Triggers Within

24 Jan

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Have you ever lived with a clock whose hands make a sound so loud it feels deafening? A rhythm you can’t unhear. Wishing your ears weren’t so attuned to it, wishing your body didn’t brace with every beat.

Tick. Tock.

Triggers. A word most people reduce to reminders sensations of discomfort, moments of unease, flickers of uncertainty. For me, a trigger lands hard. Deep. As if my breath is held just a fraction tighter than before. The nerves coil in the pit of my stomach. Fear rises beneath my skin.

Why again?

Even in moments of calm of letting go, it returns. Like the tide that creeps closer the further you believe it has receded. Faster. Harder. No matter how many times you watch the water pull back, the next wave’s timing and force are always unknown. A nervous system left living in fight or flight.

Today was no exception.

This feeling has always been tethered to my mother.

For years, I went back hoping for a different outcome. Maybe this time would be different.

And then BAM out of nowhere another drama. Another attack. Another hurt.

I see this pattern echoed in families touched by addiction: a false sense of safety. As if willing things to be okay, or thinking positively enough, might prevent the inevitable. A kind of denial born from longing. And no matter how much distance we try to create from those who hurt themselves and others, it never seems far enough to avoid being pulled back into the web.

She left me in the will, and in doing so I remained stuck.

Sometimes I feel a strange sense that if she could look on, rather than seeing the cost, the real price paid in pain and suffering, there might be a satisfaction in knowing it no longer affects her.

“I’m dead; it doesn’t touch me.”

It may sound disrespectful to speak of the dead this way, but I say it with tongue in cheek. Only those who knew my mum would understand.

People get lost in the details, caught in the moment-to-moment drama. All I can see is hurt layered upon hurt. You knew you were terminal for years. You had already witnessed, once, then twice, how death reveals people’s true colours. The fights. The betrayals. The financial stress. Being left without.

You’d think a mother would protect her cubs.

You were warned.

Perhaps this is why we never truly saw eye to eye. Becoming a parent didn’t draw us closer, it forced me to relive my childhood trauma again and again. Feeling it as a child is one thing. Seeing it through the eyes of a parent is another entirely. There was no understanding left for how it happened or how it continued to happen.

I cannot imagine pitting my children against one another. I cannot imagine inviting a paedophile into my home.

For years I made excuses for your actions. For your wounds. I tried to understand, to justify, to hold compassion so our relationship could stay intact. But in the end, I had no choice but to let go for me, and for another life.

And yet…

This.

You have won.

I am still caught in the entanglement of the web.

She kept me in it. Because she wanted me in it.

The clock keeps ticking. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

I prayed for closure. I want so deeply to heal.

Then Tick. Tock.

What’s this?

Ring. Ring.

My breath freezes. My body tightens. I grip the grass beneath my fingers, trying to stay anchored.

This could all be over. This could all be gone. And yet something still allows the web to hold me fast.

Maybe I need to go limp. Fake death, like a deer frozen in terror. To sit inside the uncertainty. The fear. The anger. The rage. The hopelessness. To stay a little longer and see what the sea’s foam brings to the surface.

With each passing moment, a small increase in confidence to endure.

But in the moment, it’s hard to know: