Explorations of Terror (Trigger Warning: Medical and DV terror ahead)

This week I had my first colonoscopy. It's something I've been needing to do for a few years as my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer about 5 years ago, and I was having some concerning symptoms. I...explored the idea of getting a colonoscopy back then, but wasn't super excited about it and my PCP was a bit on the dismissive side when I tried to bring my concerns up, and that was enough to slide in to the pit of...I don't know. Like most people I'm just not super excited about anything that is a colonoscopy; the prep, the having a stranger shove a tube up your butt, all the potential risks associated with anesthesia and the procedure, but then I also had my own Dr Nassar when I was a youngster to add a nice heap of trauma on top of that shit sandwich. Fortunately, while chatting with a friend recently she told me about her very positive (?) experience with her MD, and since I had some other invasive tests I was avoiding I thought I'd distract myself by taking care of a test I would be unconscious for. 

When i arrived at the site and they were taking my vitals I made an interesting observation. Usually in times of intense distress/terror (including/especially medical shit) my blood pressure and heart rate drop, but when I went in for that morning they were both elevated...so apparently I switched out of my usual "freeze" response, and into "fight" or "flight", which makes me think perhaps I'm shifting out of pure hopelessness/powerlessness as my auto-response to perceived threats. Although medical shit still is equated with trauma and terror, I'm responding differently, so even though it feels like I'm merely treading water in therapy I am apparently moving forward.

Speaking of terror...I have an old blog back there somewhere where I talked about discovering that the un-identifiable emotion that I struggled with when I approached my trauma in therapy was terror. One might think that identifying terror should be pretty easy, but I had this bias that it couldn't be terror because my life wasn't in danger. Even now as I'm exploring a mine field that I have kept buried for almost 30 years that belief that "terror" must equate "life in danger" keeps interfering with getting a handle on this shit. Specifically, "I wasn't afraid for my life so I wasn't "terrified" enough to justify freezing, I wasn't terrified enough to justify not fighting back harder"...so it was all my fault.

This is still an incomplete thought but I was thinking about terror and how there's also this thought that terror for me can only be associated with real potential severe bodily harm/death from physical violence...not a half-assed threat of physical violence, but actual physical violence. (the funny thing is that I don't really fear physical violence...I kind of get a delightful adrenaline rush from it-i hate the confrontation and conflict of it, but I love the actual violence, the fighting). As I was thinking about this, this memory popped into my head: I was about 14 and my sister was over with her husband, and he just flipped out with no warning, threw her in the chair, pinned her, and was cocking his fist back to beat the fuck out of her again. She was terrified (maybe that's why I can identify my own terror in that moment), and telling me to call the cops, and he was looking at me with his crazy-rage eyes telling me not to, and I froze. Good news, he got himself under control before he struck her. But I did nothing; I was frozen by my terror, by his uncontrolled rage, the conflict, and perhaps the fact that he threw her around so easily (my psycho sister who EVERYONE is afraid of).  I wasn't afraid for *my* life, but I was legit terrified, and I don't question that terror.

Family: Age 7, part 1

We were isolated, living in the vast emptiness of the ND prairie-no friends, no play ground to escape to, no crowds to disappear in to. My father was melting into his alcoholism-most of his day was spent away from the house hiding his drinking, and when he was home he was nearly comatose from his non-stop drinking. My mother although she hadn't had her first mental-health hospitalization of my life-time, I already knew that her emotional state was on a delicate balance between volatile and fragile, and any false move on my part was not acceptable. My half-sister, was just volatile...she loved you, or she wanted to "FUCKING KILL YOU!!!" Her chaos ruled our house. Her screaming flip-outs, the running away, the going to The Social Workers and telling fantastical tales furthering the family need for secrecy. The chaos that was her, and the chaos that she created in the home was enhanced by her diet-pill addiction that would leave her sobbing and waling incoherently as she cut a path from bathroom to kitchen on her knees. She would laugh in your face when she hurt you, because she truly found delight in doing so. My half-brother was my closest ally, my protector when my sister was at her worst, but just as emotionally unavailable as the rest. And there was no respite to be found outside of the home. I was drowning in shame. I was in tormenting pain. A pain I had to hide, I pain that I had to bear alone. There was no place to be safe. There was no place to let my guard down. There was no place, and no one to provide solace. How did I bear it? How did I carry on? How did I survive?