Fast Friends
Trauma can bond us to others who’ve experienced it too. We often find ourselves gravitating towards one another without understanding or even questioning the nature of the drag, until one day the common, frayed thread is let slip in a passing comment or remark. In a familiar flash of knowing, the center mass of the relationship is revealed.
It’s a frequently wonderful revelation, and one that I’ve [knowingly] experienced more than a few times in my life. We can have a way of carrying ourselves, the cracked and broken, often utilizing a common inflection that signals a particular, and peculiar, underlying strength and dignity. Once the walls come down and the commiseration begins, the bond pulls on a stronger cord within one’s self and accelerates the blurring of lines between acquaintances, friends, and loved ones.
In several ways, these relationships can nourish the willing participants, but one must be alert to the ways in which co-dependent and destructive patterns can emerge. The anger you may have for your own situation can now easily find ready-made, high-efficiency paths to theirs. The allied, vicarious fury at their family members' dismissive and entitled attitudes allows us to excuse their bad reactive behavior, and to form an unspoken, reciprocal agreement that excuses our own. To be vigilant that these relationships promote healing from past experiences, and encourage growth with mutual support in a way that does not deflect the responsibility onto the other to make this happen, is both difficult and critical.
Tread lightly, as those fellow travelers have likely been deeply hurt too. Yes, we’ve all been hurt, but I want to distinguish the pain of the Human Condition from the searing, deep hurt that splits you into pieces you didn’t know you could be so infinitely parsed out into; those that create in your psyche the types of schisms that either fosters understanding, generosity and vulnerability, or turn someone into the type who shuts off from the world, hiding from connection and the commensurate risk it surely presents. The latter type, vowing to be self-sufficient, may allow people partial access conditionally, the condition invariably being ‘put up with my [insert your -ism of choice here] because I’m hurt’, which can be considered entirely understandable, but wholly untenable as a posture to tolerate and contend with in the outside world. I tend to vacillate between the two. I’m working on it.
The point is that oftentimes those of us, and by ‘us’ I mean the survivors or ones who got away from the obtuse dramas of drug addiction, mental illness, poverty and the like, don’t generally have family we can rely on. We’re the ones our families come to when there is a crisis. We handle it by taking the phone call or sending a care package of food rather than money (because who knows where the money goes). We activate family and friend networks when a cryptic, disturbing message from a loved one who’s still struggling but rarely reaches out surfaces somewhere, playing out an ever-growing routine process and hoping for the best. We make the calls on birthdays and make sure a card and package are in the mail. We don’t get letters, and we don’t get care packages. We don’t get our college education paid for. We don’t get an inheritance other than the legacy of a broken family and the occasional ‘Congrats for making it out!’ from those who learn your truth, even just a bit of it.
The bond of knowing this awful pain can help ease a dull, listless, dissatisfaction with life and the way things were or are, feelings that can race wildly through us all at times, especially when we're not careful. And it seems these feelings have the danger of being held onto more easily when there is so much sadness to look back on, the pity for ones you’ve seen disintegrate and fall away coming through the cracks and crevices of the integumentary system built ostensibly to protect, but serving primarily to isolate. I’ve resigned myself to simply manage these feelings, be it with therapy, journaling, bonding with those that truly know. It's an attempt to render the feelings absurd, disallowing them to cut so easily and so deeply.
Some days the fire inside me is calm, almost to the point where it dies out and I forget for a moment that it’s there. Other days it is fanned by new, fresh family drama causing the fire to roar and rage out of control within. I’m learning, wholly and completely that I can’t control anything outside of myself, but the pattern of taking the reins are well-worn and the paths so easy to follow. I try to breathe consciously when this happens to center myself. I have started meditating again. It helps to not hold onto my feelings of whimsy, but this can seem impossible to do at times. Less reaction, More compassion. That should be my new mantra. Perhaps that would get the knowing of this into the rhythm of my body rather than leave it outside of myself to observe or want for others, applying the concept to myself as an abstraction. I think I know a friend or two to whom I can recommend the idea. Maybe we can remind the other of the reasons we should value ourselves.