Trauma Central

they could just treat you better now.

and you should never trust someone who, by default, needs to be convinced to stop doing things that hurt people.

most people who have an interest in not hurting those they care about are able to be told "hey could you stop doing that? it hurts me" without needing a debate, a doctor's note, or throwing a huge fucking tantrum.

on survival

“Resilience”

When a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or any other competent mental health practitioner tells you in a mild or observational tone that you are "very good at compartmentalizing" in your first session, that's not actually a good thing.

Like it's not inherently a bad thing either, to be clear: we generally develop intense compartmentalization skills because we needed them! They have a purpose!

But what they mean is not "gosh, look at you with your high level elite skill that everyone should aspire to, you barely need any help from me at all!"

What they mean is " . . . ah. You . . . have been through a lot of shit. Hmm."

What they mean is that your compartmentalization capacity is obvious even in this very brief first conversation and that means that you are compartmentalized to a point where you probably don't actually know how you feel about things and have entire rooms of Psychological Wounds you not only aren't actually attending to but don't know or admit are there.

I say this as someone who generally gets this, assuming I have not already myself said, "so as a result of bullshit I am great at compartmentalizing myself all the way to a breakdown/ruining my own life!" and thus we have shared the Dark Laughter of Serious Mental Health Work. It's not a bad thing, AS SUCH.

The thing is that compartmentalization is a coping strategy and it's a skill that does often turn out to be quite necessary to function in the world. And the more stressful your world is, the more necessary it is to function.

Compartmentalization means that when you're in a hella stressful situation (whatever that happens to be for you), you can sort of close off or move back from the front or the driver's seat, all the things that don't help with that situation - and that can be not only really useful but absolutely necessary for survival.

A fairly innocuous example of compartmentalizing is that when you've had a shitty day at work, but you're a parent, you still have to go home and do all the Parent Responsibilities; you have to compartmentalize your anger at your boss or at some part of your job, or whatever, from the space where you look after your kids, and vice versa.

Almost all of us will learn to compartmentalize a little, and we'll learn it because we have to.

. . . but.

Compartmentalization is not as clean as it sounds, because the human brain doesn't work like that.

Because all of the shit you experience is still there. It still exists, in your brain and your body and your memory and often the former two even if your memory of it is fuzzy.

All metaphors are flawed, you understand - none of this is actually putting anything in a box, or sweeping it under the rug, or under the bed. But for the purposes of an easy image that's useful to imagine this, compartmentalization is like sweeping stuff under the rug, or under the bed, or putting it in a box - you've got it out of sight, but it's still there. It still exists, and crucially, it's still having some affect on you.

And also - letting the "sweeping it under the rug" metaphor go, because it's only a metaphor, and using another one - it can become so habitual and complete that you're closing doors in yourself before you even really know what's behind them, and given that all these solutions will "leak" you can (almost certainly will) end up in a situation where your thinking brain, the part that is reading this post and thinking "this applies to me" or "this doesn't", has no fucking idea what you've got in all those boxes, or under the rug, or whatever, because you habitually shut doors on the whole thing before you were even aware of it.

Those of us who learned how to compartmentalize the hard way, and do it as a habit, will often be like yes, see, I am excellent at this coping skill. And we're not wrong.

But the compartments are all artificial. Fundamentally it's all you - fundamentally every part of your experience is part of you, is acting on how your brain works, how your body experiences the world, and if you don't learn how to un-compartmentalize and integrate and deal with all of that, then you get increasingly fucked up by the very thing that lets you function.

And if you are so good at compartmentalizing that in your first session your mental health practitioner (who you are almost certainly seeing because shit is starting to go wrong and you're not sure how to fix it) is like ah, this person is very good at compartmentalization and says so. . . .

That probably means that this habit is so advanced, and so automatic, and so inflexible, that it's harming you. That part of the reason you're struggling with depression, or anxiety, or rage, or hopelessness, or hypervigilance, or whatever (I could go through a lot of pathology here) is because there is shit behind doors that you have not dealt with or processed through, stuff under rugs that's decomposing, or in fact you've just got so many locked doors that parts of your psyche don't really function anymore, even if nothing behind them (so to speak) is that catastrophic - they're still closed and locked and that's part of you that you can't access.

But is still there and is still influencing what you do, how things feel, all of it, because you don't actually get rid of things by compartmentalizing. Sometimes the influence is like having a hidden bomb or button that makes things explode that you don't even know is there; sometimes it's just something that makes everything a bit more sharp, more pointy; and sometimes it's more just like . . . . part of being human, the flexibility and imagination and change and capacity for growth, isn't there; there's a rigidity or a touchiness instead. Sometimes it just makes you literally physically ill.

A lot of the time it's a mix of all the above and even more things.

A lot of the time we're pretty resistant to decompartmentalizing because the blunt truth is, it's probably going to hurt and going to be messy. The longer we've been Very Good at Compartmentalizing and haven't learned how to deliberately then stop, open the various things and lift the lids and process shit, the more it's likely to hurt. And to be totally honest the more likely that hurt is to impact multiple areas in our lives.

And because compartmentalizing often makes it so we don't have to feel Bad Shit with any immediacy, we are often convinced that we've "handled" the emotions, when really we've just hidden them even from ourselves. And since bringing them back out and integrating them means, you know, feeling shit and that shit is bad it really doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

Masking is a kind of compartmentalization - masking in the psychological terminology for things like ASD or ADHD or mood disorders. Masking often means that we take all the things that we feel or think that don't match what we want to show on the mask and we shove them away under the rug and pretend they're not there. We compartmentalize.

Unmasking is a kind of decompartmentalizing; that's why suddenly it feels like you've constantly got less Cope, that things that "never used" to bug you are now a massive screaming problem. You're opening those doors and now you have to deal with what you used to just deny, and at the very least if you're still shoving it behind a door you're now aware there's something there.

But let's be real: you didn't get a diagnosis because everything in your life was fine, did you? You didn't start wondering and start looking at things and so on because you were actually "fine". You did it because you were exhausted or horrifically depressed or just not functioning, you were coming to the end of your rope and something was wrong and you started looking for explanations and some kind of solution.

And you had to do that because all of the shit in the compartments doesn't stay there neatly. It always leaks. It is always still part of the body and the brain that you live in.

That's just one example, though. People also compartmentalize grief; they compartmentalize around relationships, especially ones that come from very strong bonds (like parents) but are also in some way toxic (like . . . parents, often) or hard to deal with, or cause cognitive dissonance in some way. We absolutely compartmentalize around cognitive dissonances that arise from conflicting beliefs, or needs that conflict with our belief, or anything else like that.

You compartmentalize around a horrible hateful job so you don't "bring it home with you" and that's admirable and noble and maybe even necessary - but if you don't have somewhere to decompartmentalize, integrate and deal with the shit that the work is leaving you with, you will still start spilling it on your home.

Compartmentalization is a very useful skill but it's a skill that ideally you use temporarily and briefly, and one that you do have to know and learn how to turn off. Because everything you experience is a part of you and keeping it rigidly compartmentalized just means you now don't know how it's influencing you, or what fault-lines or residue or rot is building up, because you've got it over there in a box you're not looking at. Sometimes you gotta, to get through the day; but it's risky to leave it there too long and the longer it stays the higher the risk.

I compartmentalize really well. A lot of shit happened to me in 2020-2021 that I literally looked a lot of people who were worried about me in the eye about and said, "I'm not dealing with it right now. If I try to deal with it right now I will drop something important that will have horrific consequences that I don't want to deal with. It's POSSIBLE that it will creep up on me and make me fall over before I get a chance to deal with it in controlled circumstances, but it's GUARANTEED that if I do so now, it will be bad. So I am very deliberately choosing to take 'possibly getting away with it' over 'definitely fucking everything up'."

I got about a year out of that, before shit caught up with me, but by the time that year was over yeah, I was in a place where I had a lot more leeway to crash and burn for a bit than I had at the time.

But you want to make those choices on purpose; you don't want to leave yourself armed mines in your psyche ready to blow the fuck up, and you can't rely on compartmentalization to save you long term. You gotta be aware that it itself can start being a pathology that means you just don't know what you're feeling (but what you're feeling is still affecting how you act and how you interpret how other people act).

That's why it's not "oh look at this very mentally healthy person!" when a mental health professional says that, especially on your very first appointment.

Indeed that is quite a similar mechanism, and has a similar "there is a reason we develop this and a utility to it but also it will fuck us up if we don't recognize it's got hard limitations" quotient.

The "messy shit" is everything that won't go nicely into the verbalized/intellectualized/described part. It's the raw feeling in the body; it's the shit that doesn't actually make sense; it's the emotional experience that then goes twisted around in a totally Stupid and Fucking Useless way but stays there.

I 100% sympathise with the "not sharing it with anyone else until I have control of it" part, and I wish I could now pass on to you the magic technique that makes it possible to sort it out all on your own, but tbh, we don't really have one.

Humans are hypersocial mammals; none of our psychological shit exists in a nice, siloed control-area separate from other humans. We exist in relation to other humans in general, and as a result most of our Bullshit does, in fact, have to be solved relationally, even if we can at least choose to do it in controlled relational contexts.

Please understand that I FUCKING HATE THIS. I am not saying this as an hah hah silly people, not understanding they ~*need others*~. I am saying this as someone who has dug into the genuine cutting edge research on trauma and toxic stress and how to heal it and how to deal with it and how social-interaction-and-relation-with-other-humans is a sanity-requirement that's wired into our fucking brains (yes even us Autistics yes I promise no that Lone Hermit wasn't actually Well and if you look at the records we have from such people that becomes super obvious super quickly especially that they were desperately lonely actually) and wanted to scream and pull out her hair because fuck that shit.

I really hate it.

So with that in mind: alas, yes, that "oh you're really good at describing/explaining/intellectualizing/verbalizing what happened to you" is another one of those phrases that from a half-competent mental health professional means "whooooo boy there's a coping mechanism that has been stretched beyond its furthest functional edge!"

As with compartmentalizing, like . . . you can, theoretically, if you're lucky, continue more or less indefinitely while still being able to, say, get up, do whatever thing gets you your economic security in the world, keep your life going sort of way - if you're lucky and nothing ever trips the landmine or sleeping slip fault in your brain?

But much like that'll mean you're sort of . . . . existing in a cramped and smaller version of your own psyche, leaving "the messy stuff" untouched/hidden by yourself until you feel it's sufficiently cleaned up and orderly to show the world in general tends to mean "the messy stuff" leaks out from under the container or sets up the metaphorical equivalent of a pervasive stink/whatever and fucks up bits of your life (like friendships, or relationships, or your ability to make art, or just your ability to feel basic contentment or safety) and does it in ways that aren't even necessarily clear . . . which actually decreases one's control over whether or not you can mitigate them, y'know?

My unsolicited advice in the sense of, this has worked for me, is that if you want to start trying to get a handle on that, find a mental health professional who a. has experience with very specifically the need of clients to be allowed to create their own sense of safety, and b. has literally nothing to do with the rest of your life (including maybe finding a new one if you've gone to a different one).

The latter is relevant because one of the most important parts, for me, of the counsellor who did help is that it didn't matter what she knew (or didn't know) about me, because she was 100% irrelevant to the rest of my life and had no chance to interact with me. Our circles did not cross in any way.

It was still hard, but that was a crucial element in creating the space *I* needed for the Truly Messy Shit: I did still need that relational piece, the part my stupid hypersocial mammal brain insisted on of involving another breathing human, but its context was controlled and removed from any of the other places it could be threatening.

(This is, of course, First Step - the overall point is to be able to lessen the threat those Messy Parts represent to our entire everything, so that we can figure out how to integrate their elements into our self overall and all the rest of our relationships, but everything is multipart, so.)

I think if there's one thing I think is important for this, like, thread/post/whatever overall to convey is: everything you've lived through is part of you and it is still there and mixed up in who you are right now. Existence is hard, and sometimes yeah absolutely we have to put shit in boxes or behind doors, or have to weave words around shit to make it safe for Right Now and our ability to do that is crucial to being the species that can handle the stresses and demands of eg being in an airplane for whole eight hours without anyone actually killing anyone else! With STRANGERS! Total complete STRANGERS! (our nearest relatives could not do this, to be clear).

And none of this was ever like, planned. Nobody ever sat down and went "hrm what is the most useful and efficient way for humans to handle all this shit" - we are stuck with the kludge-brain of millions of years of layers of shit that our evolution has left us which is way, way weirder and more complicated than any pat "this is why we are how we are" thing (human babies can literally have every other need provided but simply wither and die if not held enough - who the FUCK thought that was a good idea? too long alone and our brains get so desperate for company that they will make it up and hijack our senses into it! etc).

So we . . . have to figure it out. And since we started figuring it out systematically, one of the things that keeps being true over and over is that everything you've experienced is part of you, and there are costs to anything that attempts to make that less so. Sometimes, in order to survive, we just have to pay those costs - sometimes there's a war on, sometimes there isn't the possibility of creating a context safe enough to sort shit out and figure out how to process it. That's how it be sometimes.

Though I will caution that as a result, sometimes people just die/fall apart/break. Like the idea that "sometimes you just CAN'T stop and deal with things the right way" often seems to carry the implicit claim that thus if you try hard and really mean it, you can be guaranteed that you will get through, that it'll hurt but -

And that's . . . not true.

It's a lot more like driving a car that's giving you an engine warning but you don't have time to get out and fix it. If you stop you know you're gonna die (or whatever) so you keep driving and you hope that the car will hold off dying until you're safe. And sometimes that is the only thing you can do!

. . . but that car might not. That engine might die. This isn't a bargain with the universe that if you endure pain or are committed enough or whatever, you will get through this necessarily harmful period - it's a dice-roll with a bad engine on a long drive.

People who say "well I had to do it, I had no other choice" and did manage to get to the other side ignore their survivorship bias, because there is always another choice and that is everything breaks. We all have actual hard, abrupt, "this human and its body are just no longer functioning, good night" limits and none of us get to know what they are before we hit them.

If you really have no choice but to just keep going, that's legit. But if you are noticing shit is starting to break down and you're having problems and this kind of shit, this whole thread, is relevant to you, it's maybe worth it to take a second to see if you really do have to roll out onto the highway in a storm with that shitty engine, or maybe if the consequences of starting to get it fixed are less than the fear of feeling shit makes them.

It's one that most of the worst, meanest, etc etc people around us all the time are usually pursuing vigorously and it doesn't tend to work for them very well either (that's why they're so fuckin' angry all the time), but yeah, sure. That's something you can try.

As noted above: sometimes you just have to throw the dice on the engine and hope you get out the other side, whether that "other side" is in a few years or at the end of your life.

And some people will, and some people will die (or break, or otherwise suffer the ugliest of consequences). I am, trust me, extremely aware of this; I have seen both the survival and a lot of the fucking breakage, and that is a heartbreaking aspect of reality. It sucks.

However, there are ways that you can learn skills that let you handle shit better even within moments of intensive toxic stress; there are things you can do to lessen the ongoing toxic effects, and things you can do to give yourself a better chance of psychological repair, even when the circumstances still fucking suck. You can literally get beneficial improvement in some of the worst external life circumstances on the planet - these kinds of things have demonstrated effectiveness in those whose circumstances are among the worst on the planet.

Those are balanced by our internal life circs, our extant mental illness and everything else; I'm not even saying "well people in war zones can do this, so can you", because that's also bullshit, but what I'm saying is that there is no single shitty circumstance that categorically makes this knowledge useless or inapplicable.

There are also a lot of ways in which the damage we do to ourselves by the instinctive coping mechanisms convinces us that any improvement is impossible, and that opening the doors and boxes and learning those skills is impossible or the worst idea ever, and that it could only possibly be done in an imaginary (and impossible) state of Perfect Safeness. The skills aren't intuitive in the same way.

The only person who can judge which of these is available to any given person is them - but given that skill-building programs to increase resilience have literally been studied and found to have some impact in even the poorest and most desperate communities and circumstances on earth, I guess what I'm suggesting is stopping and asking yourself if it's really impossible to reassess things and start doing some work to handle shit in a less poisonous way even if it's ongoing; if there is really nothing that can be done except to continue to just drive on that engine hoping it won't break.

And what I'm saying is that rather than being a rigid either-or where All Compartmentalization/Intellectualization is Bad or Actually It's Fine I Need It Fuck Off, it's a lot more that it's a thing we do and it's really useful to figure out how to use it in the way that's least likely to be a bomb that blows up and fucks everything up worse later, as opposed to maybe learning some new skills - ones that aren't intuitive and can be kinda terrifying to try out - and seeing if that decreases the unexploded minefields in your own head.

It's not easy, and it's not fair, and again: sometimes you just can't, and you have to roll your dice about whether or not you'll get to be someone with a survivorship bias in five years or whether you'll be . . . the other case study. That is absolutely a true thing.

But a lot of the time figuring out the better way is more possible than it looks, and if that's the case, I recommend it, not because everything will get better and be easier but because handling All The Shit with fewer minefields has better risk rates than handling it with more, so you might as well make sure you're doing what you can.

Carefully practiced dissociation will get you there for a while, but it tends to decompensate after a few years and just wind up with severe depression interspersed with anxiety-attacks; similarly, certain substance-use patterns can maintain this desire for a while, but again, it then declines into persistent and extremely exaggerated negative feelings and expressions of feelings.

Meanwhile in both cases the capacity to do things like "not end up chronically unhoused" or "maintain access to food" usually take significant hits, often to the point of destruction.

Because, again: everything you go through is still part of you, and "emotion" is part of the mechanisms that actually underpin all human choices, including "bothering to get something to eat." There isn't actually an ability to remove all need to "feel", while still remaining a functioning human being; attempts to do so largely end up with simply feeling negative things very loudly (and acting out on them on other people, and causing harm in the world thereby). Human brains don't work like that; everything is literally entangled in everything else, so that very basic functions are unfortunately tangled up with the things we call "feelings".

You can certainly try it out for yourself. That is a path available to you as someone with free will and the right to your own choices. When I note that it doesn't work well, that doesn't mean it's bad, or stupid, or whatever: I mean you cannot achieve a lack of feeling things; you cannot achieve a lack of emotional response. You can achieve self-deception; you can achieve the alexithymic state of not knowing what the emotion is that you're acting out under, and thus being unable to control it or mediate it or choose your behaviour appropriately; and you can pursue lack of feeling until what you have destroyed is your ability to do anything but rocket from emotional reaction to emotional reaction; and so on.

But your brain will register emotional responses and those will impact how you behave, especially toward others, and the more detached and suppressed you try to make them, what you will mostly lose is actually self-control and the insight that allows self-awareness.

This is, I know, very boring and very very obnoxious. But it is what it is. There is no path available to a human being to the unfeeling intelligence unaffected by all others. Believe me, many people have tried for a very long time, and remained actually scared, and mad, and lonely, and upset, and angry, and paranoid, and acting like it.