All hail the Ice Queen…

Wow, what an emotional weekend, and I am left feeling like I have been dragged through a ringer on this rather gloomy Monday morning!

You may think that’s a bad thing, but for me it’s a win…even if it did mean that most of my weekend was spent crying and snotting everywhere!

Let me explain why, just so you don’t think I have completely lost the plot…

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In my mid-thirties I started therapy.

It was long overdue and with the crystal clarity that only hindsight can provide, I realise I should have started the process at least 20 years sooner!

Sadly, my Mum had her own serious mental health issues and in those days, life was all about her! It wasn’t her fault that my needs were overlooked for so long, it was all about survival for us all. For my mum, it was about living with her volatile moods and emotions, for me it was getting through a day without worrying my mum was going to kill herself!

It would take very little to send my mum spiralling…a look, a thoughtless gesture of impatience, a discarded unwashed plate, dirty clothes left on the floor, an unmade bed, an unfinished meal, a careless comment…

Reading my mum’s every move, gesture, ready for the smallest, almost imperceptible shift in her tone, I learnt to amend my behaviour to accommodate her needs. In doing so, I was often able to defuse the nuclear device that was her unstable emotional state…often, but not always!

As I am sure you can imagine, living under conditions such as these was intense to say the least. You are probably familiar with the phrase, ‘walking on egg shells’, well that is a very apt description of my formative years.

This way of living, scared all the time, meant that I had to keep a lid on my emotions. On the rare occasions that I had been unable to, when my bucket was so full it was spilling over, the shit that would hit the fan was devastating. My 2 minutes of emotional freedom came at a massive cost and the guilt afterwards would be crushing! Leaving me despising myself for putting my mum at risk, hating myself for not being ‘good enough, clean enough, clever enough’, fearful for her life.

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This is how the Ice Queen was born! I say Ice Queen, because genuinely, that is what one of my best friends has me saved as on his phone! It’s not a criticism, its quite an accurate observation!

Following on from years of relentless bullying, from school to school and some very abusive men in my life as an adult, I learnt that to survive I must ‘switch off’! The constant sadness, dismay, fear, shame and loathing became too much to live with!

I made a choice. I chose to never do to my family what my mum had tried unsuccessfully to do to us! Suicide was not an option! However tempting the promise of oblivion seemed at times! But I could no longer function with the hollowed out ache that had become a permanent resident in my stomach. It left me nauseous and winded daily. Heart ache doesn’t just live in the heart, it crushes everything from the chest down! Hurting in the way that extreme cold makes your limbs ache!

Switching off my emotions wasn’t a conscious choice, it was a survival response! What an incredibly efficient machine the human body is… I survived!

The trouble with this effective form of defence, it doesn’t discriminate as to the type of emotions it turns off…everything stops! And that in itself becomes a whole new beast to slay!

So years and years of therapy later, after a telephone conversation with my son this weekend, the flood gates opened!

He is moving away. A 4 hour drive away! With my emotions in defence mode, I have been able to help him plan the logistics of such a move, with not the merest hint of despair! Like the machine I know I can ‘default’ to when things get potentially painful, it was business all the way!

He has just had his second hospital stay in a 4 week period. Bleeding internally from a tear in his stomach. I know I am worried about him because I am fussing over him,

“You have to start taking care of yourself”

“What are you eating? You need a balanced diet.”

“Are you getting enough sleep? Exercise?”

“Why don’t you care about looking after yourself?”

“Are you ok?”

And so on…you know, the typical ‘mum’ go to responses when your baby gets ill! I say baby, but he’s 20! He will always be my baby though!

Switched off, and not really aware that I had slipped, despite my therapy, I busied myself with the practicalities! Then something odd happened…looking at a BBC news video on Instagram, I watched, open mouthed as a cop in America rescued a 60 year old man after he became stuck in his wheel chair on a railway crossing…with a train coming! The disturbing footage all caught on the cops body cam!

I watched it once, then replayed it to my husband, all the while something was bubbling within me! Tears prickled my eyes and that familiar ache hit my torso hard, winding me!

Confused at my reaction to this footage, I tried to get my feelings in check! Ridiculous to have such a strong emotional response to something that happened a million miles away, to people I have never and will never know! Disturbing as the video was, it certainly didn’t warrant my mermaid tears! Composing myself, left only with a tightness in my throat, I busied myself making lunch.

“Should I make some for Milo?”

BAM!!! The flood gates broke! Not merely crying, bent double sobbing! It wasn’t about the video, it was about saying goodbye to my son! My fucked up internal wiring unable to process my thoughts and feelings in a productive and ‘normalised’ way! The tears had to come, but because I am so ‘shut down’, they were forced to find a back door! It is through therapy that I am able to see that now!

My past traumas have my internal network of wires misfiring, sending bizarre, seemingly non-sensical responses, not just emotionally, but physically too. Effecting my mental health and my physical health in equal measure. I need to retrain my brain for the sake of my body!

This weekend was a breakthrough. Painful as it was, it was a win! The Ice Queen melted and I was able to understand and make sense of my emotional response…as cack-handed as it was! Progress isn’t always pretty and it certainly isn’t painless, but without it how are we to open ourselves up to joy! It’s not easy to be vulnerable, to let the guard down, it takes practice, patience and a shed load of commitment.

This weekend was a win!