Seeking the whirlwind: when the calm after the storm becomes the calm before the storm

I want to write, but I need caffeine.
and to cry.

and to learn to be content.
to let calm catch up with me.
instead of seeking the perpetual whirlwind.

I think I learned to survive by running headfirst.
You see, I couldn't run AWAY.

Away from what? They were drugging me, I'd learned to dissociate at a very young age (possibly from infancy) so I wasn't recording the worst of the memories. My body was feeling, and fearing and despairing but cognitively accounting for why would have left me insane. Never mind the grooming, coaching and outright brainwashing.

I lived my life on high alert never missing a thing, except THE things. I've been all but told there were neurosurgeons among them. If a neurosurgeon didn't want you remembering something, do you think you would stand a chance?  How about when you were 3, 6, 15?

If you want to be in my shoes try imagining this scenario.

I couldn't run AWAY because I didn't know where or what the trouble was? My birth-family and other perpetrators were experts in dismissing and demeaning us, for the littlest things. I remember being lined up between my brother's after my bio father had found and unfinished apple core in the yard, with our mouths open, so he could determine who's mouth the bite marks fit, and therefor had waisted the apple y not finishing it and be "punished." When I thought of this as an adult it seemed to me an absurd way to determine guilt, until it hit me that it was never about punishment or wrongdoing. It was about instilling fear and establishing dominance.

So I ran TO. things. Experiences, changes, places. When I was beaten, drugged, raped, tortured, I didn't... respond to it. I couldn't. For two reasons. 1.) It was my norm, and had been since birth and 2.) I didn't remember that anything had happened. I couldn't say "I'm not safe at night, my father comes in and rapes me." Instead, I spent hours praying and dabbing "holy oil" on the walls, doorways and windows to keep the demons out. The demons came to me in the form of the incomprehensible (given that we had no indoor cats) sensation of a cat jumping onto my bed when I was asleep, or falling asleep. A sensation that scared me terribly, but never caused me to turn around and look at where the cat wasn't.  Instead, I, for reason's my mind never required me to articulate, snuck out at night to leave and sleep in my neighbors carpeted storage shed. This I did with such regularity that he began to leave blankets and pillows there under the desk for whenever they were needed. Instead, I searched the yellow pages (remember those) for the numbers of, and cold called women's shelter's, without ever being able say more than "I think I need help, do you take kids?" They didn't, so I panicked and refused to answer any follow up questions. I couldn't, after all. I did not know what I was running from. So instead I ran to. I ran to school, to church, to friends houses (one's so regularly that they kept a bed ready for me). I ran to anyone who would give me the time of day. Instead, I ran to anyone or anyplace I thought could hide me, or keep me away  or buffer the possibility of being hurt for a little while, at least.

The result of all that running TO, is that, now (only just now) am I realizing that my habit of running to is, at it's core, also a running FROM.  Calm scares me. I crave it. Until I have it. And then, I always discover there is something just beyond the horizon begging me to come running. Let's have a kid, adopt a kid, become porn stars, move to another country, go back to school, go back to school again, hey, we never adopted a kid yet, that person looks like they need a place to live - we still have one unoccupied room in the house, let's move to China, let's get a divorce, No, I really like you, let's finally adopt that kid, I need a different kind of job, I need to go back to school, I really can't live with you anymore, the furniture needs to be rearranged, I'm a lesbian, I'm an artist, I want to go back to school, Let's adopt a kid...

All of those things, I genuinely feel.  Feel so strongly. But what's driving the urgency is that when things slow down my brain says "warning! warning! warning!". Because of a little thing called the cycle of violence, in which intimate violence is enacted in repeating phases of calm (called honeymoon) and escalating tensions (called tension building) to outbursts of acute violence (called explosion). What you will often see (remember I'm a social worker as well as a survivor) is this cycle spiraling in on itself with extended exposure such that the honeymoon period shrinks or becomes almost non-existent or only appears intermittently (such as after more extreme outbursts or external influences intruding into the cycle like medical or legal attention, a partner leaving and returning, a relative visiting etc...) and you left with little more than the tension building phase followed by explosion followed by the tensions building into the next explosion of violence.
Perpetrators of such violence are expert at intimidating their victims into believing the violence, rather than being a barometer of their internal workings, is caused by their failings. Add to that a child's developmentally appropriate egocentrism (the belief that the world revolves around, and can therefore be influenced by, the child) and you often get a child who's only mechanism of self protection is the illusion of control. The chid may not be able to stop the violence from happening, but they may be able to bring it on, and in doing so create an illusion of predictability.  Translation: Kaja's brain has been trained to interpret calm, even relative calm as a signal of violence to come. And, given my lack of viable options for most of the time of my abuse, what I learned to do in the face of that treat, is to enact chaos. I learned calm is the unpredictable time in which, not knowing where or what the next violence will come from or be, that I must run. Not away (from what, remember?) but TO. To something, anything. If it's a good thing, all the better.

The long and short of it is that now, when calm means I can sit down and do homework with my Brown-eyes or hunt Krëiks with Tousled: when calm means eating dinner together and catching up on paying bills; when calm means finishing that book or running errands so that Handsome and I can sustain the kind of life we have worked so hard to build for ourselves and our children, I must learn to fight the overwhelming desire to make it the time paint the living room, buy a dog, start a new company based on some great idea I know nothing about...

When things begin to settle down, for a change, and my heart begins to pound and my mind begins to race,

I need to write, put the kettle on.
Have a good cry.

I need to learn to be content.
to let calm catch up with me.
instead of seeking the perpetual whirlwind.

I must learn to believe in the calm after the storm, too.