Hold & Release: Reparenting My Inner Teenager

Content Note: rape, sexual assault, substance use, addiction, parental loss, parental abuse and neglect

Image ID: a digital collage with two photos of Margeaux in polaroid frames. The first is Margeaux around the age of 17, posing in a bikini on a diving board. The second photo is Margeaux at age 18. They’re wearing a black fishet top and black tank underneath and their head is turned to the right and they’re sticking out their tongue. There are some scribbles and doodles surrounding the two photos, including the words “you’re the best”

For so long, I never considered myself someone with attachment wounding. As I grew from an infant to a young child, I had two doting parents that loved me, who offered me all of the things a child could need or want.

All of the books that I’ve read about attachment wounding say that insecure attachment develops when you’re an infant, toddler, small child. I’ve also read some discussion of attachment injuries that happen in adulthood. But I’ve rarely seen mention of the attachment wounds that come in your adolescence.

I’ve found a similar lack of discussion of tending to our inner teenagers. Conversations abound when it comes to tending to our inner child(ren). And while many of the same rules apply when it comes to the practice of reparenting these younger wounded selves, teenagers are not the same as children – and teens will not let you forget that.

Right now, I’m learning about what it looks like to tend to my inner teenager, and I wanted to share some reflections with you. Because perhaps there lives inside of you, a teenage version of yourself who is crying out for attention, even as they desperately try to hide their suffering from you.

***

I was eleven when I experienced my first attachment injury: my mother’s death from cancer. After her death, an avalanche of attachment injuries followed. My father’s emotional neglect and abuse. The taking of my virginity when I was 14 and too high to consent. All of the relationships (if one could call them that) that I had after that where I was used, neglected, and abused. I wouldn’t have my first non-abusive relationship until I was 24.

As an adolescent and teenager, I learnt that intimacy and care weren’t possible unless I sacrificed my sense of safety and self-worth. Intimacy became tethered to drugs and drinking, and I’m unsure if I had a single sexual encounter between the ages of 14 and 23 where I was sober. Too much has been forgotten and repressed. Those of us who’ve experienced chronic trauma – or complex trauma, as others call it – cannot access chronological memory in the same way as others. But the memories live somewhere in our bodies.

Those memories have been resurfacing over the past two years. The first moment came at the start of the pandemic. I was terrified to leave my house. But what was I terrified of? I kept asking myself this question. I knew that with masks and social distancing, the chances of getting COVID were small. I also knew that whatever I was afraid of wasn’t COVID. My somatic experience told me that something older was moving through my body.

My therapist asks me to go to the meeting place so that we can see which of my trauma responses show up. But all of my meeting places have always been outside. Resistance courses through my body. I can’t go outside – not even in my mind – because outside is unsafe. I’ve been feeling this for weeks now, since the announcement that we’re living in a global pandemic. I know it’s irrational. That no one is going to run up and cough in my face. I won’t contract the virus simply by breathing in the air. She asks if I know that going to the meeting place together, right now, doesn’t mean that I have to go outside in reality. I nod. Again, the rational part of my brain knows this. But knowing is not the same as feeling. And feeling is all I have right now.

At first my therapist thinks that this fear of the outdoors is linked back to my family. She knows about the rape, but I’ve never really discussed it in detail. I haven’t been ready to go there yet. And at this moment in time, I’m just learning that this is the memory that’s being triggered right now. This is the memory that makes leaving the house in the middle of a pandemic so terrifying that I catch my breath just thinking about it. It’s not safe outside.

Our trauma brains look for patterns to try and keep us safe. What triggers a flashback isn’t necessarily the thing that caused a trauma in the first place. It could be a smell, a sound, a sensation. And just like that, your body is back there in the woods. You’ll say no, and thankfully he’ll listen. But it’s already too late. Your virginity gone, taken, there on top of a collapsed tree, with your pants down around your ankles. That day you learnt that not only was your sexuality not safe, outside isn’t safe either.

I bring myself back to the room and begin to process this with my therapist. We decide that it might be good for me to ask my partner for some support in leaving the house. We can go on walks together so that I can feel safe, so that I can remember that I’m no longer that fourteen-year-old in the woods. It is this young one who comes to believe that sex and emotional intimacy cannot co-exist. That attachment will always come at a cost. And it’s this teenager that I’m working with now.

Another digital collage. The first photo is Margeaux around the age of 19 years old. They’re looking towards the camera with a smile on their face. In the second photo, Margeaux is with their high school boyfriend, who’s out of the frame. Margeaux is wearing a blue hoodie and is smiling.

*** 

To build trust with your inner teenager, you have to show them that you want to show up, you want to spend time with them. For years this was impossible. I couldn’t look at old photographs without waves of shame coming over me, without my inner critic judging me for all that I did to survive those years of my life: drugs, unprotected sex, sneaking out in the middle of the night, lying to everyone, cheating on boyfriends, sleeping with my friends’ boyfriends behind their backs.

When I moved to Calgary in November 2019, I brought some of my teenage archive with me. Some of my old journals, a selection of photographs. I know that part of what I’m meant to do in this move across the country is connect with my younger selves. Over the past year and a half, I take out the photos and journals, and while the shame still comes up, it feels less intense each time.

The other day, I discovered some poems that I wrote for a class assignment in university. I was probably twenty-years old at the time, and technically these poems were written in the voices of secondary characters in novels that we’d read that term. But teenage me is written all over them.

“I love you”

i let him kiss me; does he taste my emptiness?
i let him kiss me, knowing that it will never mean anything
but still it means everything.
yet i do not care. his kiss means nothing just as i mean
nothing.
and still i let him kiss me.
he looks at me and i say: it’s okay. i will be okay.
how easily some words flow from my lips.
and so he continues to kiss me; his hands feel as though
they are floating down my body.
his caress is more that i can comprehend, and yet it should
mean nothing.
he looks at me and kisses me with such undeniable passion
that i commend him for being able to put on such a
production.
to produce it at will for my (dis)pleasure.
and i let him undress me.
he says that the pants are his and he’s right.
they are his; mine were soaked in the rain.
i wish he would say that i was his as well, but kisses will
fall from his lips many times and those words will never
come.
he touches me and i shudder and yet i do not know why.
his touch means nothing to me. it is soft and yet coarse.
it should mean something and yet it means nothing.
he wants to kiss every part of my body and i let his lips
fix all of the words that exited his mouth not long ago.
i could not, would not, ever mean everything to him.
i could mean something, but being something means just as
much as nothing.
i want to be someone and yet the kisses fall from my lips
with far greater ease that those words ever could.
he gives me the passion that i desire but it is devoid of
sentiment.
his passion is a fire that turns to ice with such haste
that it burns my skin.
and yet i cannot tell him to stop kissing me.
i desire to be desired; even if i mean everything now and
nothing once he has had his pleasure.
i will allow myself to be his desire for this moment as
though this is my only chance to be wanted by another human
being.
we lie there after and i refuse to dress.
i need to be bare in front of him for a bit longer so that
he can see how he has not only stripped me of my clothing,
but of my self-worth as well.
or did i do that when i put on his pants, knowing that he
would soon take them off.
we wax sentimental, speaking words that neither of us
understand. words that require us to feel something that we
long since decided had no necessity.
i smile and laugh and pretend as though this meant nothing.
it scares me how easily i can lie to myself, lie to him.
and then i just lie here numb. naked. exposed. and nothing.
i just want you to see me as something.
we sleep next to one another and yet our bodies never
touch.
we cannot risk that level of intimacy; how hilarious that
thought.
and now, in this moment i am no longer a desire.
i am nothing.
and i knew i could be that all along.

Because of all of the gaps in memory, I’ve had to create a story of myself. In this story, I have no clue just how traumatized I am. And yet, here in this poem, I can see how much I did know.

That connection required me to sacrifice my self-worth: i will allow myself to be his desire for this moment as though this is my only chance to be wanted by another human being.

That sex and emotional intimacy cannot exist simultaneously: he gives me the passion that i desire but it is devoid of sentiment. 

That I wanted intimacy, to be everything, but at the same time was so terrified of love, so comfortable in being nothing.

That love is so dangerous that the words “I love you” can only exist in the poem’s title. That is the only space in which they can feel safe.

I read this poem and I can see my disorganized attachment so clearly. It can be found here too:

“An Idiot’s Hobby”

Words disjointed
Course through my veins like melted plastic.
Tools made of metal dismember me,
Limb by limb
Until I lie in pieces on your floor.

Pain produced by sentiment of folly,
Drips from my veins in place of red
Until nothing but a sea surrounds me.

You clumsily put the pieces back together;
But you know not of their place
And you do not know yours.

The words that spilt from your lips:
Cancerous,
Tainted my blood.
It hurt so deeply I know not
What recourse to take.

So I pulled them apart;
Letter by letter.
Now I sit in a pool of alphabet soup and my own blood.
I bleed myself out in hopes that your words would be truer.

You, the master of words
And of Love,
What say you now?
Make sense of your words,
My pain,
And all that mess you left
When you said you loved me.

 If we read these poems together, we see what happens when the speaker gets to hear the words that they so desire (i love you): it dismembers me, infects me, leaves me bleeding out on the floor. These words literally fragment me. I cannot hold myself together when faced with the intimacy that I so desperately desire. It is too much.

I used to look at these poems with so much shame. Oh how trite, my inner critic would exclaim. But now I can look at them and feel all of the grief that my inner critic was trying to protect me from feeling.

When we’re younger, we turn to our caregivers when we feel unsafe. But when our caregivers are the source of our lack of our safety, it produces a simultaneously movement towards and a pulling away. This is disorganized attachment. My attachment wounding taught me that the things I wanted were inherently unsafe. And so I spent years and years of my life running from love, like the speaker in this last poem, and towards those who would provide a similar experience to what I grew up with, as the speaker in the first poem does.

I’ve never shared these poems with anyone other than the teacher I submitted them to. It was his words of encouragement that inspired me to apply for the creative writing program at my university. He didn’t look at me with shame and judgment. Instead, he felt compassion and saw my potential. For the first time, I’m feeling that for this younger me too. 

***

A partnership has ended recently. I know that I haven’t yet fully felt the grief of that loss. There are some trauma responses working to protect me, as they did for so so long. They don’t want to feel the grief. They want to escape, to dissociate, to pretend like everything’s fine. I’m trying to show them that adult me is here now too, and we can make some different choices.

I sit at a café with my journal, I ask myself: What is it that inner teenage Margeaux needs? This is the image that comes to me:

I’m sitting in bed, covers pulled up around me, with a book in my hands. Someone knocks on the door and my mom pops her head in.

“Can I come in?” she asks me.

I nod. Words aren’t coming easily. As though my sadness has submerged them underwater.

She takes a seat towards the end of my bed. Places a hand tentatively on my leg.

“Sweetie,” she starts, “I’m so sorry that you’re experiencing this loss. I wish I could make it better, but time will. I want you to know that you get to feel all your feelings. And I’d be honoured to see them. If you need to cry, I can hold. You. And if that feels like it’s too much, I can just sit here quietly beside you.”

As soon as she stops speaking, the tears come, water from the depths swells up to the surface, and I start to sob. The damn has been broken by all of the spaciousness she has offered me with her words.

I sob and sob and she holds me. Fingers running through my hair to soothe me.

“I know baby, I know.”

Eventually, when I’m all cried out, she looks at me and says, “Isn’t love a motherfucker?”

And I laugh at her use of profanity. I can feel some of the sadness, once so all consuming, dissipate a little bit. Water evaporating into a cloud that hangs above me, but it feels so much softer.

Then she asks me, “What’s one thing you’d like to do tomorrow that’d make you feel better?”

I tell her that I want to go shopping and get our nails done. Two things. But she doesn’t object.

With a smile on her face, she looks at me and says, “Well that’s a date then.”

I want to carry this scene with me, I want to imagine her here with me, as I move through the grief that comes when a relationship ends. 

And as I move towards processing all of the grief underneath my attachment trauma, I will continue to return to teenage Margeaux’s bedside. I will continue to remind them that their feelings deserve to be witnessed. That they won’t be punished for crying anymore.  

I will hold their hand, if they’ll let me, and I’ll gently stroke my thumb against the top of their hand. I’ll remind them that we can take our time feeling this grief. That we don’t have to feel it all at once.

I’ll continue to ask teenage me, “What do you need right now?” so that I can give them exactly what they want, what they always should have had. And I will tell them: you mean everything to me now. I’m sorry that it took me so long to be here with you, but I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere. 

*** 

I sit surrounded by slips of pink paper with writing on them. I’ve been cataloguing old beliefs about love and intimacy and connection that my trauma responses, and younger versions of me, hold. Of what it means to love and be loved.

you will be alone forever.
“they’re never coming back”
intimacy/love = grief/loss
no one is safe, not even yourself
the only way to be safe is to push others away/keep your distance
push others away before they push you away
you can’t have love without abandoning yourself
it’s only a matter of time before the other shoe drops
dissociation is the safest way to access connection
if you stay, something bad will happen
safety + connection aren’t possible at the same time
they’ll leave you eventually, once they see that you’re a horrible person
you’re so stupid for trying to make that relationship work
safety = appeasement
you must sacrifice yourself if you want to receive love
the only way to receive love is to take care of others before yourself
crumbs = connection
you aren’t deserving of love, so accept what you’ve been given

I wrote these beliefs down a few weeks ago, and I’ve been waiting for the moment that I feel called and ready to release them. It’s not here yet, but I can tell it’s coming. I’m not going to force teenage me to move faster than they’re ready for.

Ahead of us, I see the grey blue of Lake Ontario. In a few weeks I’ll be returning home for a visit. This visit will also be occurring during my 36th birthday and the Full Moon in Cancer. I can see myself walking with teenage Margeaux to the lake. We will place the slips of paper in a mason jar and we will fill that jar with water, so that the beliefs can slowly be released and held at the same time. We will thank these beliefs for all that they did to help us survive. And we will sit down and welcome new stories in.

***

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