How I Stopped Reacting to My Top Three Triggers: (Lack of) Money, Body Image, Breakups

I have been confusing myself lately. Things happen and I don’t do what I normally do: freak out. My heart doesn’t start pounding; I don’t feel like I’m going down the drain; I don’t think I should save the world and disappear.

Who is this person? I have been doing those things my whole life.

But now I don’t.

Here are the top three issues that used to trigger me and that now almost never do:

Body

Something would happen: I’d see myself in a mirror, I’d try on a new pair of pants, I’d look down, and I’d see that my body was bigger than I thought it should be. I would see how out of control my body was, how sloppy, how ugly. This is a terrifying feeling. It’s like walking around in a stinking sack of wrong. This feeling led me over the years to various attempts at control: strict dieting, bulimia (That is harder than it may sound! I was not good at this one, but I sure tried! There’s something so satisfying about hating on yourself, hurting yourself, when you can’t get either full or empty, can’t get right.), daily exercise, loose clothes (that way I could control what people saw of me, somewhat).

This behavior was at its worst from ages 13-40. Having a child was the turning point. I did not want a daughter who had to watch her mom struggle with body issues.

Being a massage therapist helped a lot. I saw so many bodies and heard so many people apologize for their size and what I saw was that truly, truly, truly, the body size did not matter. I have worked on what I consider a perfect body: a Navy Seal, and he was no better a person than a client I had who was too obese to turn over on my table. There is the body and then there is the soul. The body is this thing, like a sweater. The soul glows, connects.

What really really freed me from slipping into self-hatred when I saw my own body in the harsh light of judgement was when my mom died and I realized I was lucky to be here. Who cares what this skin and muscle suit looks like! It works!!!! I can walk! I can hug my daughter.

Writing this feels like a lie. I just can’t believe I can live without hating my body. The self-revulsion feels like a duty, like something I was born to do. Partly this comes from growing up in a house with a mother who hated her own body, who was constantly trying to diet it or Jane Fonda it to another shape. Partly it comes from a culture where what others, men in particular, think of my body is supposedly more important than what I think of it.

A long time ago I was babysitting a young girl and I saw her trace her rounded belly with her index finger when she was bathing, and I saw her sweet curiosity and I thought about how most adults in that position would either close their eyes or slap themselves in anger. I wished for that kind of self-interest, that kind of sweet touch for myself and for that girl her entire life.

Writing my book and telling my story was the final act of I got this. I owned my story, and that meant that I also owned myself. My body was my body. Food became much less of a way to reward myself as language increasingly became a way to articulate my deepest thoughts and beliefs.

Hating the body is a convenient way for adopted people or people who have grown up in trauma (or human beings as a whole) to externalize their own confusion over self-worth. If your mother gave you up or if your alcoholic father seems to love the bottle more than he loves you or if you were raped by an uncle or an aunt, one way to deal with the rage you feel is to turn it on yourself. The body is such an easy target.

This is yet another reason to understand that children with significant or high ACE scores need mental health support as soon as possible so they don’t go turning their traumatic experiences into ways of hurting or hating their own tender bodies.

Breakups

There is something addictive about returning to trauma feelings. Breakups are a great way to re-experience loss and heartbreak. If you want to fast-track the whole thing, go out with a bunch of people with whom you have little in common and with whom you would never even have coffee never mind sex if you weren’t after the experience of feeling really shitty. Breakups let you feel abandoned, frozen, unwanted, near-death. It doesn’t matter who does the breaking up—the end result is the same: you get to sink into a trauma bath.

Pam Cordano helped me end this exhausting habit. The last time it happened, she told me to get into bed, get into the fetal position, and think about my birth mother. I did it and cried and cried and cried, realizing it was not about the guy, that Pam was right: my bottomless sorrow was about the early loss of mother, and so I just kept crying until I was done. Then I got up, washed my face, and had a wonderful walk by the ocean.

Now I don’t date because I don’t need to feel crappy. (Hahahaha.) I am working with the new belief that if I do my work and focus on being myself and making connections with others, love will happen.

Feeling Broke

Money, a lack of money, has been a stressor for me since I was a kid because it was the key stressor for my mom. There was never enough in our home. As an adult, a guaranteed way for my day to go completely in the crapper was to look at my bank balance and see that I was in trouble. Maybe I didn’t have enough money to pay bills or buy food or maybe I was overdrawn. The result was predicable and immediate. My head would start buzzing, spinning. My heart would pound. I would feel sick, weightless. I would feel full of shame. I would want to die. I had done it again.

It wasn’t until very recently that I realized I was the one spending my money. That I actually had a lot more control over this situation than I knew. I realized I was using money as a way to live out my anxiety about not feeling at home in the world, at being a burden for others, at being too expensive.

When you know you were purchased as a baby, it seems normal that money might be a way to play out the conflict over that strange and inhumane fact. When you know that your relationship with your parents was at one point (and forever after?) a transactional one (we’ll give (you) money and in exchange we get you), it makes sense that one way to play out your (un)conscious feelings about this is to cause mayhem in your current life with your own finances.

If there were a book on adoption called MONEY that explained how trauma and loss of roots may well affect ones ability to feel they have the ability or the right to take care of themselves, maybe more adopted people would struggle less with making and keeping enough money to live comfortably.

I recently saw this pattern of behavior in myself: have money, lose it in some way, panic. I saw that I must be getting something out of stressing about money because I could, if I changed my earning and spending habits, fairly easily take control of the situation and conceivably never have to worry about money again. I mean, even when I lived in a three-million-dollar house and drove a Lexus, I still deeply felt there was not enough money to keep me safe. So I spent like a maniac until there wasn’t.

This is how I changed: when I looked at my bank balance and saw I didn’t have enough money to cover that month’s expenses, instead of getting tight and going into panic and self-hate, I softened. I softened my chest, my heart, my guts.. I felt the fear but I also went to what can I do to fix this? instead of I wish I were dead. I made opportunity a game. I was a human being with two arms and two legs and there were so many ways for someone like me to make money! I found that if I wasn’t busy hurting myself by mentally tearing apart my character and my habits, I could use that energy in a productive manner and change my world for the better.

And I did. I stepped into what I love to do most in the world: encourage others to write, and I made a business out of it. The trick was that I had to step into self-confidence and out of self-disregard in order to own my powers enough to sell them. There was a time in my life not long ago at all where I felt I did not have the right to step into self-confidence. There was a time I felt that part of the way I survived on the planet was to have no ego, no self-regard, no right not be my real self, for, when my parents adopted me, they took care of me, fed me, sheltered me, loved me. I had lost control of my own narrative when it had been sold to people who were, essentially, strangers. My existence based on me having basic needs that were filled by others.

If I said I was me, me, myself, was I going to die? Was I going to lose my world? If I continued to flounder, continued to need help, continued to put myself in situations where essentially, even as an adult, I was getting adopted over and over again as people came to my rescue, feeding me, housing me, loving me, I was living in agreement that selling a baby was the right thing to do, that I had been part of a successful transaction. In the same mindset, if I became financially independent, was I stepping too far away from this agreement? Would I lose everything?

I’m here to report my findings: I lost only fear and uncertainty and shame and gained pride, hope, and happiness.

The difference between living in fear that at any moment I could run out of money and living with the knowledge that I can depend on myself is tremendous. It feels like I am living a different life. It feels like I had been driving all this time in a car with three wheels and that I finally have all four. Things are just humming along.

I had no idea life could be this easy, this light, this kind.

Obviously, I’m not saying every adopted person or person who grew up with a traumatized brain has issues with the three things I’ve listed. I’m saying I did.

And that now I don’t.

Pretty-much don’t. Headed-there don’t.

Yay!