Aftershocks

Sometime in 1984 or 1985, there was an earthquake in Salt Lake City, UT, a city that happens to lie on a major fault line. I would have been 6 or 7 at the time. I don’t remember the earthquake at all – it happened while I was sleeping. Here’s what I do remember.

My eyes opened slowly to a blurry world of darkness and light. My vision cleared just in time to see my mother with a blanket in her hands, spread out in front of her. She was coming down the stairs to the basement bedroom that I and my two older sisters were sleeping in. She was coming down so fast that the blanket flew out to her sides and she looked like a bird, with wings spread, descending to its nest. She wrapped me up in her blanket wings and carried me - and subsequently, my sisters – upstairs to my parent’s bedroom.

Once all of us kids were safely deposited to my parents bed, my dad came in and moved the bed away from being directly under a support beam, in case it came crashing down on top of us during the aftershocks. He went back to the kitchen to listen to the radio for updates.

I was scared, but I didn’t know why. “The earthquake is over, but there may be aftershocks,” I was told. I didn’t know what an earthquake was; I had slept right through it after all. But we waited for aftershocks and I didn’t know what those were either. I was scared because everyone else was scared. I was afraid of not knowing what was happening to us or not knowing what was going to happen to us. So we waited for the aftershocks.

Flash forward to today and the fear of aftershocks has come back to me, though not in a way I would have expected.

In my life, trauma has been like a massive earthquake; it shook up everything in my life and rattled me to my core. I felt powerless, weak and useless. It arrived unexpectedly and overwhelmed everything going on inside me. The actual events were brief, yet their impact would affect me for decades, because of aftershocks. And there were aftershocks. Emotional upheavals that weren’t as intense as full on trauma, but felt just as powerful, just as threatening and left me feeling just as helpless.

My aftershocks come in many forms: fear of not being good enough; fear of being inherently “wrong” or worthless; fear of being a failure and/or a disappointment; being ridiculed, pointed at, laughed at, or singled out in some way; fear of loneliness; fear of being weak and powerless; and so on.

When I feel these aftershocks, I do what anyone should do in an earthquake - I hide, I cover (or mask) and retreat. Only my hiding/covering/retreating includes isolating myself, binging on junk food, fantasizing about perfection/control over my body and my life, watching movies/tv to escape and so forth. 

But this is where my analogy differs because aftershocks – the inner/emotional aftershocks I’m talking about – aren’t really real. I mean, they are real in the sense that they feel real, and create an emotional/behavioral response, but they aren’t real because these emotional aftershocks are not the actual trauma itself. They are phantom traumas – they exist, but have no substance. They are reflections of traumas that ripple through my soul, becoming real, only because I expect them; I wait for them; I fearfully anticipate them…

I felt another aftershock recently during a workout. I was attempting to do a kettle bell down and up, which I’ve done before, but this time, I was flooded with fear. I couldn’t recall all the steps, for some reason. And even when I did, nothing felt right. My arms were giving out. I wasn’t able to lower or lift my core without some pain in my lower back. I couldn’t control my descent and felt like a sack of blubber, crashing into the ground.

And then the “aftershocks” began vibrating through me: “You’re weak. You’re not even strong enough to support your own bodyweight. You’re pathetic and never going to get this. You’re never going to make progress and you’re going to stay fat, weak and stupid your whole life. What made you think you could do this? What made you think you could get better at this? You’re only getting worse. You were able to do this with a 14 kilo kettle bell and now you have to go back to un-weighted? What a loser.”

I wanted to leave. I want to run away and say, “this is such bullsh*t.” I wanted to drive to the nearest fast food place and shove as much crap down my throat as I could stand. I wanted to cry. I wanted someone to hold me and say, “I’m sorry this is hard for you right now, but it’s going to be okay; you’re going to be okay.”

But I stayed and finished my workout. I went home and ate healthy food. Not because I wanted to, but because I recognized the aftershocks. I saw the phantoms rearing their ethereal heads again, only this time I knew they weren’t real. I knew that they would stay as long as I continued to believe in them and right now, it’s the hardest thing in the world not to believe in them. Aftershocks can be like that. They can keep coming and bringing a host of fears and doubts with them, but it is my belief that if I can see them for what they are then I can accept them for what they are, and I can gradually minimize their impact on my life. I can brace for them, or I can embrace them.

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, embracing aftershocks (accepting that they appear as remnants of trauma) helps me to dissolve them, because it means I can see them for what they are – fears of uncertainty, or fear of things that only “might” be true. I get to decide what’s real for me. Maybe I am weak, but that doesn’t mean I always will be. Maybe I am just a big loser, but somehow, I’m still here and I have to think that that makes me a winner on some level.

What I have learned is that I’m not worthless; because no one is worthless. I have worth, because we all have worth. Our worth cannot be changed and it cannot be diminished in any way. Not even by “earthquake” trauma and certainly not by aftershocks. Even though I still deal with aftershocks, I know where they come from and to some extent I know why they’re here. My challenge is not to be afraid of them when they do show up and especially not to waste my life waiting in fearful anticipation for when they’ll appear next.

And who knows, maybe one day, they won’t show up at all.