We’re back! For a personal bonus.
As stated, I have deep and timely ties to this topic of an abuse-inviting gait. I’m currently in physical therapy (it’s going poorly, because “western medicine” – it’s hard to be heard) and seeking alternative treatments. This article cemented what’s been going wrong, when practitioners haven’t been able to.
For the past three to four years I’ve been saying “I somehow forgot how to walk?” and “also stand?” while observing that my pathetic attempts to do normal physical activities seemed to correspond with others taking advantage of me in ways I’ve not seen before.
And I’ve not been able to figure it out.
Where does the dysfunction start? How is it my entire lower half AND my abdominals that are cyclically, progressively, getting worse together? How does this connect with recent abuse and the ongoing prey experiences I seemed to be having?
Primary care physicians offered nothing. An osteopathic doctor couldn’t or wouldn’t help me. Physical therapy has so far been a bust. And the internet hasn’t pulled through this time, either.
Until… these papers we’ve been discussing just snapped everything into place.
But, it is a circuitous and nonlinear story I’m about to tell you. So bear with. And let me try to describe this trauma-muscle-psychological-intestinal-disordering in case someone needs to hear it.
The jist
Starting from peak fitness of my lifetime, everything went wrong when emotional trauma became overwhelming in the last few years. Robbing me of my favorite processing behaviors (hiking, walking, running, mossing) and catapulting my inner world into dysfunction when I’ve needed those tools the most.
Look, we won’t get into the whole thing. But let’s say that independently starting a trauma recovery podcast has been ironically the most traumatic experience of my life, or has indirectly caused a trauma domino effect across so many areas of life that it feels “complete.” No stone unturned.
Yadda yadda yadda, sometimes people attack when you start uncovering things they’d like hidden. Who knows when family deaths are going to rock the most difficult people you know. Plus, the economy when you’re not from a financially secure situation and chose “meaning” over profit…
Together, have tossed me around like a tiny sailboat in a hurricane. These years have almost killed me emotionally and mortally, through some of the more dangerous situations I’ve been in, thanks in part to being exiled from the people I thought I counted on – and then some unexpected events, like wildfires.
Long story short, you don’t know the depths of your family trauma until you start pulling strings and pissing those people off during one of the most unhinged times in human history.
So at one point I was living in a tent / SUV at my state park, having left the daily screaming that marked my mother’s home, where I had been staying to try to help with my late father’s undealt with estate. My disabled puppy just had to be put to sleep – I no longer had a reason to be stuck there – and I bolted into the woods to regain some peace. If I wasn’t sitting at a picnic table working on my master’s degree, I was doing research, podcasting, working an SEO writing job, or grading a course for my school. If I wasn’t doing any of those things, I was trail running and hiking – roughly the only activities available.
No, the lack of support from that picnic table and ubiquitous overwork weren’t good for my body. But I wasn’t swimming in options. And that’s when I acquired the pain in my ass.
Running one day, there was a sharp something. Which then lasted for the rest of the year.
From that, my whole – previously pretty perfectly conditioned - body started going south.
Which is when it started to seem like everyone could smell the abuse on me, and jumped in for their own cut.
Disjointed, disintegrating body
The thing is, what started as a “woops, think I pulled something in my butt” pain eventually became a full side of my body pain.
Butt became back became hip, knee, shoulder, and all the way into my already weak ankle. The entire right side of my body stopped working right and started hurting. And despite being fit, athletic, active every day, and intuitively quite good at figuring out my body ailments…. Nothing I did could fix it. Any of it. Each problem seemed to make every other problem worse. Trying to help myself resulted in provoking ALL OF IT and then not being able to function.
It felt like each component of my body started working as a separate unit, completely separate from the left side as well. Every individual area was compensating for every other area, up and down, left and right, so that nothing worked TOGETHER cohesively. It was like a Rube Goldberg machine knocking around inside of me, not the precisely aligning gears of a clock.
And the issue worsened and spread and touched nearly every part.
For about three years, I’ve been comparing myself to Edgar from MIB. My body felt like a “broken marionette doll” who’s strings got too loose or busted.
Eventually nothing could move correctly, every position (standing, sitting, laying) made me hurt in aching and nerve-zinging ways, and I couldn’t do things like sleep at night because of it.
Western medicine had pain pill prescriptions to offer me, which I turned down because I come from a family ruined by opioids. And further attempts to navigate health insurance and unhelpful doctors’ offices to get into physical therapy have taken years, ultimately being again unhelpful as well as expensive – a demoralization event that had me at my wits end recently.
Meanwhile, I’ve also cyclically said “I don’t understand how I keep ending up in these abusive workplaces, it’s like they can smell it on me,” more times than I can count.
It’s felt like whole-system failures; family, to health care, to occupational; have sacrificed my physiology.
I knew it had to be related. But I couldn’t quite figure out how. And I knew I needed to rest and get back IN my body after all the t-word. But that’s not what the economy had in mind.
So what’s a poor person with no one to turn to, to do?
Answer: work about it!
Disability but can’t – make it worse instead!
I’ll be honest, I should be on disability. But I’m not.
And I’ll also be honest, I have appearance perfectionism problems.
And lastly, I get stuck in overdrive mode as a part of fight or flight. And the energy has to go somewhere.
So at no point in these years did I stop working or working out. It just became harder and harder to do both. So I pushed through and made every second of my life torturous!
As we do.
Which… is THE WRONG THING TO DO, for all of us, and explains the mismatching, incohesive, body part problem, for me.
There were injuries and inaccessible muscle groups. Structures compensated for other structures, none of them moving the way nature intended, as I ground them into the dirt. Running, walking, manually laboring, and intellectually working on computers with furious anxiety.
“It’ll work itself out” I kept telling myself flippantly as I ran or hiked or hunched over a desk or destroyed non-native plant species through the woods.
It did not work itself out.
Soon but gradually, I couldn’t stand up straight – everything askew and my body twisting to one direction, ready to tumble at the slightest touch. I couldn’t even sit correctly to drive or work; the weakness and pains worked their way into my collapsing back and shoulders, too.
But I couldn’t stop doing any of those. I was alone, I was stressed, I had to survive. I actually only moved faster and faster, taking on more and more duties, every year.
Like the big feelings I was also suppressing, I “powered through” and “showed what it meant to be an adult” and “didn’t act like a malingering pussy.”
And hurt myself so, so, badly, in all of it.
The result was eventually having a disjointed, awkward, poorly balanced and unnatural gait to my walk. Overall, a feeling that I COULDN’T walk. That efficacy was at about 25%.
The core issue
Let’s also mention the real problem here besides the class disparity that makes “cost of living” a hilarious term and the onslaught of uncouth behavior raining down from everyone I thought I could count on….
From that abuse, trauma, and later emotional suppression to keep performing came?
Disassociation from the gut.
I harden under pressure, and that includes to myself. I operate out of my mind and that place is slave driving.
I have to disconnect from anxiety to focus on other things when that anxiety is unfortunately logical and unable to be dissipated.
I have to turn off the soft, empathetic, piece of me to get work done, let alone to avoid predators. What, am I going to cry when I have things to accomplish, potentially in front of other people?
Also, my favorite healthy emotional regulation activity – moving in the woods – had been taken away from me. It became a punishing chore that only caused more negative feelings of helplessness and frustration with every uncomfortable, inefficient, unsymmetrical step - not something to look forward to or lean on like I used to.
And let’s throw in an extra item.
The coping self-sabotage
My organs hate most foods.
Unfortunately, when I’m emotionally vacant (on the surface, deeply emotionally disturbed underneath) and my needs aren’t being met, and life is joyless… I crave most foods for comfort, for meaning, for something to look forward to in the bleakness.
And – kicker – even the foods my body DOES permit? (Essentially lean proteins and vegetables) Only are allowed in small portions.
Nothing is safe! It’s a difficult way to live, even on the best days.
So, living alone in unstable places for years, working at home alone, with (and I mean this literally) no one to talk to except my dog, some of the most disturbed, repressed, cyclical, feelings I can recall, and no means to support myself emotionally the ways I had relied on…
Things got hairy.
Though I executed the willpower to keep my diet in check by item, I regularly did not fare so well by volume.
And eventually, in a sea of hopelessness in 2024, also slipped up on items. To be honest. Even convincing myself “the glutens” as I called them for the last 11 years were never real for me, and I could return to HBO with reckless abandon on my worst days.
Like I said last time, if you just don’t FEEL your abdominals, you can’t hold yourself to all the intestinal damage you’re doing.
All with the cumulative effect of making my guts perpetually bloated and sensitive (secretly, willfully ignored by me as much as possible). And the side effect of making me feel terrible about my stick-thin frame + pregnant belly combination.
So that, together, I had two more reasons to disassociate from my lower stomach. To forget it existed, in sensation or appearance. So that it disappeared from my mind. It literally ceased to be a part of my experience.
It’s astonishing that I didn’t “glutton” myself to death like the movie Seven. The copious foods I shoved into it? Didn’t register. Like a bottomless pit. I could go on forever, pouring into a blank spot on my skeleton where reality couldn’t touch.
Which is to say…. I stopped being able to access my core. I was never exercising it. I wasn’t aware of it as I moved.
AND I started weakening the muscles from the inside with continual bloating. There’s nowhere to contract to when there’s a rock in your guts. There’s a physical barrier that prevents muscle movement.
In this, over years, I found that eventually your body seems to lose the pathway to those muscle groups. Especially when that batch of nerve endings would only report “pain” from all the inflammation and water retention. So your brain cuts off the problem child.
And although this emotionally-driven issue happened long AFTER the butt injury that seems to have kickstarted a lot of the purely mechanical damage… I think it contributed heavily to everything else getting thrown out of whack.
The full body connection
If you can’t access the structural components of your pelvis – the “bread basket” that’s supposed to hold everything up and provide a foundation for the top half of your body, it turns out that it affects all your other muscle groups.
And, on top of that problem, if you have a weak core, you have? A weak everything. Without core strength, you can’t work your butt or hips right. Without butt or hip support, you can’t access your core. It becomes an infinity loop of inaccessible muscles. Which is why I became so confused and stalled out. My problems became indistinguishable.
But you might have to keep working, strong, like a man. Be that doing manual labor or trying to keep the right posture on a computer.
And you get? A series of misfiring, laterally mismatching, muscles that only cause more ailments. You create an injury machine with loose gears that keep dinging and damaging all the others.
That you? Also disconnect from.
Over the course of a few years, which did not improve in circumstance or provide compassionate respite from the demands of living…
I couldn’t recover my brain or my body. I couldn’t access what I needed to do for longer than a few weeks at a time, and all progress slipped backwards into negatives when I would re-ping an injury in my attempts to therapize myself.
So mostly, I felt nothing as I manhandled myself – forcing my numbed out lower body to work because I could ignore it along with my GI tract…
Until I couldn’t.
It was like my energy was cutoff at the bellybutton, after which was immaterial void. Except for the pain. The nonstop hip, butt, and back – regular knee, and ankle – were the only reminders that I had a foundation to my torso.
And with nothing working right, including our healthcare system, there was no place to start making fixes.
And only so many people wafting into my life to make things worse.
Patterns of abuse “as if they can read it on me” : a great mystery of the past 5 years
The pieces have finally fallen into place though.
During this upsetting, scarce, overworked time, yes, I considered myself a bedraggled woman – something that doesn’t go over well in society. And I attributed the social mishaps to “the energy” I was carrying, as such.
Somehow I kept winding up in positions where I carried the weight alone, where a team of people previously was in charge of the same duties. And then was blamed for anything that went wrong, or outright punished for things like asking not to do tasks that facilitated being sexually assaulted.
I felt bullied and scapegoated while I gave 300% the effort I actually could extend.
The reward was more bullying and scapegoating.
And interpersonally? It was like being picked up, examined, utilized, and tossed aside like a Kleenex for a few years. Simply no “takers” on being in relationship, unless they were men who sent clear danger signals.
Overall, I would call it a period of “subhuman” treatment like I haven’t experienced since I left an abusive relationship and was a “bedraggled woman” for a few months getting back on my feet, back then. The catalyst for starting this project after experiencing the stigma of abuse.
But after about three years of getting outright taken advantage of by everyone I worked for or tried to know, concurrent with these injuries, I started to wonder if there wasn’t something else going on. A connection.
My old way of walking – when I projected confidence and opposition – when people would get out of the way – when partners complimented my “won’t take your shit” gait? Had been completely forgotten. And so had the treatment I used to receive during those times.
I felt at odds or deserted from my body in a helpless way. And the way it seemed to be attracting sharks that could sniff blood in the water was terrifying. It helped keep me awake at night, concurrent with every nerve zing.
The central issue
And now, this research came in and blew that mystery apart.
Finally, giving me a single place to start working on things, instead of exhaustingly trying to fix each component.
Because unsymmetrical, unsynchronous, disjointed, gestural movement is the definition of how I have been walking during these years. I’ve been focused on moving each part, individually, since my ankle, knee, hip, butt, back, and shoulder seem to have forgotten how to operate in their own unique ways, or to do it together.
Since the traumas began to unfold, I’d not been focused on core to centrally mobilize the rest of me. As described, I couldn’t be.
Along with this, probably due to the effortful and disembodied lifestyle I took on, I forgot how my weight was supposed to be distributed during movement. I lost the figure 8 pattern that I now immediately recognize as my old natural gait.
And, I was explicitly lifting my feet, unable to swing them.
I mean, I was so uncoordinated – forget left-left arm and leg movements – I was executing paradoxical breathing when your diaphragm moves the wrong direction with each breath.
So, together, I was doing nearly everything right to exemplify the victim’s gait. Forcing an incohesive body to show its wounds, its weaknesses, and to worsen them. Revealing that the same thing was going on, inside. Showing that I was in a desperate and out of control situation, all around. And probably wasn’t enjoying a strong “self experience” either.
;;;
Leaving me baffled by the snap judgments people seemed to be making about me that resulted in getting taken for a ride.
Which, now, make perfect sense. They COULD read it on me. And even though I don’t believe I was engaging with psychopaths, it resulted in extreme and inconsiderate relationships where I was consistently put to work for others, as if I didn’t have two legs to stand on.
Because I didn’t!
….
And – you know how it gets ironic when dealing with trauma cycles.
The physical demands of the mistreatment and additional stress it caused resulted in?
More traumatic reacting. More “survival” behaviors. More pushing through the pain to try to prove myself. More disassociation and emotional coping so I couldn’t begin to refind the muscle pathways and strengthen my stomach muscles! So I couldn’t fix my butt, hip, and leg problems! So I remained diminished, demoralized, and easy to use.
Exactly like an abuser would want.
The cycle of compensatory behaviors intended to fill the emotional void left by a dozen living deaths kickstarted it all.
And then worsened it all, in an unbreakable cycle of abandoning myself, working too hard, and never being able to stop long enough to execute the solution; refinding my core.
Until now.
WRAP
So the full story may be:
Life has been – sorry – very shitty for me, for about 6 years. Sortof a fact, not an opinion.
In that time, I had nowhere to go to safely process traumas, so I overworked and injured myself in a purely physiological way.
But at the same time, I had hurt feelings I couldn’t stop to deal with despite my own best knowledge and advice.
Taken together, with no way to emotionally process the way that I like to – hiking many hours in the woods – I turned to coping. Eating too much and foods that my body doesn’t tolerate for the comfort.
In doing that, I hurt my intestines.
And then disconnected from the feelings of their injuries so I could keep it up.
With that, I hurt my lower body muscles even more intensely. With no core support, my ass injury became much worse. It contributed to other muscles being mishandled. I was caught in an endless cycle of being unable to access the muscles I needed, recruiting other muscles, and hurting those as well.
So eventually my whole body stopped working right, digestively and mobility-wise. Walking became a near-impossible task. So did everything else. Even sitting, laying, sleeping. It has been a personal circle of hell where I, a person who loves to “git shit done,” eventually adaptively adopted the mindset “I can’t do anything” to conserve energy. A hopelessness that nearly ended me when I had nothing safe to focus on because it extended to every area of life.
And these years living with immobility and skeletal pain have been both driven and exacerbated by the fact I was unable to feel or utilize…
My core.
All snowballing from overwhelming trauma and emotional abuse.
….
Do you see?!?!
Because “they did.”
The predators – pretty normal people who spotted a weakness – and worsened the stress-cycle underlying it all.
….
And that’s what I’m recovering from now.
Through settling into an environment, which has only been possible by standing up for myself and demonstrating I won’t be an indentured servant again.
Through slowing down my movements and noticing when I’m hurting myself, which I’ve had to make mindset and lifestyle changes about – especially financially – to put into practice.
Through emotional work and emotional need fulfillment that I’m finally accessing in a relationship.
Through maintaining a near-perfect, very boring, diet, which is greatly supported by not being entirely isolated or emotionally deprived.
And also, through taking a more direct approach. Finally getting help. Or at least trying.
No, the osteopathic doctor didn’t assist, and oh, how I have stories… “are you really in PAIN though?!” yeah motherfucker, I didn’t get a referral and drive 1.5 hours each direction because I’m a bored woman with nothing else to do… But he was a route to getting physical therapy. And dry needling at the PT office is helping with the nerve-pain triggering injuries.
I’m still waiting to decide if the exercises, themselves, are hitting the mark, or if I’ve been given a standard prescription for a problem I don’t have and their strategy of taking two clients at a time doesn’t allow for intense observation to prevent weird muscle compensations in the way I need.
It feels like the latter. It has been about five weeks. It has been upsetting.
So, while I can’t say western medicine has been a positive experience so far, I have at least gotten used to approaching my days differently and also spending money on the issue – both have been obstacles to working this thing out during these inflation-heavy times.
And whilst I don’t love medical debt or taking wild swings at things with a checkbook… I have an acupuncture appointment for later this week, attempting to take a whole-system approach.
And this paper, meanwhile, has swooped in and revealed some of the great unknowns, so I can get back to helping myself.
What do I need to do? Get serious about my diet and lifestyle. They have to work FOR me, not against all my effort.
And what should I focus on when I walk? For years, I thought it was the individual parts of my body misaligning. Ankle, knee, hip, butt, abs, shoulders... trying to mind each one in an infuriating teeth gritting.
Now I know it’s much simpler than that – core, weight distribution, and easeful flow. Which has turned my woods-walking time into physical and emotional therapy, itself.
And, finally, through all of it, I feel I am relearning how to walk.
I feel actual changes in the structures of my body. Like, finally, I’m reaching for muscle groups and finding them. The strengthening is slow, but I’m finally standing straight and stably – at least sometimes.
While at the same time, I’m sure not getting taken advantage of the way that I was. Which has also required finding my backbone, along with my lower abs.
And I can say that this change in perspective and dose of hope is, in good part… unfortunately… not thanks to the physical therapy that I fought for years to obtain…
But due to the articles:
Psychopathy and Victim Selection: The Use of Gait as a Cue to Vulnerability
Angela Book, PhD, Kimberly Costello, PhD, and Joseph A. Camilleri, PhD
Journal of Interpersonal Violence
2013
and
Attracting Assault: Victims’ Nonverbal Cues
by Betty Grayson and Morris I. Stein
Journal of Communication
1981
And the revelations caused by their research.
Trauma recovery takes guts.
And when you’re not able to access them, perhaps causing physical changes to muscles and movements, you might be judged as a predation-ready pushover – until you relearn to straighten up, stand up for yourself, and operate from your center again.
Til we talk again… walk again… with your core leading the way.