No relationship is ever 100% rock solid. Things can happen at any time. People can be someone you had no idea they were. The only way to truly guard yourself is to not make yourself vulnerable – to pass up opportunities for connections. I do believe that no connection (that is not literally dangerous) is a complete waste of time. I think you have to look at your experiences a bit from the 50,000 ft. view – holistically, over time. Relationships are an opportunity for you to learn more about yourself; to figure out if choices you’ve been making might not be working for you anymore, or if patterns you are seeing need some therapy time.
There was a time, when I had been almost a year into a relationship, I experienced a moment of dissonance so profound I had PTSD a year later.
The details of it are not important. The outcome definitely is, for several reasons.
What happened was in a few sentences during a conversation suddenly everything I believed to be something turned out to be completely something else. Ever have that moment? It’s jarring, to say the least.
In that moment I questioned everything I’d been doing, the choices I’d been making, and the vulnerable space I’d allowed myself to be in.
I hated myself. I felt incredibly dumb, spending time and effort on something that clearly meant something completely different to someone else. It was the worst kind of epiphany.
I was also trapped. I could not rectify the situation the way I normally would have – by exiting the vehicle while it was still moving. I spun and spiralled for days, seeing no way out. To say I did not eat or sleep well would be an understatement.
We had the conversation. I spoke my truth, as much as I just wanted to throw in the towel and call it a day. We moved past the moment, although really, I did not. Not every day, but quite a lot of the time since that moment of shock I feel like I’ve been walking on shifting sand. There’s a tiny part of my brain that still hears that dissonance from time to time, like the almost imperceptible buzzing of power lines.
Trauma, no matter what it looks like, changes you on a cellular level. You will never be the same person you were before. The “return to normal” is less a return than a reset to a different frequency. This is why with multiple traumas it can feel like you’ve lost your bearings entirely. It can make you feel literally like you’ve lost your mind.
I did the therapy around this event. I looked at my part in it and cleaned up my side of the street. It’s bound to happen again but since I took that event as a learning opportunity I may reset a little closer to the starting point instead of being kicked off-kilter to the extent it did the first time around.