HeartBalm

“Patient Zero”: Taylor Swift and the Games Narcissists Play

I’ve written about narcissism in this space many times. But I think it is so important to understand it from every perspective, to recognize where it might exist within our current relationships, and to learn to see the truth of the games being played.

I recently began seeing random clips and discussion of Taylor Swift’s video for her song “Patient Zero.” I like Taylor’s music, but I haven’t been an avid follower, so just thought it was another music video. The song title didn’t really reveal much to me until I kept hearing others referencing how perfectly it showcased a narcissist in a relationship and the games they play. It is spot on. It is haunting and heart wrenching. It is revealing and yet healing, and I wanted to share it here for anyone who might be stuck in a relationship with a mentally ill narcissist.

Sometimes words don’t allow for full realization or impact of where we are or how it affects us. We might be so armoured up just to survive within narcissistic relationships that we don’t fully have the capacity to read content about the subject of narcisissm and see or feel the reality of how tied into a toxic, narcissistic relationship we actually are.

As Taylor notes in her song:

“When the toxins take their hold, you’d rather die than let it go.”

So when I saw Taylor’s video, the impact was so visceral and real that I knew I had to share it here. Seeing others in similar situations, dealing with the maniacal, toxic, self-serving games that partners play is often the most powerful way to understand where we are at in the our own lives.

“I know he charmed your family and friends

And you thought it’s ‘cause he loves you

But it’s ‘cause he loves how everybody else loves him.”

It offers us the mirrored truth being played out and that’s often when reality hits home, when decisions can be made, and when healing can begin!

It is also a truth telling from Taylor that is much needed in our times of rampant narcissism, patriarchal overreach, abuse, exploitation, male violence, unchecked male privilege and entitlement, and zero accountability!

“Patient Zero” Lyrics by Taylor Swift

If you wanna party with somebody who might know

About the devil on his shoulder under his halo

When the toxins take their hold, you’d rather die than let it go

But if you’re sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero

I’ve gotta be honest, I’ve been expecting your call

No, it’s not a bad time at all

I heard somebody saying there’s trouble in paradise

And my lips are sealed tight now

It’s not for me to tell

Someone else what to do

But if you wanna party with somebody who might know

About the devil on his shoulder under his halo

When the toxins take their hold, you’d rather die than let it go

But if you’re sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero

I bet he burst into your life like fireworks

I bet he even said “I love you” first

And when you saw another woman coming out of his place

I bet he kissed the rain off your face

Now he seems bored by you

And you don’t know what to do

But if you wanna party with somebody who might know

About the devil on his shoulder under his halo

When the toxins take their hold, you’d rather die than let it go

But if you’re sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero (I was patient)

I was patient zero

So let’s get into it

I know he charmed your family and friends

And you thought it’s ‘cause he loves you

But it’s ‘cause he loves how everybody else loves him (Uh-huh)

I know it seems like he shines so bright

But he’s bathing in your reflected light

On a free solo social climb (Uh-huh)

Take it from somebody who lost his games but won the race

Take it from someone who said all of this to his face

Someone who knows she’s more than just the chase

Someone who had him and walked away

And so

If you wanna party with somebody who might know

About the devil on his shoulder under his halo

When the toxins take their hold, you’d rather die than let it go

But if you’re sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero

So if you wanna kick it, then I’m with it, I’ve been there

Felt the reeling, done the healing, said the curses and prayers

When the fever turns a dreamer into a pathetic ghost

If he’s killing you, I see you

I was patient zero, oh

I’m offering this post for free in the hope that it finds who needs to find it, and that Taylor’s words and video might help someone see the truth of a relationship they’re struggling to understand. I’m also including links to other HeartBalm Friday Edition offerings so that you can explore the topic further from other angles.❤️

Without further ado - “Patient Zero” by Taylor Swift

“Patient Zero” by Taylor Swift. Watch the official music video on YouTube and explore more of Taylor’s work on her official website (taylorswift.com)

For more HeartBalm Healing and Friday Edition articles on narcissism check out the archives or click on the links below:

https://heartbalm.substack.com/p/is-it-insanity-or-malignant-narcissism

https://heartbalm.substack.com/p/why-the-world-feels-like-one-big

https://heartbalm.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-narcissism-surviving

https://heartbalm.substack.com/p/narcissistic-parent-betrayal-and

https://heartbalm.substack.com/p/the-friday-edition-no-15

https://heartbalm.substack.com/p/the-friday-edition-no-4

I hope this meets you with love and understanding today. Please like, leave a comment, and subscribe for more HeartBalm Healing. As always, from my heart to yours!

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Being a Disruptor of the Extinction of Love!

I woke this morning with the words:

“This world is made for the abusers – not for the abused.” Dropped into my lap.

My eyes were still closed, and yet I found myself (metaphorically) looking around like… What the heck – where did that come from?

It’s a big statement and not something I wanted to dive into. I threw it aside, but it kept coming back into the frame of my mind in a way that said: You need to look at this.

Sometimes, this is how I learn, understand, become aware, and heal. This is not the remedy of patriarchal western medicine but of our intuitive wisdom – a far more ancient, wild, wise, and timely offering. It waits on us to pick up the hints, the downloads, the wisdom… as we become ready to take on more and heal more.

Often, it doesn’t look like healing from our “linear time-frame perspective,” but what do we flesh suits truly know about the infinite and divine reasons for why we are here having (or going through) this experience of life?

And so, it began, as some mornings do, by sitting with this ethereal drop of information for my research, my healing, and understanding of things that are ready to be seen, heard, and transmuted.

On some level, it feels like an invitation to hurt more – to be unfuriated about those who hurt others, and grieving for the ones left hurting. This didn’t sound like a fun topic to me. But sometimes these morning downloads are filled with profound truths even when I don’t want to look at it. They come from a deep-down knowing. From the part of us that sees what most people are too afraid – or too comfortable – to look at or admit.

That whisper: “This world is made for abusers, not the abused” – is one of those statements that landed with a heavy thud of grief and clarity all at once. And, it is also something that needs to change.

This world, as it stands in its current systems: patriarchal, capitalist, exploitative, image-driven, is structured to reward dominance, power-hoarding, manipulation, emotional disconnection, and performance.

It has been built – generation after generation – by those who conquered, colonized, pillaged, denied, and skewed and dismembered truth. So naturally (but horrifyingly), those who harm often find easy pathways, wealth, respectability, and protection.

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

_Unknown

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Meanwhile, those who are harmed get silenced, gaslighted, and dismissed. They get shamed, and spiritually squashed out of their rage, pathologized for their pain, gaslit about their memories, and with a smile, told to “let it go” so you can be “normal” and fall in line like everyone else (*activate eye roll).

The systems of this world are not made for the tender-hearted, the empathic and sensitive ones, the truth-tellers, the wounded, the survivors. We are too inconvenient. We see too much. We feel too much. We break the illusion.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.

_Unknown

But what is also true is that this world isn’t fixed in place or finished being made. And the abused, the survivors, the ones who have seen the underbelly of this place and still choose to stay and speak and heal and love anyway – are midwives of a different world.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

_Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

What’s infuriating – and part of why I didn’t want to dive into this download – is that seeing the truth, seeing past the illusion, can come at a cost that feels unbearable. It’s like… here, hold this pain. Witness it. Birth something true and loving from it – even when it guts you.

No! That doesn’t make it okay to deal with it! I am not here to be a sacrificial lamb. But maybe, just maybe, the way to find some clarity and harmony with this truth is to remember that we are here to be disruptors of the extinction of love.

Protectors of what should never be lost.

Guardians of the tenderness, the truth, the sacred fire – before the world forgets it ever existed.

So, what do we do with this information? What do I do with it? What I hear is do what I can from where I am – from where I stand today in this moment.

So, I speak out.

I write about it.

I feel and become aware of the truth of it all.

I name what others bury.

I reclaim and alchemize what others throw away.

I love with eyes wide open.

I say NO when my ancestors couldn’t.

I grieve what others numb.

I stay, even when everything in me wants to disappear.

I’m not just witnessing this shift. I am the shift. I’m not asking permission anymore to say what I see, feel, and know.

We each must do what we can from where we are – whatever that looks like and feels right for you. You don’t have to do everything. But for the love of truth, do not stay silent. Not now. Not anymore.

The adage – “be the change you wish to see in the world” may be overused, but it is critical right now. In this time of chaos, division, and painful reckonings, we can begin where we are! From where we stand on this beautiful planet that holds us and nourishes us.

Meditate with it.

Journal about what matters to you, even if it is just for your eyes alone.

Say NO when the truth in you knows you need to stop abandoning yourself – again – to please another or put someone’s needs before your own.

You were wild once. Don’t let them tame you.

_Isadora Duncan, Isadora Speaks

That is how the world begins to change.

It is not fair that it takes so much pain to bring forth a better world.

But it is powerful to know that we are not powerless. That we carry the seeds of a future where maybe, just maybe, the world will no longer be built for abusers anymore.

And you, sweet one – your voice, your truth, your fire – you are part of that reckoning. You are not alone in this. And you don’t have to make it okay.

But you can make it real.

And real… is how love survives – and does not go extinct.

HeartBalm is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

To read or explore more, please reference this publication’s resource list:

• Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

• Isadora Duncan, Isadora Speaks

Please hit the like button, share your thoughts, and add your stories in the comments. I’m grateful for each of you and excited about what we’ll discover together. #HeartBalm #CommunityPower #ShareYourStory #EngageAndInspire

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Raised by Meatsuits! On dishwashers, lemmings, sovereignty and WTF we’re doing here

I finally traveled home to get the last of my belongings after finally committing to living in the land of my dreams – in the Rocky Mountains. And while there I stayed with my parents. It isn’t an overstatement to say that being there again is not easy. It feels like slowly being crushed by a vice and having to shallow my breathing and limit my awareness and cognition just to survive the pressure of smalling myself down to simply exist.

While I was there I really saw and felt this country for what it has become, its corruption and slow decline into whatever it is we are surviving (not living) through. The older generation, like my parents and the new generations that replicate their cruelty, selfishness and narcissistic tendencies, their obliviousness, irresponsibility, skewed ideas of honor and integrity, all in spite of how many neighbors and country[wo]men suffer every day are what I find so horrifying. I am horrified by their lack of empathy, conscious awareness, humanity and even everyday common decency.

Their habits are so rigid and I get that as we get older rigidity, schedules, normalized expectations for the days, weeks, and future ahead become more and more locked into some kind of mindless existence. But I wonder why be in a body at all then. Without curiosity, interest in new things, awe and wonder at the world and all that changes in a day and even in a tiny moment – you’re simply a meatsuit.

My friend and I talked one time about our clueless, abusive parents and ventured into this topic and she suggested we write a book “Raised By Meatsuits!” I thought it was spectacular – like she is! I made a book cover and sent it to her that seemed perfect (see below). But I digress.

The other day I brought home some cleaning supplies from my storage unit for my mother and one item was liquid gel dishwasher detergent. She looked at it and said “I don’t think I can use that in my dishwasher.” I asked “Why not?” She said she didn’t think her dishwasher would take it because they used the dishwasher pods (filled with the liquid gel.) My astonishment was immediate and I said that’s what’s in the pods – of course you can use it. But in her tiny programmed mind she thought the little rectangle space in the dishwasher could only hold a plastic dishwasher pod or it would not work.

I have stopped over the years trying to explain anything to the pair of them. I know who they are: conservative, catholic, right-wing (nuts). Clueless to their own evolution or place on the planet and the ripple effect of their decisions and indecisions. Her inability to understand that the dishwasher is not a slave to the corporate brands that put liquid gel into a dissolvable capsule and that there are other things she could use to clean her dishes was a new low for me and my understanding of humans. I didn’t have a lot of hope for either of them anyway but this was truly remarkable to me.

All I could think of was “mindless robot lemmings.” Their status in this new low level of being’ness was less astounding and more about how someone could find a new low when they are already at knuckle-dragger depths.

The idea that you can be so controlled, so mindless, and a believer of whatever anyone peddles you or you somehow adopt as a belief of your own, that you give up all curiosity, education, ability to question and evaluate information enough to ask a simple question like – am I not able to put something else in my dishwasher other than a pod or it will destroy it – is, I think why we are all in this corrupt, chaotic, overpriced, sell-your-mind-body-and-soul-just-to-survive world.

They truly became the educators of me that day. They are the willfully ignorant, the religious soldiers, the ones who think they know all because of who they follow and what lies and darkness they are being fed.

The followers, I had always thought, were weaker and didn’t have much bearing on the whole, but now I am seeing that the lazy thinkers and followers and allergic leaders of the world are truly shaping our country and beyond into a cesspool of despair, evil, abuse, exploitation, and a death trap to us all.

I heard someone say that lazy thinkers and followers literally have a cognitive disability. And that hit hard too. Not because I think they are incapable of thinking, but because somewhere along the way they have surrendered their soveriegnty and the part of themselves that questions, investigates, and thinks for itself, and can do any kind of critical thinking. How do you break someone out of a cult or the Russian nesting doll of cults that hold so many under their control – like we have now. Religions within politics, patriarchy within religions and politics, predatory capitalist companies destroying our earth, animals, and humanity to have more inside religions, politics, and the patriarchy. Obviously, these can go any which way. Like the chicken or the egg – which one comes first?

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Attachment Trauma and One-Sided Relationships

There are some days when an old post finds its way back to you because you need to hear it again, and today is one of those days!

I’ve been feeling the frustration of one-sided relationships again. It’s a familiar realization of how much I can give, how much I can show up over and over, how mu…

Sovereign Coherence: The Responsibility of Being Yourself

My understanding of Sovereign Coherence did not begin with a theory. It began with a life in which I had to learn, very early, how to orient myself to the world.

I grew up with survival as a primary organizing force. When I was young, my physical survival and stability were dependent upon other people. I did not have the resources or autonomy to simply walk away from circumstances that were painful or unsafe. My nervous system therefore learned what many trauma survivors learn: pay attention, anticipate, read the room, understand what other people need, adapt, defend, survive.

That knowing came back to me recently from an ad for the movie Dog Stars - “wake up, defend, survive.” It hit me hard because that really was the architecture of my life for a very long time. And, not just childhood, but well into adulthood. As I gained more autonomy and resources, those states became less constant, but the pattern remained. I became exceptionally good at reading people, managing complexity, anticipating problems and figuring things out. I became the person who could fix things, understand what was happening and take responsibility for whatever needed to be handled.

Constant cognitive dissonance gave me the gift of seeing that this life and world was ridiculous and truly unreal.

At the same time, there was always another part of me that knew this physical experience could not possibly be all there was. I have always been intensely curious about nature, consciousness, spirituality, interconnectedness and the larger intelligence underlying life. I could sense things long before I had language for them, and I have spent much of my life trying to understand the pieces well enough for them to become coherent.

That tension of being highly adapted to the physical world while simultaneously sensing something much larger beneath it has been one of the defining threads of my life.

My accident brought another important piece. When surgeons wanted to fuse my cervical spine, I had a very strong internal NO. I didn’t simply reject their recommendations. I researched, considered the risks and alternatives, worked with a physical therapist, and ultimately followed the path that felt like my deeper knowing. I put images of a healthy cervical spine throughout my home and used them as a representation of what I believed my body could move toward.

That experience taught me something I have carried ever since: my inner knowing does not ask me to abandon reality. It asks me to investigate reality deeply and then listen for what remains true for me. Intuition and discernment are not opposites. I can gather information, consider evidence and practical realities, and still recognize that another person’s conclusion does not necessarily have to become my own.

My work with Biofield Tuning gave me another language for this. I began thinking about coherence not only intellectually but as something I could experience through the body and the biofield. Then Michael Levin’s work gave me another piece of the conceptual framework: the remarkable organizing intelligence expressed by living systems and the possibility that coherence is fundamental to how biological systems maintain themselves and change.

Eventually I realized that I had been asking a parallel question about trauma all along: What happens when survival stops being the organizing intelligence of a life?

That is where Sovereign Coherence began to emerge.

For me, sovereignty is not about independence, domination or believing I am always right. It is about recognizing that I am the rightful inhabitant of my own inner life. Other people can have opinions, expectations, reactions and narratives about me, but they do not become the authority over who I am simply because they have them.

It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

_Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

That is a profound reclamation for someone whose early survival depended upon other people. Trauma taught me to orient outward, and to notice what everyone else needed, what they were thinking, how they might react and what I needed to do in response. Sovereignty gradually turns that orientation back toward the self: What is true for me? What do I know? What do I feel? What belongs to me, and what belongs to someone else?

Coherence is what allows all of those pieces of myself to participate in that answer. It doesn’t mean being perfectly calm, healed or certain. It means that my body, nervous system, mind, emotions, intuition, values and lived experience can remain in relationship rather than allowing one activated survival response to become the authority over everything.

But understanding Sovereign Coherence is one thing. Living it when you are triggered is another. So what does it actually look like in real life?

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Almost: When "Almost Loved" Becomes a Way of Life

Sometimes there are ghosts and wounds of the past that show up and loud and proud, and then there are the quiet ones - the ones that become so woven into the fabric of our lives that we stop seeing them altogether. We simply live them. We build relationships around them. We call them normal.

This week I met one of mine - the wound of almost being loved, but never fully. A wound so immense I had been dragging it through my entire life like a mountain of luggage strapped to my back, never fully realizing its enormity, only feeling its weight, its exhaustion, and the way it quietly shaped my life.

Every relationship became another fractal of what my narcissistic mother and emotionally unavailable father offered me from birth into adulthood. No wonder I have been traumatized throughout my life. Always the longing. Always the hope. Always the mirage and hope of finally finding the love I needed as a child but never received. A carrot dangling from the end of a long stick. Always just about there, always just out of reach. Almost there, yet never reaching it.

All of us are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure.

_John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development

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Love, Wisdom, and a Tree: Finding Wholeness in the Ashes of Trauma

I went to the mountains the other day. To my trail. My favorite trail.

I hiked up and on the way back stopped at my favorite tree. I call him Big Brother Tree because he has an arm that is just slightly above my head, and I can hold onto it like a big brother might allow. Strong, steady, willing, loving, safe.

As I stood with him and shared his space of beingness, of rootedness and presence, I am always moved. But as I moved away, I could feel a deeper wisdom coming through.

The understanding that we are never separate. We are never without love.

Love, from Big Brother Tree’s perspective, is all things. Just being. Never wondering if there is more or less or enough or needing more. There is just this moment. This present moment. Everything is here within it. Nothing more and nothing less to be added.

The wind flowing up the mountain and into the canopy of trees and grasses. The birds flying and chittering to each other. The rooted state of a tree in communion and harmony with all things is all that is needed.

Love is everywhere. Love is all there is.

I was mesmerized by the truth of it. Thankful for the wisdom granted to me in that moment. I had longed for that kind of knowing, feeling, deep insight, and wisdom, and here it was.

I felt it fully.

Love is everywhere, in everything, at all times.

There is no separation in love or from love in any moment. It only takes the awareness and openness to understand and accept it as our authentic and holistic state of being.

The tree was in a state of isness. A love affair with all things because it needs nothing. It is forever grateful and appreciative of what is. Of what is happening in each moment. Of its state of being. Of its aliveness.

And yet, this tree. Big Brother Tree. The tree I have held onto and leaned into and held like the big brother I never had, is now scarred up one side of his trunk and into his branches by fire.

One side as it always was and the other side charred and blackened.

I don’t know how much time he has left, but I do know that he does not grieve his state. There is no resentment, despair, anger, or feeling of being victimized.

There is only aliveness.

Only now.

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My Job Is Not to Carry the World. My Job Is to Help the World Remember How to Care.

I’ve realized lately how much I struggle with carrying too much. I’ve always been a justice fighter. I want to protect those that are harmed, and reveal all those that cause the pain. But there comes a point in healing when we realize that trauma didn’t just teach us how to survive, it taught many of us how to become guardians and protectors.

Over time we became the ones who see everything with precision and clarity, notice what others miss, listen more carefully than most, sense danger before it is obvious, and speak when silence feels unbearable. We learn to watch over children, advocate for the vulnerable, and protect others in ways we were never protected ourselves.

Somewhere along the way, many of us quietly accepted a burden that was never ours to carry. For me, that burden began with a simple but profound belief: If I don’t stay vigilant and keep watching, who will?

As a child, no one was watching out for me, noticed what was happening, or stepped in to protect me. The people who should have seen me either couldn’t, wouldn’t, or chose not to. Like so many survivors, I learned a painful lesson: if I wanted someone to notice suffering, I would have to become that someone.

Long before I had words for it, my nervous system made a promise of sorts, I will make sure no one else is left unseen or unprotected.

At first, that promise felt like strength. It gave me purpose, sharpened my awareness, and helped me protect others in ways I had never been protected. Yet hidden within that promise was another, much heavier burden. If I became the one who watched, then I also became the one who was responsible for noticing, for speaking, for protecting, and for making sure no one else felt as invisible and unprotected as I once had.

And without realizing it, I slowly began carrying not only my own pain, but the pain of so many, and what felt like the pain of the world.

Every story of abuse became personal. Every child who wasn’t believed reminded me of every child who had been overlooked. Every cover-up by a family, corporation, church or religious cult, government, monarchy, the media and Hollywood felt like another confirmation that vulnerable people were still being sacrificed to protect privilege, power, wealth, reputation, class or comfort.

The difficult part was that I wasn’t searching for these stories. They found me. Stories about gross injustices, privileged, entitled abusive, disgusting men and the women that enable and uphold them appeared in the news, in documentaries, in conversations, on social media, and in headlines that seemed impossible to avoid. Everywhere I looked, I found myself asking, Who is protecting the vulnerable? What about the ones who have been victimized, abused and destroyed?

It took me a long time of feeling rage and daily devastation to realize that my deepest wound wasn’t only the abuse itself. It was being unseen.

The abuses I suffered throughout my life happened, but what shattered something inside me was that no one truly saw it. No one intervened or stood between me and the harm. No one protected me or saw truly what I had to endure. Maybe that is why I have spent so much of my life trying to become the person I needed as a child. The one who is hyperaware, notices, believes, and the one who gently says, I see you.

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Abdominal Guarding: When the Body Says No More

For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.

_Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score

I used to think my stomach was just my stomach. A little bloating, some nausea, cramping, digestive issues, and the occasional feeling that I had swallowed a bowling ball or a bag of rocks and somehow both had lodged themselves beneath my ribs. I blamed food, hormones, stress, aging, the latest supplement, or the lack of the latest supplement. I experimented endlessly because when you live in a body that hurts, you become a reluctant but necessary detective.

What I did not understand was that my stomach was not simply digesting food. It was digesting my life. It was digesting decades of vigilance. It was digesting a childhood spent in a nervous system that never knew safety. It was digesting the emotional labor of carrying myself through a world where the people responsible for protecting me instead became the very people I needed protection from.

And now, after all these years, it appears my body has finally reached the point where it is no longer willing to do that work quietly. It refuses to be bulldozed by me and my wants and desires.

Stomach guarding, sometimes called abdominal guarding, is a chronic protective tightening of the abdominal muscles, diaphragm, psoas, pelvic floor, and surrounding tissues. In acute medicine, doctors often look for guarding when someone is experiencing severe abdominal pain because the body instinctively contracts to protect an injured area. Trauma survivors can develop a different kind of guarding, one that becomes chronic rather than temporary. The body learns to brace against emotional, psychological, and physical threat until the contraction becomes so familiar it disappears into the background. Over time, this can affect breathing, digestion, elimination, sleep, circulation, posture, weight regulation, hormone balance, lymph, cortisol, and fluid retention contributing to cramping, and the ability of the nervous system to shift into rest-and-digest states. What begins as protection can eventually become a prison.

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The Lifelong Cost of Trauma: And Yet Here I Am... Still Trying

One of the things that continues to unsettle me most is realizing how few people truly understand the lifelong impact trauma and abuse has on victims of abuse. Not just intellectually, not as some abstract concept they can nod along to while watching a documentary or listening to a podcast about childhood trauma or violence or neglect, but understanding it in the body, in the nervous system, in the architecture of a person’s entire life.

People still speak about trauma as though it is an event someone survives and then just magically “gets over,” as though the body simply forgets years of fear, instability, humiliation, manipulation, abandonment, terror, or chronic emotional injury once enough time has passed. They do not understand that trauma alters the way a human being moves through the world. It changes the nervous system in ways that are mind boggling. It changes attachment. It changes the ability to trust, to rest, to feel safe, to love without fear, to exist without hypervigilance running quietly beneath everything.

And what has become harder for me as I get older is not only the grief of what trauma itself does, but the grief of realizing how emotionally disconnected so many people are from the suffering of others unless it directly impacts them personally. There is a frightening absence of imagination and empathy in people now. An inability or unwillingness to place themselves inside another person’s experience long enough to understand the devastation human cruelty leaves behind.

Everything feels so individualized now, so contracted around “my family,” “my comfort,” “my survival,” “my beliefs,” “my finances,” “my little corner of the world,” and as long as those things remain intact, many people seem perfectly willing to detach from the suffering happening around them. There is very little collective humanity left in it. Very little tenderness. Very little willingness to ask what kind of world we are creating when empathy itself becomes conditional.

And maybe this affects me so deeply because trauma survivors do not have the privilege of remaining abstract about suffering. We know what harm does to people because many of us continue living inside its aftermath every - single - day, not only emotionally but physically. Trauma is not only a memory stored somewhere in the mind. It becomes a nervous system that no longer knows how to turn off and stand down.

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