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Yesterday was a beautiful, quiet (still) warm and gentle day, and I loved it! I could be outside working in the garden without impediment, without interference, without struggle. BUT TODAY? The sound of the raging wind against my house woke me this morning well before 5 a.m. And here I am closeted against its force here on the inside of the four walls of my house — and I hate that!
There is something different about the winds that are tormenting us down here in southeast Arizona this year. Coupled with the dryness that is also unusual, the winds bring with them clouds of dirt-filled dust and irritating pollens.
But for me? The wind is somehow MORE than ‘just the wind’. I sat down to write here because I am realizing these winds are a ‘trauma trigger’ to me because they remind me so much of my first 18 years of life with my mother!
Now darkness. One can bring light into the darkness. Too much sunlight? There are choices about coping with that, too. Find shade! Rain? There are always umbrellas and awnings. Cold and heat? There are ways we can deal with those conditions, also.
Of course any time we can seek shelter from weather conditions that are overwhelming us we can try that option. Whether we can actually locate and access such shelter might be another matter.
Extreme weather (and I have to say this wind is not THAT extreme – just chronic!) very often causes trauma to people and to the ‘environment’ it impacts.
And then there is THIS wind, this frequent fitful threatening predatory wind down here this year that howls and roars, whines, bellows and gasps, shoves and bangs and pounds and batters. This wind tosses things in the air and chases them while it shakes and tears at whatever else it can’t get loose as if to rip everything apart. It changes directions nearly all of the time. It rarely pauses. It pulses and twists and turns. It blasts the world it enters and the only way I can cope with it is to close my doors and windows and hide inside my house.
Which I HATE to do!
Yes, I myself frequently whine against these winds, but I NEVER win. I cannot fight the wind (though I have a good friend who got so mad at wind one time she threw a cast iron lawn chair at it).
But however I feel about these winds and whatever I think about them, I realize today how much these winds, THIS wind (they always seem on each new day’s attack to be a different wind with its own personality) reminds me of my first 18 years with my mad abusive mother!
There was never a way to truly escape her. Her madness permeated every molecule of the world she ruled (pretending to be nice when it suited her, becoming a raging monster when that mood suited her) just as this wind does.
This wind is NEVER quiet when it is here. While I am certainly glad it is not double or triple (or more) its strength, the way it is behaving out there is NOT nice from my point of view. And there is nothing I can do outside today in spite of its force.
So I am trapped in the house today — and being TRAPPED is exactly how I feel. This feeling of being trapped always corresponds for me to a feeling of being sick and not-well. I can still hear the wind. It has a continual presence. There is no true escape from it until it stops — and nobody can control the wind any more than anyone could control my mother!
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Stop the Storm 
God, It was as if I had found my own journal that I had just forgotten I’d written! Seriously, your every word resonates with me – my absolute hatrid of the wind, and my past in relation to my mother, who I now believe is a narcissist.
It is only recently that I have begun to link the two things – feelings towards the wind and past abuse – together, and see them as connected. Reading your post made so much sense and reinforced the idea that this is psychological, almost like some kind of post traumatic stress.
It is blowing a storm as I write. I feel like i could go insane, and as irrational as it sounds, if the wind were a person, I would be serving life by now!
Like you say, with any other condition there are ways of making it more comfortable (I could cope with weeks of rain or hot or cold), but this wind is bloody inescapable! Even indoors, it finds ways to creep in to my space and intrude… The constant banging, howling and gusting, literally, has me on edge!
You could say that I was driven to vent and try to release my tension, so I googled the words “hate wind” and found your post! It is do good to know that I am not crazy!
Amazing! Thanks for writing back — also very good for me to know I AM NOT ALONE! The wind hasn’t blown here for days, and it makes all the difference in the world. When the wind blows in the desert the DIRT finds its way into every nook and cranny — even into the cupboard under my bathroom sink, into every closet. LAYERS of it!
I have heard other perspectives on the wind. The Dine (Navajo) medicine people pray for things that need to be healed and/or understood — and then depend on the wind to blow ’cause then the medicine people go out and find revealed to them through the uncovering of the wind the answers to the questions.
I have also heard that the wind is one thing we can know blows exactly with the movements of the Will of God! That the wind is one of our clearest and purest examples of the movement of God’s Will.
Then when it comes to childhoods such as ours where we were shown the opposite of God’s Will — the overpowering, overwhelming EVILNESS of actions that happened to us because God was so completely left out of our abuser’s life — things become so much more complicated for our understanding.
At least I try now when the wind blows to think about some positive things so maybe I can separate out what does NOT belong in my life from what does.
When we were little the adults in our lives were like gods to us. They held all the power, and it was their will that so traumatized us. So in many ways inside my body powerful winds are a trauma trigger that comes from a deep knowing in my body what powerless feels like against malevolent intent and harm.
The wind does NOT intend to harm but it sure is a display of power!!
When I was 12 I went through that great Alaskan 1964 earthquake. THAT was power!! My solution has always been to live as far away from a known earthquake zone as I can manage.
Finding my own peace inside my own heart – which to me is a spiritual happening — is what I strive for every day so that nothing that happens outside of me might trouble me. A job to spend a lifetime doing, no matter what one’s formative, earliest years were like!
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Years ago someone gave me a Baha’i Prayer Book – I don’t remember who or when — but in that person’s handwriting is written something they found in the Baha’i Writings that must have been of great comfort to them:
“On the appearance of fearful natural events call ye to mind the might and majesty of your Lord, He Who heareth and seeth all, and say “Dominion is God’s, the Lord of the seen and the unseen, the Lord of Creation.” (Baha’u’llah in the book titled the Kitab-I-Aqdas -[Persian/Arabic])
My insane abusive madwoman (BPD) mother was a fearful unnatural event!!
BEST!~ and thank you so much for your comment! Linda – alchemynow