There’s not a beginning to any of this, there’s only what happened. So here’s what happened the best I can remember it. The back half of 2025 contained more twists than any other point in my life. It started as a 7yr partnership prepared for another surgery and ended with 8yrs being left in the rearview mirror. I can point out spots I was dead wrong and others where she was or maybe I was right and so was she. It doesn’t matter a whole lot now, but what does still count is the fight I have left inside that I had forgotten even existed.
No this isn’t a love story, but it is my story and there is love. At least it’s the thing I’ve called love my entire life. Trauma therapy has this fun feature where it tells you how dumb you are and awful at identifying emotions. That’s how it feels anyway like I was the dumbest person alive and had no idea what emotion was what. Some of this story is built on the foundation of misidentifying emotions and the causes that can have. At least some of the causes it had for me, but I’ll get to that. The important part here is that this includes all the emotions I felt towards myself too.
All the thoughts or voices or ideas or whatever you call them were not fighting for my side. I didn’t know that during childhood a brain can develop such an intricate system of protection that it can trap other parts of itself. My brain knew where it was to be safe and put special parts away for later. That’s how all this feels anyway. It felt like I had left breadcrumbs for me to follow when I was ready. Breadcrumbs that ultimately led to where the real me had been hiding. I’d stop reading here if this didn’t happen to me because when I think of what happened to me I don’t fully believe me.
“Would you like to try trauma therapy, Rob?”, is how all of this really got moving in couples counseling. A simple question, in an office, in a basement, in Media, PA. It was extremely intense. I “came to” on my knees, in the office, crying. Unfortunately for me the session was ending so I had a couple of minutes to dry my face and get out. My partner and I sat on the steps to have a cigarette after it ended and that’s when it really started. When I flicked the lighter and saw the flame I dropped everything. I remember vaguely walking and holding my head. I truly remember the fear. It wasn’t terror like I was dying but a deep deep fear like my mind was cracking and I had a front row seat to insanity.
In the office I had visions of being tiny. Maybe 3yrs old, crawling in the back of the cabinet in the kitchen, while my mother did dishes. I could see and hear kind of, but the emotion. I could feel the safety of the dark, quiet, back corner of that cabinet with all the towels. I could feel one of the towels against my 3yr old face while the tears were running down my cheeks as I sobbed in the office. I could see the little hands and know he had set this up somehow. None of it made sense at the time, but looking back it’s actually kind of neat.
It wasn’t neat when I “came to” outside after dropping the lighter and running. My shirt was off and I was sitting on the ground against a chainlink fence. My eyes were closed and I could feel my inner and outer worlds at the same time. Inside I was terrified of what was outside. I was sitting against the same fence we had when I was small. I would sit against it and run my hand where the fence met the grass. I forgot that feeling of the grass on my hand as my fingers clicked in the links of the fence. But I could also feel her and my present world waiting on the other side of my eyelids. It was like a new “me” was mediating between the inside me and outside me. Ok I know this is getting hard to follow if you even made it to this point, but I don’t know how else to say any of this. When I finally was able to open my eyes it was not the fence I sat against as a child and it was wooden not chainlink.
There was this new perspective that was awake inside of my head that hadn’t been there my entire life. Well maybe it wasn’t new? Maybe it had been there and I never heard or noticed it because it didn’t feel foreign. It had a familiarity that was scary and calming at the same time. I would later understand this as a key moment in the individualization process. There was a combining of conscious and unconscious parts and a slow cracking in the ego. I had glimpses of “me” that I had always been, but trapped behind who you thought I was and who I was trying to be. What I’ve come to realize is that we are all of those things all the time and not tying those parts together led me to the brink of insanity.
I am an awful person who has terrible thoughts. I want to cut you and punch him in the face. I want to smack her and kick that damn crying kid. I have had thoughts fly into my head of terrible things happening to my son. I get filled with horror and dread and fear and anger that I would think such a thing. And it’s happened a lot more than once and it’ll happen again. Some thoughts are just random impulses that just happen. I can’t make my heart beat or make sure I breathe when I’m sleeping, but they both happen. I don’t think every thought that leads to my arm raising I just raise my arm. Imagine if we had to think of every electrical impulse that went into any movement? While also blinking, breathing, smiling, swallowing, driving, etc!? Our brains do so much more unconsciously than we know and we believe conscious thoughts are all that contribute to who we are.
Individualization is basically admitting, accepting, and working towards uniting these parts. Sitting against that fence in Media that day I had my first contact with my true self. The one that decides between “YES! That girl will love it! Do it!” and “She might like it, but you might die.” Ego wants to do the thing and get the girl, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for Rob to do and Rob is himself. Rob is the guy who should’ve been saying “yes heroin is good, but we’re not doing that”, but he was hiding in a cabinet while his mom was doing dishes. He knew he didn’t have the voice or strength, yet, to fight off what needed to be hidden from in that cabinet.
The fear that pushed him, me, us, into that cabinet isn’t as relevant as you might think. I don’t mean relevant in the sense that it wasn’t the big factor in all of this, but relevant in the sense of its details. For some people it can be physical and for others it can be mental. Both can have parts of the other and pieces of emotional and psychological and so on, but it’s a fear more real than whatever is chasing you up the stairs at night. I mean the details of why I was scared or what I thought I couldn’t fight. For me it was boiled down to a lack of boundaries that made me unaware of how unimportant I was. I dont mean that i didnt matter. I mean I wasn’t as special as I told myself I was and I think that applies to most of us. I was sliding through life pushing away anyone with boundaries that led to a mountainous wave of chaos walking around saying it was an adult. I think that applies to most of us, too.
Again, I want to stress that keeping this linear or editing and editing can’t help me write it more clearly. I tried, but all these insights came weeks and months later. In those moments there was fear. I was clueless, alone, and scaring people around me. I was still going to work and driving a car and going to 12 step meetings and therapy and counseling. I was still saying I was an adult, but really starting to question what that word meant. Adult what? An adult person? What even is a person? Am I the one who lived 47yrs and had all these thoughts and opinions or am I the being who doesn’t agree with some of those thoughts and opinions? Where was he when I was forming those opinions and why do I have to change them now? And why the hell is this so insane and real? How does this happen in a world I’ve lived in for this long? What world am I living in if I didn’t know this was here? What else is here that I don’t know about, yet?
