Getting out of the trauma pool

I am almost 54 years old. Has it been..long enough? Long enough to digest the things that were handed to me, layered on me, forced on me? Yes. Have I had enough? Yes. Yes. Yes.

I want out of the trauma pool.

The trauma pool is where you go when you figure out you have work to do on yourself because of what has happened to you and because of you and before you.

Once the trauma pool has you, it doesn't want to let go. Just when you think you've gotten to the deepest end, lord there's a deep deepest end, and then a deeperest end than that. You get better and better at holding your breath, you can dive for a while. It starts to feel like that's life- holding your breath, ready for a deeper dive, ready to be more fixed. The scrutiny is never done here- it concentrates a need to find it all. You long for the sigh of relief but cannot reach a point where it can just be...enough.

And it's normalized to stay here- you've come so far, how can you leave the trauma pool now? You could be having another breakthrough any day now. You could be even more fixed. If you just go deeper one more time that could be the thing that changes everything. What about this? One more time. And what about that? Just one more thing.

I spent almost 10 years in therapy believing I belonged in the trauma pool because my life and my parents lives and their parents lives held so much pain and suffering that it had no distinct end. I felt like I had to heal it all, an endless match game of never ending combinations that I was never going to finish. I would get to a good place and say

Oh, I am in a good place

and therapy would just look at me

like it could see what I couldn't

and it would say

but don't forget about ...

and I couldn't understand why I would ever forget,

and why isn't there room for just a good place?

Did you ever play Sharks and Minnows? After some time, therapy was like that, me trying to get across to the other side of the pool and it feeling like therapy was in the middle making sure I didn't get there.

Can we just hold the complexity of that together? That therapy did work for me, but it also didn't. Can I have an experience and just share it without someone telling me counterpoints? And can we talk about the ways it failed me without lining up excuses for it, or making it a me thing, because I am exhausted by there not being space for my experience.

I am bone tired of our paradoxical individualism that self selects in favor of experience scarcity. There seems to always be an answer waiting to shut down expressed thought, another you should know better, and if no one is around to take away my options then I should take them from myself. What makes it so difficult to add the space for my experience without having to funnel it back towards something else?

We keep diving into the trauma pool (with and without therapy) compulsively and continuously correcting and over-correcting ourselves, counting on that one day coming when we've done enough. We make it to the other side of that damn pool and we get to get out- glistening and...finished?

[Social media has done a great job of perpetuating never enough, of holding up a devil for each and every shoulder, of policing people and making sure they know they forgot this or that or to center the status quo again. (Like we could ever forget the mainstream exists. And if you did, don't worry, it will never stop reminding you.) It has continued what started in elementary school, continued into middle and high school...and college, and more college, and work, and life

what it's like to try for 13 years of day in day out school to understand how it all works and to fail. To try college and fail, to try life and the backbone it takes to make it every. single. day. The walls that crumble when you realize (after almost 10 years of weekly therapy) that you not understanding why you can't also have room is actually not because you are the most clueless worst human on the planet but because you are AuDHD and gifted and brains work differently and that being different is not synonymous with stupid?

Especially when stupid is the thing you have tried your very hardest not to be since you have let people down all of your life because: "You don't realize how smart you are!" or "You don't live up to your potential!" and somehow that seems to be the key to knowing how it works is being smart

but how am I supposed to know how smart I am if I can't figure out when there's room to show it? I don't get the invisible rules of being in the world. The rules that are so rigid when it comes to different points of view and people and how standards just flop over when it comes to the mainstream. There are so many things like this that confound me. I thought therapy would help with this.]

There are a lot of things we need to know when we start therapy that I didn't know and my old therapist didn't tell me, and I don't know why- assumptions? Lack of methodologies? The colonization of mental health? All of the above? After 10 years I know enough now to know what I need, and I have a great therapist. Mental health is a place that needs to be full of curiosity, information, questions and answers, healing and being healed. Especially because of the vulnerability in that space. It needs to be different. Feeling better doesn't mean you don't go back and do more work. It means you get to enjoy the work you've done. The energy for the next step forward comes from taking a step back.

I tried to quit seeing my old therapist three times. Close friends told me it made sense to quit. But when it came time to talk with her about it she would convince me to stay. She said that it seemed like I wanted to leave when things got hard. That I was avoiding something. I thought she was the expert, that I didn't know what I was doing. I kept working with her. I really wish I hadn't. But I did, even though I had the support and information I needed to stop. There is so much scarcity in the trauma pool. I didn't know I had other options.

I didn't know that I was working so hard on getting well that I wasn't ever BEING WELL.

Then, exactly a year ago, one diagnosis sailed towards me, a bright rope, a line. I grabbed on. It was ADHD. It changed me. It changed me enough to make me want to get out of that pool. I knew I needed more room. I swam hard past the shark for the ladder on the other side. I grabbed it, pulled my minnow body up. Another diagnosis wrapped itself around and inside me- autism- a summer sun-warmed towel of knowing.

I'm getting out the trauma pool.

I don't want to be working on myself all the time. I also want to be living and having a life.

For me, jumping back into the confines of the trauma pool and working through all the life I lived undiagnosed, redoing it all through an ND lens feels like I'd be missing out on more life when I have already missed out on so much.

I'm not interested in sustained drowning.

I am interested in discovering who I am underneath all the things. I am interested in room to do the work and room to not always be working.

I'm interested in...glistening.

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