Hello trauma warriors! My name is Jaena and I am a workaholic. If you read my last Heal-Along, you know that I am also a reformed book hoarder. Both addictions developed in 1996 when I was twenty-two years old. That’s when I started “recovering” from my depersonalization period (Trauma Glossary 2). I felt so fatally flawed, I thought that my only chance at salvation was to make myself over. In other words, I gave myself a full person makeover. But little did I know that in my quest to forge a new identity, I was developing not one, but two attachment disorders.
This is a companion article to our main topic this week: Dissociative AD: Dissociation as an Attachment Disorder. I do these whenever I feel my own experiences can shed further light on a subject. We’ve been covering attachment disorders (person, object, or dissociate activities). And since I’ve experienced two out of three of them, it seems only fitting that I share this part of my life too.
How I became a Workaholic
Since exactly the same trauma produced both attachment disorders, a brief recap from last week is in order.
But by 1995, a slew of terrible things shattered my inner landscape. I trusted the wrong people, the manipulators and users. I got financially swindled by my first roommate, my car died, and my credit was shot. Then I got my rejection letter from a major literary agent who told me in plain English that I was a terrible writer with no talent. All these events happened in a matter of months. I was twenty-one years old and I had no inner defenses. It felt like the whole world rejected me in one voice and my inner landscape became this one:
Then my trauma brain decided to “help me” through my compounded stress by making me go all dead on the inside. That’s depersonalization for you, and it’s a special kind of hell. I was in that mode for a year and it only fanned the flames of my self-hatred. (These images of our inner landscape were explained in last week’s article here.)Confessions of a Reformed Book Hoarder: A Heal-Along with Jaena
Now is the time to expand on my depersonalization period. What the series of unfortunate events didn’t destroy, my depersonalization period finished it off.
Depersonalization decreases the activation in almost every area of the brain. It causes low energy, a low attention span, and emotional numbness. But the most frightening is how in depersonalization, we feel so detached from our own body. So, for a year I was sleeping fourteen hours a day and then binge watching TV shows until it was time to go to work. The only variant in this routine was my weekend partying, but even that was lifeless. Outwardly, I was laughing and having fun. Inside, I was dead. Thus was my routine for a year, wash, rinse, repeat. I was completely broken and there wasn’t enough me left to put back together again.
Brainwashing Myself: Watch Me Need You Even Less Than You Need Me, Cruel World!
My so-called “recovery” from depersonalization became alexithymia (Trauma Glossary 2), but I wouldn’t know that until 2020. I was just relieved that I didn’t feel emotionally dead and disconnected from my body anymore. So, as I transitioned into alexithymia, I reviewed all the events that had broken me, and what it was about me that caused it. In my mind, it must have been because I still carried the taint of borderland (Trauma Glossary 1), my childhood home. That led me down the path of uncovering other flaws. I saw myself as being too open and too available to others, and so I probably came off as needy. There was so much about my world that I didn’t understand, so I was probably stupid too. No wonder the world rejected me in one voice.
Self-improvement became my primary focus so that the world would never hurt me like that again. But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t want a little revenge on that world. I needed something to do, something that would consume so much of my time, that being available to anyone wasn’t possible. So, I became a workaholic and a recluse. I only left my house to go to work, and even then, I was carrying some object from home that represented what I was working on. Either a book or one of my spiral bound notebooks, they served as both talisman and shield. Something I could both cling to and escape into at a moment’s notice. I was proving to myself and to the world that I had better things to do than to seek their approval and acceptance. And how swiftly it became my new truth!
Brainwashing: How it Works
The best and most thorough article I have ever read on brainwashing is this one. And kudos to the authors, Julia Layton and Alia Hoyt. If you ever wondered how POW soldiers are brainwashed by their captors, this article breaks it down step by step. There are ten steps in all, divided into three stages. The first stage is attacking the identity. Stage two is the breakdown period, the prisoner is convinced they are fatally flawed and that there is no hope of rescue. Then, the final stage is the “salvation and leniency” stage. This is how the captor convinces the prisoner that it isn’t them that’s fatally flawed after all. It’s their beliefs they must change, and then they will be good. The prisoner is so relieved to escape the shame, they accept the new beliefs and then cling to them like a life raft.
What blows my mind is that I did this to myself. My childhood programming took care of stage one, attacking the identity. Then stage two, the breakdown period was my depersonalization year. It’s amazing how a few daily mantras backed by comforting activities can change a person. “I am a workaholic. I need no one. Someday I will be so smart and successful, they will all be sorry they rejected me.” I clung to these beliefs in such a way that I had no idea who I was if I wasn’t learning or doing. Thus how I became my very own captor and prisoner.
My writing style vastly improved and I breathed fresh life into my characters and made them fully dimensional. No one would ever again say that I had “flat and colorless characters with no character background descriptions” ever again. (That was a direct quote from the literary agent who rejected me. I kept his letter and highlighted those words as a reminder.) The characters were more real to me than the world I knew and I knew my fictional characters more than I knew myself. I grew deeply attached because I had total control of the fictional world but no control of my present reality. Someday this novel would hit the New York Times bestseller’s list and then all of my problems would evaporate overnight. Or so I told myself.
The less adequate we feel about ourselves, the more inclined we are to overcompensate. And that’s how we keep feeding those inadequate beliefs. I spent eighteen years destroying any chance my novel had at being published. Picture it, the most fully dimensional characters thrown into the most convoluted plot in all history. It was a murder mystery with multiple subplots. I thought it would be great if I added a haunted house element, then set the murder twenty-six years into the past. Oh, but wait! The ghost of the haunted house was also murdered, so now there are two murders that must be solved. Then it needed a family curse and a reincarnation element as well. All of this just because I felt so inadequate, I thought I had to go way over the top in originality.
A Workaholic and Her Mental Processing Addiction
My brain was starving for ways to make sense out of this cruel and confusing world that we call reality. Curiosity was the only trigger I needed to get obsessed with research. Each time, I attacked the subject so voraciously, and explored every angle that I would achieve accidental mastery of it in one week. Then I would overthrow that one in lieu of a new interest. Nothing I learned made me feel any wiser or more intelligent. But like a junkie in search of the ultimate high, I was in search of the ultimate enlightenment. That eureka moment that would help me finally make sense out of everything.
My interests of the week are all a blur to me now. But some stuck around for a while. I wanted to know if there was some divine reason behind everything, so I got obsessed with astrology for a couple of years. Then I got heavily into logic puzzles, though I do still enjoy those. Reading will always be a major interest of mine, though at one point I wanted to see how many books I could read at the same time. Forty-eight was my record. One day I asked myself “How did we (as a world and society) get here?” So, I started with Primitive times and worked my way up through history. And if you’ve seen my history comics, you know that’s another interest that is with me to this day.
I never got satisfactory answers because I was using the wrong questions. I thought that understanding my world would solve my feelings of inadequacy. All along, what I needed to understand was staring back at me in the mirror. But the workaholic in me was too busy left-brain dissociating my life away.
Age 40 is when we stop believing the lies we tell ourselves
I became a workaholic at age twenty-two because I believed it was the fastest path to success. It helped me endure what I thought was a temporary job. As I turned 40, so was my 2oth anniversary at that so-called “temporary job.” In all that time it never fully registered how much was slipping away.
Time flies when we dissociate. Like the story from Rip Van Winkle, I woke up from my beautiful dream of Someday and I asked it, “When exactly is someday supposed to happen? Because I’ve literally just spent half my life at a job that was supposed to be temporary.” This forced me to accept some hard truths:
When people spend twenty years working for the same company, they usually call it a career. I had a career in a job without meaning or personal fulfillment.
If I just wasted 18 years struggling with the same novel, then maybe writing is not my meal ticket to success.
Outer world perception worsens over time. I had spent 18 years rejecting the present, and my return to reality was a painful one. This was my forever and there was nothing I could do about it.
We become our habits. Who was I when I wasn’t productive? 18 years of dissociative activities infused with my identity. I had no idea who I was outside what I did.
But I did know was a workaholic with a mental processing addiction, so I found a new interest and used it to escape the present. I researched superfoods and nutrition and started creating my own recipes. Like everything I approached, I made my recipes more complicated than they had to be and my weekends were swamped with meal prep. This was my last obsession before my healing began at age 44.
Healing Helped Me Make Sense Out of Me
Do you know what the number one sign is when you’ve discovered your true calling? It’s more than finding something that brings you personal fulfillment. It’s when you see your whole life and realize everything that’s happened has prepared you for what’s next. And what’s next is the reason you’re here.
My CPTSD diagnosis gave me something new to throw all my energy into. I started therapy and a support group for my CPTSD community. Naturally, I researched trauma with the same voracity I had with everything else that interested me. All those years with my mental processing addiction had turned my brain into a finely tuned instrument, capable of digesting information rapidly. I was sharing what I was learning and it was making a positive impact.
I worked a job I despised for 28 years before I resigned. But it was a company that had excellent mental health benefits and my therapy was affordable. I had also accumulated a generous enough pension and 401k to retire early and have a three year financial cushion.
All those workaholic years I wasted on my novel were training me for writing articles. I was using fiction to escape reality, when all the while I was meant to write truth. So, here I am today as a full-time blogger for CPTSD and hopefully for the rest of my life. Because nothing has ever filled me with more pride than making a difference in the lives of my CPTSD community.
Have I conquered Dissociative AD?
The short answer is, not yet. All those years I spent as a workaholic and a recluse with a mental processing addiction earned me an honorary PhD in how not to grow, how not to heal, and how not to get ahead in life. I developed more symptoms of CPTSD than I had at age 18 when I left my childhood home. So, it’s had a far more intense control of my life than my other attachment disorder, which was hoarding.
I defeated my book hoarding in 2019, not just by removing forty-six boxes of books from my home, but by attacking the core problem. I no longer define myself through objects. So, I am not addicted to acquiring anymore.
The core problem in Dissociative AD is perceiving ourselves as having no control in an uncaring world. That’s why there’s an addiction to checking out of the present. I am able to be present because I see the world through a vastly improved lens compared to how I was seeing it in 1996. It has helped me see where I could lend my voice to hopefully make our world a better place. So, lowering its stranglehold is the very reason I am able to run this site today.
But feelings of inadequacy still haunt me to this very day. Though I now know there is more to me than what I do, I still haven’t figured out how to value me unless I am doing something productive. So, I am still a workaholic with a mental processing addiction.
Just like all of us, I am still a work in progress.
This image was originally used in my history comic issue 1: Guided Wisdom with George Washington. This was the very same room with all the dirty and forgotten cards on the wall. The first step I took on my Dissociative AD was ripping down the cards and redecorating the whole room.
