Various posters have encouraged me to post about things in my life even if they aren't exactly trans-related, and one of the bigger things in my life is PTSD (Complex PTSD, to be more precise.)
I tried a few times to write a coherent description of the PTSD in my life, and I couldn't. I think that's kind of the point: the essence of trauma is that it overwhelms the nervous system's ability to cope, so you don't get a coherent narrative, just fragments. You get images split off from feelings and overwhelming feelings split off from whatever caused them. So I'm just going to post every now and then about a fragment or two.
Anyway, one of those fragments is what I now think is separation anxiety. As an adult, I heard from someone who my mother told that when my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, she was put on bed rest to prevent a miscarriage and was not allowed to hold me. I've calculated that this must have been when I was 15 months old, give or take a few months. My mother did tell me "you used to be my cuddly baby, but then you suddenly wouldn't have anything to do with me."
Last week, when I was at a music and dance camp, I got to see classic separation anxiety. There was a mother there with a one-year-old child. The child was okay when her mother was holding her or right next to her, but the minute her mother went away -- for instance, to get a cup of coffee -- she would start howling and crying and was inconsolable until her mother returned. I try to imagine what it would do to a child to be in that much distress, not just for a few minutes, but for a month or more. She had a fairly good relationship with her father -- he was the only person besides her mother that she would allow to pick her up -- but he wasn't enough.
I have, of course, no memories from that time. It's all a blank. But I can't think of anyone who was around when I was that age who could have given me any sense of safety; my relatives were and by and large still are pretty emotionally unavailable. I still can't imagine what it must have been like. I only know that when something makes me feel like I'm not in control of things, I feel a deep-seated panic, as if I were being dropped into the middle of an unpopulated, uncharted wilderness, to survive or not; rather like the babies who were left out on the hillside to die back in ancient Greece.
I'd like to think that if my parents had been different, I might have gotten over it. But they weren't. Basically, my parents were willing to handle the easy parts of caring for children, but simply did nothing or went into denial when anything emotionally difficult came up. In a sense, they kept repeatedly emotionally abandoning me for as long as they were alive, and the real turning point in my life came when, as a teenager, I finally convinced myself never to ask for or hope for any help from them in handling my life. I even started calling them Mr. and Mrs. <my last name>, and never got any response. I might just as well have been raised by robots. (Cf.:
the Harry Harlow monkey experiments.)
