Walls Are Lonely

Everyone has a way they choose to protect themselves. Whether it be setting boundaries, being overly aware of your surroundings, staying away from people who may potentially hurt you or that trigger you, or protecting yourself from people who don’t serve you in a healthy way. For some others, we build emotional walls. A defense mechanism triggered by deep emotional trauma that serves as a wall of protection to separate our feelings and mental state from the event or “thing” we feel we need protection from.

Emotional walls can be detrimental to healing from trauma you’ve experienced in your life. In my case they lead to a world of loneliness, drug use and fear.  

Growing up boundaries were never explained to me in a way that taught me they were more than the bubble around me, and I am sure for many of us, boundaries are something we needed to learn as we got older not knowing the appropriate way to use them or how to enforce them.

So, Let’s talk about it.

I remember being about 5 years old and going to a child therapist. She would play with these dolls and arrange them as if they were my family members. She would stand the doll that was supposed to be me next to the doll that was supposed to be my dad and she would say “How does your dad love you?” “How does your dad touch you?” I would wrap the dolls arms around my pretend doll body and squeeze the baby so tight, because my dad would always give me the best hugs. She would repeat this over and over asking me things in between like “are you sure thats all he does” “he doesn’t touch you anywhere else?” until I would get so mad that I would just stop answering her questions.

This all stemmed from my older Aunt telling me that having sex was “hugging and kissing”. So, I went home and told my mom that my dad had sex with me all the time.

This is where therapy and I really just don’t get along. (Not to say it’s all bad) But this was the beginning of the VERY unhealthy relationship I had formed with therapists. I seen this therapist for about a year. Never once do I remember her talking to me about healthy boundaries (separate from “good touch, bad touch”) and I’m sure because I was so young, healthy boundaries weren’t something they felt back then could be explained to children. Whatever the case may be, this is the time I should have been taught because years later when I started experiencing domestic violence and sexual assaults, I may have been able to cope with it in a healthier way than emotional walls.

Instead of being able to process things that were happening to me, and setting healthy boundaries for myself, and using healthy coping mechanism to get through them, I created a fortress of protection around me. One that I still live with today, one that is still very active in my everyday life.

I judge everyone in my life based on the things I’ve went through before them that are no fault of their own, and this has caused turmoil in all of my relationships, whether that be sexual & romantic relationships, friendships, family relationships, etc.

If you are a male, I automatically do not trust you. I automatically assume that your intention is to either sleep with me, degrade me, rape me, use me or beat me. (I’m sorry) Because of this, I watch you, closely, when you are in my bubble. I make sure that I keep you an arm’s length away unless I am initiating contact. If you raise your voice at me, I yell back and immediately prepare to protect myself, but internally I am fucking SCREAMING AND CRYING because I’m preparing for you to hurt me, and for me to freeze and not be able to protect myself.

In my current relationship, I spent years being scared (not because he was physically abusive) but because he knew the things that triggered me, and he used them against me because of his drug addiction. He knew I had a dependency issue, anyone that I allowed in I thought I could not live without, because my mother taught me I could never be alone, so when I would confront him about the things he was doing, he would threaten to leave, and I would immediately cower down and beg him to stay, apologize for accusing him of doing things I knew one hundred percent he was doing, but I would tell him I was wrong and I was so sorry and I would beg him to stay. Promise him I would do better, even though I didn’t even know what “better” was other than pretending I was stupid.

I was living such an unhealthy nightmare that when he went away for a while I spent the next couple years working learning how to be alone. I now have some sort of confidence in myself and although I have done a lot of work on me, those thoughts are always intrusive, they are always things I am pushing out and I am always reminding myself I am better and stronger than I used to be.

However, regardless of all the work I have done….

My emotional walls are still there, they are huge and thick, they are the armor that gets me through every day. They protect me from getting attached to people that I assume will hurt me, they protect me from loving people I assume will take advantage of me, they protect me from people that make me feel things, and they protect me from the people I love the most. (Doesn’t sound too great, does it?)

My walls have kept me from forming relationships that could have easily changed my life for the better, they have kept me from loving people with all of me, because I always have one foot out the door; ready to run from the potential pain they haven’t given me a reason to believe they’d cause me, they keep me from trusting people who genuinely have the best intentions, and worst of all they’ve kept me locked in my trauma. Scared to move from the tiny little circle I’ve created for myself.

Let’s be better than our parents.

Teach your children boundary setting, teach them it is okay to create a healthy safe space for themselves, but it is not okay to emotionally cut themselves off from the world out of fear. Bad things happen they always will, but if we prepare our children with healthy coping techniques and the power in themselves to set boundaries, they will feel safe enough to stand up for themselves and generational trauma will not happen. We will have a whole generation of cycle breakers a generation we absolutely need.

I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty lonely in this bubble, and I’d never wish that for my children.