Two Places at Once

I wrote this some time ago as an attempt to put words to one of the most isolating and indescribable experiences of living with trauma. Growing up I would have benefited from seeing my experience in another’s, from reading words that felt recognizable to me. If this is your experience, I hope these words provide you with some context to find yourself in. This piece was difficult to wrap up, but I think that is itself a representation of living with trauma. There is no finish line, no neat resolution. There is only the journey of healing.

Have you ever been in two places at once? Here, but also there?

It happens suddenly.

I notice an indescribable sensation on the outsides of my ears. It is beyond words, but it causes me to feel exposed. Open.

Vulnerable.

My desire is to cover them, to squish them to the sides of my head so I don’t feel exposed to the open air of my own home. I wrap a blanket around my shoulders, fluffing it and layering it so it cocoons around my head.

I can sense that it’s coming, because a whole host of body sensations that lack accurate descriptors start to occur. There’s an ache in my gut, and a fluttering in my chest. There’s an innate desire to curl into a ball and close my eyes against the onslaught. I have never truly been able to describe it to another, but the word lurching comes to mind. I wrap my body in a ball, close my eyes, and it is as if I can see my insides being pulled, lurched, to the past.

I am here. But I am also there.

Two places at once.

A flashback.

I have had many of these over the course of my life, and up until my mid-twenties I did not know what they were. I had no words to describe the sensations, and no language to articulate the dread and the self-loathing that would plague me. I felt so strongly that something was wrong with me, and I did everything I could to heal it. I prayed. I went to therapy, three different times. I completed a full course of care with each therapist and experienced growth and healing in many ways, but never when it came to this. I read scripture. I surrendered to God, over and over again. When well-meaning people asked if maybe I needed to surrender? I would surrender again.

And still, these events would occur. I never understood why they did, or what I had done to deserve it.

Until I met with a woman who gave me words to understand.

“It sounds like a trauma response,” she said.

She then proceeded to briefly explain how trauma works, and how the brain processes it. She explained that experiences from my past were popping into the present, because my brain hadn’t encoded those experiences into space and time due to the stressful nature of them. In a matter of moments I finally found context for what had been happening to me. My brain had been reacting as if the complex events I witnessed throughout my developmental years were happening in that very room, years and even decades later.

Two places at once.

This is the nature of trauma. It exceeds our boundaries of time, and our concept of memory. It often surpasses language and description. What cannot be communicated can make you feel gravely alone. You can be surrounded by people, and even in two places at once. And still, alone.

But this is also the nature of trauma. It can be reprocessed. Our orientation to it can shift and change with treatment, care, and authentic connections with others. What was once a terrifying memory grows to become that: a memory. It takes time, but suddenly you aren’t in two places at once anymore. You are where your feet are, and you experience a glimpse of joy for the first time in a long time.

And you soak it in. And you might flash back, again, later. But for now, you embrace being in one place at a time.