On Embodiment & Trauma Bonds

I’m one for occasional tasteless jokes about serious issues. One such joke I’ve been known to make over and over again is about my relationship with Stockholm Syndrome in the context of my tenure as a resident of Philadelphia. Much to the chagrin of my fellow Philadelphians, I’d describe my raison d’être in that city as something akin to the bond that occurs between a helpless captive and her ill-intentioned captor. Is it shitty? From the outside, yeah. But I feel a bond to it for some strange reason. (I actually do love Philadelphia, btw.)

“There’s a hell of a lot of misinformation when it comes to what is and isn’t love these days. ”

Lately, as I’ve begun to take drastic steps to reclaim a sense of embodiment, I’ve been unraveling years and years of body dysmorphia, stored trauma, and stealth-self-hatred and have discovered that while I was joking about being an unwilling but content Philadelphian, there was an actual “trauma bond” happening much closer to home: in my body. In my inner-most self. 

“Trauma bonding” is a term that’s often applied in relationships between a narcissist and a co-dependent person. Distilled into the simplest set of words possible, it’s what happens when one interprets abusive behavior as loving gestures, and accepts this toxicity as affection. For most, and I’m also speaking for myself here, it can happen because there’s a hell of a lot of misinformation when it comes to what is and isn’t love these days. 

I’ve discovered that this is just as true for self-love.

“Traumatic bonding occurs as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change” (Source)

In all of my years of trying to “make right” with my body, I never once looked at it and thought to myself, “what a beautiful vessel for my mind and my soul.” There was always a disconnect—even before my “trauma.” To be honest, even before I was fully conscious, as I think disembodiment is just a part of human nature. It is, after all, a heavy lift to ponder humanness. What even are we? Meat sacks with awareness, loosely adhering to an ambiguous social contract? (Sometimes… looking at you, people who listen to music without the use of headphones, walk three or more abreast on the sidewalk, and wear backpacks on the train at rush hour.) Even at my most pensive, I can say with full confidence that I’d rather sit my ass in my favorite corner of my sofa and marathon Broad City than think about what it means to be a person. Not that it’s not fun to do so, it’s just that every answer is met with a dozen more questions, and by the end of the day, who wants to THINK? 

There’s only so much TV one can watch though, and with all of my newfound solitude—along with a recently-imposed fitness regimen (Krav Maga 3-4 times a week) and a few books I’ve read over the last few months—I’ve been thinking about my body in a whole new way, and I can no longer accept this disconnect.  

“My misguided attempts at self-love enabled self-harm.”

I used to think that self-love was as simple as “leveling up” in my career and also posting half-naked photos on Instagram. No, really. I thought it was radical as fuck and hella empowering to post my imperfect body for social clout while increasing my salary. (This is a self-drag, I still do the photo thing, I’m actively doing it in this blog post because I know nude bodies rake in the clicks.) It’s not though. In fact, functioning in this way has been reinforcing a really unhealthy thought pattern that I’ve spent my lifetime developing. It’s sort of like sticking a dollar store bandage on a bloody stump of a limb, mangled and chaotic and causing harm to the rest of the body if not properly tended to with a tourniquet or something more serious. (I’m not a doctor.) If I pretended that I was fine, surely I would be fine eventually, no? I’ve made a career of “faking it until making it,” isn’t something deeply personal just a matter of getting myself to believe it? You’d think, but no dice.

My misguided attempts at self-love enabled self-harm. My bad self-love was punctuated with self-deprecating humor which—though funny—didn’t quite assuage my insecurities in the way it was meant to. My emphasis on an ill-informed approach to self-love took the real problems out of the forefront and replaced them with the temporary serotonin release that comes along with doing something kind but ultimately kinda shallow for yourself. My self-love turned me into someone with absolutely no boundaries or self-respect. My self-love turned me into a victim. My self-love almost killed me. 

You see, the thing is, while I was practicing “self-love,” I forgot the most important part: I was forgetting to actually love myself.  I was merely existing in this body in which I feigned enjoyment with the justification that it’s a necessity only because this is the only body I’m ever going to have. What once seemed so empowering became a reason to hate myself.

“We move on. Sometimes, we get stronger.”

So how did I come to this conclusion? It’s been an emotional few weeks and I’ve had to go to some scary places. I’ll preface this by saying that I don’t think I know anyone who truly escaped adolescence fully unscathed. We have to choose to either ignore this vital information (my old go-to move) or to grapple with it and move on to bigger, better things. After some personal instances and a lot of soul-searching because I had nothing better to do, I decided to make peace with my past. I didn’t know what this would entail and, true to form, got a whole lot more than I bargained for. Given past traumas and realizing that lightning can strike twice in the same place, on top of feeling very vulnerable living on my own and spending so much of my time walking around at night, on and off trains, surrounded by people I neither know nor trust, self-defense seemed like the only option to bring me some precious peace of mind. It’s done a great job of it, and it’s been somewhat healing to learn how to escape from someone who is trying to cause me harm. Knowing that I can be cunning enough to overtake a man twice my size is delightful, but it’s also unearthed something that I try to not think about: my own trauma from the point of view of myself now—knowing what I know and still feeling hopeless against it—which, incidentally, happens to be at the root of so many body and disembodiment issues.

I quickly learned that my self-love was weak and causing more harm than good. I’ve heard that still waters run deep, and think that my recent stoic streak may be in part thanks to the fact that I’ve buried so much fear and anger for so long. I had to allow myself to be angry. I had to allow myself to be afraid. The outcome was a little different than I expected though: after letting my rage finally bubble to the surface and finding the strength in myself to learn how to beat the shit out of someone, I learned that it can never undo what was done to me. No amount of punching could ever reclaim what was taken from me, and that’s a tough pill to swallow. All of these years, I’ve been warring against myself to try to bring back something that’s lost forever. My innocence, my childlike sense of wonder, my willingness to trust. It’s gone, and ever since that moment, I’ve been wandering around knowing that my body and my soul are incompatible bedfellows, and that’s about it. I resent myself, and what I’ve seen the the mirror has never made sense with what I feel inside. And really, all that it took was this realization that I’ve been somehow missing for 11 years now: I’m not the same, and that’s okay. No one is. We move on. Sometimes, we get stronger.

Professionals say the first step to breaking a trauma bond is to find a way to stop the self-hate that abuse instills in the deepest, most inaccessible parts of ourselves. For me, this meant taking a step back and listening to how I speak about myself. About a year ago, I referred to myself as a “dumb bitch” at work and my co-worker asked me to not do that, saying I was worth so much more. I wanted to smack him for being such a corny asshole. It was, after all, a joke. Looking back though, he was right. The joke came from a very dark place, and revealed a lot about my inner psyche, my soft wounds buried deep under a crumbling facade of confidence. I brought it up in therapy, and my therapist asked me to list five things I like about myself. I was able to list five, but all were dripping in sarcasm and self-loathing. I didn’t realize it until recently. 

“The lack of validation has challenged me to become the kind of person I’ve been pretending to be all this time.”

For so long, I was both the abuser and the abused.

I got attached to this unhealthy, ill-adjusted version of myself. Attention-starved, I knew how to get validation without seeming too desperate, which is why I figured it was okay. Validation is fleeting though, and now that I’ve gone through the motions of “breaking up” with myself. I haven’t felt home in my body, but I’m getting back there. Getting a fresh start in a new city where I’m surrounded by people who truly don’t give a shit about me was difficult at first, and now I see it as a blessing in disguise. The sun surely does not shine out of my ass. And that’s alright. The lack of validation has challenged me to become the kind of person I’ve been pretending to be all this time. Who would have thought?

Much like I had a damn meltdown about leaving Philadelphia, my Stockholm Syndrome lover, I’ve had a hard time leaving this broken, less-than-great version of myself. It’s really, really fucking hard to get away from somewhere you feel comfortable. (Some might call this “complacency,” and they would be absolutely correct to do so.)

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from strenuous exercise it’s that the recovery is more important than the act of fitness itself. If a muscle is continuously worked and worked to the point of fatigue with no rest, it’s never going to get stronger. When properly cared for, it repairs itself in the downtime. I have to stop moving forward. I have to stop trying to accomplish new feats and just let myself be. I was working myself until I no longer recognized myself—I should have been celebrating each exciting new thing but I found myself further from happiness with every accomplishment. I got more and more lost until I no longer recognized myself, because being a “make shit happen” person became my persona. Nothing would ever be “enough” because I had no foundation; just the thrill of the chase. That’s no way to live.

Like anything else, breaking free is a process. It’s one that’s not easy; I’ve been generally confused and unsure for the last few weeks. I found myself eating a questionable diner omelet at 9PM last night because I didn’t want to go home and deal with the aloneness. I needed a break from “getting better.” Even my high-level homebody self I didn’t want to be anywhere near Brooklyn, where I spend so much time in solitude. I wanted to be an anonymous face in the city, which I’m told is part of the allure of New York, just sort of disappearing into the crowd—or in my case, slipping into a mostly-hidden booth, surrounding myself with drunk, happy strangers, sipping a Diet Coke, and enjoying some shitty eggs. In this place, I was able to find a respite from the constant back-and-forth of gratitude and self-flagellation that I’ve found myself in recently. (All part of my personal healing process—I’m getting more grateful and less self-flagellating every day.)

“I have no idea where I’m going or what the hell I’ll be doing in six months from now.”

When I finally did make it home, I crawled into bed and, for the first time in a long time, felt content and competent being alone. I felt comfortable. I turned on some music and let myself drift to sleep. I made sure to make a mental note of what I love most about my body—this night, it was my broad shoulders, which I used to hate but feel come in handy with self defense. I woke up tired but not defeated for the first time in a while. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, for maybe the first time ever, “I have no idea where I’m going or what the hell I’ll be doing in six months from now but here in this moment, everything makes sense.”

Here’s to progress.

xo, e.m.