“You can share it with him. Like, ‘I don’t want to nag you, I’m sorry. But you cannot die on me, and I cannot watch you not take care of yourself. So please take care of yourself for me.’?”
“Oh. Okay. I’ll try that.” This seemed like a good, prescriptive solution, but I still didn’t feel better. Saying something like that when I was all triggered and crazy sounded impossible. And honestly, Joey would probably get irritated at that, too.
I grabbed a pillow from Dr. Ham’s couch and hugged it over my belly. “Maybe we shouldn’t even get married in the first place if we’re going to fight over stupid things like this. If I’m going to constantly be triggered by the way his face looks.”
“You’re so stupid,” Dr. Ham said, laughing again.
“What?! You…you can’t call me stupid. I’m not stupid.”
“You’re being stupid,” he said, grinning infuriatingly. “It’s not the fights that matter. It’s the repairs.”
The repairs.
You’re still my friend, Jeremy. I’m over it, Willow, because I’m your friend.
* * *
—
As adults, Dr. Ham told me, the process of repair is a bit more complex, more transactional. But no less satisfying.
“See, for people who are traumatized, all they know is rupture,” Dr. Ham explained. “They always have to come to the abuser with an apology. But it’s never about them having their own needs. It’s not a mutuality thing. It’s a one-way street.”
I thought about this for a moment. “You mean…I was only taught how to apologize whenever there’s a problem and say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so fucked-up.’?”
“Exactly. You don’t know how to apologize by making it a two-way repair.”
I stammered out what I thought he was saying. “So for people who are traumatized, that means they’re constantly apologizing…but they’re not having their own issues witnessed and repaired. Or they’re constantly demanding an apology and not—”
“Recognizing the other person. Right!”
“So they’re lacking nuance in their repairs,” I said with some awe.
“Yeah. Forgiveness is this act of love where you say to someone, ‘You’re an imperfect being and I still love you.’ You want to have this energy of ‘We’re not giving up on each other; we’re in this for the long haul. You hurt me. And, yes, I hurt you. And I’m sorry, but you’re still mine.’?”
“That sounds really good. I want to be able to have that two-way thing. But I don’t know how to do that, really.”
“That’s why you’re here.”
CHAPTER 40
The truth is not an easy thing to discern. If it were, the world would be a much more peaceful place. Instead, each of us is a delicate bundle of triggers, desires, emotions, and needs—and we all have our own ways of concealing those needs. And so, when our understanding of what people need fails to match up with what they want—therein lies conflict. In order to minimize conflict, the trick is to ascertain some version of that truth. To identify what is actually happening around us. Only, as in a quote often attributed to Ana?s Nin, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
According to Dr. Ham, complex PTSD further clouds our perception of basic sensorial instincts. We are jumpy creatures, expectant of danger and conflict, and so that’s what we see. We’re often blind to what is actually happening.
So Dr. Ham advocates for what the Dalai Lama calls “emotional disarmament—to see things realistically and clearly without the confusion of fear or rage.” For every narrow, fear-based C-PTSD reading, Dr. Ham said, there is a wider truth—layers and layers of truths. Of course it isn’t possible to always know that entire truth, because the people we love might not even be aware of that truth themselves. What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that truth is, not fear. He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”
Dr. Ham modeled this curiosity for me in most of our sessions. In the middle of a conversation with me, he’d often go ramrod straight, look at the ceiling, and ask, “What am I doing?” or “What’s happening?” I’d sit there and wait as he figured it out: “I think I’m being grumpy to you because you were challenging me,” or “I think I’m trying to make you feel better by relating to you,” or “What just happened with you, why did your expression change?” It was a relief to have someone so open and honest about everything that was going through their mind and who was so unabashedly eager to know everything that was going through mine.
* * *
—
After a couple of weeks of combing through Google Docs looking for misattunements between Dr. Ham and myself, I started finally identifying misattunements in my interactions with others. I had brunch with two friends, I told Dr. Ham, and the conversation never quite clicked. It felt as if I was forcing conversation or performing most of the time. “Good, I’m glad you noticed it,” Dr. Ham said.
I had a dinner party that felt a little strained, and I went through the details with Dr. Ham to try to pick apart the truth of what had actually been happening. Had I been a bad host? A careless overtalker? A bad person? “Hold on. Was it two girls, two guys, a couple?” he asked.
“A girl and a guy.”
“Were they both single?”
“Uh…yeah. But they’re not interested in each other, I don’t think?”
“You invited two single people of the opposite sex? It must have felt like some kind of setup. That’s going to make kind of a weird vibe,” he said, chuckling. “This one’s an easy fix. Just invite more people next time.”
Once in a while, I picked up on my little realizations quick enough to act on them. Like one day, Joey’s brother was over for dinner and told us he’d recently injured his hand. I started talking about my own sprained thumb to relate. He grunted in response. Hmm, I thought. That didn’t quite land right. Maybe I shouldn’t have compared our injuries, especially since mine is so much smaller. Maybe affirming his pain was what he needed instead. The next day, I sent him a text. “I’m really sorry that your hand hurts. That sucks so much.” Then I shared a couple of links to CBD pain creams that I liked. He thanked me. Okay, I thought. That felt more right.
But those actionable moments were so few and far between. One day, I told Dr. Ham about a friend who had just been through a breakup. “I listened to her talk for four hours, but I don’t think I made her feel any better. Maybe instead of giving her advice, I should have just told her, ‘Wow, you’re in a lot of pain.’ Maybe she needed that.”
“Ah, that’s very intuitive! That could have been a very helpful thing to say.”
“It would have? Oh, goddamn it.” And then I proceeded to spend the rest of the session feeling miserable regret about not having thought of it at the time.