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2016 Almost broke me. It triggered wounds I thought I’d healed and moved on from and presented bountiful opportunities for those that wished me harm to inflict it (and boy did they). It left me alone in a sea of red, managing the fallout of complex PTSD while living in a constant state of being triggered. I had a new husband who despite my desperate pleas and attempts to explain why that person and his support of him had me literally standing before him sobbing, was unable to offer anything but more uncertainty and a blank stare (his own traumas left him incapable, but I didn’t know that at the time). He needed me to be okay—so in the midst of my own breakdown, I told him it would be okay—that I just needed time to work through it all.
And I did—I got on antidepressants, talked to a therapist, even went to a retreat for women leaving narcissists that quite frankly saved me and helped me put the pieces together for why I was so triggered by the election of our 45th president. Understanding and healing are two vastly different things, but with understanding, you can give yourself space to heal. And that’s what I did. For two years I poured myself into making changes locally. I attended the Women’s March in DC, became the Chair of the local Democratic Party, attended the TX State convention in 2018 and was ALL IN for Beto when he nearly beat Ted Cruz for his senate seat.
In 2019, after my kids had both graduated from high school, we moved out of the small Texas town where I had been living and fighting one of the ugliest most hateful group of republican women you will ever meet. I needed to get out of the town for many reasons—there were too many painful triggers and I was ready to move on. In 2019 we moved to Arkansas.
And then comes 2020. When we first moved to Arkansas, I spent the better part of the first year hermitting in my office. I worked from home all day and would spend the evenings in my studio painting. I enjoyed living somewhere no one knew me and I could go to Walmart without seeing anyone that wanted to talk to me. When Covid came around, I felt like I had been preparing for it all year. It hardly made a difference in my daily life.
Except 2020 was also an election year and it was a big one. I was feeling a lot of the same stress and triggers that I’d felt in 2016, with the addition of the Covid stress. My husband was just as ill-equipped to deal with anything but a happy wife that was taking care of everything. His oldest son was living with us at the time and was old enough this time around to understand how to use it all to hurt me (well, I also explained it to him in an attempt to get him to have some humanity about it—to no avail). In addition to having zero capacity to support me and my emotional needs, my husband at the time had zero capacity to hold his son accountable for his behavior or treatment of me and once again, was complicit in watching others do me intentional harm.
About that same time, I read a book called Hollywood Park, by Mikel Jollett--a beautiful memoir that opened up the conversation about childhood trauma—and specifically about how it affects us as adults, and how lack of emotional needs being met is a kind of trauma. More healing and understanding.
But more healing and understanding also brought about the realization that my husband was never going to be capable of giving me the emotional support that I honestly had never had.
I had to step away for a minute. Typing that last sentence really struck me. I have spent 24 years—almost half of my adult life in marriages that took and took and offered nothing in return. I had never been in a healthy, mutually emotionally supportive relationship. The first was incapable and abusive about it, the other just incapable.
Leaving my second marriage was in some ways harder than the first one. He wasn’t a bad person and I know that he loved me. I also know that because of his own traumas, he wasn’t capable of accepting the love I gave him back, and he had demonstrated again and again that he desperately needed me to make everything okay—even if it meant doing it alone. I finally decided that if I was going to be doing it alone anyway, then I was going to do it alone. Carrying the entire emotional burden of a relationship and its ebbs and flows, in addition to all the household and daily life things for a family of people that give absolutely nothing in return is not a way to live. I told him again and again as he told me that “No one will ever love you like I do” that it didn’t matter if anyone did because I loved myself enough to not need someone else to do it for me.
As we approach another election, I’ve found myself falling back into different stages of the cycle above—triggered, worried, despondent. I’ve also had a very traumatic experience at work that has me understanding PTSD in a whole different way (yaaaayy??), and how that experience has reopened all the previous wounds at a level that is way deeper than just under the skin: You are alone. No one is here to help you.
But I’m not alone this time. I am in a committed relationship with my person—the person my soul recognized immediately 30+ years ago on a crowded two-lane highway somewhere along the coast of California (it’s a crazy love story, really, but for another time). He’s not perfect and we’re not without our issues. The difference is that he’s willing to try to do things differently. He’s willing to try therapy. He’s willing to look at his own very traumatic past and try to understand why he responds and feels the way he does—so that he can change the dysfunctional dynamics that have played out his whole life as well. We both have to be willing to listen, to communicate, and to be vulnerable with each other when our natural trauma-driven responses are to run away, or shut down.
My dude voted for 45 in 2016, but not in 2020. He has considered himself a republican for most of his life. I think mostly he hates the two-party system, but he also recognizes that there’s a lot at stake this election—and he knows how deeply personal and triggering all of it is for me.
As I sat here in my office watching the first night of the DNC last night, I thought about the contrast of me standing in front of husband number 2, him staring blankly at me while I’m sobbing, telling him about being literally grabbed by the p#@y and begging him not to vote for that man—and last night: sitting at my desk watching with tears of hope and an enthusiasm for the future that I haven’t felt in 8+ years, while my partner in life sits behind me on the world’s most uncomfortable futon, clapping for Joe Biden.
This hope that I’m feeling isn’t just about the election or even my personal relationships. It’s about shifts in our ideology and country that have been a long time coming. It’s about healing and growth that starts with us and bleeds out into the world, genuinely making it a better place.
Life is such a crazy ride. Don’t waste it chasing relationships with people that aren’t capable or willing to recognize their trauma responses and do the work.
Do your own work--create your own safety and love yourself enough to accept nothing less than whatever it is you need. I promise you're worth it.
Me and my dude, circa 1991
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