I’m tired of shutting people out. I’m tired of cutting people off. I’m tired of ghosting people. I’m tired of people ghosting me. I want relationships where we work through the hard stuff. Where we are committed to each other even when we fuck up and say hurtful shit.
How can I do this? How can I revolutionize my relationships? Can I step away from the blame for a goddamned second?
How do I stay in relationship when things get hard? My trauma—in all its wonderfully protective facets—screams “Run run, run!!!” at the sign of any kind of conflict.
Despite the yelling and screaming, I’ve really been trying to stay. It doesn’t always pan out. But I’ve really been trying to not run.
Maybe I can linger with this fear a little bit longer. What’s this fear here to tell me? I’ve been trying to lean into some curiosity with this spikiness, these surges that come and go. What’s going on there?
All too often, I’ve simply refused to engage with people who trigger this intensity in me. This applies to places too. Oof, that didn’t feel good. I don’t really know why. But I’m not going back there. That person really sets me off in a weird way, I don’t know why, how can I avoid them at all costs? How can I construct my life to avoid any kind of discomfort?
But the control becomes exhausting. It also fuels this idea that I am not capable of dealing with the discomfort. What if I went through my life with the confidence that I could handle it? What if I didn’t fuel the anxiety of avoidance by planning out my routines and relationships to avoid discomfort?
I’ve been experimenting with stepping into the scary territory of asking for what I need and advocating for myself. These things were never afforded to me in my childhood. I often think of a line that I heard on a podcast once: “Whenever I ask for something that I need, I feel like I have to go take a walk.” These things may seem simple on the surface, but they feel like huge landmines to traverse when growing up in a house like I did.
What was this home like? Enmeshed, codependent. What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours. We tell each other everything. When I am upset, you are to blame. And then you have to make me feel better. There is no accountability for emotions, no responsibility for self-regulation.
I was held accountable for the emotional reactivity of my Mom—that deeply entrenched activation she’s carried from years of trauma and abuse. I was held liable for her feelings, her overloaded responses. The reactions were so huge, a culprit must be found for their emergence. Someone needed to be blamed.
And that person was me. The fits of rage were too scary to look at. She didn’t have the tools to be interested in understanding them, anyway. The easiest thing to do was to find a simple reason for why she felt the way she felt. And that reason was me, or my brother, or my Dad.
The trigger could be something small: the way I said a word, the look on my face, how I entered a room. And then she was off. And once she got going, there was little we could do to wind her back down. The cat was out of the bag. It now was up to me, my brother, and my Dad to placate her in whatever way we could.
Because of this, I was not allowed to have emotional needs of my own. All of that attention was diverted to my Mom. I was not allowed to have agency. I was not allowed to have boundaries.
If I tried to speak up for myself, that would only make it worse. It became clear that I would always have to kowtow to my Mom to restore the emotional safety of the home. Everything was sacrificed for this stability.
And that’s why relationships are so fucking hard. My initial understanding of connection, intimacy, and conflict was all fucked up. Conflict was never constructive in my home. Conflict was never safe. Conflict was a weapon to wield. Conflict meant yelling and screaming and the silent treatment. Guilt-tripping. How could relationships ever be easy?
But what else is there to do? Spend my entire life isolating, controlling, trying to fasten myself into a 100% safe and secure container at all moments? An impossible, exhausting task. And a setup to make me feel even worse when my best laid plans inevitably go to shit. Because life will always be messy. Relationships will always be messy. Community will always be messy. But I’m here for it. I’m not running away from the pain and the conflict anymore. Because buried deep inside, I know that’s where the greatest tenderness lies.
About the author: Jaime Lazich is a freelance writer in Seattle, Washington writing mostly about gender and also healthcare and whatever sparks their fancy. When not writing you can usually find them doing improv or walking a dog.
Connect with Jaime on Instagram at @jamplesjamples.