren’t feeling something. Including these folks. “Fuck Your Feelings” is a statement full of feeling. After all, bitterness is a feeling. Coldness is a feeling. Numbness is a feeling. Emotionally shut down is a feeling. Not wanting to deal with feelings is a feeling. The T-shirt wasn’t a negation of the importance of feelings. It was actually saying, “Our feelings are the ones that matter.” The T-shirt was all about feelings.
This was my dad’s attitude toward me at eight years old, and it remained that way until he died. Fuck your feelings. Feelings don’t matter. Unless they’re mine.
Another Story
Flash forward a decade or so and—big surprise—I’m a drug-addicted drunk reenacting my trauma in one dysfunctional relationship after the next. I want to make sure to say that none of these have resulted in physical violence, as is commonly the case and an active threat for so many.* The story I want to tell you next is about a night that showed me so much about the power of empathy to affect, and even transform, human psychology. It is a story of how another person related to me externally in the exact same way we can relate to ourselves internally.
I was mid-incoherent-argument with a partner. I can’t even tell you what we were fighting about. I just remember that in the midst of our exchange of outbursts, I heard her ask me a powerful question:
“What did they do to you?”
It stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t know it, but I had waited my entire life for someone to ask me this question, to be curious about how I came to have a constant thrum of desperation in my life. My entire body softened. I began weeping. Memories of violence flashed in my mind’s eye. My dad’s earth-shattering shout. The night a gun was held to my head. Another night when a knife was held to my ribs. The night they beat my best friend with a pipe. The night another “friend” screamed in my face, “Just admit that you’re a faggot already so I can beat the shit out of you now.”
And yet, in this moment, I was grateful. Grateful that someone could tell something was done to me. Someone saw through the veil of my reactivity to the terrible and unacknowledged experiences I had internalized. To the way my past was present. Someone wanted to know how life had come to be such a painfully twisted-up mess. What did they do to me? Certainly, it hadn’t always been this way. Oddly enough, I didn’t even need to tell her about any of it at that point. Neither of us said anything more. Being asked was somehow enough on its own.
We were on our way to sleep when I finally said, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For your question. For asking what they had done to me.”
“Oh. That’s not what I said. I asked, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ ”
I had misheard her.
I got up, got in my car, and drove home. Drunk.
My father’s son keeping the family tradition.
* I also want you to know that dysfunctions in intimacy have been an enormous motivation in my ongoing trauma-focused inner work and process, which has included making amends for situations like the one I’m about to describe.