Imagine, for a moment, you have survived a difficult childhood. Details aren’t necessary, but let’s just say, when you took the ACEs test you scored an eight. Out of ten. Although your face and personality appear designed for the musical theatre stage, anxiety, depression, and a lifetime of habitual fawning to covert narcissists has resulted in an awkward, oft misunderstood, introverted extrovert personality built on a nervous system triggered by, well, almost everything. Although your husband will claim this apparent dichotomy is “evidence” of undiagnosed bipolar disorder, it is, in fact, caused by Multiple Sclerosis. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The year is 2015. You’ve been a full time mother for 16 years. You have raised two extraordinarily talented and hard working daughters whom you are homeschooling to be curious, thoughtful, passionate beings. You have already helped them transform their hobbies into lucrative, rewarding careers. Your life is exhausting, but wonderful. You are joyfully anticipating the high school years of a classical education customized to each child’s strengths, interests and goals. You assist your daughters with music, dance, blogs, artistic projects and YouTube channels, while single handedly caring for an award winning garden and a menagerie of fish, dogs, guinea pigs, turtles, frogs and birds. You are personal assistant, content facilitator and videographer to social media darling Clarissa May (with neither compensation nor credit), all while keeping a 4,200 square foot house clean and serving up gourmet, home cooked meals, carefully crafted for nutrition, deliciousness, and a multitude of allergy restrictions.
While you intuitively support your nervous system through diet, gardening, meditation, yoga, presence, and Prozac, you have no idea you have been coping with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS) for decades. Nevertheless, you have manifested the life you wanted through prayer, yoga, hard work, smart choices, and a healthy dose of stoicism. You are now 46 years old, married to a “good man,” actively helping your daughters to manifest their dreams and giving them every support and encouragement to do so, often vehemently against the Scarcity Myth driven wishes of a man who sacrificed his own artistic dreams in favor of an all consuming career in Mergers and Acquisitions.
Now imagine, if you will, the man you loved so deeply when you married 19 years ago has enslaved himself to the Scarcity Myth and a 75 hour work week. Your teenage daughters, testing every form of rebellion, stop completing the curriculum you spend hours each week creating and, in an effort to evade paternal discipline, apprise their ever absent father that you haven’t been assigning it. Then, if you can, imagine this grown man with an MBA , a seven figure income, and access to your homeschool software decides to believe them. Instead of you.
Wanna skip the sad stuff?
🛑 Potential trigger warning: in the following paragraphs I describe, in detail, my experience of maternal and spousal gaslighting and forced incarceration in a psych ward during an MS attack. If these details will not be welcomed by your Central Nervous System please skip ahead a few hundred words to the smiley face. 🙂
Suppose this husband, no longer the loving, reliable protector and coparent you thought him to be but an adversary with zero emotional intelligence and a massive chip on his shoulder, joins your narcissistic mother in gaslighting you to crazy and refuses to extricate said mother from your home even as you plead with him, on your knees, tears streaming down your face. Imagine in desperation you put a few suitcases and your favorite beanbag in your car and drive off in a fury. You go to Laguna Beach, look at some AirBnbs, consider a few nights in a hotel. You take yourself to a dive bar to have a margarita, eat some peanuts, and consider your options. You message your husband that it’s not too late to get your mother out of the house and talk.
Your husband, meanwhile, calls the police, tells them you are suicidal, requests they arrest you on a 5150. (Did I mention his BFF is a cop?) The Laguna Beach police department is sympathetic to powerful Orange County husbands. It would be a tragedy if anything untoward became of you in light of his documented concern.
You return to the metered parking lot and habitually slide into the drivers seat, hungry and full of nothing but tequila, corn syrup-free margarita mix and peanuts. As you pull out your phone to find a hotel within walking distance, what feels like a swat team descends upon your car. As armed officers and uniformed firemen bang on every window, the police loud speaker joins the shouts of the man at the drivers side door. “Open the door! Step out of the vehicle. Step out of the vehicle or we will take you by force. You can make this easy or you can make this hard. Either get in the ambulance or I’ll have to handcuff you and put you in it myself.”
Although the police report will reveal that not one of the ten witnesses interviewed reported anything unusual in your behavior, the swat team conducts a thorough search of your car, strewing the contents of your suitcases across the rear of your silver Nissan Murano. They find two medications, recently filled and prescribed to you by your personal physician. The paramedics note in their report that these medications, Prozac and Valium, are contraindicated, and with this “evidence” in hand, you are handcuffed, placed on a gurney, and driven to the hospital in an ambulance. No one will, at any point in the next three days, contact the physician who wrote the prescriptions. She happens also to be a friend of yours. Your husband will tell the hospital he does not deem it necessary to contact her.
Notwithstanding that the toxicology report will place your blood alcohol level at only point zero one above the legal limit, the following twelve hours will become embedded in your mind as the blurry, surreal horror of an intoxicated fever dream. You are having a full blown CPTSD attack strapped to this gurney as the ambulance careens through the busy streets of Laguna Beach. The flesh of your heart, the soft, life-giving marrow at the center of your bones, is bleeding out through your eyeballs with enough force to invert your eyelids. You are blind with heartache and mad with surreal horror when the ambulance pulls into the ER of Mission Hospital Laguna Beach and wheels you into a guarded room.
Handcuffed to the gurney in nothing but a paper gown, you hear yourself chanting a question that goes unanswered: “Where is my husband? Where is my husband? Where is my husband” It is a question you will continue to ask yourself for years to come.
Finally the armed guard ensuring you don’t pick the cuffs and escape from the locked room, barks that your husband is not coming. He wants you to “sleep it off” and will “deal with you in the morning.”
Sleep off what? Your courage? Your confidence? Your audacity in believing you deserve more than his version of “Everything?”
You’re being locked up in a psych ward.
Maybe you really are you crazy.
Or maybe you married a monster.
Mission Hospital, in the midst of an expensive renovation, has beds to spare and is, as your husband well knows, legally required to forcibly admit anyone arrested on a 5150 for a maximum of three days. You will learn from the solitary psychiatrist now holding your immediate future in her hands that the Mission Hospital Laguna Beach policy is to hold 5150s for a minimum of three days. It helps keep the beds full.
Somewhere in the vicinity of one AM you are brought to a small, locked room containing a folding table and chair. Two nurses will strip search and examine every inch of your shivering body before finally returning the clothes that were confiscated hours ago when the paramedics wheeled you into the emergency room. The rest of your belongings, including your cell phone, have been confiscated for the duration of your stay. You are not permitted a phone call. Although the blood tests you will demand weeks later confirm that your one hundred twenty pound frame is dehydrated and in full ketosis, you are offered neither food nor water.
You spend three days locked in the sixty two degree psych ward, rooming with a homeless meth addict, eating prison-style cafeteria food to earn points towards your release and looking forward to your daily eight to ten minutes in the tropical seventy two degrees of the psychiatrist’s plush office. The Soup Nazi of Psychiatry will perfunctorily ask you the same ten questions each day, roll her eyes when you give the same, obviously incorrect answers and, pronouncing you unfit for release, snap her notebook shut.
After your first meeting with the Prozac Nazi you begin hyperventilating and shaking uncontrollably. A lupin howl is building at your core. Your vision is reduced to a tunnel. The very idea of gravity becomes overwhelming. Through the haze of pending dissociation it dawns on you that a full scale CPTSD attack in the St. Jude’s psych ward will unequivocally get you locked up and force fed an intravenous drug cocktail you would never order for yourself. As your survival instincts kick in, the tidal wave of adrenaline and cortisol that had threatened to drown you transforms into the saline sea which will carry you to safety. For the first time in your life you truly understand the gift of fear.
You raid your treasure chest of meditative survival skills, cultivated through a lifetime of trauma. You begin to watch, speak and listen to your fellow inmates. Your inner extrovert rises to the occasion. Awkward and insecure though she may be, this is the girl you rely on in a crisis. This is your Harley Quinn.
During mealtimes you are allowed to congregate under weaponized supervision. There is at least one armed guard at the door, in addition to the “personal attendants” assigned to patients considered a potential danger to themselves. Or to others.You quietly greet the woman next to you, the one your meth addicted bleach blond roomy calls “The Witch” because her aging, strawberry-box-colored hair has been getting kinky with the generic shampoo samples they hand out once a day at shower time.
You offer an ear for her story, share yours in return. Your seventeen year old roommate smirks and flashes her eyes at you. You smile back and wink. You like her. She’s been an addict since her mother’s brother raped her at the age of 9. She checked herself in, but admits to you she doesn’t want to get clean. She loves the high too much. You’ll leave her your Uggh boots when you get out, to keep both her feet and her heart warm when she returns to the streets.
Through half whispered conversations over patties constructed of a mysteriously unidentifiable protein source that will take two weeks to fully exit your system, you learn The Witch was admitted by her son for refusing to cooperate in the sale of the family estate. You share with her what you’ve learned: you have the right to request paper and ink. Take notes. They limit blankets and keep the temperature at sixty degrees because cold induces lethargy. Take notes. Eat the prison food, participate in groups, Take notes. Don’t run in the halls, don’t look sideways at The General, don’t say anything too original. Take notes. Submit without emotion to the Prozac Nazi to whom crying is an annoyingly tedious symptom of emotional imbalance. Take notes.
You have found your purpose. It is, as it has always been and will always be, in whatever place life takes you, to make someone’s experience of it better through personal empowerment. You have already come to realize this nightmare is a test, a warning, a lesson, and a gift beyond measure.
You breathe.You listen with your heart at group. You say something about “when everything feels overwhelming, I stand in mountain pose and just breath, while recognizing the miracle of staying vertical in the face of gravity. Some days, that may be all I can ask of myself, but when you think about it, that’s no small feat.” You’re pretty sure you lost release points for that little nugget of nonsense.
You breathe. You do yoga on the dirty tile floor. You breathe. Yoga mats and pencils are contraband, as are blankets heavy enough to insulate against the arctic air conditioning. You shiver. You breathe.
Just shy of three days the Prozac Nazi cordially pays a personal visit to your sparsely furnished sixty degree room. You would offer her a seat, but their are no chairs. You both remain standing.
After several minutes spent explaining all the reasons she thinks you should remain indefinitely in her psych ward, listing several “facts” she could only have learned from your husband, the Prozac Nazi announces that against her “better judgement” you are being released. It appears quite a few people have been taking notes.
Your husband is unable to conceal his shock when you call from the communal dial out phone and tell him to pick you up.
After three days without the stimulating comfort of coffee, your first stop is Starbucks. You sit at an outdoor table, the familiar warmth of the venti soy latte in your hands, its smooth sweetness on your tongue. Although it was only three days, it feels like a lifetime since your were free. Free to drink coffee. Free to hold a pencil. Free to wear shoes with laces. Free to use your voice. Almost free to say no.
Your husband never apologizes. Not then, not later, not ever.
You agree to try one last time, to make your marriage something you can live with, something that won’t kill you. You’re a fool, you know,
but he broke you. Exactly as he intended to. Recovery will take time. If you decide to leave in the end, you’ll have to be smarter than that. In the meantime, you must fall in line. You, at least, will try. One last time.
Sitting in the sun outside of Starbucks, gazing across PCH at the Pacific Ocean on a perfect California day, you tell him things have to change, he will have to change. You tell him how desperately you miss the best friend and partner you married. You cry. He cries. You spend one romantic weekend in San Diego. You are hopeful. You are, you think, healing.
Two months later you are still attempting to earn back the trust and respect of your deeply traumatized daughters when your husband receives an email from his boss. He has been fired. For being an asshole.
It’s not the first time your “good man” had his ass fired. Five years ago he decided to build a home gym. Rather than trading his hard earned money for cardio machines, he backed a rented U-Haul up to his employer’s office building, loaded up a treadmill, elliptical trainer, and stationary bike and drove off into the sunrise in full view of the security cameras. He lost his job, the respect of his peers, and the twenty year severance package he would otherwise have received when Citi Corp shut down their Irvine M&A division one month later.
Once a top predator in the small pond of Orange County business, your husband is an overnight pariah.
Five years ago, when this happened, you proposed leaving the merry go round, moving to Australia, starting a goat farm, being a family. There was already plenty of money. You’d been careful. You envisioned the life you might live, one that conforms to the values you thought you shared. He opted instead to find a sponsor willing to hire a petty thief and build a business of his own. It is this business which has now, five years later, been unceremoniously liquidated by the sponsor who would hire a thief.
Once again, your husband will start a business from scratch. You voice your concern about the tenuous state of your marriage, the fact that you are barely beginning to rebuild your relationship. You know you cannot survive the stress of launching an M&A business from scratch. He makes promises to keep his workload light, to hire assistants even though it will mean smaller profits. He asks you to trust him.
(😊) One year later you will file for divorce.
Just suppose this absurd sounding tale were true, and that it had happened to you. What would you do with the rest of your life?
Well, first, you would determine to make something good out of the nightmare you’ve survived. You might decide to write a blog about trauma, Complex PTSD, narcissistic abuse, homeschooling, or parenting in the social media age. You would definitely plan to share your story and the resources and tools that have helped you survive and recover from the trauma induced MS that is the result of a lifetime of emotional abuse, neglect and gaslighting at the hands of multiple covert narcissists.
You might, in your wholehearted efforts at recovery and rebirth, discover such inspirational figures as Eckhart Tolle, Brene Brown, Sadhguru, and Joseph Campbell. Perhaps your brain eventually heals from the trauma of the past 5 years and you find you can once again think, problem solve and follow a book. Surely you would take enthusiastic advantage of your author-boyfriend’s amazing library, now lining the walls of the home you share together. Hell, you might get really crazy and decide to continue the classical education that was so tragically interrupted. You might just custom design a curriculum for your SELF based on your own talents and interests, which now revolve around trauma, spirituality, yoga, philosophy, quantum physics, travel and literature. You just might!
And should you indeed decide to launch such a blog, sharing your skills, your lessons, and your story, you would absolutely call it Single and Hungry AF.* Because one, your ex husband hated you to use the word fuck, so that’ll really piss him off. And two, you are, after all, a single soul hungry for connection and collaboration with other souls on their journey of healing.
Hmmm, you just might…
*Update: this post was originally published in 2021/22. Since then I have rebuilt my blog and renamed it Hungry for Presence. You can still find my @SingleandHungryAF account on Instagram.