Everyday Sway

Unravelling The Trauma Cycles That Entangled My Sexuality

Retracing The Self

How far, and deep, can one retrace oneself? We all (hopefully) remember our last few weeks, the things we’ve experienced, the ways we’ve felt and how we’ve responded. Even in this short time, these new set of experiential data has added to the channels and modes of thinking in ourselves that over a lifetime continue to form the overall psychological and emotional algorithms by which we function (although we have less neuroplasticity with age).

But if one asked themself, how experiences in the nascence of childhood or during the uncomfortable balminess of adolescence added to the self in this way, how fundamentally can that be retraced? And don’t forget what, why and how these variables also influenced subsequent outer layers of the self that continually become part of one’s equation until death (like a factorial if I am going to continue with the data driven metaphors).

Trauma decontextualised over time can look like personality - i.e. there is no distinction and the trauma has become solidified with the self. Like how being ghosted could make one less likely to respond to IMs in a timely manner, and overtime this becomes a general (digital) aloofness that one feels is just their general personality but is rooted in an unhealed trauma that has sank into the unseen. Could this experience of trauma be in pure fusion or as a conglomerate with the self? I’d say based off my own experiences that proves me that trauma can be unravelled that it is the latter.

However, I don’t think these traumas ever truly disappear before they are untangled. They merely fade into the subconscious while our consciousness rationalises these things into a cycle of coping (that sometimes appears health on the onset) that I think is deeply intertwined the self’s great focus or need at the time (à la Maslow’s Hierarchy).

I’ve gone through a lot of grief trying to discover my own deep-seated trails that run from the top of my present consciousness all the way down into untouched parts of my subconscious down to the root of the spirit. Recently, I’ve made a breakthrough that has changed my life a profound way so I wanted to share it with you. I’m in no way saying that our histories are the same, but rather, showing you that the way the human mind and heart works has some universality to it, and so should be thought about as such.

The Entanglement

The Velvet Rage offered me lots of new ways of seeing myself. Not taking that as gospel, I sought a personal investigation into the conditions present at origins of my sexuality. When I was young, I suffered a big emotional trauma that consumed me with rage and self loathing. Lust, attraction, satisfaction and fulfilment were intertwined with a consuming rage and self-loathing that I felt at the time. Dominance (exertion of masculinity) came as the satisfaction of that rage, and submission (claiming or receiving of others' masculinity) came as the fulfilment that self-loathing.

The Subconscious

Over time, this faded into my subconscious, so consciously something could make me feel good but cognitive dissonance meant that very same thing could be a subconscious validation of my self-hatred. This self-reinforcing cycle is where my depression, anxiety and low self worth stemmed from for years, but I'm thankful that recently I've been able to break the cycle, clear out the beautiful lies that felt so good, and swallow the bitter truths of my life.

The following photos are an original poetic series about my journey into the intoxicating glorification of self-hatred, through the blue, and out into the light of (self-)love:

Thursday, July 06, 2023
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Trauma Masking As Power

"I won't text you back for hours,
But I just want to bring you flowers..."
Trauma masking as power

***

Tell me about your first time? I'll tell you mine.

I lost my innocence 7 years ago on a beach in California but somehow I only realised it just now. It happened in the rain, aptly, in Long Beach to be exact and 7491 miles from home. I lied about it to the rare few I ever pretended to tell. Then the lying got worse: to myself.

And I would have stayed this way had it not been for a starry night of serendipity in the springtime of 2020. A dear friend of mine, let's call them "L", and I were spending a night carousing to poetry, Van Gogh, and a LA based artist we both cherish by the name of Lana Del Rey. Our favourite sad girl was about to become our mutual ground zero.

L reveals how unblossomed at 15 they got up to no good with their English teacher every night till 5 am for months. In the darkest hour of the night L describes how they didn't understand exactly what was happening, but we all know what it's like the first time we fully give our honest self in pure childlike innocence to someone and they actually reciprocate. Starry sky paradises in the eyes. World of your own that no one else can find. Never ending summer.

But summer's end did come, brought on by L's discovery that their English teacher actually had a partner the whole time and with the eruption of public scrutiny which ultimately caused their separation. L goes on to narrate the aftershocks of the next 9 years: older, many loathsome and sometimes abusive men were the only type of men who felt like summer again. A almost-decade of dead-inside staring at the ceiling, so sick of your own bullshit but you're still doing it anyway kind-of-cycle. L also describes how playing the part of "The Other Woman" à la Lana felt like power and how through time that just became character.

"Some might not realise until years later, and many never, how trauma and affinity to familiarity start as a small haunt but can infuse into your very stature"

And it was in that very sentence that my own darkness from the last 7 years made sense to me for the first time. Trauma masking as power.

No one even knows what life is like
Now I'm in LA it's paradise ♬ ♬

"With Lana, it's not about the older men, for me it's about LA". I'd never told anyone this.

7 years ago after unthinking episodes on the darker web I found myself connected online to someone we'll call R. I was a neurotically antisocial and closeted 19 year old who's life comprised of digital fantasies and being voluntarily locked up at home. I was from Sydney and R was from LA, so I would wait until 2am to pour out the inner treasures of my haphazard heart with all the eagerness pent up from my superlatively conservative upbringing.

I spent obsessive amounts of time creating montages of my life for R. It was perfect at times, but inversely, I reflect that upon the many times that R made me beg and do things for attention. Stockholm-like hostage of the heart - felt like love.

In the summer of '14, I set out to wander the further I'd ever been from home, to meet someone I had never met, with only vague Long Beach address to go by. R had egged me on to visit for months, conjuring rose coloured fantasies about LA.

But on that fateful day: the blackest radio silence.

Landing in LA, I sent messages that are left on read to this day. I can't remember how exactly I felt because since then I got really good at putting any feeling that was even slightly nuclear into a cement box and forgetting I left it at the bottom of the ocean. I do remember that I drove in a senseless state from LAX to the Long Beach. Then I sat like an agent on stakeout in the rain for two hours outside the address that R had given me months back.

A blunt smashing of my side window broke me from my watch. A middle-aged blonde lady launched at me and accused me of trespassing. "I'm looking for "R"" I defended, showing their picture. She beckoned twice, "There's no "R" here", before a front door slam - shotgun to my perfect delusion. It's all static from there, but I do remember I drove as fast as I could and somehow ended up by the sea. I don't recall how long I lay in the rain for but just that I wanted to run into the blue - so I did.

The Blue

I concluded months after that I had been supremely catfished, but I couldn't care very much by then because I had already started playing the character of the jetsetting ingénue who was always frivolous and who's only measure of life was how great the parties I went to were. He was untouchable and he came out to play whenever I was scared to. Trauma masking as power.

Just like L, my choice of partners has consistently shocked my best friends and I could never explain myself.

Never fully emotionally or physically present (better if both)
Interstate or overseas
Always had a chaos I identified from the beginning
Trustworthy, healthy and secure? That was a big boring "no"

It was only in speaking the truth to myself in the darkness of L's apartment that I realised that this had been my blueprint for every partner in the last 7 years.

Modern day romantics teach us to trust our instinct in love and to honour that mythical spark. Alain De Botton suggests that instead of the illusive spark determining suitability as we all believe, it actually rather reflects a subconscious affinity to familiarity (à la Attachment Theory) - and when you has a history of powerful traumas, an affinity to people who may bring you familiar types of suffering overrides other forms of familiarity, and so you are hypnotised by a spark that is actually trauma masking as love.

It's also a running joke that I'm the worst replier - 2 day replies aren't uncommon. I now realise how it was exactly after LA that I started replying slower because the thought of being left on read brought me back to the blue. 7 years on and I somehow had let that became how I responded to everyone. It felt like power, but it was the biggest healing to realise why I behaved this way. Even years on, each time I needed to reply, perhaps there was part of me that felt like I was still in Long Beach in the rain staring at my phone. Trauma masking as power.

In Healing Together:

In good spirit I want to ask you - are there thoughts of trauma that became actions that became habits that became character in your life?

Have you been honest to yourself about past traumas in your life and how they have affected you? Remember, it's normal to react with distance, illusion or power while you're healing but what we don't often remember is that the more habits become character the more invisible it becomes to ourselves.

I dislike platitudes, but awareness is truly the first step. Now I'm trying my best to unlearn the trauma cycles I had thought were just my character. My friends tell me they're pleasantly surprised that they can see me actively trying to reply immediately these days. It doesn't hurt me anymore.

I'm a believer that if you let these cycles take hold that you'll build mental and emotional systems that put you into an echo chamber of bad decisions, suffering and potentially depression. "Anchor" is one metacognitive technique I use where I create a powerful emotional and intellectual point of self reference that I can hold onto when I am tempted by my trauma cycles.

One such anchor I use is to always surface the memory of the exact moment an ex partner made me feel the lowest I had ever felt in my life as a human being. I use anchors for everything - fitness, work, learning - and the aforementioned anchor helps me run the other way when I am tempted by my affinity to dangerous potential partners. I'm also trying to condition myself to love and be excited by good character. Anchor is very much about owning your brain like a pet and architecting the maze you want it to run into.

If I'm to leave you with final thoughts - let's make ourselves aware of our trauma masks and then break them. Let's also be more aware that other people also have their own trauma cycles and by sharing and showing each other we're not so different we may mutually help break each others' cycles. Guard your thoughts, always review your attitudes and habits. The biggest mindset switch I've made is "I don't go out into a relationship to find happiness, rather I go into them to share my own happiness".