Has your trauma affected the people around you? Mine did, and here’s what happened…
About this episode: This is the thirteenth in a series of episodes that are just the start of where I plan to take this podcast. These initial episodes will give you a backstory on the journey I went through to recover from childhood sexual abuse at the age of twelve. The purpose of this backstory is to help you see how trauma affected my life and art, and to learn some of the things I did to begin healing.
I do not give any graphic details of the events.
Ripple Effects
It’s now March 2017. I feel like I’ve been living in survival mode for the past four years. So far, I’ve talked mostly about how I have been affected by trauma and addiction. But, it also affected everyone around me, too.
So the first part of the story starts with what my husband was going through. At some point I’ll have him on the podcast so you can hear this all from his perspective. For now, I’ll explain it as best I can.
My Husband’s Story
My husband has been the sole provider of income for our family of five from the beginning. He takes that role very seriously. He’s also really smart and kind of an over-achiever. So he moved up the corporate ladder quickly and provided a comfortable lifestyle for us. But it came at a cost to him. His job paid well, but was also extremely demanding and stressful. You’re probably familiar with this scenario.
Something I haven’t told you, is that the “present trauma” I’ve talked about affected him just as deeply as it affected me. I don’t know how he went to work and put it out of his mind enough to get his job done. But he did. What choice did he have? There were bills to pay.
So he’s carrying these three heavy burdens, just trying to soldier through and do the best he can…without any real help or support. Eventually, it all came crashing down on him.
Overburdened
One way to picture this is to think of sopping wet bath towels. Do you know how heavy a large bath towel is when it’s dripping wet? It’s super heavy. So imagine that all these issues are big, soaked towels being draped over my husband’s shoulders while he continues to march forward.
No one can go on like that forever! The weight he was carrying was making his sleep erratic, and at times nonexistent. He was only getting about 3-5 hours of sleep a night. This went on for months. In April 2017 he was too exhausted to work. So he used all his vacation and sick days to try and recover. He went to doctors, had a sleep study, and followed a strict “sleep hygiene” protocol.
Dr. Jekyll can’t Sleep
But his sleep wasn’t improving fast enough and his mental health continued to decline. Have you ever had severe chronic insomnia? It changes your entire personality and makes everything harder. Some things are even impossible to do when you’re that sleep deprived. It got to the point that he couldn’t work. Can you imagine building a career for over 20 years and then suddenly not being able to work? And feeling like you may never be able to do that kind of job again?
It was excruciating for him, and painful for me to watch him go through it. Especially because I couldn’t just fix it and make it all go away. I guess it’s similar to how he had been feeling about me these last few years. Maybe this shared experience was one thing we had going for us?
Suddenly, we’re living in the suburbs without an income. I was willing to work, but there’s no way I could have made enough to keep us going. And to be honest, I was still dealing with PTSD and pretty much a mess. So now we’re both barely functioning. It felt like we just kept getting knocked down by wave, after wave, after wave…
A Different kind of “Therapy”
I quit therapy when our medical insurance ran out and to stretch what little money we had to live on. But I found something that sort of replaced it. One morning, I watched a promotional video for the karate school my daughter had been training at. In the video, someone said about karate, “It helps you ask for what you need.”
I emailed the school as soon as the video was over and asked about training on a scholarship. It seemed like the worst time for me to start karate considering we had no money coming in. But I knew the school was a non-profit and offered scholarships. So I took a chance. I asked and hoped that they would be able to accept me, and they did. Without that program, I would never have been able to join.
White Belt Blues
My anxiety was through the roof when I first started going to karate. It was so scary to be new at something, especially with the instructor watching me while I tried to follow along. But it was still super fun and the community was awesome. So I kept coming back.
The first thing I learned is that karate is hard. I thought I had decent control of my limbs until I started karate. But I like physical challenges. So I was even more into it because it was hard. My favorite classes were the ones where my muscles burned and it took extreme focus to keep going. I think it’s partially because the intensity helped me forget everything else I had going on.
I Just Need Some Time
Another huge challenge was using my voice in class. In the beginning, I didn’t want to be heard. As the other students in class were doing their kiai karate shouts, I ….wasn’t. One time a teacher noticed and quietly said, “We usually kiai there.” And I was like, “Yea, I don’t want to do that.” And he didn’t push it. In fact, they let me get comfortable using my voice in my own time. And that was so important to me. One of the many effects of abuse was the loss of control over my own body. The instructors understood that, and let me go at my own pace.
Help with Anxiety
Around this time I was learning new ways to manage my anxiety. I used them every time I went to karate. Around this time, I learned about the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is fascinating and does a lot of things. So I’ll just give you a glimpse of some of them. It connects our brain to other parts of our body – like our heart and stomach – and helps regulate heart rate, digestion, and blood pressure. It also plays a huge role in our body’s sympathetic nervous system – the part that’s responsible for our “fight or flight” response when we’re under stress.
Basically, what I learned was that stimulating the vagus nerve could help me calm myself down and settle my stomach when I was anxious. I wanted relief so bad, I was like, “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
My Top 3 Ways to Stimulate the Vagus Nerve
Up to this point, I just carried peppermint oil around with me and would dab a little under my tongue if my stomach got upset. But I didn’t have anything to help with anxiety.
My top three techniques to stimulate the vagus nerve are singing, humming, and breathing. So here’s what I would do. First, I made sure I had my trusty peppermint oil for my nervous stomach. I reeked like peppermint oil at all times and I’m not even sorry about it.
Then, I got in the car, started up a playlist of songs I love to sing along to. I was belting out Patty Griffin songs like you wouldn’t believe! Her voice is really high and kind of strains my throat. But I didn’t care.
Finally, when I got there I sat in the car for a few minutes. I would slowly deepen my breath, hum a little, and prepare myself for going inside.
All of this really did reduce my anxiety. It didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous at all, but it was a tolerable level of nervousness.
An Unexpected Gift
At the end of June, I was given a once in a lifetime opportunity. My dad offered to pay for me to do a 30 day 200 hour yoga teacher training in Boulder, Colorado. The best part was, I would get to do it with my two sisters!
Now this wasn’t the best time for my husband to have me gone for that long. He was still really struggling with sleep and the stress of not working. But he knew what an amazing opportunity it was.
Calgon, Take Me Away!
A few days later, I was on a plane to stay with my sisters for an entire month. Seriously, what’s up with me getting on planes to do big things on such short notice?! The whole thing seemed like a dream!
I’ll be honest, I never wanted to be a yoga teacher. But I was interested in the training because I wanted to learn more about yoga. I also knew it involved some self reflective work and I was interested in doing that, too.
But when I got there, I was kind of resistant to doing the work. I was like, “I’ve been doing deep self-reflective work for the last 4 years! I don’t want to go back to my story again!” So it was really hard. At first, I kind of just wanted to go home. I wanted the comfort of familiarity with my house and my family.
Leading with Vulnerability
But one thing that made it easier was the two women that led the training, Shannon and Sarah. They led with openness and vulnerability and shared their stories with us. Which helped us to feel safe to share our stories with each other. All of a sudden these loose threads of our lives started to weave together.
I had never experienced that before. When I first got there I felt super out of place. As we shared and grew closer to one another, I didn’t feel out of place anymore. I fully belonged. It wasn’t because I became like everyone else. It was because I was more confident in who I was.
Cherished Connections
I really cherish my time in yoga teacher training at Earth Yoga in Boulder. All of the women were so amazing. That’s the thing with getting to know someone. At first, you might know their age, where they’re from, or their family. But as you get closer, you find out how incredible people are! All these women have such rich, beautiful stories. One woman who is an amazing musician and singer was really inspirational to me as an artist. I connected with the emotion in her music instantly. I loved how it matched the artwork I was making at the time. This is what inspired me to keep making art and put it in a series.
Going Home
In August it was time to go home. The plane ride from Denver to Austin was like going through a portal to another world. I was leaving a care free fairyland and entering back into the reality of responsibility and uncertainty.
My husband started to build a business with the limited energy he had. But, that was going to take some time. So I kept looking for ways I could help out financially. We constantly felt a sense of urgency and loss of control at the same time. We spent almost all of our retirement to pay the bills and avoid losing our house.
It felt like we were standing on a shifting fault line. The foundation we built had cracked and we were just trying to stay standing. It was fortunate that we had retirement to spend, but also super scary because we lost a sense of security in our financial future.
Inspired to Keep Going
So what do you do when your life’s falling apart? Make art, of course! I was inspired to make art by the musician I mentioned from teacher training.
Art Series
After yoga training, I felt like a chapter had closed. So I was inspired to make a series of art that told the story of my trauma recovery up to that point. I took black and white pictures of my collection of dead things and bones I had borrowed. There’s a charcoal drawing of the view from my childhood bed and the wood grain on the top of the door that looks like a claw. And then there’s the paintings I’ve already mentioned plus one more.
It’s another 9×12 canvas with more alizarin crimson and mars black. Some of the angry scribbles underneath the painting are still visible. There is the profile of a face in white and lines shooting out from there in crimson. The part I like best is this ghostly looking arm coming out of the darkness. It looks like it’s reaching toward where the neck would be.
This is another piece of art I made where I just had to get it out. I had a lot of emotions and I didn’t know how to put them in words or make sense of them. So I did it through my art.
Putting the Images to Music
The musician I met in teacher training goes by the name Dream Harlowe. She is on Spotify and Youtube. I loved her song “Moarte” so much that I started to make a video putting these images together with the song. It’s a project I never finished. I’m not sure if I ever will. Part of me kind of wants to because I could finish this vision I had. But another part of me just wants to keep moving forward. So far the “move forward” part is winning, because I only have so much time to make art. Also, those pieces meant a lot to me at the time I made them, but now I am more interested to see what’s coming next.
What are some ways you manage anxiety?
Share your thoughts below. 💬