The Times Your Body Is Not A Refuge

A black trans person with idiopathic hypersomnia sleeps contentedly on a bed of blue and purple clouds. They are wearing an eye mask and their dark curly hair is wrapped in a colourful sleep scarf. A small purple bat plushie is nestled beside them.

I recently experienced a disagreement with a service provider for my partner's NDIS plan. The requests that I made were ignored and this resulted in being overcharged for multiple invoices. This on its own was stressful, but when I confronted the business with my complaint, their response was aggressive and designed to silence me. 

The culture I grew up in was one of silence. If I made an attempt to express myself it was met with tactics to ensure I learned that my voice didn’t matter. My family was a part of a fundamentalist church, where women and children were to be seen and not heard. We were reminded regularly of our place in the world - below the men. 

My father used this to his advantage. Scripture was often quoted out of context and used against me - the only girl in our family. Scripture has a lot to say about women and their place in a family. Women are to submit and yield to men, not teach a man and do it all with a smile (cheerfully). 

When I complained to the business, the woman I usually spoke to didn’t respond, her husband did. He came into the conversation to show me who was in charge. He refused to answer my questions, aggressively accused me of lying and asserted his authority over me. The conversation was shut down by his statement declaring the case closed without giving me an opportunity to decide if I was happy with his conclusion. 

This man had all of my details, my address, his wife had been to my home and this began to unravel my foundation of safety. My home is my safe space. I try not to allow many people the privilege of knowing where I live. It wouldn’t feel safe for certain family members to know where I live. I don’t want to allow them access to me or my little family unit. 

I just moved into a new small town, a place where I felt safe walking the streets and my home once again had become my sanctuary of safety. As I settled into the fact that this aggressive man had my address and lived down the road from me, my body started to shift. Shift into mobilisation. Not just anxiety, that’s not what it was. It was terror. The remembering of what it was like to try and protect myself as a child from an aggressive man. My body no longer felt like a safe place to be in. 

At first, the change is subtle—so gradual you hardly notice it. The body takes over to protect you from further harm. It knows what to do and does it all for you before you have a chance to reassure it you are no longer in the same danger you were as a child. 

Violence changes a person. It changes the way your body-mind sees the world and responds to it. It doesn’t forget what it felt like and looks for clues everywhere to make sure it never happens again. It gives you the protection you needed as a child, as an adult. It becomes the parentified version of yourself. The parent you needed as a child. It’s a beautiful thing to cherish and also something we need to give freedom to. Free it from the burden of being the keeper of our trauma. Free it from the hyper-awareness of subtle changes to our environment and from the exhaustion of always being on and not resting. 

Trauma treatment encourages listening to our bodies and coming home to our bodies, but what if our body isn’t a refuge? What if it’s a place that holds all our trauma and sitting with it isn’t safe for us to do?

As a trauma survivor who has survived family violence, embodiment isn’t always an option for me. I think of it as a dance of awareness. Sometimes, embodiment helps me to feel safe and sometimes I need to leave my body and live in distraction for a while. Returning when things aren’t so heavy and I have the energy to process the emotions. 

Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) is a condition of the emotions. Previously it has been labelled a disorder of memory and an anxiety disorder. It is where our emotions are deeply impacted and become stuck in that moment in time. Our memory is impacted and stored in our brain differently from a non-traumatic memory but it is the emotions attached to the memories that impact us the most. The emotions form our core beliefs about ourselves and cause us to feel triggered.

Tending to those feelings is where healing lies. Those feelings also hold our trauma stories so the dance continues. We dip our toes in the awareness of how our body-mind feels and we retract it when it gets too much. 

We continue this dance throughout our lives. 

And sometimes, a disagreement with a person will trigger those feelings, especially when they use tactics that were present in your family home. 

I’m leaning into the dance and at times, stopping to hold space for the pain and other times distracting myself through reality TV and crispy potatoes (my favourite food group!).  That’s okay. I’m slowing down the speed of my nervous system and leaning into its story. Slowly bringing freedom to her.