Trauma made me an asshole

As a child, I was mostly silent.  Even as a baby, or so the family lore went.  “It was creepy, you’d never even cry,” said my mother.  But I did cry.   As I got older and my anxieties grew and my destiny as an everywhere outcast confronted me.  I cried a lot.  I was anguished, often thinking of death and making complicated plans of escape to live in solitude before I was even ten.  There was never any place I could be safe unless I was entirely alone.  Everywhere I went, I was singled out and bullied.  Adults would often talk about how weird I was right in front of me.  My family was even worse, home was often the worst place for me.  In first grade, the school noticed I’d mostly stopped speaking and spent my entire day staring out the window, dissociated.  I would just look blankly at the work they wanted me to do and did not socialize with the other kids. 

At first they tried to put me in the Special Education class, but once they gave me intelligence tests they realized I didn’t belong there.  I was evaluated by a psychologist and given a diagnosis of “delayed social development.”  This was the closest I was going to get to being diagnosed with Autism; something which was thought to impact IQ at that time.  Asperger’s was not yet in the DSM, and anyway everyone thought that was just for boys.  It would be years before Autism was understood to be on a spectrum that included high functioning people.    I was set up with a teacher’s aide who worked with me independently in her tiny office for a few hours each school day.  I still recall the two years I spent working with her, and her understanding and reassurance as some of the most bittersweet and tender memories of my childhood.  In our last session, she looked at me and told me confidently, “There is nothing wrong with you.  You think differently, you think in metaphors.”  This moment stands out to me as one of the only times in my childhood that I was ever viewed with approval and understanding.  It still makes me cry to think of it. 

As time went by and the world continued to assault me with the information that something was terribly wrong with me and they did not like it, I began to realize that I had to change.  I adopted a persona.  My father, a violent, angry man who seemed to fear nothing and who the whole world revolved around, became my model.  All of my hopes hardened to anger.   I figured out that having people hate me for being a sarcastic smart ass, for coldly tearing them down before they could do it to me was preferable to being a constant target.  I went on the offense.  I became a character.  I embraced my role as an outsider with a new fervor; actively avoiding people because I thought they were stupid.   I stopped trying to get the people who hated me to like me and instead I started giving them something to hate me for.   

The persona I adopted served me well.  People learned quickly that if they tried to attack me that they would not be having a good time.  This did not stop people from avoiding me and hating me, though.  Multiple times I was the target of pranks where boys would pretend to like me only to try to humiliate me publicly later.  In high school, the boys would follow me down the halls, barking like dogs.  At the beginning of my Junior year, there was an unofficial poll passed around ranking students and I won Ugliest Girl.  Even then I knew I wasn’t really unattractive and that this was about something else.  I retreated inside myself and spent my days repetitively tracing around my fingers with the opposite hand in a steady rhythm, soothing myself.   I found a secret hiding spot behind the auditorium where I could hide all day, reading books.  I skipped as many classes as I could get away with that way, trying to avoid the constant assault of noise, lights, talking and derision. 

By the time I went to college I had a reputation for being mean.  Most people who knew me hated me.   My goal became to deserve it.   Shrouded in anger and an avoidant attitude, I carefully shielded my vulnerability.  If people hated me, I hated them more.  And I hated them first.  I had friends - mostly guys - who liked me because I was smart and funny and had diverse and unique interests.  But I was well known for being difficult to like.  I embraced it.  Because I didn’t understand my introversion and how overstimulated I would become from associating with people, I constantly pushed my limits and tried to socialize like everyone else.  The result of this is that I’d inevitably become aggressive and weird.  The truth is, I deserved to have people not like me.  

There were people who knew me differently.  In my early twenties I got into a relationship with a guy I’d known since my teens.  He was always perturbed about the persona I put on.  “I don’t understand why you act like this,” he’d say to me.  “You aren’t really a mean person, I know you’re not.  So why do you act like this around other people?”  I could not explain to him that I had to reject them first.  I had learned.  Eventually he fell out of love with me because at the time I was in freefall, controlled by the runaway train of an eating disorder, panic attacks and constant burnout and depression.  He couldn’t stand to be around me and I knew it.  One day I asked him casually if he’d rather we went back to being friends and he jumped at the chance and then as soon as I went to sleep on a friend’s couch to figure out next steps, he got into a relationship with another woman from our friend group.  Someone much nicer and more social than me.  

Life went on like this.  I eventually married a man who knew how to manipulate my weaknesses while exploiting my strengths and it took me many years to see I was barely surviving it.  He frequently pointed out that people just seemed to hate me on sight.  Early in our relationship he told me that he could tell that my entire friend group actually hated me.  This was a ploy to isolate me, leaving me with nothing but him, but I did not see that for a long time.  The truth was, he was right.  My friends truly did not like me much, and as I slipped away increasingly no one batted an eye.  I just disappeared and I did not replace that friend group.  I became more and more solitary, with nothing but work and my home life.  

At work I was also always an outsider.  I was disliked and excluded.  Always among the first to be laid off, regardless of performance.  I never had the ability to network and even when I learned to communicate more diplomatically my signature blunt and direct style constantly enraged people and isolated me.   I could not figure out why people felt so comfortable antagonizing me.   One time, when the office was temporarily housed in a cramped space while our floor was being demolished and redesigned, I took an internal call from someone who was tense and upset that they could not get something they wanted from me.  Because we were all crammed in together, the entire office could easily overhear.  At one point, the person on the line was yelling at me and making threats to go over my head to get what they wanted.  My tone was controlled and firm, and I had to speak above the yelling to suggest that we sidebar the conversation.   A team manager (not mine) overheard me take this phone call and hearing me speak somewhat loudly over the yelling he became infuriated.  In front of the entire office, he angrily stood over my desk and confronted me about “poisoning the environment with my bad attitude” and demanded that I explain myself to him.   This kind of thing happened somewhat frequently.  

But the thing is, I maintained the persona.  My otherness could not be hidden and so I armored myself, instead.  The fact that I would not be bullied and I would not be sad seemed to be the worst for other people.  I got the sense that if I’d just cry or capitulate that they’d feel satisfied.  But I never would.  I never let them know that I was bothered and I always had a biting comment ready.  As a result, no one ever advocated for me.  My own managers at work would coach me on “being nicer” when confronted with an entire team openly trying to sabotage my work and reputation.   At the end of the day, really everyone agreed that I deserved it.  

Eventually after the birth of my son and years of attempting fertility treatments to have a second baby, the extreme anxiety and depression I’d experienced all of my life spun out of control and I found myself having constant panic attacks and erupting into rages.  I began to see myself and realized that the imagery and script I’d been running in my head nonstop for years were actually flashbacks and suicidal ideation.  When I thought about it, I acknowledged that the only thing keeping me breathing was my obligation to my son.  And I knew that if I could reason my way out of that argument, that there’d be nothing to keep me from ending my life.  I could not leave my son with that burden and this was my sole motivation to get some help and turn my life around.  

I was diagnosed with PTSD, then had that revised to CPTSD.  (CPTSD is technically not in the DSM.)  I didn’t want to take SSRIs and researched alternatives.  I was hoping to avoid therapy, which at the time I didn’t really think I believed in.   I didn’t really think anything would change but I wanted an end to the crushing anxiety and depression.   And so I pursued at home Ketamine treatment therapy.  I found a medical practice that took advantage of COVID remote health exceptions.  The doctor trained me on how to use Ketamine at home, how to get the most out of my sessions.  His wife, who functioned sometimes as one of the remote coaches, inspired me with her own recovery story and taught me how to make an affirmation to keep myself calm.  “All is as it should be,” she recited solemnly, nodding.   I eventually embroidered this with my own twist: “All is as it should be, let things unfold.”  Years later, I still repeat this to myself when I feel my heart rate picking up, or I feel myself beginning to spin out of control.  

I tried EMDR before traditional therapy.  I was still hoping to avoid therapy, but it became clear that I was going to need the help.   I had already started Ketamine treatment and was given a lot of guidance and support, but found myself overwhelmed with feeling the memories that had been in my head my whole life, disembodied.   The first year on Ketamine, it was all I could do to recover between sessions.   I never considered quitting;  something told me that this was going to be the right thing for me.  Eventually I settled upon a therapist after performing research on types of therapy, types of degrees and determining what I thought would work for me.  I put everything into a database, which returned a list of therapists who were a match.  My current therapist was number two on a list.  Buddhist, Trauma Recovery & CPTSD Recovery specialist.  Focus on Neurodivergence and attachment.  Right away, I knew he was a match for me.   

Over four years into this process, I have left my oppressive marriage.   Accepted the Autism diagnosis that has chased me since childhood.  Shrugged off the persona.  Processed memory upon memory.  Came to see and understand the many abuses of my childhood and how I perpetuated them with my adult relationships.   Reframed my entire life.  Began to live in the real world instead of the dissociated state that had always been my battle armor.  

People still think I’m very weird.  I am still an outsider.  But I show up as myself, I am not on the offense.  I am, I think, the person I was always meant to be.  If the abuse hadn’t happened, if the isolation hadn’t happened, if I hadn’t been hated my whole life for my Autistic traits, if I’d been allowed to just grow and thrive and been accepted as myself… I think the woman I am today is exactly who I would have always been.   

Trauma made me an asshole.   It made me angry and defensive and rude.   It made me out of touch with my true self and it made me hide my vulnerabilities.  It gave people an excuse to explain their visceral dislike and distrust of me.  It protected me at great cost.   But it did something else, too: it enhanced my capacity for empathy.  The hypervigilance I learned over a lifetime is  now used to detect when someone is hurting or needs help and doesn’t know how to express it.  The intuitive sense I’ve used my entire life to detect threats helps me to plan for every eventuality and people who know me have begun to turn to me for expertise in their own projects and problems, knowing that I will have some unique guidance.   My blunt and direct communication style is still something that people dislike about me, but at the same time it’s something that people have learned makes me trustworthy.   “You are always yourself,” a woman I’ve known for years, and who used to dislike me intensely, recently said to me.   And this is true.  I am, finally, always myself.