Breakfast Backlash

About December in 1968, just six months after her father began sexually abusing her. Baby Tina was already potty trained considering the sexual abuse was the reason she didn’t wear a diaper anymore. It was breakfast time. Baby Tina was hungry while she watched her mother cook breakfast. Daddy must have gone to work and the other kids must be at school because it was just Tina and her mommy there that morning.

Baby Tina likely had a broken night of sleep while being molested in the middle of the night. That didn’t stop the hunger pangs. Baby Tina was sitting in her highchair while Mommy cooked. Mommy finally put the plate of scrambled eggs on Baby Tina’s tray. The only problem was that Baby Tina didn’t like eggs. although she was hungry, eggs were just unpalatable with their icky flavor and consistency. Tina wasn’t eating it. She wanted something she liked.

Mommy became very frustrated with Baby Tina. She even tried ketchup on them but Baby Tina just wouldn’t eat them so Mommy, the caregiver who just wanted Tina to eat the eggs she made grabbed Baby Tina by her head and tried to force the eggs into Baby Tina’s mouth.

The baby was traumatized. Not only did Baby Tina go hungry that morning but her mother was physically forceful in a way that made Baby Tina feel unsafe with her mommy.

To this day,

I can’t handle having my face covered or anything put in my face. It brings flashbacks of the event into the present moment of my life. Sometimes when the flashbacks come, it’s mostly the feeling that I relive. For example, if my boyfriend and I were playing and he covered my mouth or put his hand on my face even if it wasn’t covering my airways, I may transfer all those feelings of fear that I’m reliving from the event that happened when I was a baby onto my boyfriend and react inappropriately for what’s happening at that moment in the current situation which is play time. I may even get angry or upset with my boyfriend instead of realizing that the associated feeling belongs to a past event instead of the current situation.

When an inappropriate reaction happens, I’m seen as crazy. I’m seen as crazy because the reaction didn’t fit the situation and no one present knows what the real event was so they don’t have that point of reference. They just think I’m crazy.

Being Crazy isn’t crazy

It may be the perception of others who don’t have all the information that your reaction is crazy when it’s in fact a “normal” reaction considering there was an actual and true event that the reaction belongs to. It is real. Crazy is where there is no foundation for it but you experience it anyway. That’s not the case with CPTSD. there is a real event and the feelings of that event was triggered by a current situation that may not even be similar but some aspect of it triggered the emotional memory of a violent event and therefore triggered the reaction.

Some people misunderstand how flashbacks work. We see on movies how war veterans experience PTSD Flashbacks by reliving them. Sometimes, they reenact them but sometimes like in my case, my body is frozen while my mind relives the event. I’m checked out of the present moment and thrown back in time. But sometimes my body isn’t frozen and I’m only experiencing the flashback emotionally and when that happens, transference is inevitable. It is only logical that the brain will apply feelings to current situations even when it isn’t appropriately that situation’s feeling. Even if the “right” feeling should be happiness and trust, I may be thrown into survival mode just trying to survive the trauma even when the trauma is in the past. I will experience it anyway.

No, it’s not crazy. It’s an indication that a trauma needs to be examined and dealt with.

This wasn’t the type of trauma for me that requires brainspotting. It is one that needs to be addressed in therapy with my therapist to examine it and put it in it’s place.

If I look at it from my mother’s perspective, she was simply trying to feed her baby. She is a victim of trauma too and she didn’t know how to handle that situation so she reacted by shoving the egg in the baby’s face. My family are generationally impoverished and my parents didn’t have a lot of money. My mother was likely stressed about what to feed baby me in the first place. She likely didn’t have many options and was stuck in survival mode herself. She probably was dealing with the issue of survival. The baby won’t survive if it won’t eat so force the food into the baby. I Think that’s all it was but for Baby Tina who was already experiencing trauma with the sexual abuse by her father, this event became a trauma.

I don’t remember if I did that to my own kids because I just don’t remember doing anything like that but it wouldn’t be unheard of if I had. We learn how to behave and treat people by how our caregivers such as our parents treat us.

In my life, the traumas just piled up. One after another. Some were mild and had it not been for surrounding traumas, some of them would likely never had been traumatic. But… Since there was an ongoing trauma in my little baby life, even the small events were exacerbated into the monsters they became and it was unnecessary.

Take away from this for me is that even if a single event doesn’t seem traumatic to one person, it doesn’t mean it isn’t traumatic to another.

Tina Houston