Hey folks! It’s been a long time since I posted her and a longer time since I did it with any regularity but the world has gotten pretty brutal and some of that brutality reminded me of this piece I wrote for my Patreon subscribers a while back so it seemed like time to dig it out and share it with you. Enjoy!
Maybe I’ll try to be less of a stranger moving forward.
♡-JoEllen
CW: Trauma, abuse, weight
Years ago, during a family argument, I made mention of my habit of keeping everything in so as to stay unobtrusive. I said something along the lines of “I don’t say anything, I keep it all inside so no one is bothered by it and the only person it hurts is me.” I’m only now realizing how big of an issue that pattern actually is. While I talk about talking about trauma (say that five times fast!) I’m also going to give you a little photographic walk down memory lane with the different versions of JoEllen and how they were doing as they weren’t talking about stuff.
We seem to be talking more these days about trauma as well as why it’s good to talk about things and not keep them locked inside. With that in mind, it feels like we ought to talk about the damage we cause when we force people NOT to talk about things. From internet randos who fancy themselves legal experts and insist victims of assault need to say “allegedly” before even mentioning what happened to them, to “good vibes only!” warriors telling folks battling illness that “it could be worse”, to the truly bizarre amount of people ready to snap “stop playing the victim!” when literally anyone wants to talk about literally anything bad that has happened to them (people have said this to me in reference to the DEATHS OF MY PARENTS), there are a lot of ways we tell people who are coping with trauma that they aren’t allowed to talk about it.
Personally, I have a lot of experience with this phenomenon and I’ve only recently come to realize how much it affected my long-term mental health.
- My parents divorced when I was about 3 years old and my according to my mom, her family was very hard on her about the divorce and the impact it could have on my brother and I. Consequently my mother inadvertently established a pattern where we were rewarded for not having feelings about the divorce. I learned early that when it came to my parent’s divorce saying “I don’t even remember it!” was good and me being upset about it made my mother cry. Additionally my older brother remembered more than I did and has always been more outspoken about his feelings than I, so it felt like the whole “budget” (as it were) for post-divorce sadness was used up by him. All of this came together to mean that I shoved my feelings down and would occasionally have big emotional outbursts that filled me with shame and got me labelled as “dramatic” and as having “a temper” but I never, ever, got to deal with my actual feelings.
- After the depressive episode that ate my late 20s, I worked for an employer who told me that I was only depressed because CHOSE to identify that way (a phase along the lines of “laying down in the ditch” was used) and if I didn’t do that, I would be fine. So, when I was still working there and my father passed away, I knew depression wasn’t an option. I put my head down, pushed ahead, worked a ton, slept and ate very little, drank copiously, and had sex with anyone I could get my hands on. I was so proud of myself for “dodging depression” but I never really dealt with any of the feelings, I just stuffed them down so they wouldn’t inconvenience anyone.
- I moved across the country and immediately started a relationship that ended up being, at best, toxic. Lots of controlling behavior, manipulation, and gaslighting. After I got out of it I had a very hard time processing what had happened. I tried to work through things by writing about them but the person I had been in the relationship with spent YEARS following me via fake accounts (because I blocked the real ones) and would occasionally see something that referenced things I learned in that relationship, the pain I felt from it, really anything about it (stuff that never named him or gave any identifying info apart from “I was in a relationship“) and he would drop his fake account cover to send me multi-tweet/dm/whatever screeds accusing me of lying, trying to “play the victim for attention”, and actually being the controlling manipulative person in the relationship (ever heard of DARVO? That.) and I learned that the safest thing for me to do was to never talk about what happened and to censor myself in case he thought things I was saying were about him because I couldn’t take the angry attacks.
So, what was the result of all of this not talking? For me it was a deterioration of my mental health that led to me spending 2017-2021 locked away in my Portland apartment, isolated from just about everyone. Time I now deeply regret spending that way because it is just lost time and also I missed the last 4 years of my mom’s life in favor of almost nothing.
It took me a shockingly long time to figure out what was going on. In 2018 I started pointing out to my doctors that I was spending less time healthy in between bad bouts of depression (I used to spend years feeling functional but starting around 2014, I was lucky to get more than a month or two) and that the weight fluctuations that always came with my depression (I would trade the same 25 lbs up and down depending on my mental state until 2018 when everything got way worse and I gained 80lbs in 6 months) had become bigger and far more frequent. I started likening my body and mind to a car that you try to keep driving even though something is wrong with it and because of that more and more things go wrong with it until it can barely chug along.
Here’s where it gets really weird: even though almost everyone I know has been fat-shamed by their medical professionals, I faced the exact opposite problem and it became another example of the phenomenon I’m discussing here. My doctor and my therapist both decided that me being bothered by gaining 80 lbs in 6 months was a bigger problem than my mental deterioration and, you know, my body packing on weight at an alarmingly unnatural rate. My therapist dumped me as a patient and my doctor threatened to institutionalize me for the “eating disorder” I had (the only evidence of which was me insisting it was medically problematic to inexplicably gain 80 lbs in 6 months) and I was left feeling like my only option was to never express any feelings about what was happening. That’s right, the physical, mental, and emotional collapse that was, I think mostly, brought on by all that repression (there was also a medication change and I think some of it was spurred along by the political happenings of 2016 and their aftermath but that’s another story) was met with more demands that I not talk about it.
By mid-2020 I was the closest I have ever come to losing my battle with depression.
What happened? Because the story isn’t about that part, here are the CliffsNotes: I took one last Hail Mary shot at a treatment for treatment resistant depression, that helped me see that I needed to get out of where I was living and move back to my family. I did and that gave me access to better healthcare and better therapy and things have improved immensely. Now back to our regularly scheduled talking about trauma:
When we tell people they cannot acknowledge their trauma, we send them down the road I traveled. It may play out differently for each of us—different symptoms different rates of deterioration—but I genuinely believe that the burden of carrying trauma (big or small) chips away at us and the practice of shushing people who try to speak up makes the existing pain bigger, badder, and uglier.
So, am I saying that we should all be prepared to have everyone dump all their trauma on us at all times or else we’re hurting them? No, emotional dumping is not great for the person who has experienced the trauma and is awful for the folks around them. But, there’s a distinct difference between expressing that you cannot (or don’t wish to be) the person traumatic things are discussed with and demanding that someone never discuss their trauma. What I am saying is that it we need to be aware of the degree to which we ask people to shove down their emotional stuff for our comfort. So for example, the boss I mentioned above could have said something like “JoEllen, I know you are dealing with some mental health stuff but I would appreciate it if you didn’t discuss it at work” instead of “you are only depressed because you are choosing to be depressed”. One makes me feel seen while stating a boundary, the other puts me on notice that any mental/emotional pain is my own fault and it’s better to just, you know, not have it. We can support people and not do the harmful silencing even if we cannot be the one they can talk to.
For folks who have experienced trauma, I’m not saying you HAVE TO talk about it but I am saying that being told not to talk about it when you need to can be damaging. If the folks around you can’t be the people you talk to, please seek out a therapist, a doctor, hell, even a call-in hotline— just find a place where you can express the thoughts. I, for example, initially published a version of this essay as an exclusive offering on my Patreon in 2021 because it felt like a safe place to FINALLY write about the trauma of a relationship that had happened years ago without the fear of my ex screaming at me (now I’m taking it public due to a combination of general “fuck it” rage towards men and the belief that he definitely has moved on by now.) It was a small step but also a huge relief. Also (as someone who had a long line of therapists who just let me monologue at them for hours without any guidance), when you are ready, seek out someone who can help you PROCESS your trauma. Talking is important but, for many of us, simply telling and retelling our stories isn’t enough to heal (and may actually be harmful).
Listening to the folks who shushed me (and sometimes being the one who shushed myself) put me YEARS behind in terms of healing and growth. It also let my traumatic experiences stack up, unprocessed, until I could barely face life at all (thank you to the therapist I spoke to immediately following my mom’s death for being the first person to identify this and to therapist I’ve had for the last couple of years who has led me through the actual processing). Denying and ignoring my experiences because “no one wants to hear that” or out of fear that I would be publicly screamed at kept me frozen in place and I want better for you. Acknowledge your trauma, talk about it, and process it.
Your brain will thank you.
