My Rock Bottom as Caregiver
Below I share about the rock bottom that became the turning point to my healing.
Trigger warnings: I describe my experience hours after surviving a mass shooting and a panic attack a few weeks later.
Learning to Be a Caregiver as a Kid
Once I started doing my trauma healing work, I realized that I had been the caregiver to my parents instead of being the child. Both of my parents have chronic illnesses. My Mom's health took up the most space in our family dynamic. So much orbited around her and her needs, and they could change on a dime. I got very good at anticipating her needs and shifts in emotion and feeling her feelings as my own. I became an expert at ignoring my own needs or letting go of what I wanted in order to be there for my Mom.
I loved my Mom and she was in crisis - a lot. I wanted to do anything and everything that I could for her. I learned through her example that losing yourself in order to do anything and everything for your family was considered love.
Reflecting now: this caregiver mode was SO powerfully my default, that when I was in NYC during 9/11 and in the audience during the mass shooting in Las Vegas... I made some dangerous decisions because I automatically put the needs of others before myself. I truly could not even recognize my own needs.
My Rock Bottom
In the hours after surviving the mass shooting, I was sitting on the floor away from the windows of our room in a hotel that was in lockdown and hugging my knees to my chest as my friend called her Mom... I knew the one thing I did NOT need was to call my Mom.
A very loud part of me knew that I would be asked to take care of her in that moment, and I simply... could. not. do. it.
Almost more vivid than the horrors that unfolded while bullets flew through the air... was how I felt sitting on that floor not wanting to call my Mom that night. I seriously considered whether I could get away with never telling her. I was consumed by the worst kind of shame. On top of being in shock from the Trauma I had just survived, I had this gut-wrenching fear and despair: "what was WRONG with me?" What kind of life have I built where a Trauma like this happens to me and I don't want to call anyone? I just want to disappear and isolate? While simultaneously desperately wanting to feel safely held?
I eventually called my Mom the next afternoon. Things with her unfolded as expected: it became about how much pain she was in. She requested that I do certain things for her so that she could feel better, so that she could sleep better, so that her heart would stop racing out of her chest. And for two weeks, while I was not sleeping or eating or able to function or return to my producing job in Nashville... While I sat like a numb shell of a human in my sister's apartment in LA alternating between sobbing and staring at a wall... I somehow managed to do most of the things my Mom requested so that she could feel better.
My Turning Point
One evening shortly after I returned to Nashville, I started having a severe panic attack while my Mom was making demands over the phone. She insisted that I let her come live with me because if I committed suicide she couldn't stand what other people might think of her.
Yes, I was barely keeping myself together recovering from a Trauma. Yes, I was in a new city where I had only known people for 6 weeks max. However, I was no where near suicidal or expressing suicidal ideation. Now I can have compassion for how much pain and fear my Mom was experiencing, but in that moment… I saw red.
What mother brings up suicide to a daughter who just survived a mass shooting? And FRAMES the daughter's suicide as how it would impact her? I couldn't finish the conversation. My hands started to shake, I couldn’t feel my legs and my heart started speeding up.
I hung up and threw my phone across the room. And then I couldn't catch my breath and started to see black around the edges of my vision that was turning fuzzy. I scrambled, gasping for air, for my phone to text a friend to call me and talk me down because I couldn't breathe well enough to speak.
As I laid my hands flat on the cool, solid, granite kitchen counter and pushed down with all I had in me while I listened to my friend on speakerphone help me regulate my breathing and come back into my body... something inside me shifted.
I vowed to not live like this anymore.
I promised myself that my healing would come first. My needs would come first. It become my greatest responsibility. Any person, job, task or environment that did not support my healing would absolutely be stripped from my life. My life would not be about taking care of others before taking care of myself any longer.
My life, as I knew it, burned to the ground over next 18 months.
And. I emerged from that dark night of the soul as a healer for others.