Written October 16, 2006

I walked into a crowded yet rural gas station-café after spending 3 weeks the summer of 2006 with my friend in her cabin in the northern Minnesota woods.  I experienced instantaneous sensory and perceptual overload.  It was not a logical reaction.  I felt like I shattered, splintered and fragmented.  I was suddenly now in a different world.  I needed a different Linda to cope with it.

It was like the ongoing ME of the past weeks was ‘a state of mind’ that could not transition into this different one, and I suffered disintegration in response to the input of ‘so many possibilities’ that I confronted once I walked in the door of this public establishment.  I could not help but react in almost panic.

It was as if every potential and possible reaction that could possibly happen consumed as much of my attention as what was actually happening at the moment I entered the room, although nothing unusual was happening around me at all.  The unusual was within my own body.  I was just as aware of what could happen as I was of what was happening.  It was as if I could notice at the same time things that might demand my attention in the future even though they didn’t in the present.

It seemed that by my walking into the café I had changed ‘their world’, and I could sense far more of their reactions than these people were probably even aware of themselves.  I do not understand how I could be that aware of what the possibilities of interactions might be, even though I only directly interacted with the cashier near the door.  It was like everything got noisy, very loud, in terms of what I could sense.  I was immediately on overload and left as fast as possible.

THAT was a disorganizing experience, the kind that I believe results from a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder.  Just because we grow into adults does not make our insecure attachments disappear.  I don’t believe it’s ‘just about’ our intimate relationships.  It’s about our whole operation as a self in the world.  I never got to build a solid, safe and secure self that can move around throughout all the transitions of life in a coherent, dependable, ongoing way.

It was as if all these possibilities of complexity triggered a transitional state for me that I could not include within my mind.  I could not narrow what was coming in to me so that I could comfortably focus on the immediate reality of the ‘place’ I was in.  Transitional states of mind are normally brief, just long enough to take in new information, assess it for value and safety, and respond appropriately.  Ordinarily this happens (in innocuous situations) so fast one does not notice that these transitional spaces even exist, let alone know that one has been passed through.

I doubt others without a severe trauma background would be aware of the ‘essence of energy’ present in that small establishment I walked into – and out of.  It was almost like little ghost selves dissolved out of all those bodies and came rushing toward me and hovered around, too close for comfort, when I walked in that door.  I was certainly noticed, stranger I was in their world.

The ghosts felt to me to be curious, pushy, forward, some of them leering.  People do have life forces and energies about them, but in our culture we are not given permission to know this.  We are supposed to ignore all but the socially acceptable versions of exchange between people that we are all supposed to be trained to recognize.

Yet because my childhood was so strange, and so altered from the ‘ordinary’, I did not learn what these appropriate social exchange patterns are really all about.  And even when I try my hardest to figure them out, that never makes me the same as people whose selves formed under far more ordinary circumstances, and this constant trying is a whole lot of work

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Our culture presumes and assumes that people are contained within the boundaries of the skin of their bodies.  Yet we are always ‘sensing’ others’ information they ‘put out’, whether we want to or not.  Most do not have to pay attention to it in their usual, ongoing lives.  I suspect for those of us whose bodies were formed during extremely threatening and dangerous conditions, our sensing abilities operate in different ways and are extremely difficult to shut off.  Just because people do not ‘ordinarily’ admit that parts of others can actually ‘journey’ outside of their bodies, communicate things and be perceived does not mean it does not happen.

It can also be very difficult for early-traumatized people to efficiently sort out the information.  It is hard for us to truly know what is important and what is not.  We were formed to be hypervigilant about ALL information, so we get more of it, have a harder time knowing what it means, and a harder time knowing how to respond to it appropriately.

Because early traumas change the formation of the body, brain and nervous system, and because we later are supposed to slide right into an ordinary life after having experienced anything but an ordinary childhood, we are exposed yet again to forms of incompatibility between ourselves and our environment.  We are as powerless to change the bigger world we live in as adults as we were to change the far narrower one we lived in as growing children.

Some of us will always be outside of the worlds that others live in, left only to imagine what their more ‘ordinary’ perceptions of being in the world is really like.  Some of us will just never know what ‘ordinary’ is.  We can’t help that.  We were formed that way.  I was dissociated from the ordinary throughout the 18 years of my childhood.  I cannot expect those patterns to disappear now.

Some things about the way our brains, bodies and nervous systems we can work to change, but we must be realistic.  I will never be physiologically the same as I would have been if the terrible abuse had not happened to me — especially so early.  My hope is that those of us with these altered bodies will begin to dialog with one another to improve our understandings of what life is like for us — especially on the level of what we cannot change and must find ways to live with.

Just because we developed in an extra-ordinary world of trauma does not make us ‘wrong’.  We had to adapt in order to survive, and we did.  The consequences are very real.  We need to know how the world is to us, and how we are in the world.  From there we can begin to dialog better within ourselves, with one another as severe child abuse survivors, and with those who were built in, by and for a MUCH nicer world than we were.

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