It’s Okay to be Cringe: When we Talk Past About Trauma, Its Power Fades
On a spring day when I was 16 years old my mom died of cancer. After I got the news I decided to go back to basketball practice. I don’t even remember hugging my brothers, just taking in the news with a dumb numbness and trying to shrug it off. That’s how you’re taught to be as a young boy: tough, stoic, endlessly resilient even in the face of the most unimaginable tragedies. I’d sort of known the day of her death was imminent, so I guess my young mind figured I might as well get on with life.
It’s been 30 years and I still haven’t managed to move on from that day. And many of those affected by this tragedy never have either, their lives in many ways frozen in time three decades ago, their relationships stunted by the inability to fully come to grips with their unresolved pain.
My teen years were extremely challenging even before my mom got sick. I’d always been a happy if introverted kid growing up, but in junior high school I developed severe acne. Like, the kind of thing you have to go to the doctor for. This made me incredibly shy and self conscious, something I was trying to work through even as my mom began to deteriorate rapidly from the time of her diagnosis in 1992 to her death less than two years later.
After she died I fell into a depression that really hasn’t ended. The grief I felt at losing my mother was beyond anything I could express. I remember one just sitting in the shower and bawling my eyes out, the pain flowing through me like malign electricity. But when I emerged from the shower I’m sure I slipped into the mask of normalcy and pretended I was “holding up” as they say.
I was far from the only person struggling during this time. My dad was in his early 40s — younger than I am now — and suddenly faced the insane prospect of raising five young boys all on his own. And then there were my brothers, ages 14, 8, 6 and 2. It was now both my job to help serve in a parental role while trying to negotiate my own grief. And then there were my mom’s other family members — her sisters and brothers, cousins, father. She was an incredibly popular and charismatic figure, and her death left a gaping hole in the hearts of every one of us.
And so we dealt with things in the way that so many people confronted with trauma do: we buried it. Instead of family counseling the older members of the family drank. Instead of grief counseling, the younger ones of us went to school and sports and fast food jobs and just sort of pretended things were normal.
They weren’t normal at all. Have you ever put on a wet set of clothes? Know the way they cling to you and make things itchy and cold and uncomfortable almost to the bone? Unresolved grief is a lot like that feeling. It’s like you get up every morning and have to put on a wet set of clothes and walk around in them all day. No matter how good your day, no matter how productive, no matter how busy, you’re always going to feel wet and gross and like you’re running at 80 percent capacity. Every fucking day.
Now go year after year like that and see what happens. Failed relationships. An inability to form close attachments. Intimacy issues. Impulsiveness. Acting out. Substance misuse. Drugs. UI’ve never married or had children. I’ve never purchased a home. Despite a string of professional accomplishments, the longest I’ve held a job consecutively is three years. When I was 27 and drunk on a dozen beers I plowed my pickup truck into a dirt embankment, putting my passenger in a coma. She recovered but the guilt of that day added an element of self-induced trauma to the thing I was carrying. Now I had a legit reason to hate myself.
You would think someone with such obvious issues would draw attention, but you get really good at hiding things when you’re suffering from unresolved trauma. One of my coping mechanisms was to throw myself into my work. I’d routinely work 18-hour days, often for weeks on end. Not only did this workaholism allow me to deflect from my issues, it fed into my growing narcissism because of the praise I received for my high output. Which was almost entirely bullshit, by the way. I outperformed colleagues whose lives were far more balanced specifically because I shunned the things I needed to become a healthy person.
I think a lot of people who carry childhood trauma likely cope in similar ways. In fact I’ve seen it in my own family. I’m not the only close relative of my mother to struggle with relationships, nor the only one to throw themselves into work or to fall into the trap of substance abuse. Many in my family have never moved on, and it’s been to all of our detriment.
It was with this in mind that I recently posted a tweet referencing my unresolved childhood trauma:
“At 16 I experienced major traumatic stress. Never received a day of therapy. At 45 I’m alone, childless, have few close friends and am a personal and professional failure. Have kids talk to someone if they’re struggling or we’ll continue to produce broken adults. #MentalHealth
I was immediately chagrined that I’d gotten personal on main so added the follow-up:
“This is cringe af but I’m leaving it up anyway in case it can help someone.”
I was absolutely blown away and overwhelmed by the outpouring of support I received to the tweet. Many of the people who reached out both publicly and privately told me they experienced issues similar to mine and have been fighting eerily similar battles in silence. One close friend told me her story was almost identical to mine — right down to the tight-lipped silence with which our families treated the deaths of loved ones.
As I’ve grown into middle age many of the issues I’ve fought have been softened through meditation, introspection and more of a willingness on my part to acknowledge and face this trauma head-on. I now realize that what I and my brothers went through was in no way normal, and for us to have tried to simply move on with our lives as if nothing happened was a massive failure by the adults in our lives.
That said I in no way blame the people who failed to get us help. They were suffering their own private explosion of grief, and I’m sure to a great extent the issues I’ve battled all these years are the same for my dad, my aunts and uncles, even the teachers who struggled and failed to help with a situation for which there are few options.
After hearing so many stories from people who have gone through similar (and far more unspeakable) trauma, I’m more convinced than ever that there are many, many people who are drifting through life wearing the wet clothes of unresolved trauma. And while it’s never too late to seek out therapy and healing, it’s also clear to me that the best way to prevent decades of struggle and regret is to get kids the help they need — even and perhaps especially kids who say they don’t need help.
Talking about these issues is an incredible relief. Putting a name to these things for me has allowed me to finally begin the process of resolving the grief I’ve suppressed for so many years. This looming darkness that’s haunted me now seems less a secret monster, but something manageable that can now be fought in the light of day where it seems less daunting and powerful. It’s like perpetually feeling like you’re drowning and then suddenly having someone throw you a life preserver; you’re still treading water, but at least now you feel like you’ve got a fighting chance.
Inadequate mental health care in the United States leads to innumerable problems ranging from crime and drug addiction to more mundane yet no less damaging issues such as loneliness and suicide. In many of these cases, the underlying issue is something that happened during childhood or young adulthood. These kids aren’t going to ask for help, and they’re not going to be kids forever. By letting young people “deal” with their issues on their own way, we end up creating sad and broken adults who perpetuate unhealthy cycles of addiction and abuse.
But there’s hope. There’s always hope and from the bottom of my heart I want to thank everyone who shared their stories with me or who have offered words of encouragement over the past few days. It’s been insanely embarrassing to put something so personal on my social media timeline, and people’s kindness has brought me to tears several times since I first posted about my struggle. I initially regretted the Tweet quite a bit, but once I saw how many experiences so closely mirrored mine I was honestly blown away; knowing there are others out there fighting the same battle is amazingly empowering and for the first time since I was 16 years old I genuinely feel like there’s a community of people out there who understand what it’s like.
I hope I’ve helped start a conversation that leads to healing for myself and others. I believe it’s vitally important that we talk more about how to help people better carry the unseen mental burdens that so many of us currently bear in silence.
Matt Tunseth is a freelance writer from Alaska.
