Fish Out of Water? Terrifying.
You know how a fish feels when it is pulled out of the water as it flops around on the ground freaking the hell out? Well, I do. And let me tell you that is a pretty terrifying moment for that fish. (Side note, I have had to stop myself from saying fishy twice already – welcome to my mind.)
It cannot breathe, it’s fully out of its element, nothing feels safe, and it believes it will never be safe again. Ever. It’s stuck there on the shore for the rest of its short life. Yep, that’s what dysregulation feels like. And it suuuuuuuucks.
In case the term is new to you, emotional dysregulation basically means your brain and body are not communicating well and you are unable, in that moment, to understand you truly are safe and aren’t about to die. In reality, you may be sitting inside your very safe home in your suburban neighborhood, yet your mind and body are convinced you are in imminent danger and under attack.
What dysregulation looks like may vary from person to person and depending upon the scenario, but for me during the worst parts, it looked like feeling like that damn fish! I mean literally, I would go into almost a sheer panic, crying, shaking, and completely convinced that I was never going to be okay ever again. It’s fucking horrific and I wish I had a better way to explain it.
And the best part? You can’t just tell yourself it’s okay and expect that to work. Because, well, it doesn’t. Like at all. In fact telling yourself that actually makes it worse because then your mind realizes it’s freaking the fuck out and that really freaks it out. It’s quite a vicious cycle.
It also varies in terms of severity. Sometimes maybe it’s just a feeling of your heart speeding up a bit or a thought or conversation you simply cannot stop repeating in your mind. And no, I’m not talking about an anxiety attack – this is different, although they can feel similar in certain stages.
I lived that hell on Earth for nearly two years and let me tell you that I now understand why it is called the dark night of the soul. I struggled to see or feel any light during those times. I remember sitting in therapy, bawling, and asking my therapist at the time, “Where is the light? Where did it go? Is it coming back?” I couldn’t access the light inside of me, my soul, and it fucking terrified me. (I don’t mean seeing the movie IT and being traumatized to the point where clowns make you shiver head to toe – I mean real terror as if in a life-or-death situation.) There were times I could feel the flicker deep down inside, but more often than not I was in deep emotional pain, heartache, despair, and complete panic.
Fun, right? Nooooooope. 0 out of 10 would never want to live through that again, but what else do you expect when you have 35+ years of trauma in your body that has never been allowed to move through your system and therefore you’ve fully vacated your body (dissociation). Like you’re technically in your body and functional (if you’re lucky), but you can’t seem to remember much of anything at all. You’re there, but not really truly in the present moment. Why? Because dear God when you come back in your body you experience all this stuff I’ve been talking about and you experience it all at once. Aka you realize you’re the fish, your out of water, and you’re suffocating because you cannot find an oxygen mask nor do you know the last time you’ve ever seen the damn thing.
What started all of this?
A podcast. Well, technically it started when I was inside my mother’s womb, but I was oblivious to all of that until a friend recommended I give this podcast a listen. (Thanks, “friend.” How dare you throw me into the deep end of my healing journey. Actually, thank you it’s been the hardest and best thing I’ve ever done in my life hands down.)
Listen I did. Episode after episode. (This is also where I learned that if you binge listen to episodes of really deep shit it can actually send you into emotional dysregulation. There’s nothing like driving to the grocery store on episode three of the day only to completely forget that you were headed to get groceries and that you have a meeting in 45 minutes because your body is so overwhelmed that you forget how to life. Note to you: Maybe don’t read this entire book in one sitting unless you really want a crash course in using the emotional regulation tools provided.)
At first, when listening to these episodes I was captivated by the personal stories and the people sharing about their lives so openly and vulnerably. (Ha! Isn’t it ironic that I didn’t want to share my story because I thought nobody wanted to hear it, yet the thing that jump-started my healing journey was others telling their stories? Life, you never cease to amaze and teach me.) And then everything changed. It hit me like a brick wall while driving down Interstate 65 in Birmingham, Alabama at 33 years old.
“Oh my gosh…” (Okay, it was more like “fuck!” but it’s a book and I’m supposed to be professional or something…actually we are long past that already so “fuck” it is.) I realized instantly that my childhood was not healthy and was actually full of a plethora of emotional abuse, neglect, and double triangulation (a new term for me at the time) with my parents. I was able to see in an instant that what I had gone through as a kid had been incredibly harmful to me and that it was affecting my current life.
So here I was thinking that I had it mostly made as a kid with brand-name clothes, Pokemon cards (my neighbors were boys), ATVs, video games, and all this fun stuff. But after hearing a deep, personal story shared by one of the people on the podcast my own story was staring me right in the face. (This is also where I realized apparently it’s not normal to not remember most of your childhood.) Don’t get me wrong, I had massive anxiety from the time I was 11 years old until graduate school when I started a medication to help. I was under no illusion my childhood was amazing, I simply had blocked out, ignored, and dissociated to the point where I didn’t realize just how crushing it had been to my little heart and soul.
I want to note that this book is not a walkthrough of my childhood experiences, my marriage, etc. Instead, it is a walk through my healing journey, and therefore some of those stories may surface to explain what I was walking through. I understand my parents did the best they could and I also know that I did not at all get what I needed, which was not okay. It has taken a lot of “work” on myself to understand that both of those things can exist, that I don’t have to simply say “they did their best” and neglect the effect it had on me.
With that out of the way, let’s get back to the podcast. The more I listened, the more I understood. Now I knew why I would feel intense anxiety if I sent a text message to a friend of mine and didn’t hear back within the day. I understood why even a simple phone call with my parents could make me feel physically sick, sad, and immensely frustrated. I could see why I married my ex-husband and why I stayed as long as I did in a marriage that wasn’t healthy for me. It was all starting to make sense and I had no idea how to “hold” it or deal with all it was bringing up for me.
I want to insert a note here that a turning point for me in my journey was to start demonstrating immense self-compassion toward myself (we will discuss this more at another time). It would have been easy for me to say (and many times I did at the beginning) “Why in the world am I freaking out that she hasn’t texted me back yet? She’s just busy. I am being absolutely ridiculous. Why do I keep feeling this way?” However, I learned to see myself through a new lens with a deeper understanding of my experiences. Of course, I was afraid that I “did something wrong” that would result in me being emotionally neglected or abandoned. That was my story. That was my experience. Put simply, I didn’t know anything else. I did not know that I could make someone mad and still be loved, safe, protected, and cared about all at the same time.
However, simply “knowing” was not enough. How in the world was I supposed to heal these deep wounds? How would I get my life back? More importantly, how could I create a new life? Could I even do it? One thing I knew for certain was that I would need help.
It was time to find a therapist.
When looking for a therapist, I found a person who was a trained therapist in the same program as the podcast host. I searched the program’s database and literally this is the only person I found located in Alabama. Unfortunately, she was near the coast therefore a good 3.5-4 hour drive one way. The only other option was Atlanta, Georgia, and not only did I have zero desire to deal with Atlanta traffic, but I also didn’t have friends there I could stay with for free.
So I committed to driving down twice a month so I could get the help that I needed from the person who at least understood what this type of trauma is like given her training and background. And of course, she wasn’t covered by my insurance so everything came straight out of my pocket at the private pay rate. Unfortunately, this therapeutic encounter would prove to be one of those lessons in understanding that just because someone holds a certain level of training or a specific certification doesn’t make them your guide on the journey.
We met first via phone. It was your very basic intake. The second meeting I met in her office and we started talking more about my childhood memories and experiences. I remember sitting in her office and word-vomiting all the shit that was coming up for me in my 90-minute session (we met longer due to my drive). After the session, I was driving back to a friend’s house in a state of panic because I had just unearthed so much crap that I had never shared out loud with another soul and there I was left alone to handle the aftermath.
Yet, I was committed to the cause (my healing.) So I went about my homework, which was to start writing my trauma stories (this is what the program she was trained in and the success fo the podcast centered around so it did not come as a surprise). Let me tell you that it’s one thing to say the words out loud to another person and it’s a totally different thing to write (or type) those stories down, putting words to them.
Through this process of our sessions and writing my trauma stories, we jumped in head first (we clearly ignored the “no diving” signs that were planted all around us) into one of my biggest traumatic experiences as a child. An experience that takes many people many years to heal from, here it was staring me right in the face on my screen. In this experience, I had frozen (fucking understandably so); therefore, the energy never moved through me to completion. Well, then I didn’t only understand what it felt like to be a fish flailing outside the water but also understood what it felt like to be a bottle of Mountain Dew shaken up really hard without the lid being loosened to provide some relief.
At this point, I didn’t realize I was a fish, that I was out of the water, or that I was supposed to even be in the water. I just knew that everything felt bad everywhere all at once. And what that looked like was a shock to my system and being so overwhelmed that it was hard to function.
I saw her a total of three times before I realized that her modalities and the distance were not going to work for me. Simply put, I needed more than she was going to be able to provide in terms of support as I was facing 30+ years of traumatic experiences that I had stuffed down and were now all right in front of me and taking over my life. Writing about them without the proper support to walk through the pain they were bringing up was causing more harm than good. I was devastated because I was so hopeful she’d be able to help, I had unsurfaced all of this shit, and now I didn’t have anyone at all to help me walk through it all and start to heal.
The Search for Another Therapist
Insert a period of at least two weeks of me getting a bit of courage up and sharing with some friends about the experiences with the first therapist and them kindly showing me that based on a series of events she was not a good fit for me at all. (Apparently, people raised in securely attached households don’t keep going to a therapist that’s not a good fit. That was 100% news to me at the time. Thank God for good friends who have the patience of a saint to help those of us who never experienced a securely attached relationship as a child.)
Being an Associate Professor at a local university I honestly did not want to see someone in the city (hello ego, welcome to the show.). A lot of people in Birmingham knew me because of the agency I started and ran for many years and I also taught at two local universities. However, I became aware very quickly that I really did need someone close to home if I was seriously going to relive (and release) these traumatic experiences (I know that trauma and triggers and such have become these buzzwords and are often used in non-serious manners, but I can’t think of another way to describe the experiences so we are going to call them what they felt like to the deepest parts of my body – immense trauma).
After stalking online a few different local therapists who specialized in trauma therapy, I chose one who was new to the area because quite frankly I was tired of some of the cognitive-based therapy options that was dominant in Birmingham. (Okay, I also thought the words on her website were warm and inviting, which is important to me as a marketer. Ironically enough one of my therapist friends said he was concerned after reading her website because it seemed she was trying to heal her own trauma through her clients. Desperate times call for desperate measures and I ignored him just like we often do when people express concerns about the person we are dating. Hindsight is 20/20, man.)
Before I left the first session she gave me her cell phone number and told me to reach out to her any time if I needed anything. (I will admit that this offer took me off guard as my master’s degree is basically a counseling degree in higher education administration, and that was not at all how we were trained; however, I was in deep need of help and her offer felt like a lifeline when I was on the verge of drowning.)
Disclaimer: I think it’s important to make a quick note here to say that she was in the beginning stages of her practice and therefore many things were done that were harmful to me and well outside of therapeutic boundaries. However, she was a key part of my healing journey and I honor, respect, and appreciate the many ways in which she did help me. There will be additional stories within this book about this relationship since it was pivotal in my healing journey.
Together, we began the incredibly painful process of walking through the stories from my childhood. I was seeing her three times per week at the time (way too much in hindsight, but I was susceptible due to my trauma). At the beginning stages between me dealing with all of the pain I had been disassociated from face-on and her being new to her practice (and therefore not having much experience) there would be way too much sharing of my stories and not enough time helping me to calm down and integrate the information. The result was me being basically emotionally dysregulated all the time and in a constant state of panic. (Ya know, flailing like a fish out of water.)
I also deeply struggled to trust her. When you grow up in a household where your parental figures aren’t emotionally safe, withdraw love and affection when they are upset with you, and have communicated in many ways that feeling anything is “too much” for them to handle, you learn at a young age that people can’t “hold” or “contain” anything that you feel, let alone all of you. You further internalize this to mean something is very wrong with you that needs to be fixed. It’s a bit of a mind fuck really, but one you’re completely unaware of until you’re not.
Many of those type of childhood experiences resulted in me being a people pleaser, making sure others were okay, and making myself as small as I needed to ensure others felt comfortable around me and wouldn’t think I was too much and leave me. I became the caretaker.
So I would share an experience with my therapist and then internally freak out that she was going to leave me because my emotions, feelings, and stories were too much for her. The pattern continued. I’d share another story, then we’d have to work heavily on emotional regulation, I’d freak out between sessions being afraid I was going to be abandoned, then we’d work on helping me feel safe again and then walking into another trauma story. It was freaking exhausting!
I can’t really explain in words just how difficult all of this was for me. My days pretty much consisted of the same thing each day. I would wake up crying and have no idea how in the world I would be able to go to work and be “on” as a university professor in the classroom. I would somehow make it through teaching and freak out (cry and feel like the world was ending while under my weighted blanket and in my hammock) until I was able to go to therapy again. Then we would walk through another experience and I would go home and be reliving the trauma and feeling completely terrified to sit in it all alone. In between were periods of me pulling myself together enough to parent my sweet kiddo and try to be “normal” so I could spend time with friends. Sometimes spending time with friends looked like being on my best friend’s couch under my weight blanket crying and taking fast-acting anxiety meeds so I wouldn’t spontaneously combust.
I wish I could say this phase ended within a couple of weeks, but that is far from the truth. This part of my journey was brutal. It was at times unbearable, lonely, confusing, and downright terrifying. And I do believe at some level we all have to journey down this part of the pathway on our journey back home to ourselves. We have to walk through all we weren’t able to walk through when we were younger and less able.
In hindsight, I definitely believe a more experienced therapist would have been able to pace us in a way that would have eased this process on my entire system. He or she would have been able to hold space for me in a healthier and safer way for me. However, I also know myself well enough to know that I tend to dive head-first into stuff, which can result in quicker healing but is not always the most gentle way to get to the same end. And a really good, experienced trauma therapist can see that and help me navigate the pathway in a way that I simply didn’t have at the beginning of my journey.
Fortunately, I survived (somehow) the worst of the emotional dysregulation and its ability to take complete control over our ability to see, think, act, and feel. And even though I am now years away from the period of my healing journey, feeling emotionally dysregulated can still shake me to my core when it happens.
Thankfully, I now know that everyone gets dysregulated. I know there is nothing wrong with me. I have an entire arsenal of tools that can help me get back to center (aka the place that isn’t full of metaphorical battleships) when I am triggered or feel like I’m out of the water and flopping around on the ground. I also know when I can help myself get back emotionally regulated and when I need support from others (and I now know who those others are – and who they aren’t).
It’s been a process. It has not always been easy and there were times I wasn’t sure if I could make it through, yet I can confirm that from the other side the journey through the darkest nights of my soul was well worth what lies on the other side.
