Survivor POV | When Memories Surface
Picture yourself a twenty five – young & vibrant – excited about a new job. It’s your first day and you are impressive. You wear your fancy, new clothes and a genuine smile as you walk through the glass doors to a new start. Work comes easy so you settle into a good pace as a promising, new day begins.
Two hours in and you are still working steadily. Your mind is dedicated, focused. Your phone pings, but the world outside can wait. You can’t help it, but you work with a smile. Others notice and it feels good to be seen. All of life seems well when the unthinkable happens… your worst nightmare roars to life. Everything around you fades as your mind rolls out cinematic footage of your worst lived fears. Your hands start shaking, your body stiffens. Sweat begins to pour as you frantically look for an exit. Not here, not now!
“Breathe” you whisper to yourself. “It’s not happening anymore.”
But even if your mind knows the truth, your body doesn’t. You try to press through, but your ability to focus is now inaccessible. People stare but don’t say anything. Renegade tears seep out; you manage to catch a few before they fall. Stumbling into the bathroom, you hide in a stall for fifteen minutes until the shaking stops. Slowly but surely the memory ebbs back into darkness.
You pick your way through the desks back to your seat. As you look down, it hits you that the last thirty minutes of work you did was full of mistakes. Now, not only did you lose time, but you have to undo what you already did. Your boss noticed you were missing. He peeks his head out his office door and begins to lumber toward you.
What do you do? You can’t tell him your history; you don’t even know him. You can’t launch into a detailed depiction of trauma – he is a middle-aged man that values productivity without excuse. You could lose your job… on your very first day.
Your heart races with each step he takes. Before you know it he is peering down at your workstation, seeing the mess, surely wondering what in the world has happened.
“I..I’m sorry” you manage to squeak out, “I’ll fix it.”
His face says everything he doesn’t as he walks off without a word. You dive back into work at a hectic pace. The joy is gone, the newness swallowed by a sense that you are already behind. The day ends with frown wrinkles and a tension headache. You wonder how long you’ll last here. This time, this job, this “you” was supposed to be different…
Learning How to Live
Flashbacks are a very common side effect of trauma. They can happen at any time, anywhere and without any notice. Being as intrusive as they are, they can take a decent amount of time to learn how to navigate. To the outside world, a person reliving a memory can appear unsteady, unpredictable and nearly unhinged as they try to process the flood of sensory input the remembering unleashes. What they can’t do is snap out of it; what they must do is go through it to the other side when reality is restored. Sometimes all it takes is time, but other times a trusted friend is needed to help the individual ground back in the present.
Containment is the incredible capacity to take a strong emotion, thought and feeling, including a memory, and quarantine it in a safe mental space until a person has the ability to process it. Containment isn’t something we are born with; we have to learn it. This is a powerful tool to assist when a memory surfaces and the individual is not in a safe place to process. If the capacity for containment is built when a flashback comes, then the person can quickly set aside the experience of reliving trauma until a time when they are ready.
At Shopwell, we provide a safe place to build containment and support women working through the effects of trauma. Some days women are bombarded with images from the past while other days hold nothing but beauty and peace. Either way, residents are encouraged to pay attention to their bodies and their various experiences. If work is impossible one day, grace is given to process whatever needs to be processed. If 40 bracelets are made and 39 of them are incorrect, the world doesn’t end and the job isn’t lost. We seek to foster a trauma-informed environment where mistakes are seen as opportunities and learning is the goal.
You never know what the life of another has held.
Thankfully, today Shopwell and the WellHouse have equipped women like me with tools to be able to care for one’s self and others when the past seeks to overtake the present. But for twenty years I hid my panic attacks and flashbacks from my coworkers and bosses. I’m sure they knew something was going on, but they managed to believe the best about me and I was able to keep my job. I consider myself the exception, many people in the workforce are not so kind and forgiving towards the things they cannot understand. I hope and pray many more men and women can learn to be grace-giving. Remember to believe the best as more and more Wellhouse graduates and other survivors enter the workforce as strong, capable women that sometimes just need a little extra kindness.
