“Can I ask how it impacts your relationships in a toxic way?”
“I’m just noticing things. All the time. Bad behaviors. Like, I tend to categorize people as ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe.’ And when I don’t like somebody, I see them as unsafe and I can’t deal with them. And then whenever anybody’s upset, I’m not good with sitting with their discomfort. I’m always trying to help and fix. And some people have told me I have a tendency to make things about myself. And I’m negative and I’m always complaining about my life. And I always feel like I’m having a crisis because I’m still not good enough at self-soothing.”
Dr. Ham nodded throughout my explanation. He’d seen this before. “This sounds really familiar, like—prototypical or classic or something. But I’m hesitant to say that because I don’t know whether you’re going to—”
“Well that’s the thing! That’s why I have such a fucked-up relationship with this condition. I’ve read all these books that say people with complex PTSD are tough to be around. And that’s really hard. It puts me in this category of suboptimal human. And I certainly knew I was flawed before the diagnosis, but I didn’t see myself as an irreparably bad human, I guess.”
“So the diagnosis made you make sense of why you act the way you do, but it also doomed you in that there’s not much that can be done about it.”
“And it gave me much more awareness of things I need to change and bad patterns I perpetuate. But I feel weighed down by the amount of shit I need to fix. It just feels like I can’t even have a conversation with friends because there’s so much wrong. I think I always had a fear of being patently unlovable. But now I have all these scientifically validated reasons that prove I’m patently unlovable. So I think the main thing I would like to get out of this is being able to reframe it.”
“Yeah,” Dr. Ham said, smiling, almost in awe. “That’s awesome. I want to say that I think the progress you made is really hope-inducing. Tell me about the changes you feel like you’ve made.”
“Well, there was this time with my aunt about a month ago that I’m pretty proud of,” I started.
A month ago, Joey and I had visited my family in Singapore and Malaysia for our pre-wedding honeymoon. One day, we drove past the post office and my aunt handed a package to Joey and told him to go inside and mail it for her. As soon as he left the car, she turned to me. “Ah girl, you must know no matter how nice your in-laws are to you, they are not your real family and you must not trust them. You must not act the same in front of them as you do me, and you must never fight with Joey in front of them. They will always side with Joey and not you.” This turned into a longer lecture about how I must forgive my father because we all have to forgive our real family for slighting us, because they’re the only actual family we’ll truly have.
Joey was only gone for ten minutes, but by the time he got back to the car, I was sobbing angrily, crouched over with my face in my hands, shouting, “You don’t know what it’s like!”
“What happened?” Joey gawked, swinging his gaze between the two of us. Nobody paid any attention to him.
Instead, my aunt sucked her teeth and said, “Wah, you are still so upset about this stuff with your father, huh? After so long? You know, you should really take your pain and use it to be a better and stronger person.”
“You know, I think Stephanie already does that. She works really hard to become a stronger person,” Joey pushed tentatively from the back seat, because I was crying too much to respond.
“Oh, good, good,” my aunt said. “Aiyah, okay lah girl, sorry lah. Come, stop crying, let’s go eat chicken rice.”
Before I’d gone on my trauma journey, my aunt’s comments would surely have ruined my day, I told Dr. Ham. I would have kept crying for an hour, then held a grudge, then self-loathed for holding a grudge. I would’ve stayed triggered the rest of my visit. But instead, I counted colors out the car window, regulated my breathing, and let it go. I was back to normal within a few minutes, cracking jokes and enjoying myself.
“I mean. That’s okay…” Dr. Ham said, sounding skeptical.
And this is when our first session got weird.
“Tell me if this sounds interesting to you,” he suggested. “You can do the grounding exercises for sure to start, but it’s not enough. If you just go, ‘Okay, let’s move on,’ you’re only doing the regulation part but not the reconnecting part. I would ask you to make sense of why your aunt talks the way she does. And first understand why it bothered you so much.”
Any other therapist would have patted me on the back and given me props on my progress. But right off the bat, Dr. Ham was challenging me. It disconcerted me and, quite frankly, upset me.
“I know why it bothered me,” I countered impatiently.
“Okay. Name it.”
I told him that my aunt was projecting because Chinese mothers-in-law of her generation were notoriously nightmarish, but she’d never met my mother-in-law, who was an absolute gem. I listed past fights we’d had that had led up to this moment, issues with her defending my parents. But he kept pushing: “And so? So what? What was the raw nerve?”
Finally, I spat out, “The nerve is that my entire life all I’ve wanted is a family. I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be loved unconditionally. And the joy of entering this family is feeling something like that. And she was saying, no, you don’t get that still. You can’t trust them; you can never trust anybody. So, you know. It’s this hunger. And her shitting on it.” My eyes welled up as I said it.
Dr. Ham, who had been leaning forward in his chair, finally sat back, smiling as if he’d gotten what he wanted. I resented him a little for it. Cool, he felt like he was achieving some kind of fucking breakthrough, but this wasn’t new information to me. I wasn’t getting anything out of this. So I tried to change the subject to something more relevant—my relationship or more family history. But after a few minutes, Dr. Ham interrupted me.
“I have to say, I just want to register that. When I asked what nerve your aunt hit and you said you just wanted to be loved. That felt really moving.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said irritably. “So like, you’re saying I’m dissociated from—”
“Oh, no. Actually, I was just tracking and sharing with you that…um…I’m trying to…Oh God. I’m sorry.” He paused, seeming confused about how to proceed. “It’s just, there are moments when you become hypervigilant and you presume to know what I mean. And you try to jump in.”
“Sorry,” I whispered, my voice barely audible. Oh no! I did? I’m such a bad listener. Yet another C-PTSD trait.
“And there are other moments when you’re just really raw and, I don’t know…poignant. That moment when you talked about wanting to feel loved felt really good. It was making me tear up, and I was resonating with you. Do you feel this coming and going, too?”