Trapped Inside

Day 1011.

When I was deep in my cocoon of trauma, I was mentally and often physically curled up deep inside myself, eyes veiled, senses blocked. Frozen.

I could not reach out. The private world of my journal was the only place where I could talk, free of judgment or comment, to my various selves. I could not reach out. The people around me, helped me by reaching into me, offering their emotional hand to hold. Maybe just a finger, like the enduring images of a baby holding an adult’s finger.

The equally enduring image I have in my mind is of Luke, trapped inside his addiction, unable to reach my outstretched hands, unable to grab them, just our eyes locked through an unfathomable tunnel.

With all that is turned upside down in this world, politics and pharma entwined is the way forward not to attack, but to plunge our hands deep into their corrupted souls and offer the safety of a finger to hold, so that they may do the human thing, in connection.

Is this offering of a finger the basis of safe injection sites, of the concept of harm reduction? To reach into where they are.

In the reading of the possible causes of autism, I read about the autistic children in medical trials of Suramin, who have been brought out of autism and report that they could always hear and understand all that was around them, they just couldn’t reach out and access it, they couldn’t come back. The devastation of knowing all this, only to have them slip back and away, at the withdrawal of the meds at the end of the drug trial, must be hard to bear.

Is there a parallel with addiction here?

The advance of scientific knowledge of the brain in complex turbulent inflammation described by autism experts seems to offer a parallel somehow to the brain in substance use disorder.

Is the drug of choice bringing them out?

And at the withdrawal of it, is sobriety sending them back in?

Is that why relapse is so prevalent?

Is this the science behind the beloved adage that you hear in the recovery rooms: “The good news is you get your feelings back. The bad news is you get your feelings back”

Is ADD/ADHD (so prevalent in addiction), some kind of cytokine storm? - An overproduction of immune cells or other cells in their brains? An imbalance of several systems intertwined?

And if so, can that be reversed? As it has shown to be in autism?

Is it a particular cell or chemical that becomes too strong?

Does it keep them trapped?

It breaks my heart to think of those trapped inside their trauma, whether it be grief, autism or substance use disorder.

It breaks my heart to think of those of us who stand outside trying to reach in.

I didn’t always want to come out of my cocoon and face the world.

Was that Luke?