Chapter Four: Conundrums of the Deeply Traumatised
This chapter was originally published as BULLSEYE on Thursday, January 7th, 2021, a couple of months before I found out that there was still an active publication ban on my name. What this means, is that it was revealed to me well after the trial that it was a federal crime for me to be as specific as I wanted to be about my life experience within my online writings.
After I released Chapters One, Two, and Three, I decided it was important for me to take a moment to speak a bit about my point of view and what it is that I go through when it comes to opening up and sharing the stories that society, and those close to me, had shamed me into keeping secret. Especially since I’m no longer needing to censor myself to avoid a legitimately possible criminal conviction for using my voice. So I’m upcycling BULLSEYE.
This piece absolutely carries the same Soul and the same heartbeat as its original, I’ve just edited the fear out of it.
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This is peaches; a series of essays dedicated to the things I learned while dedicating my life to never being raped again. My name is Maarika Freund, and this is:
Chapter Four: Conundrums of the Deeply Traumatised
TRIGGER WARNING: rape, sexual abuse
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Photo taken by my husband on Polaroid Film, circa March 2021
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I usually don’t let myself be sad on the internet.
So with that being said, I had no idea how to start this.
I know that I talk about this conundrum in Chapter One. The conundrum of not knowing how to start things. But it bears repeating, because it’s a very loaded statement.
In one of my final sessions with my last therapist, she broke a very long, very uncomfortable silence by saying:
“A writer’s room couldn’t come up with your life.”
And while I found it really funny (especially because her delivery was impeccable), I also found it disturbing. So, my not knowing how to start this isn’t because I couldn’t find anything to say. It’s because I have too much to say about trauma recovery and the past 34 years of my life.
If you’ve already listened to Chapter One, you might feel like this is old news. What I haven’t brought up yet though, or homed in on, is how her statement made me really sad. If my therapist was floored by the actual truth, then how was the rest of the world going to receive the truth about my non-fictional existence?
What I also don’t say in Chapter One, is that more than not knowing how to start this, I’ve been struggling because I don’t want to hurt the people who’ve hurt me. First because I’m not interested in creating more pain and suffering within the world, and second because I’m terrified of what their belief systems may convince them is acceptable to do.
I am wildly aware that this reaction is very much a conundrum of the deeply traumatised, because it puts the sacredness and validity of the lives of those who hurt me, well above the sacredness and validity of my own. And it’s really heartbreaking evidence of how gaslighting is a disturbingly powerful tool.
But regardless of my awareness to my trauma reaction, I keep asking myself this question:
How do I honour my story without creating the same kind of pain that was inflicted on me?
I think it’s really important for me to be publicly recounting what it is I’ve been through. For starters, women are too frequently written out of history, which means our voices and stories aren’t used to being heard. And, at this period of time on the planet, we’re still having to fight against the kind of oppression that denies us autonomy over our own bodies, making it feel impossible to imagine a world in which we can share our stories from a state of being that’s not in crisis mode or disaster management. Whether it’s denying us access to medical procedures that could save our lives and stop preventable deaths from occurring (e.g. Roe vs. Wade in the USA), or death as a punishment for not covering up our bodies in a way that’s “moral” enough (e.g. the tragic death of Mahsa Amini in Iran on September 16th, 2022), it’s becoming painfully apparent that when it comes to women, we’re still treated like disposable objects, who’s stories and life experiences only carry weight if they complement the narratives of men. So I believe that we need to be documenting the work women are selflessly engaging in to ensure a better life for the next generations, especially so that we don’t take our current freedoms, like voting, for granted, because at this point, with the way the world is going, anything could be taken away from us. So it’s essential to continue to document our history so we can really learn from it and actually grow as a species, instead of allowing history to continuously repeat itself.
So there’s this reason that peaches is such an important project to me.
I was also able to figure out how to live a really happy existence, despite the sadness that comes sometimes to visit, that isn’t dominated by what happened to me. And I was able to get to this place without having to subscribe to any kind of religious belief, through pretending to be a completely different person, or through wearing a scarlet letter “S” on my cardigan to warn people that I’m a Survivor of abuse before they choose to engage in conversation with me. I have actually tried all three of those tactics in desperate attempts to fit back into society after traumatic happenings, and none of them panned out very well (for me, anyway). So, not only do I never want what happened to me to happen to another woman ever again, but also I want other women to be able to experience a calm and peaceful life without having to give up a huge part of themselves, transform themselves into a completely different person, or wear protective armour (be it literal or metaphorical), or define themselves with the limited set of labels we currently have to choose from in order to go out and function within the “real world”, even though, in 2022, the “real world” feels pretty surreal and dystopian.
So there’s that reason, too, that peaches is such an important project to me.
But my biggest motivation for engaging in this project is the sum of the two reasons I’ve just detailed. I believe, with my whole heart, that in order to usher in the kind of change that I want to see, fingers crossed, in my own lifetime, will be initiated more quickly if we’re able to engage with urgent human-rights issues in a way that’s accessible. And I very sadly believe, with my whole heart, from the decades of life experience I never wanted or asked for, is that without accessible material that people are excited to engage with (see Chapters One and Two), created from a lion’s heart (see Chapter Three), the kind of change that I’m so desperate to both see and experience may not happen in my lifetime.
The Collins Dictionary defines someone with a lion’s heart as: “a person of exceptional courage and bravery.”[1] And, as a grown adult who has had night-terrors since publishing Chapter Three, let me tell you, engaging with this subject matter with empathy and compassion is not for the faint of heart.
So, I really understand why so much of the art, media, and writings dedicated to the subject of rape culture is driven by anger. For example, the way some people feel comfortable attempting to shame victims into silence is infuriating. But as much as we need fearless warriors on the ground doing the important grassroots work like clapping back when assholes on social media are abusing their freedom of speech, not everyone is built this way, and, this isn’t the only form of activism that’s available to us. Now, I’m not saying one method is better than another so please don’t attempt to glean that out of my statement. We need multiple tactics in play to get ahead. What I am trying to say, however, is that I’m not built to be a “clap back” kind of gal, unless, of course, I’m on the stand-up comedy circuit, but I’m even currently taking a bit of a break from that art form to finish developing my next play. That being said, as someone who considers themselves an artist, and as a person who finds clapping back too extreme a sport to engage in (because I’m really not that young anymore), I am still trying to disrupt the status-quo. I’m just choosing to do it in my own way. Instead of clapping back and working to silence the silencing assholes back with the same kind of energy they seem to just love doling out, I’m trying to transmute that energy into something accessible and funny.
One, because I don’t know if I have that kind of fight in me, anymore, and two, because I would much rather be remembered as an upcycling alchemist than a warrior.
But that’s just me.
Besides, it’s not those assholes on social media, or the people who don’t want to get behind feminism that any of my white-hot-rage is directed towards. My anger lives where the pain is too difficult for me to look at. But I’m getting ahead of myself now.
When it comes to this upcycling alchemist’s personal trauma recovery, however, there are a handful tracks on loop inside my head as the direct result of everything I’ve been through that make what it is that I’m attempting to accomplish more difficult than I would like it to be.
There are four very specific songs that play on loop in my head, at volume 11, especially whenever I sit down to write about my experience. They are:
1. I don’t want to bleed on you
2. Nobody cares
3. I’m terrified to be as real as I want to be
4. I don’t want to hurt anyone
I’m going to now put this self-destructive cassette tape into the stereo. I promise, these tunes are really catchy with sick baselines. I mean, they’d have to be, otherwise how else would they end up going so viral in my head?
TRACK ONE:
I DON’T WANT TO BLEED ON YOU
Sometimes, reading long rants of others who have experienced what you’ve experienced is cathartic. You want to know that someone else is going through what it is that you’re going through because it feels better to know that there’s someone out there who gets it the way you get it.
It feels better to not feel so alone on this planet.
But while it’s one thing to find solace in finally breaking the silence, and finally feeling what the freedom of saying whatever it is that you need or want to say is like, I think there has to be a level of awareness in what it is you’re saying, and how you’re saying it.
Because while it’s one thing to find solace in finally breaking the silence, and empowerment from the new-found freedom in having the ability to say whatever it is that you’ve been forced to stay silent about, you need to have an acute awareness about whether or not your own trauma is leading the narrative.
I’ll talk about why this awareness can feel next to impossible to achieve in this day and age in a tiny bit, but there are two reasons why I believe it’s important to make sure our own traumas aren’t behaving like an untamed garden hose on full blast.
First and foremost, I believe in journaling, and I did this a lot while I was working through my own fears. But I also don’t want to publicly explore my feelings (anymore – 2014 Maarika was a very different person). If I’m publishing from an exploratory place, then to me, I’m publishing from an ungrounded place, and when I publish from an ungrounded place, I’m exposing myself to more hurt – and that’s the opposite of what I want.
peaches is a project that has already opened me up to a lot of criticism. While I admit that when it comes from the people I’m related to, it’s much more difficult to receive, however, when it’s from the general public, I have to be able to take it. I can’t start talking about an incredibly difficult subject matter that has oppressed millions, if not billions, of women, with the expectation that everything is going to be rosy and that people are going to give a heck about my feelings. That would be outrageously naïve.
So, for myself, I have to be certain about where it is that I stand on what it is that I’m speaking about in order to protect myself and my mental health. It’s really important to me that I’m aware about whether or not my trauma is leading the way, because it’s going to stop me from being exposed to the kind of pain that I don’t want to expose myself to anymore.
Secondly, if I publish something from an ungrounded place without a clear direction, I’m not just exposing myself to more potentially traumatic happenings, but exposing my wounds with the expectation that they’re validated.
Validating me isn’t your responsibility, and if I’m searching for validation, I’m not creating with the intent to help. I’m creating with the expectation that you’re going to help me. And when I create from that place, I’m letting my open wounds bleed all over people who didn’t do anything to cause the pain that I may be feeling in that moment. And I don’t believe that it’s a very fair or kind thing to do.
While I absolutely feel that I deserve to be helped, and that every human, however they identify, is worthy and deserving of receiving the help they need, I ultimately believe that we’re the ones who are wholly responsible for initiating and reaching milestones on our own personal healing journeys. Because at the end of the day, the only person who is responsible for my healing is me. I love it when people cheer me on from the sidelines, but I’m now really open with my friends when I’m having tough mental health spouts, and I’ve learned how to become aware of what’s going on “on the inside”, and take time out to get myself back to a more peaceful and grounded place, but it’s never on my friends and family to do the work for me. Feeling at peace and moving through my own pain is completely my responsibility. In the past couple of years, however, I just happen to finally be lucky enough to have people in my life who want to help me now. But I do believe that this is largely because I have done the really tough and ugly work of learning how to be responsible for my own healing journey.
The problem with what I’ve just brought up about the importance of not bleeding on people, however, is that in the immediate moment, women are still having to operate from a state of emergency. Especially because there’s been an alarming increase in right-wing conservatism, and we’re seeing laws we fought for, ones that gave us autonomy over our bodies, reversed before our very eyes.
To give it a different set of vocabulary, we’re stuck in a reactionary place, and consistently stripped of the ability to be proactive about the future. It’s really difficult to work, create, write and recount from a place where “everything’s fine” when you’re constantly having to react, especially when it feels like the room you’re sitting in is on fire. And, because of this urgent need to react to issues like making sure that women have access to abortions again in what’s supposed to be a first world country, it reopens very deep wounds that already took a very long time to heal. So a lot of us have to be activists while we’re bleeding (metaphorically speaking).
The thing that frustrates me about this, is that I shouldn’t have to bleed on you (metaphorically speaking) to not feel so alone on this planet, and also I don’t want to because it’s really shit for my mental health. But the frustrating reality is that without exposing our wounds, the general population doesn’t seem to understand how urgent these human rights issues are for the majority of us who are forced to live through them.
So no, I don’t want to bleed on you, but that being said, I don’t want to feel like I have to bleed on you for you to take what I’m going through seriously.
TRACK TWO:
NOBODY CARES
Now, there has to be some truth to this statement, otherwise the song wouldn’t exist.
However! I realize that these lyrics aren’t entirely accurate. There are a lot of people out there who care about me, are really upset about what I’ve been through, think it’s important that I tell my story, and are proud of me for it.
It’s just that there are a lot of people out there who have enough of their own stuff going on, and I think it’s really tough to engage with every single gut-wrenching, horrifying, human right’s issue that needs and deserves our full attention. For example, at this point in time, helping the people in Ukraine and solving the energy crisis because of the ongoing war so that people don’t freeze to death in the winter, definitely takes a front seat to what it is that I’m talking about. Talking about ending rape culture on a global scale isn’t exactly a luxury we all have time for when there’s a risk of not having any culture at all because a narcissistic psychopath has his hands on a nuclear bomb that really could go off at any minute.
Speaking from experience, it’s exhausting to be so consistently engaged in political issues that are deeply rooted within religiously driven fears and oppressive beliefs. Especially when, in the world, there is still a disturbing obsession with control, money and power. And while I absolutely have a strong distaste for organized religion, I do still pray to God that things will be okay. Because at this point, when we’re living in an era in which we really could all be nuked and gone tomorrow, I feel exactly like I did that day in December of 2018, completely helpless and in need of some sort of divine miracle.
And, in this current era in which we really could all be nuked and gone tomorrow, spending our time doing fun things that lift us up and spark joy is so important. Heck, it’s my greatest rebellion to just go out and live my best life after everything I’ve been through. And that means that I’m not always up-to-date on absolutely everything that’s happening on this planet. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the issues. We all just tend to become champions of our own causes, and tend to have innocently tuned tunnel vision because of it.
I have a very delightful example of this – of innocently being a champion of our own cause.
One day, a couple of years ago, I was having a conversation with a very brave, very beautiful, very intelligent friend of mine who was awaiting the date of her confirmation surgery. And, in an attempt to showcase my solidarity, somewhere in the conversation, I said to her: “exactly – nobody just chooses to become a woman - because it isn’t an easy thing to be one in the first place!”
Ever so kindly, she corrected me, as she should have in that moment, and reminded me that she wasn’t choosing to become a woman because she was, in fact, already a woman. I thanked her for correcting me because I was grateful to be corrected. It meant a lot to me that she felt safe with me, and that I was using the right vocabulary. But not ten seconds later, she stuck her fork into a falafel, examined it, and declared: “what are these?! Space balls?!”
I laughed so hard when I recounted that moment to my Israeli-Canadian husband.
While my friend was unaware of this Middle Eastern delicacy, she tried it, and she loved it.
Nothing about that moment we shared was malicious. Just as I had made an uninformed mistake about her experience and identity, she also showcased a lack of awareness for cuisine that was outside of her own echo-chamber. But, she wasn’t opposed to trying it and embracing it. And in fact, I as will happily repeat, she loved it. Not a single moment within that interaction was silencing, and neither one of us was looking to gain power over one another. In fact, we cared very deeply for each other, and still care very deeply for each other, and it’s because of that level of caring, there was room for us to make mistakes and grow as people.
But what happens when your cause isn’t so innocent?
I often feel like 80% of the people within my following on social media is comprised of humans who helped to reinforce the idea that I was a loser (see Chapter Two). While it’s definitely a dramatic statement, and comes from a place of very deep, unresolved pain, this feeling gets reinforced when people like and comment on the “felt cute” selfies I post, but choose to say absolutely nothing about what it is that I’m doing with peaches. To be totally honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people from my past have me on mute so they don’t have to engage with my political leanings anymore. In their defense, I’ve muted some people myself, so I’m definitely not one to be throwing stones. However, given my experience in the world pre-#MeToo movement, given my family history, and given how the majority of female role models within my life have felt comfortable treating me because of the two prior givens, I have spent the majority of my life living in an echo chamber that’s reinforced the negative and silencing stereotype of “loser”. So when I hear, or more specifically, don’t hear anything from, what really is just a set of roughly twenty people, the emptiness of the lonely cavern I once lived in reverberates with a lot of intensity. So much so that I feel the vibration in my bones. And this is why “NOBODY CARES” is on my “Conundrums of the Deeply Traumatised” playlist.
Dictionary.com has two definitions for echo chamber that I want to highlight.
Traditionally speaking, an echo chamber is “a room or other enclosed space that amplifies and reflects sound, generally used for broadcasting or recording [echoes] or hollow sound effects”.
What an echo chamber has also come to mean, with the impact of social media algorithms in our lives, is: “an environment in which the same opinions are repeatedly voiced and promoted, so that people are not exposed to opposing views”. [2]
The effects of a social media echo chamber are, in my opinion, best described by Dax Dasilva in his book Age of Union:
“Algorithmic coding and its recent applications across social media and paid ad space are designed to empathize homophily – a natural tendency to associate with people the same age, background, and perspective. It also pronounces our propensity for tribalism, which, when taken to its extreme, limits our social diversity, creating dangerous echo chambers of opinion and belief.”[3]
As Dax Dasilva has so eloquently explained, living in an echo-chamber in which the majority of people share the same opinion, whether or not it’s an opinion that carries positive intent, can be a really dangerous and destructive thing, because it reinforces ideas and ideals instead of opening you up to new ones. When you’re faced with an outsider who doesn’t think or feel the same way as your tribe, you’re immediate reaction to them will be, more often than not, is that they’re bad, or that they’re wrong, simply because, whatever it is that they’re saying, falls outside of what your tribe believes to be true. And, as humans, we’re wired for survival, and in ancient times, if we strayed from the tribe it meant we might not survive. So these echo chambers can have a tendency to keep us trapped in a set of beliefs that could be limiting, hurtful, or downright destructive. So while bringing like-minded people together can be a really beautiful thing, it can also stop us from hearing other facts, opinions, and stories that would shift our way of thinking into something more inclusive, healing, and beautiful.
Another negative side effect of being in an echo chamber for so long is that when all that is being presented is information that helps you to champion your own cause, you end up being ignorant to what’s actually going on in the rest of the world.
So this power-ballad that declares: NOBODY CARES, is actually not the full truth. I’ve just been stuck in a really demeaning echo chamber. And, even though I never asked to be in it, it is my responsibility to step out of the algorithm, which, can feel like an impossible thing to do sometimes because change is really scary. And, it’s going to sound strange for me to say it, but that reverberation of “loser” became so familiar to me, that it almost became comfortable. And so it’s my responsibility to learn how to live with a feeling that’s different.
While I do recognize that the negativity and abuse that have or am currently experiencing isn’t okay or a figment of my imagination, I know that this isn’t the only school of thought when it comes to my worth as a human being. The sad thing is though, it’s very rare to be in a situation in which you’re surrounded by people who genuinely care about you. So it’s not that often that you can make mistakes or refer to falafels as “space balls”. So, because of the rarity of genuine caring on this planet, in order to live a life that’s not dictated by people who want to hold me down or hold me back, it’s my responsibility to look outside the algorithm, and, with the way things are programmed these days, it’s not the easiest thing to do. And, I have to be willing to cut ties with the people who reinforce the negative stereotypes that I’m working to unlearn about myself.
Caroline Myss, on her YouTube channel, has said that “healing is a machete” (the video is featured at the end of this blog post), and from my experience, I tend to agree with that. And that metaphorical machete (I can’t stress enough that I’m not actually talking about a real machete) is the only thing that can stop my nightmares.
And actually, this metaphorical machete has.
What I would love to say, on a positive note, is that if 20% of my online community deeply cares about me, that’s awesome! That’s a lot of people who give a heck about me and my feelings, and that is something to be excited about. And, as of this day I haven’t even hit the 1K mark in a world populated by billions of people, so my online community, at the moment, is actually really tiny and isolated.
It’s not lost on me that this song is in direct contrast to the first track on the playlist, as there is some need for validation in a track that’s titled “NOBODY CARES”. But hey, that’s why this mixed tape is called “Conundrums of the Deeply Traumatised”. If it all made logical sense, none of it would need to exist.
So I need to continue doing the work to escape the algorithm that had me, and still kind of has me trapped in an echo chamber that has the term “loser” bouncing off its walls. Besides, generally, people have a lot of their own stuff going on, and while they may want to hear what it is that I have to say, they also need a day off at the beach, or to escape reality through cartoons, way more than they need to listen to my story.
And you know what, that kind of self-care TLC is a cause I can champion.
So peaches will continue to be here, ready for whoever wants to listen, whenever they’re ready. Because ultimately, the point of this podcast is to help ensure that what happened to me doesn’t happen to another woman ever again. And as long as I keep reminding myself of that, then I don’t really give a heck about who’s listening. Besides, we really could all be nuked tomorrow.
TRACK THREE:
I’M TERRIFIED TO BE AS REAL AS I WANT TO BE
Track three is hugely impacted by the algorithm that I alluded to in track two, you know, the one with “loser” bouncing off its walls for three decades.
Let me state immediately: I don’t want to hurt the family I was born into. While I have used my metaphorical machete with a lot of them, I’m not sharing this information because I have malicious intent. Sharing my family history, or more specifically, sharing my history, is really important when it comes to understanding my perspective on rape culture, on healing, and what I believe it means to have a lion’s heart.
My last therapist, you know, the one who said “a writers room couldn’t come up with your life”, she suggested a book to me that I bought in early 2020 to help me on my journey with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which I am a big fan of, by the way. The book, for any of you who are intrigued later and want to read it, is called Reinventing Your Life and it’s by Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko.[4] This is not an #ad, and nobody has sponsored me to promote this content (although I would be open to sponsorship in the future…).
I am such a big fan of CBT because what it did was put me in the driver’s seat when it came to my own healing. You know, I finally got to hold my own (metaphorical) machete. There are a lot of other things I do to supplement my healing journey, but one thing that’s very important to me is being grounded in this real, physical world, and CBT helps me to do that. Equally as real for me are gut feelings and intuition, but, in order to heal, we have to be willing to face everything that’s happened to us and because of us on this planet so far, even if it’s not easy to look at.
Reinventing Your Life has a foreward written by a person named Aaron Beck, and the very first sentence goes like this:
“I am delighted that Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko have tackled the difficult issue of personality problems, -”
I didn’t even finish the sentence.
After that comma, I closed the book and in my next session with my therapist I more or less told her to go fuck herself. How dare she recommend a book to me that was compiled in the 1990’s by “intellectuals” who probably got each other off at key parties talking about what “interesting” human neuroses they got to psychologically examine in their offices that week?! I mean, the 1990’s gave us the world’s classiest dance music, but it also wasn’t as advanced in terms of mental health awareness.
Now, when I told my therapist to go fuck herself, please keep in mind that I had done no research on these people what-so-ever. My reaction was purely emotional. And my reaction was fuelled by my trauma. And I was being reactional because I was really pissed off. I was pissed off because I did not have a personality problem! I was dealing with being the victim of multiple rapes, and endured severe psychological abuse from my family as a very young child that continued into my teenage years, and then well into my full-grown-adulthood.
I wasn’t the problem. The people who hurt me were the problem and the problem that I had now was that I had to do all of this shitty, painful, messy “healing work” in order to undo all of the terror they had inflicted on me. How dare Aaron Beck suggest that I had a personality problem right off the bat?!
You know what my therapist did?
She laughed.
She laughed at me and then she told me to just try reading it anyway and not give the authors so much power.
I was LIVID about her response and with these (probably) sex crazed wieners with Ph.D’s.
Why wasn’t she supporting me!?
But, since she kind of made it sound like I might not be brave enough to read the book, and because I can be pretty stubborn… I started reading it. And even though I 100% stand by my criticism that it could be re-written for a 21st Century audience, and even though I don’t agree with everything they have to say - it was helpful. It is, in my current opinion, a really good book.
I even Google’d the authors, including Aaron Beck, and they all look like very sweet, good intentioned people (especially Aaron Beck, actually). That book put a lot into perspective that I needed to, in my own life, get really real and proactive about.
Healing is ongoing work that we have to be really responsible for. And we actually have to do it. It wasn’t until August of 2020 that I was finally brave enough to look at the truth of my childhood, and then the truth of my first encounters with sexual abuse when I was sixteen.
Healing, to compare it with something a bit more fun than a (metaphorical) machete, is like playing an old-school arcade game. Maybe this analogy is as dated as that book I got so angry about, but whatever, this playlist was made on a cassette tape, so it fits.
When you find a game that you like at an arcade, you put a quarter in the giant machine and you play until there is a challenge. When you get to a part that you don’t know how to play or a level you’ve never encountered before, you usually flub, and then get the “game over” screen.
Here you have a choice: admit defeat and grumble to everyone around you about how there’s something wrong with the game, or, you put in another quarter and work towards passing the level you got stuck on. I believe that when we’re ready to “level up” in life, or rather, ready to reconfigure our algorithms, we’re confronted with a new challenge. And here we have a choice: we can either run away and decide it’s the game that’s flawed, or we can cry, yell at our therapists, or complain about the authors of the self-help book we’re reading, and then stubbornly forge ahead.
It was my responsibility to choose to show up for myself, to keep playing, and to figure out this new level of healing so that I could really live the peaceful, successful existence that I’ve always envisioned for myself. But it took a lot of work, and the work sucked big time because I had to be really willing to hear things that I didn’t want to hear because of how deeply they triggered me, and badly they made me feel.
Did I actually have a problem?
…Yes, Aaron Beck, I did.
The problem was that I was deathly afraid of facing the truth of the things that I really needed to look at. It wasn’t my personality that was the problem. But the problem was affecting my personality. For instance, it’s not the nicest or gentlest thing to say: “fuck you” to your therapist, you know? So yes, I had a problem.
Here is what happened to me when I read that half sentence Aaron Beck wrote:
Since the age of three, I was a problem. That message was consistently reinforced in my familial echo chamber until I believed it and embraced it whole heartedly. So, reading that I had a “personality problem” on page one of a book that was supposed to help me feel better did not sit well with me because it brought back a lot of pain that was too difficult to look at. And because the pain was too difficult to look at, it turned into anger. But getting pissed off with some sweet old psychiatrist I didn’t know, also meant that I was handing my power over to a complete stranger, which is a problem if the end goal is freedom and peacefulness.
So, I kept putting in quarters and learned how to use my (metaphorical) machete and finally face my alligator cherry dragons. Now, when I read something in books like these, I laugh and keep going.
Healing is really tough. But if my therapist had coddled me when I was freaking out, I would never done the really necessary and important work that got me to where I am now.
And here’s the thing: she didn’t coddle me because she believes in me.
When people believe in you, they encourage you to keep going. They don’t judge you for freaking out, but they also hold you to a higher standard. When someone has high standards for you, it’s a sign of respect. And with the birth of cancel culture paired with the vortex of the social media echo chamber, I do get a bit concerned that we’re becoming too reactionary a planet, and that instead of being able to hear other opinions and points of view in order to grow proactively as a collective, we’re becoming more tribal and defensive, attaching ourselves to ideas that, while comfortable and familiar, may not necessarily be in our best interests, or worse, create a world that’s less safe for everyone to live in.
At a later date, my therapist brought up Reinventing Your Life again. She asked me if I thought I would feel comfortable going back to the book to create some goals to work towards in 2021.
My response to her, a whole year later, was: “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. I was way too vulnerable to look at it last year.”
To that she replied: “You weren’t the only one to react to Reinventing Your Life like that upon first read.”
TRACK FOUR
I DON’T WANT TO HURT ANYONE
This one particular track, to me, is a double-edged (metaphorical) machete.
This (metaphorical) machete is double-edged because even though there are people who did some really awful, horrible things to me, I’m not interested in bringing up my past, or these stories, with the intent of inflicting the same pain back onto them.
However, the truth of the matter is, there are people who did do some really awful, horrible things to me, and by not facing the truth because I’m avoiding a negative reaction from them puts their actions above the sacredness of my own being. It also just goes to show what a disturbingly powerful tool gaslighting is.
So, the truth is necessary and attacking someone is a no-no. And, like I mentioned in Track Three, we attack when we’re not actually willing or ready to see the truth.
It is also very challenging for me not to feel empathy for the people who have hurt me, because I understand on a very deep level that they are hurting more than I could ever imagine. I mean, for instance, you have to be in a very low place in your life to feel like you need to rape someone in order to get some action, or to tell your five-year-old that they’re a bad person in order to justify your alcoholism, or to tell all your surrounding family members that your daughter is a bully because the way you offered to support her wasn’t what she needed in order to make it through the upcoming rape trial she was the Key Witness in. Happy, healthy, peaceful adults don’t rape, blame a child for their problems, or try to turn their family against their own daughter.
But what I hope you can glean from this final track on the mixed tape, is that just like there is telling the truth and attacking someone, there is also telling the truth and believing that the person who did the bad thing isn’t worthy of love.
When Caroline Myss talks about the (metaphorical) machete, she’s not saying that you use it to destroy another human being. She’s saying that you need it to cut that person out of your life in one, clean shing of the blade. You don’t keep going back for more! Which is hard to do when you love a person, because you want to believe them when they say that they’re sorry (that is, if an apology even arrives). Instead, you cut the connection. But not the person. It is possible to cut someone out of your life and still have the capacity to love them, even while you’re bleeding because of what they’ve done to you.
Here is the thing – and this can be annoying to admit because having a lion’s heart is generally exhausting and thankless: everyone deserves to be loved, everyone is worthy of love, and everyone deserves a second and third and fourth chance. The second or third or fourth chance just doesn’t have to be with you. And just because someone is deserving of love and a second chance, doesn’t mean that the truth shouldn’t be told (or you know, that they shouldn’t be locked up). I love my family. But I also want nothing to do with a lot of them anymore because engaging with them is always a guaranteed traumatic experience for me. That being said, it’s my love for my family that’s what shaped my perspective on rape culture. So there are some things that I will have to share about my traumatic childhood, but it’s not because I’m looking to hurt anyone. I’m trying to make sure that what happened to me never happens to another woman ever again, and I have this feeling that by recounting some of my life experience, I might help to shift our perspectives and encourage more people to be proactive about a really urgent problem.
With that being said, I do think that privacy is very important, and that not everything should be shared. Which is why I am doing my absolute best to share things very selectively and thoughtfully, and with an intention to help leading the way.
I would like to be of service and not publish solely for my own sense of validation. I mean, I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t want some social redemption after being abandoned and treated like human garbage because of what I was going through and what I had gone through. I would love for the people who deliberately hurt me or took advantage of me while I was vulnerable to finally apologize. I would love for my family to recognize how they’ve been conditioned to treat me. I would love for all of the friends who abandoned me even though they knew what I was going through to stop pretending that they aren’t seeing my Instagram stories about this podcast. But all of that is probably never going to happen, so it’s up to me to believe in a world that could be different for myself, and it’s up to me to create it.
Which is another reason why peaches is such an important project to me.
I think it is possible to live in a world that’s more inclusive, kind, and compassionate. We just have to all be brave enough to help create it, or, to stop being assholes on the internet.
And you know what, I do believe that it’s possible for me to see this in my own lifetime.
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And that my friends, wraps up DJ Maarika’s “Conundrums of the Deeply Traumatised” playlist.
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