The grease hit my bare skin and landed in the space between my shoulder blade and the arch of my back. We were in our kitchen, my mom frying a chicken meal on the stove. My father was soon to arrive home from work, and she always worked hard to have his meal ready.
My dark chocolatey skin sizzled, and I cried in pain. My mother picked me up and tried to calm me down, wiping tears from my cheeks. As soon as my father opened the front door, she saw disappointment all over his face. He greeted her with “What happened to her, Lisa?”
She put me down, preparing for what was coming next. His open hand smacked her across the face, and from there, they fought. This would happen whenever my father drank too much or whenever either of their fiery personalities got the best of them, but this time was the last straw. My mother left him, and neither of us ever returned to Texas or my father’s home again. In many ways, that was also when my mother distanced herself from me, both physically and emotionally. She left me with her parents while she went about her life, a young woman who had a failed marriage and a young child before she was even 20 years old.
Mom shared this story with me whenever I asked about my childhood or her separation from my father. I continued to question the validity of the story until my wife, Dinushka, and I became the parents of our three kids.
Any parent knows that dinnertime is hectic, no matter how experienced the cook is. Cooking is one of the ways I express my love for others, yet whenever I am in the kitchen preparing a meal, I feel my body tense up as I glance at the clock or hear my wife’s car pull into the driveway. I move more quickly, trying to get out of the kitchen before she reaches the front door. I am hyperaware of the placement of the pots on my stove, and where my kids are. I do this every single day. It’s just how my mind and body work – a response to the trauma from my childhood.
Without fail, if my kids wander into the kitchen, I will say, my voice elevated and my heart racing, “BACK away from the stove,” loud so all can hear. My tone is stern. They look up at me and listen to my command. They’ve all remarked on it, and asked me why I get so nervous in the kitchen. I share with them what I can, leaving out the physical abuse my mother endured at my father’s hands.
I never defined what I experienced as a child as traumatic, and I never once thought of myself as a victim or a survivor, until I became a parent.
In 2019, just before the pandemic changed our lives, I was diagnosed by our couple’s therapist with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) during one of our sessions. Through my tears, I tried to make sense of his words but found myself angry. Angry that I was being called a survivor while sitting in front of my wife, who didn’t have such a burden to carry. Of course, she had her baggage – but in my eyes hers had always been lighter.
I was angry that she could never understand what it felt like to be abandoned by your parents, the two people who were supposed to always be there. She’d never had to question their love for her, or dissect her childhood stories searching for the truth. I was also angry that it took so long to name what I’d been living through for years: anxiety, the inability to remember my past, difficulty taking criticism, the inability to contain my emotions when I felt hurt, my lack of trust in others.
I glanced at my wife, and her face looked as pained as I imagined my own to be. We had a name for it, but now what?
Dinushka was relieved to finally know exactly what we’d been managing together for 12 years. My wife always says what’s on her mind because she values telling the truth. She’d learned early on in our relationship that I could be sensitive and guarded and would consistently retreat inward whenever we argued or whenever her truth was too difficult for me to hear or process.
“I can recall our first few arguments,” she says. “You’d tell me, ‘Well, you can leave, then no one is forcing you to stay.’ I was so hurt. Over the course of our argument, I would wonder if you didn’t feel I had the strength to stand beside you. Or did you feel I wasn’t important enough to fight for? If you could dismiss me after an argument over bills or the struggle to understand our son’s disabilities, maybe you wouldn’t want to invest in me, in us.”
Dr Janelle S Peifer, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Richmond and a licensed clinical psychologist, says that symptoms can be missed when diagnosing someone with CPTSD. “Some of the often overlooked symptoms might be the somatic symptoms. An individual with CPTSD might be presenting to a physician as opposed to a mental health provider. The physical signs that might be recurring are headaches, migraines, stomach issues, insomnia, sleeplessness – those physical signs that may be indicative of the chronic stress the body has been under for long periods of time.”
CPTSD is often thought of as something a war veteran suffers, and not necessarily associated with a parent. “I see trauma as an experience of an event that disrupts your view of yourself, others in the world, in profound ways,” says Peifer. “It is the type of event or events that shape your core identity and often involve feelings of helplessness, powerlessness or some form of horror. I think trauma can be extraordinarily, broadly defined.” Trauma can develop after being sexually assaulted, or after having gone to war. But trauma can also be caused by prolonged abandonment, neglect or loss of safety. Trauma can come from many different events, from car accidents to neglect from adults.
I later realized, with the help of my wife and my therapist, that some of the choices I made as a parent were the direct result of what I experienced as a child.
I was deathly afraid of missing my children’s first step. Their first lost tooth. Their first words. I was worried that they would need me, call out for me, and I would not physically (or emotionally) be able to be there for them, just as my parents never were.
The idea of leaving them with a babysitter or a relative filled me with dread. My wife and I would fight about not having alone time, not having the ability to be a couple and go on a date, without the kids.
According to Peifer, what I brought into my home is something many parents who have CPTSD also experience. I was not alone. “Especially when we look at new parents, there can be signs that might be mistaken for anxiety – hypervigilance or intrusive worried thoughts. They might find in their close relationships they have trouble with trust, they feel like they need to be hyper-independent and not rely on anyone. There might be anger, agitation, irritability showing up that might be masking some of those trauma symptoms that aren’t being addressed.”
I carried fear everywhere I went; leaving my children was the reliving of my fear of abandonment. When our son turned three years old, my wife joked: “Will we ever go out again, on a date, without Jonathan?” And after we had our twin daughters, I thought I needed to always be present to nurture them. I wanted them to know they were cared for and loved. I wanted and needed to show them in every single way that I wasn’t ever leaving them. I needed to do everything in my power not to be the cause of any trauma in their lives.
Coping requires my active and consistent monitoring. I meditate. I connect spiritually week after week at church or on walks alone. I have an on-again, off-again relationship with my therapist, who is gentle with me. He understands my triggers and empowers me to reach out to him whenever I feel I need to.
While access to mental health care is a privilege some people cannot afford, therapy is a necessity for someone with CPTSD. For me, it’s a way to ground myself, to have someone distant enough from my life to reflect back at me what I cannot easily see myself. Peifer suggests seeking out free to low-cost mental health resources from virtual support groups through the Atlanta Birth Center, the Loveland Foundation (which helps women and girls of color) or the Open Path Collective, and she suggests exploring mental health options through Medicaid or Medicare, which vary by state.
I have learned that I could not outrun my trauma. Becoming a wife and parent did not erase my past or my childhood. It is part of my family’s history. For me, managing meant doing the work in therapy to understand that one argument wasn’t the end of my marriage, or that when someone tells you how they feel, however hard it is to hear, it won’t define the relationship. And when someone says “I love you”, I can believe those words too.
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