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Maybe like an astronomer who has detected an anomaly in the sky, I have my telescope trained upon the spot where this ‘irregularity’ first appeared.  I watch it hoping that someday what I learn will turn what seemed so strange into something that is just plain ordinary.

Trauma triggers are often like that for me.  Even if I can detect what the trigger actually was, I don’t usually understand how the trauma trigger and my reaction to it are even connected.  So I train my inner telescope on both the trigger and my reaction to it, hoping that in time whatever the trigger turns out to be can be made benign to me.  Maybe someday at least that trigger will no longer create any reaction in me at all.

Yet today I feel my ‘crater’ inside, my ‘black hole’ of deep and enduring sorrow.  I didn’t feel it yesterday.  Why it is resonating within me so strongly today?

As I track backwards in time (and event) I realize that what I suspect triggered my deep sorrow was not a ‘single thing’.  The trigger was actually an accumulation of experiences that I never knew were even related – until my inner telescope showed me that they WERE connected.  These seemingly tiny triggers all seem to add onto one another until – like a log jam that can grow so big it can change the course of a river – suddenly I find myself ‘somewhere’ inside of myself that I don’t want to be.

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A cumulative trigger can show me something helpful if I know how to look at it.  But this looking can be difficult when I am in the middle of my reaction to the trigger!

What I see THIS time is that as I encounter people in the world around me I am often comparing myself to them on some level I am not even aware of, and I come up lacking.  Then I begin to notice in someone else’s honestly cheerful approach to life, or in their competent management of their life and resources that keeps them from poverty, or in their ability to maintain a stable partner relationship – whatever the POSITIVE is that I detect in someone else I see myself having lost my own ground to the negative.

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As a severe infant-child abuse survivor I understand that whatever I was given in my earliest environment was enough to keep me physically alive, but not enough to allow me to gain ground in important ways that ALL non-infant abuse survivors (in particular) have.  I know enough now to translate this thought into its truest meaning:  I did have resiliency factors available to me that kept me alive, and inner ones that kept my self intact (although not integrated into my body-world).  At the same time my earliest environment of severe abuse by my mother created overwhelming risk factors that – in truth of fact – could not possibly balance themselves out with an equal ‘number’ of resiliency factors.

In other words, I was robbed of what I desperately needed to grow up as a happy, healthy infant-child.  Being robbed changed the course of my physiological development so that today there are certain abilities non-abused, non-traumatized (during their earliest years) people take absolutely for granted.

Why should it occur to these people to appreciate or be grateful for what they received as infants and children?  WE NOTICE!  We severe early abuse survivors DO NOTICE – and I suspect that we have ALWAYS noticed that other people have ‘things’ we do not have – because they were given these things just as every little person SHOULD be given them.  These ‘things’ we were robbed of (at the same time we lived in an environment of pain-filled terror) were not trivial extras.  They were essential to the growth and development of an optimal human being.

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It has never occurred to me so clearly as it has today that being around BOTH ‘optimally formed’ people AND being around sad and troubled people that were obviously deprived in their own earliest years of what they needed to grow up ‘well’ are BOTH triggers for my own grief and sadness.

I can’t go back and change what happened to me in the first critical months/years of my development that so changed the body-brain I live with.  What I want to achieve is some kind of immunity against the triggering of my deep, deep grief-filled sadness that lies within every cell of my body and that can snag me out of a day of ‘well-being’ like a gigantic fish-hook that captures me and drags me down to the bottom of the sea.

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In case I might try to take a simplistic and erroneous path toward my hoped-for goal, I have an image that appears to me every time I think I am ‘making a mountain out of a molehill’.  I see a young child, one old enough to notice, having been invited to a birthday party.  The child is left out of all the games and laughter, ignored like it is invisible.  When it is time to sit at the table for lunch and cake with the other children, who all gaily giggle with their party hats on, everyone else is served the party sustenance while this single child receives nothing (not even a party hat)!

In our culture I believe we are trained not to complain (or ‘envy’ others).  The child says nothing.  Nobody even notices what is happening.  The child experiences all this sadness, and to make matters worse it does so ALONE.

I do not wish to blame my own self for noticing the deprivations and traumas, the horrendous abuse, or minimize anything that happened to me or be ashamed to speak my own truth.  Just because very few if any people want to hear what our reality was (and is) doesn’t mean our reality doesn’t matter.  When the contrast between non-abused people and our reality as survivors strongly catches our attention – when we notice consciously or not that there is difference between us – I believe those experiences of contrast will most often trigger our trauma in our body memory.  Being as aware as possible when this is happening might be able to thwart a full-blown trauma ‘allergy’ attack in reaction to these subtle (and very common) and extremely powerful triggers.

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