An honest look at the real cost of trauma… and how a body, heart and mind can heal.
Ted took a toll not only on my mental, but on my physical health, as well.
I just can’t stop wondering just how his demanding, egotistical circus of a life so consumed me that I basically took leave of my whole self? How he so forcefully imposed his agenda in our lives, that I was no longer concerned with or even connected to my own limits at all? How I stretched and twisted and contorted my body to conform to his wishes, to please him, to appease him? And how all that ever became a certain form of abuse?
Ted didn’t even hit me, but the lifestyle he demanded left marks on my body just the same.
The hint, which came rather heavy handedly, felt more like a slap upside my head… as if my body was saying,
« Wake the fuck up!
This debauch of his… is gonna to kill you! »
But then it became a slow and strange downward spiral, layer after layer, one hitch after the other, until my health became a stew I could not ignore.
When that first early morning throe came, I didn’t know it was the beginning of the end of our marriage, but Ted did. He’d been spying and planning for weeks already, if not months.
He was shaving in the adjacent bathroom for work and when I sat up in bed, our eyes met in his mirror. But then, when I fell back onto the pillows, as if I’d been hit by a train, in a dizzy stupor, like a child getting off a spinning merry-go-round, except a hundred million miles an hour faster, he watched me fall. When I moaned, but was unable to string together the words to explain, he continued shaving. When I was finally able to flutter open one lid, slightly, in a silent plea for help, he never came. He continued eyeing me though, from his mirror, with disdain.
He couldn’t know what was happening to me then. But he didn’t ask and he visibly couldn’t have cared less.
Those little crystals, it turned out, had escaped, apparently, from my inner right ear somehow. That happened, I learned, although no one really knew why. No one had ever actually seen them at all in fact. But when the doctor had to perform that quick acrobatic movement to flip them back into place time after time, he commented, one day, on my teeth. He noticed I’d been grinding.
Ted and I had been together by then, for over ten years and I’d been used to him running the show. But around our marriage, some three years prior, when he’d become more and more demanding in his appetite for group sex… I’d begun taking drugs to cope. I was self medicating to put myself into a mental space to participate in the never ending sexual games Ted demanded I play. Ted used those drugs to get me to prolong his own amusement too.
So I clenched my teeth to sleep, but I especially clenched them in fear… because Ted’s insatiable little head always wanted me to fuck one more time, no matter what.
Our jaws muscles, it turns out, are the second strongest in our bodies, after our hearts! So prolonged and unabated clenching can cause damage, not only to our teeth, but to our whole skull. I had altered my ear canals and set my crystals free on my own and I broke or chipped 8 teeth as well.
That’s how frightened I was of Ted’s angry reactions and demands. That’s how far I was willing to go for him. That’s how little I was thinking about my own comfort and how confused I was about my own priorities… and how low I’d placed my own health on the totem pole in our relationship… Or how low, perhaps, Ted himself, had placed me.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg, because the body keeps the score*.
When Ted finally left and openly began his crusade to crush me, my health declined even further. With each lie he told our friends and the judges, my auto-immune system weakened and I became easy prey to a virus that stayed in my system for months, wracking havoc on my sinuses, eventually causing me to loose my smell completely, my ears to ring constantly and my body to shut down. I could no longer cope with the stress or the despair.
My body had been trying to outrun Ted for too long. Trying to stay ahead of his demands and avoid his anger. My body had been trying to make him happy at my own expense. Trying to stave off his attacks and his lies and his legal manipulation… So my body became as much of a mess as my head had.
In some sort of self preservation perhaps, I’d somehow severed the communication between the two, between my head and my body, between my mind and heart… So neither was running the show any longer. No one was at the helm at all anymore when I finally became aware of my cascading health concerns.
So the path back has been long and fraught with obstacles because the many wounds were obscure, though interlinked. And there was no one doctor that could put the ailments together, to connect the dots, no magic cure, no secret recipe… except for me.
And the work, of course, began right there, with me alone.
The work began with acknowledging that I was ill. The work began with wanting to heal myself. It began by becoming conscious of the trauma I had experienced. And it especially began by being present… when I’d been living so unconsciously for so many, many years.
When I was finally in a safe enough place to concentrate on me, my physical health reciprocated immediately. I made an about face in how I’d been living and I began to prioritize me!
Nurturing, caring, treating, being and giving back became my motto.
I started with yoga and meditation and I healed myself from the inside, through nourishment and nutriments. I began to breath and care for myself consciously. I became mindful of myself and of others. I began to listen to my body where before, my body had been a mere vessel, that I’d offered Ted on a golden platter, for his own personal consumption.
When I consciously recuperated ownership, I nursed my whole self back to health. I found a team of professionals to help, but the main medicine was me. Self love has made me my own best doctor and today I can even smell again.
I’d thought olfaction was mostly a memory trigger, but it’s so, so much more than that. Our sense of smell units us in a shared experience in spite of ourselves, it creates community and a common awareness. Smell link us, almost imperceptibly, to the present more strongly than I ever knew.
And smell in French is the same word as feel.
So today, thanks to my own expert self care, I can smell and I can feel again too. Finally.
So even if Ted was domestically violent during our marriage, even though Ted was a lying cheat in our divorce, and even though Ted’s psychopathy is no longer a secret to any of us anymore… this story, the story of my own body, my own physical and mental health, is all mine.
I am reclaiming responsibility and I’m taking care of myself now in spite of Ted’s abuse.
I’m no longer Ted’s victim. I’m a survivor!
*Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps The Score (Penguin Books, 2014)
