Reflecting on Reflections
I traveled to San Francisco recently and visited Pier 39, filled with its gift shops, eateries and other oddities. As I passed by each one, I happened upon an establishment that housed a giant mirror maze. For $8, I received the opportunity to get lost and confused. I handed the clerk the money, and he handed me a pair of disposable gloves so as to not smudge the mirrors and ruin the fun for everybody else.
Inside the maze, I became instantly disoriented. The mirrors reflected off of each other so that a simple hallway appeared to be anything but. And everywhere I looked I saw me. I couldn’t escape me, and it seemed that with every turn me was blocking my path. In many instances I simply froze. I felt I had gone in every possible direction yet still ended up in the same place. I became frustrated.
I realized that the mirror maze was a metaphor for what real life has been like for me with PTSD: the frustration, the propensity to freeze and the fact that the major obstacle in all of this is me. My counselor and I have been trying to get to the root of things for a very long time, and we have been using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help get me to the maze’s end. The goal of EMDR is to create new adaptive coping strategies to replace the former ones broken by trauma.
As part of this, I have been deconstructing my former coping strategy: when I would get uncomfortable or overwhelmed, I coped by physically and emotionally removing myself from the environment and/or relationship. This destroyed the relationship but I felt safer. Looking back at past relationships this pattern rears its ugly head almost every time. It’s quite frustrating to me that I am just realizing this now.
EMDR also has revealed that I often find myself uncomfortable in comfortability. Oftentimes I ended relationships not because there was anything broken, per se, but because there was an extended period of normalcy. I know – that sounds bizarre, but it seems to make sense when I look back at all the transition and trauma in my life. By the time I was 18, I probably had lived in 15 different places. I had gone to five different schools. I had seen an unhealthy divorce and felt the storm of sexual assault in my immediate family. I was used to transition and turmoil. To me, THAT was normal, and crazily even comfortable. So when things were going even keel it put me on edge. Rather than wait for the other shoe to drop I would beat trouble to the door.
It wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism but it worked – until the bridge collapsed. Suddenly the old mechanism didn’t work. And it especially didn’t work entering into marriage. You can’t run when things get hairy. Putting up emotional walls between you and the bride when life got messy became a recipe for disaster. So that’s why changing my coping mechanism is so important. The old way no longer works, and it was unhealthy to begin with. I’m searching for a new way. I’m turning over stones in an attempt to get comfortable with comfortability.
Two weeks ago I took Bubba to a pumpkin farm that included a hay bale maze for little kids. The maze was pretty simplistic and was only knee high, but the creator made it more difficult by mandating that participants only be allowed to make right turns to reach the maze exit. Bubba sailed right through it with little difficulty. Sure, he made left turns, backtracked and climbed over the hay bales in order to leave the maze. While it wasn’t the proper or popular solution, Bubba’s coping strategy worked for him just fine. My toddler may be ahead of me in that respect, but then again, I’m not afraid of the vacuum cleaner. I guess we’ll call it a wash.
