EDIT May 26th 2025: this post was written summer of 2024, but was never actually posted. A lot has happened since.
There’s one thing in all that I’ve written (ie. learned and discovered about myself) over the last year, that I hadn’t really touched upon, and that is emotional pain and how I (didn’t) deal with it.
How I dealt with pain (from without) that happened, how I reacted to it, and how I prevented myself from getting there (in a situation where something from without and how it could hurt me) again.
During my formative years, things happened that became “a reality” to me where I had felt unseen, unloved by my parents. Making me feel unsafe. I’m not saying that is what factually happened (in an exact timeline), but in the heart and soul of a young child, that is what obviously happened, and there’s probably some timeline expansion and condensation. What it did, however, is, it traumatised me.
Enter trauma response and coping mechanism.
My most noticeable trauma response was that I’d go silent, frozen, limp, dead… And every single time it happened, what actually happened inside me, was that I felt that – without cause – I was admonished or attacked emotionally, for having done something that I shouldn’t have, or not having done something that the other person insisted I should have.
That is a wildly different situation from the one where the other person – and me knowing and understanding they were right to do so – criticise me for something I’d done. The operative difference between the two, and how I’d react to either, worked like a decision tree, “with cause” or “without cause”.
The two clearest examples are:
1.) I lived in Italy, I was at the place my then girlfriend lived, in her parents’ livingroom, and we were browsing some of my Aardschok music magazines, and there in one of them, there was a survey I had taken (but never mailed), one of the questions was “would you like to see more Playmates in this magazine?”. Obviously you and I will first associate with “Playmates” and back then (late ’90s) it was instantly associated with what Playgot boy called their centrefold posters. I didn’t and still not blame her for making that association, but her response that followed was deeply hurtful to me, because it was – in my eyes “without cause”. She grilled me about why I wanted more Playmates, and the logical “Oh, am I not pretty or good enough for you, then?” And I totally understand it, and I’d have agreed with the grilling, and admitted my fault, if that had been the case.
But it wasn’t.
Playmates were what Aardschok called the musical instruments, technique, and gear review section.
And that is where the “without cause” comes into action. I did like that section of the magazine, and wanted more of that, so that’s what I answered.
In the discussion with my girlfriend, I never responded that way, nor did I explain my response, or the actual meaning of “Playmates” in this context.
I just froze, and blankly stared at her, not with my typical childlike Bambi eyes, but with a beaten puppy’s eyes, while she unleashed her emotional (and there may have been some punches she landed on me, I don’t remember) storm ended and she’d sent me away. They lived on the top floor of an apartment block, and her bedroom was one floor further up, with an fire exit door to the staircase. I sat down outside that door, as close to her and her bedroom as possible, for several hours, until I dejectedly carried myself home. For about a week she didn’t speak to me, and I felt like I wasn’t allowed to speak to her until she spoke to me again.
2.) After my gender affirming surgery, and my return back home, my dilation assignment got really difficult really quickly (the two weeks post-surgery, in Thailand, I had no issue at all with dliating). I had reached out to my surgeon several times already about hints and tips and tricks on how to make it easier/possible (again). While I had easily progressed from the smallest to a wider device without any issue when I was still in Thailand, and was literally one day away from progressing a yet a wider device, all of a sudden I couldn’t even insert the narrowest of them upon my return home.
Was it the temperature? (30 degrees there, 5 here), the rigidity of the mattress? The angle of insertion? A physical issue where something had shifted or grown in a way it shouldn’t? Was I perhaps overthinking it and making it more complex than it was?
( I now know better, there had been a major shift in “stress levels” between the flight and getting home, compared to the almost virtual absence of stress while in Thailand, and for me stress equalled physical tension, and in this case, tensed up pelvic muscles ).
My surgeon literally accused me of not following orders (literally referring to the promise I had to make to make sure I’d maintain depth through those dilation exercises), and that I should simply “push through the pain” and “not be scared of the pain”.
And that is where the “without cause” is again. I did not feel pain, and in contrast to what happened in Italy, I actually responded rationally, that I did not feel pain, that it was not an “I’m scared of pain”, I actually did not feel pain, I just couldnt get the device past my pelvic muscle. My surgeon insisted on me not following orders and being afraid of the pain. So he told me I was no longer allowed to contact him, and hung up.
In both cases, and anything else that semeed to me like “without cause”, I’d turn into a proverbial frozen deer mixed wth a stubborn (and in the Thailand case, self-sabotaging) donkey. And that is a very stark change from what I feel is my default energy. I’ll call it my childlike optimism and innocence and I’d love to go the extra mile, “retriever energy”, I learned about that idiom the last few weeks. But when admonished “without cause”, I’d instantly stop doing that, and even stop. Full stop.
And to make matters worse, and here is whow and where the trauma response becomes destructive. Self-destructive.
Rather than telling the person who admonished me “without cause”.
I’ll keep saying that, as it is the only case where and when this happens, it does not happen when it’s “with cause”), I would typically get into a rational word vomit debate about the verathe city or the cause. EDIT: May 26th 2025 – I now know that to be a trauma response to mask me shutting down into freeze mode. I’d shut down, then dissociated, and then mask it by pretend-fighting by using word vomit. Intense guilt and shame about shutting down, not being seen, and not being good enough were too much for me to show, so I’d pretend I’d actually be “fight”, rather than “freeze”.
That’s not cool, but I’m trying to understand that trauma response better, and for now, I notice that when I feel wronged or hurt, and that they cause me pain… I’d turn that inward instead, and destroy whatever I had built up prior to being admonished by them.
Think: “a child makes a sand castle, and is proud of what they achieved, and for some reason a person whose opinion they cherish or crave, their response to my achievement is mock or criticism… I’d then not make the castle bigger or better, or tell them to stop saying that… No, I’d go back to the castle and undo the castle. Destroy it.
There’s things I’ve wanted to tell people close to me, hurt they caused me that I believed to be “without cause”, but rather than telling them, and speak those heavy words “Hey you hurt me”, I’d just stop doing what I did.
No, those words aren’t heavy, and shouldn’t be.. But they became heavy for me. Unbearably heavy. The times that (subconsciously) I had “done” things, had caused the other to admonish/leave me, traumatise me. That trauma, and how I could or should respond became heavy, and difficult. What I subconsciously had done cause them to admonish or leave me; I’d only make that more real and definitive if I pointed that out to them, so I’d better shut up, and that way keep the door to change/hope/improvement open.
It was so much easier for me to do that. No one else to blame, or point the finger at. Only my own self-destructing and destructing myself.
It’s taken me about 40 years to – for the first time in my life say – “you hurt me”. And even then, I sort of back paddled, by making it “something happened, you were involed in that interaction, and now I hurt.”
That not-telling people I was hurting (or any other emotion, or actually telling them I am Laura) became the essential ingredient to my coping mechanism. Empirical facts, immutable laws, maxims, those were what I’d replace any words I’d want to express with. Those were always safer, because I could rationalise and argue those; and prove being “right” or at least “worthy of being heard”. I always felt deeply unheard, unseen.
Back to that “not seen, not acknowledged, not safe”, I had quickly picked up on the one thing that I did get seen and acknowledged by/with/for… My factual knowledge, my brainpower… I would counter any discussion I’d find myself in with “simply pulling another set of facts from my arsenal, to stifle and overhwelm them with”. It allowed me to not show them how much pain they caused, and how much I was shutting down. It allowed me to avoid saying “this hurts”, “I (don’t) like this”, each of those phrases potentially causing that other person to react emotionally in my direction. I could hide behind facts, and I could not be attacked for those facts because I did not make them, I simply relayed them.
