Hey, I'm Not Dead
Abuse trains us to anticipate danger. Healing means remembering everything we've already survived.
How to overcome fear?
It’s a question I am wondering often.
Which– hey hey– I already consider this a win; that I can step away from the emotion, from the sensations of trepidation and terror, and come back to my logical mind.
I can make some more measured response, rather than laying curled on the floor, immobilized by narrative threads constricting round my heart. I take a deep breath and try not to revert to the lizard brain, that primal stem which can only scan for danger.
Human life has always been imperfect. Every life has trouble, some more, some less than others. On a long enough timeline it becomes a moot point to compare. Where is the scale upon which we weigh our burdens and blessings?
Some humans are tortured, some are trafficked. Rocky Mosure kept a wild rattlesnake as a pet to terrify his target Michelle. As Ruth tried to escape Josiah, her car kept losing its lug nuts. This, to have occurred naturally, would have been an infinitesimally small probability. On my honeymoon, I received a bruise, a kind of cosmic irony.
We are all here, together, trying to grapple with the pain. Trying to overcome it rather than succumb to it. To live is to contend with pain.
One of the tactics I use to counter fear is to be relentlessly, aggressively grateful. “Hey, I’m not dead!” is a sharp reorientation tool.
Many women have died at the hand of their abusers. When a woman is killed, 55% of the time it is by a current or former partner. If you are reading this, you have outlived them. Me, sitting here in the sun on a Sunday, I have outlived them. We must use this time we have purposefully. My mother, she got to live also. And for this, I am grateful.
As an adult, my mother told me stories about him, her abuser, my father. Years after we had shed him, and we could talk about those times, she recalled how one night he was drunk, in just his underwear, and threw a punch at her which she dodged. He ended up tumbling, pitched forward, went down head first, and ended up upside down, his back caught by the hallway wall, his legs dangling about. Like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” a creature caught on his back, limbs flailing.
“I knew if I laughed, I was a dead woman,” said mom.
She didn’t laugh, and she lived on. I suppose because she, too, could, even in that moment, think strategically; or perhaps that the trained fear response was to remain silent, and even this saved her. Today, she lives on. For this I am grateful.
I’ve suspected my father’s alcoholism saved us, in a way. That had he been a bit more sober, he would’ve had more capabilities to harm her, harm us. I’m grateful this man was a drunk. He died in a puddle of his own blood and vomit, by the way. The death of a cursed man. The universe has its own logic and order, on a long enough timeline.
Years ago, and I cannot recall if I told my mother this story or not, my abuser became enraged. I dodged him by going into the bathroom, and I locked the door. Abusers hate for the target to have boundaries; he used a hammer to break down the door. Once the door has been removed, he proceeds to use the hammer to bust up the door frame, bits of wood flying.
A few steps closer and the hammer would hit me. Do I break a bone? Do I get brain damage? Do I go into a coma?
No, none of these. I lived on. I patched up the fucking door frame. Moved out, moved on. And I continue to move on from him. Each day, I get better at turning away from the pull of fear.
Fear screams for us to focus on everything that might happen– to get marionetted into different narratives. Healing suggests we notice what has already happened and to recognize– hey hey– we survived. We adapted. We made decisions within dangerous circumstances and are still here to tell the story. We have evaded death, lived to tell the tale.
When I am afraid, I try to remember that. Not because the future is guaranteed to be safe, but because the past has already proven something about living. Every terrible thing that could have destroyed me did not. The fear arrives; then it leaves; it’s a recurring guest, who I try not to mind too much.
Terror comes and goes. I remain. We remain.
What are some tactics you use to counter fear?
I also find being physically strong helps me feel less afraid.
Fear Screams at us Look Out for this.
Our next step, to quiet that scream, is to then look, assess, measure, know how to see, know the words to label and name, AND THEN
Step 2) Preparing. We know that overcoming that fear relies on asking it what it has to share, but then also on building what's needed to survive & thrive. Do we need to increase our physical strength? Physical Stamina? Do we need knowledge of a certain type, how do we access or go about gainjng?
We have a Third step - planning. We need to know there's a course of action to take, we literally need to draw our Roadmap Out of Hell. There are reasons it takes several tries before women surviving abuse succeed at leaving.
Then that Fourth Step, bc it never really ends, is acknowledging there may be long-term negative outcomes, and to know how to own them, to do the repair, while living in such a way that we can reconnect with abundance through careful management. Otherwise we risk becoming our abusers in their absence.
When we look at the 7 "stages" of Trauma Bonding, it gives us Signposts for pur Roadmap. So do many other similar types of education. Now we can build a plan, and plan to be abundant.