Shaken AND Stirred

I arrived in Yellowknife, the capital city of the Northwest Territories. Here’s a map of where that is: https://www.britannica.com/place/Northwest-Territories   It’s north of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and to the east of Alaska, once you get past the Yukon. I’m here to serve a congregation of the United Church of Canada, from now until Christmas day, when I fly back to Calgary. They’ve been without a minister for about a year now and have been doing most of the services themselves. So, here I am, having another adventure! And I feel privileged to be with them for this special season in our faith story. That’s also why the blog is late!

But nothing’s simple, is it? The week leading up to getting on the plane left me badly shaken. It wasn’t just all the things I had to get done, it was facing all the self-doubts about myself again and coming close to how thoroughly my ex-husband had shattered the integrity of everything that held me together. I was up all night worrying about how I would manage the logistics of the trip, the housing, the work, the people, and the unexpected curve balls that ministry always has in store. My confidence was gone. I’m in the thirty-second year of ordination and I was a blubbering idiot. And I wouldn’t have my partner, my family, my friends or my old dog to hold me steady. Anxiety grew each day. I was crying over things that worked out and things that didn’t.  I had forgotten how much it took to do my job and get through each day in those early years after dday. Here I was, over ten years later, shaken to the core, again.

Many of you know what I’m talking about—the creeping awareness that you struggle to do things you never struggled with before. Then the second creeping realization that you may never do them without struggling, ever again.  

Like you, I want to keep going in life. I want to participate. I want to add value. I want to be me. But “me” is different now, in ways I can still hardly believe. Just when I think I’ve settled in my new life of “me” I am faced with the gap between who I was, and who I am now. 

I know that most of the time, other people forget anything happened to me at all. And not many of them know what happened in the first place. They didn’t want to know. Most of the time, I’m okay because I just don’t try to do what I know doesn’t work anymore, and I have developed so many “work-arounds” in the last decade that a lot of the effort and the struggle is hidden from most people. A few who know me well can sometimes see how I get from “A” to “B” now, though usually it’s a pretty smooth and “not obvious” operation.

But every time I go back into a congregational setting for my vocation, like that which I was serving on dday, there’s a pretty complete deconstruction of “Diane” before I start. I’m shaken to the core. I remember how bad the trauma symptoms were. I remember trying to find help online and in books and being retraumatized by the treatment industry snake oil salespeople--retraumatized to the point of wishing I could die and stop the torture of the injustice and the heartache, both. I remember hanging on to my preaching so tightly, because it was such an important responsibility that now I think I must have strangled any gospel out of it.

These are the times when I have to remind myself how far I’ve come from those days. I have to tell myself that “those days” are not happening again—I am just in that terrible world we know as the trauma flashback. And it will pass. 

Now, you don’t have to be clergy to know what I’m talking about here. This just happens to be my version of it. You will have your own context and details in your version. And it is just as real and important a consideration as mine is! The thing is, no one is there to tell us how much courage it takes to do some things that were once as much a part of our default setting as breathing is. No one is there to give us a smile of encouragement as we work our way through it. No one is there to say “good job” when we get through it without any unplanned casualties.

But I know you are doing it. Every day you are doing it. Just like me. You get on the plane like I did, or in the car, or on the phone, or whatever it takes. You just gird your loins, take a deep breath and do what you think comes next. You have no idea if you will get it right this time, or not. You just do it and deal with what results. Well done, sisters, every single time you’ve done it. Well done.

In that terrible reliving of how the discovery of his deceit, his cruelty, and his contempt for your humanity hollowed you out so completely, let’s all remember that we still put one foot in front of the other and brushed our teeth, made our children’s lunches, went to work, volunteered in our community, and then crawled into the corner of a closet, crying in the darkness for how alone we discovered we had always been, after all these years. Alone and abandoned. 

No one told us how much courage we would have to find to stay alive every single day. In fact, the treatment industry seems to have a vested interest in not noticing much about our lives at all. Even now, as in one of the articles I wrote about last week, a female industry practitioner didn’t even try to hide her loathing for our pain and how she had to protect her precious clients from it at all costs. She had to sneer at our trauma symptoms that cripple us, and make “poor baby” noises at her clients’ sad puppy eyes because wives and partners weren’t putting a parade together every time their man called a sex addict achieved the most minimal standards for being not much of an asshole for a few hours.

The thing about men called sex addicts and the treatment industry is that they hate consequences. Most people with narcissistic habits, traits, characteristics (or the full-blown disorder) do hate consequences. We, the pesky wives and partners, unable to rally our hollowed-out selves to make comforting noises for the abuser now cast as the victim, have this annoying habit of embodying the consequences of his abuse. Ughhhh! We don’t hide our trauma symptoms because we can’t. Even, worse, we imagine we are finally going to get some help. But we don’t get it. Instead we are patronized and insulted for having trauma symptoms.

Most of these industry practitioners are ignorant about trauma. They had maybe 3-5 hours on the topic of trauma in their training and many don’t have the intellectual or professional discipline to address that gap. Others have even less training about the many forms of domestic violence and no training about criminal sex offenders. That ignorance can lead to an arrogantly cruel attitude towards us. And the socialization of misogyny also means we probably won’t get support from our families, communities of faith, friends or fellow workers, either.

Yet, we keep trying to live our lives without the support or the encouragement we deserve. We still offer up our skills and gifts and commitment to life in our families, communities, and work settings. And we do it even though most of us will have these crippling flashbacks, first. 

I’ve been shaken again. But I’ve also been stirred by courage to share what I’ve learned and what I know to be true. So, I’m here in Yellowknife. I led worship yesterday, with a message about hope learned from living in the trenches of trauma recovery, with you. I’m shaken. And stirred.

In every 007 movie, when the tuxedo clad James Bond orders his martini “shaken, not stirred” the viewer knows exactly who has come to town and has entered the story line of international espionage and the world in peril. And every day, wives and partners of men called sex addicts face the antagonism of a treatment industry and a misogynist context for our lives. We are shaken. And then we are stirred to rise and be visible in the world telling the true story that our abusers, their enablers, and all who turn away, don’t want us to tell. In our real-life story, we order our martinis and Shirley Temple’s “shaken AND stirred.” We tell stories of being shaken by devastating trauma and loss, and stories of being stirred to have the courage to keep living and keep participating in the work that is still ours to do.

I’m here and I’m in one piece. I am a different minister than I was. I’m actually a better one. Even with all the vulnerabilities and tears and fears. Even with the flashbacks. Take heart, sisters, those signs of being shaken to the core of your being are not as strong as the courage that stirs you to get up in the morning and be in your life with all that you are now. We are women who are shaken AND stirred.

With you,

Diane.