I've been reading The Body Keeps the Score, about trauma and recovery from same. There's a lot in here that I wish I had known about earlier, though I don't know that it would have made a difference. I don't have the kind of deep-seated, serious trauma that this book is talking about. schoolpsychnerd does, but other people can't solve that for her. Still, it might have helped me understand better what she was going through.

This post isn't about that, though. One of the major points the books makes is that the ways traumatized people behave mark them as strange, cause them a lot of pain, and get them shunned or mocked by their peers, but those habits continue because they were protective against the source of their trauma. At one point, in a certain context, they were useful habits, even if in every other context they cause nothing but pain.

When I read that, I immediately thought of some of the habits I developed in my marriage to deal with schoolpsychnerd's behavior. I don't want to go into exhaustive detail (and it would be lashon hara anyway), but one simple example is how I'm often leery of offering a suggestion because there's a part of me that thinks it creates an obligation in the listener. schoolpsychnerd would often treat it that way, because she was a people-pleaser and always tried to accommodate herself to what other people wanted. I didn't want to run roughshod over her, so sometimes we'd end up in a stalemate where each of us tried to get the other to state their opinion first, me so I'd know that her opinion was purely her own and her so she could take my opinion into account when making a decision. That led to me being anxious about asking people to do things, including even inviting them to go out for pie or come to a party, because I've learned over years that merely suggesting something is often treated as a command. So in order to avoid applying undue pressure, I often avoided suggesting things. Most of what this did was isolate me from my friends, but maybe it made schoolpsychnerd feel better.

On Tuesday, though, I thought about hosting a party for Shavuot, since the "eating dairy foods" aspect of the holiday makes it easy to secularize for a gathering. And after about twenty minutes of thought, I made an event and invited sixty people. A Facebook event invite is not a binding contract. It's not pressure in any way. And hopefully people will come and eat delicious ice cream and cheese and have a lovely time.

And this is something I should be aware of in the future, and examine my own actions, and try to figure out what impulses I have that were once an adaptive response but no longer are.