You showed up for an appointment for the second time in 2024, but the people you were supposed to meet weren’t there. You asked the hostess about your reservation and learned that it had been canceled — six days earlier.
You checked your emails and text messages to see if you had missed anything. No, you hadn’t. No one bothered to tell you that lunch was canceled.
As expected by everyone, you were angry, even though you understood the circumstances and dynamics at play. You are closer to one member of the group than the others, and that person was very ill that week. She had postponed the appointment due to her illness, but in her ailing state forgot to let you know.
All members of the group have since apologized, and you assume that there were no bad intentions, but that it was simply an oversight.
Unfortunately, something similar happened last month when you met a friend for lunch. You gave her a reasonable grace period and ended up texting her to ask where she was, only to find out she was at home without realizing it because she had completely forgotten.
She apologized profusely and came over at the speed of light. You both had a great time despite the mishap.
After these two events, you are left with ambivalent feelings. Your mature, adult self knows that people generally make mistakes. Life is stressful, and sometimes everyone needs a little leniency. This version of you responded to the apologies with kindness and made a mental note to confirm plans the night before.
But there is another part of you that has reacted quite differently. The unhealed child in you was angry, it was burning to fight and give blows to those that wronged you.
No one wants to be overlooked, especially not twice in a short space of time. But for you, this is a trigger, because throughout your childhood and adolescence, your needs were constantly passed on to two desperately needy family members.
Being the youngest in a dysfunctional household, you spent your formative years trying to make up for your mother’s terrible childhood, not realizing this was not your job. You soaked up her barely suppressed anger, soothed her insecurities, and did everything you could to make her feel better. Meanwhile, she gave you the minimum amount of grudging care necessary to make her seem like a loving mother on the outside.
You don’t have to be a PhD in psychiatry to realise the impact this had.
Indulgent and eager to please everyone, you spent your young adulthood doing the most for people who cared the least. Once a “friend” complained that no one had done anything for her birthday when you planned and paid for a celebration dinner, homemade card in tow.
That was about the time you stumbled into the office because you were so exhausted from work, and your boss made fun of you for being uncoordinated when he left.
Developing enough self-respect to stand up for yourself was a long and hard-fought process. It involved extensive research, painfully exploring your history to better understand family patterns, and fearing yourself by setting boundaries, knowing that everyone around you would walk away if you weren’t a complete pushover. It took years to stand up for yourself, and it’s something that still takes a lot out of you.
So it’s no surprise that these events, which happened so close together, sent you into a tailspin. While your adult self understands that they were accidents, your original lizard brain remembers a time when you were overlooked on much more important occasions, the forgotten, unwanted, inconvenient child.
You feel at home, in the worst possible way.
Suddenly you are mentally back at a point where your needs do not matter to anyone. But instead of just accepting it like before, you fight. Your head becomes a war zone. Whatever the real situation is, in your head you fight to make the uncaring people understand you, getting more and more frustrated and angry until you finally blow a fuse and scream obscenities until you feel weak and dizzy.
You may look slightly agitated on the outside, but on the inside, you are an emotional wreck.
At this stage of your life, you have the comfort of recognizing what your reaction is and where it comes from. There was a time when you didn’t understand these patterns and did not know why you were reacting so violently to a certain treatment. Giving in to your triggers and losing your “right mind” was terrifying.
Now you know exactly what you are going through. You can almost imagine the two parts of you, the rational and the irrational, fighting for control.
In general, your emotions are well-regulated. You cry easily when you are happy or affected by someone’s distress, but you are not someone who gets overly angry or upset. You wait before discussing questionable behavior with someone to ensure you can do it calmly and productively.
But these triggered moments are different. Everything you’ve learned about productive communication fails you. You react without thinking it through.
When the second event occurred, you stood there trying to control your wild thoughts and subdue the burning anger and pain rising in my gut. You watched the people walking past you with a fixed gaze while my limbs tingled.
You disregarded your own rule and called the person who should have told you the meeting was canceled, but luckily, she was unavailable so you couldn’t talk to her right away. Whatever you would have said at that moment would not have been productive.
Due to your shock and preoccupation with your mind, you don’t remember the 55 minutes it took you to get home. Your body was on autopilot while your mind was racing. You stayed in this state for hours. It was 4:30 pm when you realized you hadn’t eaten since breakfast. By then you had calmed down a bit, but not enough to stop you from ordering a pizza. Your sensible self, resurfacing, pleaded to eat something healthier from the fridge. But you were still so out of control that you couldn’t listen.
Having pizza is fine, but you shouldn’t use food to regulate your emotions. You want to treat yourself to something when you can enjoy it, not to suppress what’s going on inside you.
Three pieces later, you had regained control. The anger had subsided, and you felt tired and resigned. You felt your parasympathetic nervous system kick in and slowly calmness returned.
During this time, you were able to stop yourself from texting the parties involved by leaving your phone out of your immediate reach.
When you retrieved it, you saw that your friend had realized her mistake and was trying to reach you in various ways. She sincerely apologized to you, which helped bring you back to today’s reality. You see, no one neglects you. Accidents happen.
You finally allowed yourself to respond, and you are glad you were able to accept the apology while acknowledging that you were upset and needed time to process it. You did it productively instead of overreacting. She was understanding.
As your mind slowed down, you were able to do some mini-meditations, close your eyes, and focus on the immediate — what you were hearing and feeling at that moment.
This helped you refocus your train of thought, and by the time you went to bed, you felt much more like yourself, albeit a little down and sad. It’s frustrating when something so insignificant in the grand scheme of things can so destroy my peace of mind.
Although such triggers are increasingly rare, you doubt you will ever shake them off completely. It’s disappointing — you’ve worked so hard, come so far, and turned your life around in so many ways. Days like this feel like a setback. You don’t want to subject yourself to this spiral anymore.
Overall, you are happy when you think about the positive changes you’ve made. You are living a good life, have healthy self-esteem, enjoy strong relationships, and have more or less forgiven your mother. That’s a drastic change from your 20s.
It’s only natural that deep wounds leave scars. You can’t see them in everyday life, and that gives you the false sense that you’ve completely overcome your difficult upbringing. But there will always be unwanted memories, and those triggers will inevitably be triggered.
It’s disappointing to know that you can never really put the past behind you. But at least now, when it resurfaces, you have the comfort of knowing that the present you will eventually regain control.
