As of this moment, I cannot find it in my heart to truly hate those who hurt us. As of this moment, I may have feelings toward them, but I cannot find it in myself to base my thoughts about them on those feelings. I feel all kinds of things, and I am all kinds of things, but that doesn’t mean what I feel has to be all that I am, unless I want it to be. A year ago, I would not have been able to write these words in honesty, because I lacked resources to manage my own emotional state. A year ago, I would have outright rejected the idea of choice regarding reaction for the same reason. A year ago, I had no sense of self outside of what I felt in the moment, which is why I acted as I did, bursting into tears at seemingly slight issues. What those around me were not seeing, as they’d never seen from the first day of the behavioral program, was that the things that I cried about were often only the tip of the iceberg, and that before the tears had come, small things had built up, sometimes over years, and erupted with the pressure of that moment’s situation. During these times, I was often prompted to talk about my feelings with statements like, “I don’t know why you’re so upset,” by people who thought the upsetting things to be resolved and safely in the past where they belonged.
Many of the things that would lead to my meltdowns, as I later came to call them, were seemingly small, but threw me directly into feelings of early childhood that had never been resolved properly. For example, a math problem that I didn’t understand, despite multiple prompts by adults who did, consistently brought me into old frustration and anger toward myself for, in my mind, never getting anything right, that had built up over the course of my life. Not realizing that a kind of landslide had been set in motion, when prompting me verbally had failed, the next response of the adults around me was to walk away, saying things like, “Let me know when you’re ready to work,” or, “I’d be more than happy to work with you when you’re not upset,” as though what I was experiencing was nothing more than a mild disruption that didn’t bother me at all. In reality, it bothered me a lot, sometimes to the point where I was unable to focus for the rest of the day. But the adults around me, as recently as last year, continued reenacting patterns that had begun in elementary school, seemingly completely unaware of the fact that their methods were actually making things worse, rather than improving them.
It was in middle school when I was introduced to the idea that school and home life should be kept separate, and from the beginning, it never sat well with me. It was almost as though, on some level, I knew the damage that had already been done, and the separation from myself that had already taken place. As I learned more about emotional suppression and trauma, I began to realize on a conscious level that what was done in preschool, as far as putting us away in a room while we were clearly upset, had left its mark. I’d always wondered why I’d never been able to feel the emotions associated with that particular memory, and, unaware of the others who had held them apart from me for all these years, I still managed to figure out that, because of the nature of what had happened, I had suppressed some aspects of the events from my awareness. When I began to look further into healing paths such as Holotropic Breathwork and Primal Therapy, which both advocated for total surrender to full emotional expression, I began to realize that the stop crying message had no place in my life, and, based on the counterarguments I’d learned from both paths, I began to ignore the insistence of the adults around me that I do just that. This, it turns out, is what saved my mental health from getting any worse than it would eventually become, because while feeling things fully sometimes hurt, I was, at least, aware of what I was feeling, and the thoughts that accompanied the emotions.
Fighting for health in this way wasn’t the end of my own path, or, as it turned out, the end of the system’s activity with regards to keeping everyone’s ability to feel undamaged. It was during middle school, under the pressure that built up from miscommunication after miscommunication, demanding that I not cry, that I learn self-control, that I be mature, in short, that I not feel, that Vivien began to separate herself from my awareness so that our reactions to said pressure could be contained and yet still expressed. She completed the separation some time during my ninth grade year, leaving me, just as Yalluk had, under the impression that she and I were not separate at all. By that year, it was obvious that the patients of the adults, who had worked with me through middle school, and in one case, through the elementary years, was wearing thin. From the winter of 2013 until the summer of 2015, Yalluk, while still leaving me under the impression that she and I were one and the same, acted out her past pain by refusing to bathe or keep the body clean and justified it through a set of books we had read at the age of twelve. I can only imagine the impact this must have had on the adults, who had already seemingly tried to control our emotional expression through other means, and failed, and a small part of me felt sorry for the disruption Yalluk’s actions had caused. But Vivien, her and I, all under one internal sense of self at the time, could not let go of what we were doing, for fear that our natural expression of emotions would have nothing standing in its defense. After dealing with behavioral interventions designed to train that natural expression out of us, along with the continued message that we took in from adults who worked with us after the interventions were stopped, that crying was bad, showed immaturity and was a sign of poor self-control, acting out was all we felt we could do to preserve such expression in a place that seemed to hate every ounce of it we still had.
A year later, when we were in tenth grade, after suffering the breakup of our relationship with our boyfriend at the time and having another insider develop to handle that loss, our meltdowns increased in intensity and frequency. With the loss we had experienced, our unified sense of self only existed in times of great emotional storms, and then, more than ever, we clung to what I call the primal worldview, placing feelings above all else. Toward the end of that year, a different reaction began to come from those adults who worked with us, a reaction that was more of an insult than anything we’d experienced up to that point because of how it was presented. They began telling us that we were choosing to react in the way we were reacting, without taking into account the fact that we were unaware of such a choice and, at that point, had very little ability not to identify completely with what our emotional state was communicating to us. In other words, they blamed us for something that, at the time, was out of our control, without offering ways that we could get it under our control. Our sense of self, during that period of our lives, was dependent on our emotions, and to us, stepping back from them would be to lose everything we were, or to fall apart and never be whole again. Little did I know that I was closer to that state than I thought.
In December of 2015, because of this message and other factors like loneliness, I discovered the system and began working to understand them with the help of my therapist at the time, who I’d seen on and off for the past two years. As the school year ended, I began to let the insiders handle some situations, despite the protests of the people who worked there. On the last day of school, letting Carron, an adult insider, out right before I began to have a meltdown prevented me from being late for my bus home, while another time letting this same insider out prevented me from having one during my lunch break. I began to think that perhaps the messages I had internalized through my life could be reversed, and that summer I began to work exclusively with the others in the system during therapy, learning things that, until then, had never felt safe to learn with another person, such as breathing methods that would help to calm us. In August of 2016, I met a friend who also began to work with all of us, and he clarified the meaning of the things that were said to me during my last school year, saying that the assumption that I was choosing to react in a specific way was wrong because of our lack of other safe options to choose from. After his guidance in getting our empathy managed, I began to realize that I did not need to identify with everyone else’s ways of being to exist, and that I had more to myself than my overwhelming feelings. As a system, we began to put into practice the other options we had learned from therapy and our friend, and, over the next nine months, we organized ourselves so that those of us who could handle life protected the others who were more vulnerable to verbal and emotional insults, or who could not recover well from things that the rest of us could handle.
Today, I do not think the words, “you choose how you react,” are quite accurate, because, in my mind, this implies that the person supposedly making the choice is already aware of other things they can do to manage their reaction, and can maintain this awareness while in the middle of something like a meltdown. Eventually, we could say that we chose our reactions, but that was because we had learned to relax into our feeling, noticing that it was there and taking note of the thoughts that came with it, without making a frantic effort to act on it. At that point in our lives, it was because we understood that no matter what we were feeling, there were things that would never be taken from us, such as our breathing, and our observing selves, or the part of each of us that saw our feelings and thoughts as exactly what they were and nothing more. In our opinion, if someone is going to tell someone else that they are choosing to react in a specific way, they should also understand that perhaps the person they are talking to may not know any other way, or be aware of any other option in the state they are in. Blaming someone for having a meltdown is telling them that they have a choice in how they react when they have no sense of self outside of their state in the moment, and thus no way of seeing their thoughts and emotions as what they are. It’s not helpful, and can actually make the situation worse, as even feeling driven people, such as those involved in primal therapy, can attest to. All that being said, I don’t blame the adults who worked with us for saying what they said, because I think they truly believed that we had gotten the help we needed back in elementary school, and that, in their view of the situations they were involved in with us, there was no other option.
I am working with others in the system to reverse the impacts of such words on their own wellbeing to this day. Though I may have learned to manage my own emotional state in this highly complex way, others in the system still have some things to process, just as I did, before they reach this stage in their life. That is perfectly fine with me, and I won’t blame them for not being able to manage themselves yet. They experienced enough of that from the behavioral program and from other people outside of it who didn’t understand how their words hurt the listener. I myself still get angry and surrender fully to the feelings that come up about our earlier life, but now I realize I don’t need to give my power away to some outside person by telling them that they made me feel something. They don’t make me feel anything, but they do play a part in the situations that bring up the feelings, and that is not my place to force to change. Those who are involved in the situations that bring up feelings within us will either have to realize their part of it on their own, or will have to be told, but now, they can’t hurt me or those who protected me in my past on an emotional level, because, quite simply, I don’t have to let them.