Rigidity and Chaos = Childhood Trauma

Sep 19, 20235 min read

It’s been 6 weeks since my heat exhaustion incident which means 6 weeks since I have had coffee - until now. Damn, this is yummy! I gave it a break so that my body could recover and rehydrate. It was good for me. I don’t like when I find myself “needing” something to survive. For me, coffee was my preference for drugs. But I have proven that I can live without it and giving my body a 20-minute nap when it feels exhausted is a much better option.

But I also don’t want to restrict myself from ever having it again. So my goal is to have it when I want it but not get to where I MUST have it. Everything in moderation right? (Although I don’t think that saying works for all things. I don’t think I can ever have too much peace in my life. Just sayin.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about rigidity. I grew up with a very rigid routine that my mother implemented every day. These were the very formative years of my life. We started meeting with the cult members when I was 9 years old but we didn’t take the leap to leave our farm and live with other families until I was 12 years old. For those first 12 years, I lived in a very strict environment under a lot of pressure, expectation, and, discipline. Once we joined the cult though and started living in the community, it all went haywire. Our schooling mostly stopped, my parents were busy working things out with the adults, and we were left to figure out how to navigate this weird, new way of life amidst a bunch of other kids. It was a whole new type of fear.

Before that, I lived in fear of my mom. She meant business and spankings were a usual occurrence for the smallest of things. I was constantly walking on eggshells, hoping I didn’t screw up. The only time I could totally relax and just be a kid was when I got my very limited, daily free time to go play between school and chores. Trees were my favorite thing. I played mostly by myself because my sisters wanted to play dolls or sew and I had zero interest in anything along those lines.

I loved those moments of freedom.

I was adventurous and never lacked in the creativity department. These are my happy childhood memories. I longed to be close to my mom but her intense need to “train” her children made her feel more like a drill sergeant and less like someone I could find any comfort in. She taught me to fear God and also taught me to fear her.

Living in the community brought a whole new kind of scary to my life. I went from knowing exactly what to expect, to not having any idea of what was going on. I had no tools to navigate this new way of living. It felt like walking blindly through an obstacle course and just hoping I didn’t run into anything. I was now scared of all the adults and I did my very best to quickly figure out how to make them happy and stay on their good side. Going from such rigidity to absolute chaos is a feeling that I’ll probably never be able to describe.

This would explain why I struggle with some things and find myself parenting a certain way…

I love a schedule. I love a list. I love the feeling of things going the way I want them to go and I love my kids doing the things I asked them to do in an orderly manner. But often I fall into the trap of being too rigid and then when life throws in the inevitable, unexpected issues I panic. Before I even realize what has happened, I am rushing around the house, trying to get things back in order, and exuding an amount of stress that makes my kids want to run and hide. I hate it. The loss of control over my environment feels like chaos. Even though it’s not usually a big deal, at the moment, it feels incredibly scary. My livelihood feels threatened and I go right into survival mode.

I don’t want to be a rigid person. The word ‘rigid’ means “not able to be changed or adapted.” Yikes. That’s the opposite of what I want to be. I want to be flexible and able to continue learning and evolving for the rest of my life.

Maybe my mom needed to feel in control of her life and at the time it was the only way she knew how to manage 9 kids. I only have 3 kids and it’s still a shit show sometimes. It’s not easy letting my kids have their big feelings and taking the time to help them learn to navigate life’s difficulties. There are PLENTY of times that I am tempted to just discipline my kid instead of valuing their voice and their feelings. But I also remember how I felt as a child and this drives me to be different.

Along with learning to be more flexible, I also want to learn to not fear chaos. The hard truth is that rigidity only gives me a false sense of control. The schedule is all good until the dog gets sprayed by a skunk, a kid gets sick, my lower back goes out, a partner needs me to run a last-minute errand, and all the other things that I can’t plan for. You know what I’m talking about. It’s all those annoying things that make us feel like we don’t get to be in charge. Dang you life.

Anyway, I have a new plan. I started a new list on my whiteboard beside the daily list that I write each morning. It’s called the “UX” list. This is the UnExected List. Instead of being angry that my day got sabotaged, I can just add it to that list with a smile and say “Hello Life. I knew you were going to add something to my day.” This helps me to expect the unexpected and remember that life is an adventure. The truth is that life would be REALLY boring if we had it all planned out. Routines and schedules can help us feel secure but security isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The challenges in life that come our way are the things that help us grow and give us the chance to make new pathways in our brains - and continual brain growth keeps us healthy and happy. I don’t know about you, but being healthy and happy is what I’m shooting for.

This week I am working on honoring the little girl inside me who spent her childhood living in fear. I understand her better today than I did yesterday.

I am going to acknowledge her need for order while gently reminding her that flexibility is her friend. And when she starts to get stressed, I will ask her to take a moment and realize that her life is not in danger. But above all, I will remind her of the most important truth: she is good. Oh so good and she deserves to feel safe, valued, and loved.

We can go half our lives or longer, still operating in life the way we learned to as a child. It takes a lot of self-awareness and a buttload of willingness to heal in order for us to start noticing why we do the things we do. Life is no joke and certainly not a cakewalk.

You are a brave soul for continuing to show up every day. That in itself deserves to be celebrated.

I love you. Carry on, my comrades. I believe in you.

#readytohittheroadagainonmybike

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