© HBO / Last Week Tonight, 2025
Trauma: hypervigilance to keep everything and everyone (read: me) safe, turned into a highly coveted skillset
Core wound: I am not good enough, I am not worty, I am unseen/unheard
Yesterday, on my way to therapy, I listened to the Last Week Tonight episode on air traiffic controllers. John Oliver talked about how the USA has experienced a bunch of near-catastrophic accidents in recent times, and how the one safeguard in this is how well air traffic controllers can do their work.
As John succinctly explained how much of a stressful high stakes environment air traffic controlling is (please watch the video, I can not do justice to John’s description, and the bits where he directly quotes actual air traffic controllers), I felt a very warm fuzzy feeling “yeah, I remember that for years and years, I wanted to do that job. I’d have been amazing at it. All the stress, all the needing to plan 50 steps ahead while herding feral cats. Bring. It. On.”
And then, it struck me, how traumatised must I be that I’d see that job as…. of all of the things I could have felt and found… “fun”?!?!?!?!
How on earth would a human being willfully and joyfully choose to work in an environment where each single “oopsie!” could mean hundreds of casualties, but then deal with dozens of these potentially catastrophic situations simultaneously, every minute of the day, every day of the week?!!?!
And there I am, thinking that’d be a fun job!
I now recognise the hypervigilance, the perfectionism, the need for control, the “fixing of other people’s problems”, and ignoring my own boundaries for what they are. Trauma responses and coping mechanisms.
I tried to save myself, and maybe I managed to, but I still got hurt. Or, and I think that is the more honest version; without my harsh inner critic – I got hurt despite me doing my very best to stay safe.
So, I defaulted to, let’s do this game again, but without training wheels now, in boss level mode.
