Abandoning the World that Abandoned Me: One of My Trickiest Defense Mechanisms

Trigger Warning: It’s a triggery article about triggers. I’ve had some extremely abusive experiences and will be frank about what they were without being detailed about what the abuse itself entailed.

The last couple of weeks have been challenging for me when it comes to determining my emotional state. It’s sometimes hard for me to differentiate between something that’s fundamentally healthy vs. some quirk of my personality due to my cPTSD, and for the last couple of weeks this has been extremely noticeable. Sometimes just hearing the news can be enough to bring on something I wasn’t ready for.

With that in mind, for the last few days in particular I’ve avoided reading too much about the abortion debate. My opinions on abortion are decidedly inconvenient to many having the debate because my heroin-addicted sex-worker mother wanted to abort me, but my alcoholic, pedophilic, abusive father convinced her to have me (can you guess why he might have wanted a kid — it’s as dark as you think). Eventually, she would abandon me, and I would be raised by him and the mother that created him. That was an extremely difficult thing to survive, and I lost some things in doing so. While I am dedicated to learning how manage that trauma in my day-to-day life, it is not always an easy task. I never want to dwell on things that happened to me, but I also have to deal with physical aspects of them daily. I’ve discovered that ‘dealing’ with something brings you close enough to ‘dwelling’ on it that you can fall right in.

My triggers can still sometimes surprise me and given how long I dealt with repressed memories and continued retraumatization, that’s really not surprising. For instance, recently it was difficult for me to witness public discourse which disregards the breadth of experiences of those with backgrounds that are similar to my own. Even things that aren’t triggers can introduce enough challenges because my responses to them become unwieldy. For instance I’ve found challenges, as an introvert, in connecting with people. I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself, too, which brings up a lot of difficult memories, feelings, and things to process. Things like facing my own insecurities, feelings of smallness, and impending milestones of mortality (my birthday’s this weekend!).

At some point in all this chatter my brain said “there is not enough cannabis in the world, girlfriend” and I beat a hasty retreat — sometime around the Thanksgiving holiday my phone died and I let it.

And that, for me, is weird.

I started on this information stupidhightway quite early, and I’ve been a ‘almost every hour of the day user’ since I was 18. My impending birthday reminds me that 28 years of a connection habit means something (and knowing the internet it might not be good). And, if I’m being honest in my examination in my sometimes-trauma of connectedness — my connection to the internet was also often used to hurt me.

Not just by others to stalk me, which has happened, but by employers that exploited me by expecting round-the-clock email access, or by colleagues that used it to harass me.

No wonder I sometimes feel the need to disconnect!

But there’s a problem, and that’s in determining if I’m acting to actually de-escalate a situation, or if I’m just ‘acting out’ — abandoning the world that abandoned me. If you’ve dealt with the trauma of abandonment or love someone who has, the defense mechanism that I’m talking about will be familiar.

Sometimes, if someone has experienced parental abandonment, that person won’t create meaningful attachments, or will abandon those they have — in order to avoid the possibility of being abandoned. It will even sometimes cause people to become attached to those that are unattainable — to the trauma brain it mitigates the possibility for abandonment. It can even make someone be willfully difficult in relationships — anything that will soften the ‘inevitable abandonment.’ It sucks to be this person, and I know it can suck to be around them, too.

Re-reading that makes me want to run back in time and give Little Jamie a hug.

The single most meaningful thing I’ve found that helps this feeling is to connect. Even when there’s nothing more terrifying in the world to me. Allowing myself to see the beauty in the world, the kindness in people, and potential and possibility helps me to move beyond being trapped as the face a mother couldn’t love.

But, it’s important that I’m also aware that needing time away and being alone is a valid feeling as well, and as long as I am tending to that need in a responsible way.

Holiday seasons are often tough for those with troubled family lives and troubled childhoods. It’s okay to disconnect when things get overwhelming to allow yourself to process and integrate your experiences.Allowing myself that sort of space has been very healthy for me, as long as I ensure that I’m doing it for healthy reasons and I’m not taking it to an unhealthy extreme.