🔵 By Tyreall DuBoe. Photo by lauragrafie.
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Like me, other people didn’t feel safe in their homes and didn’t have a caring adult to help them. In fact, many adults told us to shut down our emotions. I learned what was modeled: unhealthy coping skills.
I became a rock!
As a child, I learned to turn down, tune out, and turn off my feelings to survive. As a child, I didn’t have the ability to handle trauma on my own. I didn’t have a caring adult to help me process my pain and heal. I attempted to protect myself by blocking out my memory.
I’ve always thought of myself as being a “soldier”. I hadn’t been enrolled in the military but the effects of war impact me similarly. You’ve got men and women who are serving in the military in situations where vulnerability equals death. Then they come home, and all of a sudden, vulnerability, this thing that they had been trained to shut down, is the birth place of love, trust, intimacy, joy and creativity. And now they have to figure out how to reopen all of these doors that they’ve not just shut, but sealed shut.
I grew up in my own war zone and learned early on that emotions are a weakness that could get me hurt or even killed. When home, school and neighborhood playgrounds weren’t safe. I turned to the streets to find and create safety. But the streets of South Central Los Angeles were war zones.
I didn’t know how to cope with trauma; I numbed my emotions with drugs, alcohol, sex, violence. Numbing myself helped me survive and keep going amidst the trauma, survivors guilt, loneliness, grief, abuse, neglect, abandonment, heartbreak, fear and uncertainty. I was trained to shut down vulnerability to protect myself… and it worked; I survived.
And then I came to prison, another war zone. Most prisoners become harder and harder. And some of them have a hard time understanding why it seems that they feel absolutely nothing, even when they want to. I now have a choice: to keep numbing myself, or to open the door both to the pain – and the greatness – that comes from acknowledging my feelings again.