I still have a lot of pain from being mocked, shamed, guilted, yelled at, hit, intimidated, and otherwise punished, hurt, and traumatized when I felt afraid and asked for help early in life. Even now, that often leads to me feeling overwhelmed, freezing up, and not knowing what to do. I don’t want to fail and I also don’t want to be punished for asking for help.
Some people who constantly work with customers say they’ve gotten used to people being hostile to them. I never have, despite all of my jobs having a huge amount of customer interaction. All I’ve gotten from repeated exposure to that hostility is more guilt and shame, which makes me feel even worse about myself and makes it even harder to handle the next hostile encounter. That’s why I so appreciate the people who use a gentle approach with me, like a loving parent or grandparent would take.
This is why I still feel upset at times with how people talk to me, even in small ways. For example, I might say I haven’t watched a certain movie or TV show and someone almost inevitably responds with “You’ve never watched it?!” Regardless of their intentions, that comes across as hostile to me and can put me into fight-or-flight mode, especially when I’ve already been feeling stressed for extended periods of time. Similarly, when someone makes a point emotionally in a difficult discussion, adrenaline rushes through my body and I tend to freeze up as I think they’re feeling upset at me and will lash out at me verbally, physically, or both. This isn’t because of what they say but how they say it as that fear response doesn’t happen if they make the exact same point calmly instead of emotionally.
I have to be careful what movies and TV shows I watch when I’m feeling real bad. If I’m already feeling stressed, I don’t want to add to that stress by seeing lots of hostile, dramatic exchanges between people, even if they’re fictional characters. I’ve wished since I was a kid that there could be more works of fiction in which things go well and we get to explore other worlds without running into the same problems that exist in our world. As I’ve gotten more knowledgeable about those problems and why they exist, I often come up with solutions to problems that regularly appear in fiction; that has been useful for improving my own interactions, either by getting them back on track or by preventing them from going off track in the first place.
It’s also hard for me to avoid assuming that I’ve said or done something to upset someone close to me if they go a long time without reaching out to me or returning my calls and texts. Even though I’ve often been unable to respond to someone for any number of reasons that don’t involve feeling upset at them, I still fear the worst when I’m on the receiving end of extended radio silence. That’s why a brief message that from someone saying that they’re unable to talk for a while puts me at ease; at least then I know that I haven’t messed up and that our relationship is fine.
That leads to several of the reasons I treat other people well: I know what it’s like to be treated poorly and don’t want to make anyone else feel that way, I fear what someone will do to me if I even unintentionally treat them badly, and I hope that my treating them well will result in them treating me well. The third point doesn’t always work as lots of people have treated me poorly even after I’ve treated them well, whether I did so out of genuine kindness or out of fear. Generally, however, people I treat well also treat me well, and vice versa.
I’m still working on healing all that trauma so I can be more decisive, ask for help as needed without feeling ashamed, and no longer be subject to a tsunami of internalized negative feelings when doing something even remotely confrontational. I also want to get better at voicing my concerns early on while the problems are still small. That’s when they’re easier to resolve and less likely to result in huge conflicts. Holding my tongue out of fear only leads to mounting frustration on my part, a chance of exploding when I’ve had enough, and problems sticking around instead of being eliminated.
More than anything else, that’s why I wish everyone would heal their trauma and communicate kindly. I hate the thought of having to deal with hostile people who make me feel in danger; that wouldn’t happen if everyone worked through their issues and treated each other well. Since I’ve learned repeatedly over the past several years that I can’t make anyone else heal, be kind, or communicate effectively, I do my best to heal myself, communicate as effectively as I can, spend lots of time with kind people, and spend as little time as possible with hostile people.
I’m still having a hard time trusting people, especially new people. These days I’m mostly keeping to myself and the few people I already know and trust. Hard to do otherwise since I’ve been burned so much the past few years by people who said they loved me while consistently treating me like garbage.
Much of my time is spent avoiding the urge to verbally blast people or get into fights, especially over things that don’t matter. Though this can still be difficult, it gets easier the more trauma I heal. I find going at my own pace to be helpful. I also like to pause before responding, avoid speaking until I’ve gathered my thoughts, and steer clear of simply affirming what someone else has said without adding to it, going somewhere with it, or disagreeing if I do genuinely disagree. All of that makes me less inclined to respond or act with hostility, less interested in the egoic payoffs of a fight, better able to see peaceful paths, and more inclined to follow them.
I’ve spent most of this year working on healing all of this trauma. I still have a long way to go but I’ve made lots of progress already. It helps that I worked on some of the trauma in 2020 and went much deeper in 2021. Getting a head start before things started unraveling for me late last year gave me a big advantage. It made the end of 2021 and all of 2022 thus far manageable, even when it felt overwhelming for most of my waking days. I can’t imagine how I’d be feeling right now if I hadn’t worked through so much before 2022 started.
All this healing is even more difficult without my dog Sawyer. I don’t have my little best friend anymore to comfort me after interacting with hostile people, remind me what love looks like, encourage me to be the best person I can be, and help me be that person. I’m glad I healed as much as I did during Sawyer’s life; I wish I had done even more healing before he died. At this point, I’m hoping that my improved communication abilities will allow me to avoid most of the hostility that could arise from interacting with people who consistently choose the low road and that my increased emotional intelligence will finally let me shrug off hostility when it does occur. All I can do is my best, and my best gets a little better every day.