The Sometimes Horrifying Truth

Ever been faced with a situation or reality that you didn't want to believe to be true? Almost all of us have at one point or another. The severity of the situation may vary in degrees of intensity. However, the sense of intensity and the impact of traumatic events are generally very relative to the affected individual or people. The majority of my trauma exposure was considered to be secondary from my work environment (13 years of bedside care in the Emergency Department.) It is well known that chronic exposure to trauma can also make a lasting impact or have accumulative or long-term effects. Frontline workers such as first responders, law enforcement, hospital personnel, and others experience this consistently and many have, may need to, or should receive professional assistance with dealing with the very real consequences of their line of work.

Sadly, many of us don't seek help until crisis hits or our symptoms that were once more easily masked start displaying themselves in more obvious ways. We are used to providing a necessary service to humanity, not being the recipient of one. I hope this is a reality and mindset that will change at some point. One way I feel like I should attempt to use my voice is to share about a few times in particular in my life when I didn't speak up and should have sooner.

Another unfortunate reality about us "service-based" type is that we are used to being the one that is strong, relied upon, and able to keep "our cool" under difficult circumstances. Although that is generally not a bad trait to possess, it sometimes puts us in a more vulnerable position in our personal lives where boundary lines are not as clearly established as they usually are in our professional settings. (Don't get me wrong. I don't think our professional settings provide us adequate support sometimes either!) However, the more I hear the stories of co-workers and those in similar fields of work, I find that my story of home-life trauma, destructive behavior, and even abuse, is much more common than I once knew or would want to believe.

Especially when you are educated, hard working, and naturally caring, it's really difficult to accept that you may have ended up in a relationship that doesn't reciprocate the same values and character you offer or attempt to provide in almost all your relationships, but particularly, your most intimate ones. Accepting a reality that you never imagined possible is tragic. Victims or survivors of abuse/domestic violence often live in denial for years before getting out, if they ever do.

Afterall, it is natural to want to do everything in your power to make the outcome different than it is or seems to be. You cling to hope that it won't stay that way forever or find ways to justify the destructive behavior because, afterall, it's not ALWAYS PRESENT, and you know it WILL GET BETTER AGAIN. (At least that is exactly what you have to tell yourself in the hard moments to keep yourself motivated to keep functioning generally.) That process is part of what enables the cyle of abuse.

However, even when you know the signs and can educate others on what to look for or how to get help when undergoing something similar, I can attest to how unbelievably challenging it is to embrace taking those steps for yourself. It's utterly soul crushing and was unfathomable to me for several years. It wasn't even until I was fully removed from the environment of chaos and frequent crisis that I could even identify clearly what I had embraced as "normal" circumstances and standards of my mostly miserable existence. It was obviously not "ALL BAD, ALL THE TIME." No one can handle that. But most of us in this type of sitution become masters of navigating the somewhat constatnt turbulence and find ways to minimize the frequent discomforts.

Many undergoing abuse find themselves turning to substance abuse or other addictive or unhealthy habits as a means of coping with or numbing the seemingly neverending misery that is their daily existence. This clearly isn't an overly helpful solution as it often backfires, and the abuser uses those behaviors as something they can attempt to hold over your head or maintain control with. The sad reality is that none of those habits or less than ideal coping mechanisms were apart of your life until the toxic relationship dynamics were. Or maybe some of them were to an extent but not to the extreme that it may have become. You really just needed an outlet for easing the pain and the fear of someone finding out about what your life turned into or who you are afraid you became.

When you've been entangled in that messy, sticky, foggy place for too long, it gets increasingly difficult to determine what happened or what things were results of which behaviors because there is a good chance the mess gradually worsened with time, making it even more difficult to decifer what happened and how you got there. (At least, that's how it was for me.) It became my norm to assume I was the cause of my own discomfort (and sometimes I was), but that was clearly not the whole picture. At the end of the day, only YOU can take responsibility for your OWN behavior. That is ultimately what helped me get FREE.

I became aware that, despite the help, counseling, and support I was finally seeking (and had been for 3+years), I was going to have to make choices I never wanted to consider making to ensure I didn't stay the person I became, barely recognized, and detested with a passion. I already knew I couldn't change or control my spouse, but when I started having difficulty controlling myself and my behavior toward him (and sometimes my kids), I knew I had reached the point that required much more drastic action.

It will probably still be awhile before I feel ready to publicly share too many details of what steps I took to change the tradgectory of my future and, ultimately, the future for my children and our family life/dynamic. The details are not always the most important part in the story anyway. It's the lessons learned and the impact you may be able to have in the lives of others (possibly still trapped in devestation) by being unashamedly honest about the process of brokeness and deterioration that occured along that way. Regardless, I'm abudantly grateful to be in a different place now and determined to share more of my journey with others who are still grappling with what might be "the horrifying truth" in their lives.