treading lightly
The limits of relational work in the context of historic and ongoing trauma. March 11, 2024.
This is the first piece I ever wrote that was specifically intended for this then still-gestating blog! I’ve been drafting it on-and-off for over a year; even now, I have caveats and expansions and rebuttals to some of what I’m saying. I am proceeding with the trust that this space can allow all of these contradictions and continuations to exist, whether written explicitly or not. I’m excited to see how my thoughts continue to unravel. Thank you for being here.
The original title was “The Economics of Being Triggered.”
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[General trigger warning—both for my writing below and the texts I link to—for overwhelming emotional experiences, childhood abuse (including sexual) and neglect, gendered language, patriarchal oppression, and time-limited conceptions of trauma.]
part I. economics
What does an emotional flashback or trigger feel like? What does it cost?
When I am triggered, I notice increased sweating, urination, bowel movements, and heart rate. I am awash with racing thoughts, fidgeting, trembling, muscle tension, and decreased enjoyment and motivation. Everything is moving fast-fast-fast:
My adrenals are hard at work pumping out more cortisol, trying to equip me to tackle whatever threat my heart and spirit are perceiving. My gut is clocking out of work early, telling the nutrients that still need to be absorbed by my bloodstream to fuck off because we’re at war. My brain is busy beating itself up for not being able to redirect its attention to the productive tasks of income generation that would allow me to survive capitalism, because, again, we’re at war.
Such is life with complex-PTSD, I can be triggered into a flashback for hours, days, and weeks at a time. Over time, these shocks-to-the-system cost a lot of resources—not least of which is money.
It costs money to buy the herbal teas and supplements and nutrient-rich foods that help bring my body back into a state of balance.
It costs money to seek out acupuncture and massage and energywork.
It costs money to put the gas in my car to take a drive to the park that has the trees I want to talk to.
It costs money to repair or replace the broken headphones that would allow me to tune out the outside world when I need to.
It costs money to fix the battery of this laptop which allows me to stay connected to the online friends who get it and won’t judge me.
It costs money to pay the therapist who uses a modality that actually works for my mindbody.
It costs money to be in reciprocal relationship with the traditional healers I want to thank for giving me medicine.
It costs money to miss a day or two of work because I cannot get out of bed.
This might seem myopically individualistic—why not rely on mutual aid or barter? Why not seek other solutions from your support network? Why not reach out?
Money is certainly not the only resource that emotional flashbacks can eat up, nor is it the only resource that will provide a solution. There are also the costs of mental and physical energy that are quickly depleted in heightened states like trauma triggers:
It costs energy to think my way out of my nervous system enough to be able to devise other creative solutions, such as “reaching out.”
It costs energy to will myself out of shame.
It costs energy to devise the communication necessary to alert my loved ones of my suffering—to even decide that the alert is worth the cost.
It costs energy to discern what I “need” and to ideate the ways that others can help meet those needs.
It costs energy to brainstorm, itemize, delegate, and follow up.
It costs energy to will myself out of bed, to eat, to bathe, to get outside.
These are not negligible costs. In big enough increments, they can greatly impact overall quality of life due to there being limited energy left over to simply exist—let alone to pursue nourishing interests, relationships, and spirit pursuits for pleasure’s sake.
Even more, for those of us with wonky reward systems, chronic emotional flashbacks and triggers can fuck up our ability to actually feel joy from the hobbies and feel-good activities we’ve worked so hard to find our way back to. In a lot of sick mindbodies like mine, triggers are extremely costly.
part II. considerations
Given these costs, I don’t think that we should take our emotional engagements with others lightly. I think that nuance and strategy are meaningful complements when we find ourselves simultaneously in recovery and pursuing relationships of all kinds.
Helpfully, there is more public conversation about the importance of lifework skills like self-advocacy, conflict management, and emotional intimacy with self and other. Black lesbian and queer feminist writers like Audre Lorde (see essay “The Uses of the Erotic”) set the cultural foundation for this shift.
For a lot of my political life, I placed a political and moral premium on one’s willingness and competence in these areas of “emotional maturity.” When I was 19 and in my all about love (bell hooks) era, I was literally all about love. I was so pro-relationship, pro-vulnerability, pro-willing. Which is great. But I started realizing the complicated mess of this whole thing called relating. I realized that I was often unconsciously relating from a place of impulsivity and projection due to my underdeveloped and traumatized sense of self. I also realized how these illusions were inseparable from and exacerbated by my internalized antiBlackness, colorism, ableism, allegiance to desirability politics, and amatonormativity.
The start of the pandemic is what really kickstarted my journey in investigating more deeply how and why I was relating to others in the ways that I was. It no longer felt viable to continue giving myself and receiving the selves of others without having established more of a baseline of emotional safety, discernment, and an awareness of my and others’ accommodations as they pertain to emotional disabilities.
I do still believe that a critical willingness and creativity in how we relate to others will greatly help our ability to halt antiBlack colonial cisheteropatriarchal ecological devastation.
But it’s going to be hard.
Late stage fascist capitalism is greatly depleting our emotional, spiritual, and cognitive reserves which would allow us to reliably hold tenderness for each other, communicate our needs, and be present for repair. I think that many of us also have right reason to be wary and distrusting of each other, especially given the widespread social abandonment demonstrated by the pandemic.
Today, I’m a lot more interested in what it looks like to build our relational capacity first within ourselves, to develop communal practices of trust-earning, and to dream up different ways of “being in community” (like with non-humans, for instance) that honor our various abilities and levels of interest in that project. I think that we also need to have a serious conversation about stigmatized “mental health disorders”— the ones that make us “anti-social” and wary of people. I feel like there isn’t much room to talk about that, or at least I’m still finding it. But I’m seeing more of this topic come up in Mad and neuroaffirming spaces and I’m excited for where that will take us.
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wondrous eyes is an experiment in narration written by a Black queerLesbian multitude. We are (re)birthing ourselves through the thresholds of disability, isolation, and hindsight. We are currently learning from trees, tales, and past experience. You can find more of our expression on Instagram @ wonderworld.lab