Daily writing prompt

What are your biggest challenges?

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Sometimes, when I feel like all is going right in my life, along comes a person who will evoke the most negative reactions in me. Their words or actions cut through the perfectly curated armor I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life building and it happens without warning. Suddenly my trauma returns, the anger that comes with it and the need to lash out. A person can say something that triggers me to go on defense mode and I immediately feel my entire body tense. I become hyper aware of every single word coming out of my mouth, every action, every breath, every glare. Everything moves quickly and yet I feel like I move through it in slow motion as I calculate what comes next.

If I don’t pay attention and don’t remain completely in control of every muscle in my body, I lose control. I find myself recalling that survival skill that I developed through years of trauma in a home full of abuse and violence, you can say its my evil superpower, that awful skill everyone who experienced trauma developed to survive. Some people become incredibly good liars as a result of having delusional parents, others become incredibly violent as a result of sustaining countless beatings throughout their lives and others disassociate and learn to be invisible.

I learned to be cruel with my words. I often heard people say since I was a kid that words hurt, and you can’t take them back, and no one understands this more than I do. In fact, I understood it so well that I knew from an early age that if I was cruel enough, people would leave me alone. When the healed version of me speaks now, I try and speak kindness into every word that leaves my mouth as a result of this knowledge. However, when I lose myself every word comes out as sharp as a razor blade cutting deep and fast through whoever stands before me. I’ve seen just how my words have shattered someone’s perception of themselves, how my cruelty so quickly seeped into the deepest parts of their mind, taking pleasure in the fact that no matter what happens, my words will stay with them forever, long after I am gone. I always regret it when I come to, but my resentment does not allow me to fix it. I get angry thinking that a person pushed me to that point and that I allowed it, that they were able to take me from a healed version of myself to the wounded and most dangerous version of myself. My trauma continues to be my biggest challenge.