Crisis Brain

On the Perils of Managing Yourself When Things Get Chaotic

Yesterday was a stupid day.

I mean, having a stupid day is better than not having a stupid day. And they are so human, bound to happen, part of life, etc. It was a day where nothing catastrophic happened but the day just chips away at you with one inconvenience after another, so that it disassembles your brain a little.

Then, sort of the final inconvenience of the day: I was stopped in my car at a light. And without thinking, I eased up on the brake and tapped the car in front of me. It was so slight I figured he’d wave me off and go when the light turned red. But he didn’t. He pulled over and so I did too.

I figured he just wanted to make sure no damage. Fine. I have two kids in the car. They want to go to karate but this will be quick.

Except it wasn’t.

That’s when I realized that this 2012 beat up Kia was going to be the place a small war would be waged. He didn’t speak English. His nephew translated. And he was clearly physically disabled. I could see that the bumper had some old scrapes and my tap was not the culprit. This would be friendly and easy for us all to figure out.

He and his nephew in the car called in his other nephew, a young strapping muscled guy who arrived in a big fancy truck with a lift kit and an older woman. That’s when the accounts got more and more dramatic and kind of other worldly and I watched them spin and enhance and spin.

“I see damage on her car,” the big guy says examining my grill.

"My grill is fine.” I say.

My grill IS fine. It has survived 200,000 miles and a teen driver who has sketchy depth perception.

It was like I was watching people talking about something that wasn’t reality.

“Well my money isn’t going to repair this,” the big guy says, pointing to the bumper on the Kia where I am struggling to see anything wrong.

“Um, what damage?” I said, truly puzzled.

This triggered the thing that is a huge issue for me - to be made invisible. To be abandoned. To go unseen. To be, to use a psychiatry word, annihilated. (old adoption trauma)

And then I got really angry. Unhinged angry. They didn’t pull out phones to record me but they could've and if they did, without the context of these people making shit up, I would’ve looked unmoored.

I couldn’t think.

My brain was swimming in slow motion. What is happening? Why are they making things up?

I raised my voice and the big dude raised his. Then Raffi climbed out of the car. Desi was sobbing in the back seat, her anxiety on full tilt. Poor baby. I had been intermittently holding her in the back seat and rocking her to keep her calm.

“I want to go home,” she sobbed over and over.

“Something bad is happening.”

Raffi (11) got out of the car and confronted the big guy. Arguing. Accusing. He was making it worse. He was ramping it up. So I kept asking him to let the adults manage this. I kept asking him to step back. He wouldn’t. He told me later, he wasn’t going to let that guy speak to me that way, and then he cried and told me he loved me.

“Your my mom,” he said, crying, “I’m going to protect you.”

But it still only rammed things up. What I know is that when I become dysregulated and my brain freaks out uncontrollably, his does too.

Raffi wouldn’t stop yelling at the big guy. No fear.

“ It was nothing. You should wave it off,” he yells at the big guy. “There was no damage.”

“Why can’t you control your kid?” the big guy accuses me.

And frankly, this stops me in my tracks when he says this. Like I have no idea what to say back. There is no retort. He is like a lot of people, the majority of people, who sees the disabilities of his uncle, which are pronounced and obvious, but not the more invisible disabilities that plague people with Complex PTSD. I get it. How could he know? Or see what I see?

I know I don’t have words or time enough to explain anything to him, and frankly he doesn’t deserve that context anyway. He doesn't deserve to know that when I am off, my kid is off. That his fight or flight brain is going to fight in any situation like this. That when fight or flight brain happens, it can’t be turned off or dialed back. That his early developmental trauma (from lots of foster homes and early neglect) is going to run his brain for the rest of his life and a lot of it will be outside his control. And that what the big guy doesn’t get is that my kid is never going to be someone who can be controlled by me.

The big guy also doesn’t deserve to know that my daughter has something called PDA, a form of autism, where she has such severe anxiety that most of her environment needs to controlled and managed so she doesn’t fall into an abyss of sheer hyperventilating terror, and that this is happening in the backseat. An unpleasant event like this could keep her from riding in a car forever if she gets it in her mind if is unsafe.

I also knew that if I didn’t get my brain under control, I couldn’t guarantee Raffi wouldn’t get physically aggressive. So there is a part of me that is unhinged but also a rational part that is trying to get some kind of traction in my thinking.

Really all I want is for these people to stop making something out of nothing, so that I can think. I have no access to my rational brain.

I can’t think or figure out how to chill this the fuck out. These folks won’t be able to help. They are going to milk this for all they can for the insurance money. And something about that makes me hate the world a little bit. And hate people. And I want to re-absorb into the world of writing and my house and my sweet, hot husband and cook my family a dinner that will take me hours puttering in the kitchen, because my head needs that and I never have to be around people because they are all broken and sucky anyway.

I am not the victim here. I tapped the guys car. I cop to that.

But I also knew the big guy was looking for a little insurance payday and this made me feel duped and stupid. I couldn’t control my brain. I couldn’t put myself in a place to implement all my de-esacalation techniques, all the ways I can soothe bad circumstances and negotiate calm and rationality.

I was an animal.

And it is times like these that I am aware that people, neurobiologists like Robert Sapolsky, think we probably don’t have free will at all. That our brains are monkey brains and they react the way they react and we just have to follow along and manage as best we can. This is how yesterday felt.

I wasn’t going to hurt anyone, or do something irrevocable, that’s not my way, I don’t have it in me, but it certainly felt like a lot of my free will had left me.

If nothing else, this helps me understand why my son struggles to control his own emotions. If I struggle - armed with a therapist, meds, decades of maturity and lived experience, years of sorting through my trauma - why wouldn’t he struggle?

I am humbled by how quickly my brain can swerve into fear and anger. How quickly that impacts my kids. How unthinking and reactive I was. How unable I was to negotiate, discuss, de-escalate, give those people some grace even as they embellished, or come to some kind of place where we all could be okay.

Awards aren’t humbling. Having people read your writing and enjoy it isn’t humbling. Having people see you and say nice things about you isn’t humbling. But loss of control in a parking lot really really is humbling as fuck.

Who am I?

We made karate. The kids saw friends. This became a story for them to tell over and over. I made some roasted pork belly with salad and egg fried rice. I took a Xanax and spent the night calming my kids down, re-setting, loving, talking things through and added a little convo about how giving people grace when you can, is good. I watched the Duggar documentary and this helped, because no matter how unhinged my brain might be, we are not the Duggars and this is something.

It is good to give myself grace for my failings. I’m not there yet. I’m trying.