Transparency and Consent Are The Balm

Whatever was left of my initial form is long gone. Trying to hold onto the false idea that I was not formed around the trauma was a fruitless quest. Everything about the brain changes. Capacity for processing in live interactions. Capacity to self-reflect. Capacity to come back to the surface when I’m at the bottom of the dark end of the ocean. Capacity for compassion—at great personal cost.

The primary positive traits people list in reference to me were all born of trauma. Immediate access to empathy. Immediate response to expressions of pain. Immediate capacity to read between the lines quickly and adapt on the fly. Uncanny ability to read the people around me, and an unnatural detachment from the concept of ‘self.’ Excellent in a crisis, but unable to hold on over the long term.

I return, always, to solitude. The struggle to convey that how much I reach out is utterly unrelated to how much the other person is on my mind remains pervasive. I simply don’t trust people in deep ways. Not when I’m wounded. When I am in active vulnerable mode, I retreat completely. I cannot stand a witness.

This need does not negotiate. I have tried.

The need for solitude responds to only two things. Unequivocal transparency and consent. Transparency of planned action, transparency of intent, transparency in motivation. Asking for consent to talk to me when I’m in the dark, to pull me out of the hole, consent to even being worried about me, diffuses the barrier.

Trauma impacted me enough that I need people to turn their face into a pane of glass, and only traumatized people can intuit that. When I use the method while intervening on someone else’s crisis, it is a very effective entry because its respectful.

"May I come in?" I’d like to speak with you for a minute and see if we can get my head around what might be appealing to you instead of this exit plan. Suicide is your decision and your decision alone. I am simply here to make sure that’s what you want and that you are clear about all the avenues available up to the moment of death. This is not up to me, and I know that. I respect how you arrived at this decision. I believe you when you say it’s not worth it. I believe in your situational awareness given what you’ve gone through. I come with neither sunshine nor hope. I’m just coming with a hand out that you can grab if you’d like."

People with backgrounds like ours have an efficiency of language that is understood most effectively through transparency and naming the autonomy of the other person.

If you do not respect the decision for suicide or intentional isolation, you have no entryway to their mind. A client with PTSD deserves respect, including the decisions that led them to the cliff. PTSD is a product of a rational view, and recoils at the sentiment of wanting it to be better, having hope, or ‘someday’ mindsets. One of the alienating elements of trauma is that people try to convince you that your view is wrong—that it was just one man, or ten men, or a thousand men that did those things. This response holds neither weight nor water. The true response is that people with PTSD have the whole picture because most people look away, while people with PTSD don’t or can’t.

We have to hold the entire truth, the entire time, and find a way back to grace.

We become the protective shell and lose what it protected, which is their heart’s purpose—to love without defense. That’s the price for survival.

However, it does turn you into an extremely valuable resource. The pain can be put to purpose, and for a lot of us, that is an enviable outcome.

Our development is thwarted but becomes, ultimately, transcendent. Transparency and consent is a worldview all its own, with its own language and ethos. It is easy to recognize in another.

Two people operating in this frame can jump straight to the bottom and map a way out that can be replicated when one falls back to the bottom unexpectedly. We all have different bottoms, and our mind’s best mapping is always unique, but the method of finding an accurate path out of the dark is surprisingly intuitive and cross-applicable. The sensory deprivation tank of complete dorsal vagal collapse, all the way back out to being able to relate with others and see some light, is more of a format than a journey.

There are known unknowns.

When I try to sort how I’m feeling—why there is so much resistance or pain or shame—the question isn’t "What’s wrong?" It’s "Where am I?" And what I see when I ask that is a vertical map of the PTSD mine shaft.

The real question? When am I? What reminded me of this level and sent me to a fall?

When the map is thorough and accurate (requiring abundant transparency of self and with self), the falls can be seen coming, damage control can be enacted sooner, the drop is not as far, and the recovery is faster and contains less stigma. The shame washes away more quickly.

Self-shaming retreats. It becomes less effective as the map is mastered, and the way in and out becomes routine.

Confidence in self is restored.

It becomes less personal.

Therapy goes from dramatic, unimaginable collapse to maintenance.

Surviving is a skill set that we talk about as though it’s an unknown spiritual trial from which you either spontaneously emerge or disappear completely based on your own merit and character.

That is mostly false.

The desire to see trauma as ‘personal’ allows us to turn away ‘out of respect’ for the person and maintain that the process is private.

It takes a village to fail a child, and society has well-trod paths to ensure we don’t see it plainly.

Domestic violence is a private matter. Rape and incest are private matters. Poverty-based PTSD symptoms in children born of the abject moral failures of this economic system, are due to personal decisions made by flawed individuals, and that is also private.

Believing these things are private is a societal crutch that is currently unable to hold its own weight, as social media makes abundantly clear that these abusive behaviors are systemwide, not rare, not private, very predictable, very avoidable, and affect people in every arena of life.

The lie of ‘private affairs’ in a family is dying, and the world will be better for it.