Is the way you’re exercising a trauma response?
If someone had asked me this question sometime in the last 40 years, I would have looked at them incredulously, silently judged that they had read a few too many self-help books, and continued lifting the obscene amount of weight I was lifting.
If you ask me the question now, I would have to say, “Yes, most of the time—but I’m working on it.”
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear—and the student probably won’t take the hint…
I had some persistent lower back pain in the early 2000s in New York, and a friend referred me to a Chinese medicine doctor, Dr. Chan. His laser-precise diagnosis of me was that I had been wounded--emotionally wounded as a child—and that I had proceeded to build a muscle suit of armor around myself, in order to protect myself from the world. Unfortunately, only now—20 years later—am I ready to hear that, and do something about it. I wish we could speak again, Dr. Chan.
You can’t escape your own story
I was bullied as a kid. I was the new kid in ninth grade—a tough time to start over. I was athletic, and good at a certain thing—and the jocks wouldn’t have it. I was mocked for having muscles, and mocked for my athletic prowess. It felt like I couldn’t win. At home, I had a mother that was under a lot of stress herself, and she just didn’t have the emotional skills to see me, hear me, or even recognize what was going on. She had her own traumatic past, and she did the best she could.
In hindsight, I see these two phenomena as the defining traumas that made me a great athlete. I dedicated myself to my sport of choice—as a “fuck you” to the bullies, and as a desperate attempt to gain recognition and praise from my mother. It was a winning combination. In my senior year of high school, I won every competition I was in, and I set a new national record in my sport that I held for 27 years.
I wonder—is there a hurt child behind every big success? A child desperate to be seen, heard, and validated? That’s how I went through life—feeling like I had to perform in some way in order to receive the love and validation I so craved. Eventually, I hit a brick wall. A big, brick wall.
Just when you think you’re indestructible…
Exactly at the time a kid broke my 27- year-old national record—I learned about CrossFit. I remember thinking that I had to achieve some new, impressive athletic feat, and CrossFit had these Masters age categories. Perfect! I will become a Masters champion at CrossFit! And I was off to the races again. After eight years of trying, that plan wasn’t exactly panning out—and I was feeling worn out and defeated. I was also dealing (or not dealing) with acute mental stress for much of that decade. That was a bad combination. Cue the heart attack, and fade to black.
I recently watched a documentary called “The Wisdom of Trauma,” with Dr. Gabor Maté. I continue to be amazed by the revolutionary work of this man. He sees every form of addiction has an adaptation to childhood trauma—and I think he’s hit the bullseye of all bullseyes. For me, CrossFit was part of my unhealthy addiction—a desperate need to perform for love and validation, and a desperate need to build an indestructible armor of muscle to protect myself. In the documentary, Maté was talking with a woman who had built a wall around herself, mentally, in much the same way that I built an armor of muscle around myself. It’s part of what made her sick. Maté spoke to her in a gentle voice, “The belief that you can’t be touched—that nothing can touch you—when you get sick, that defense is destroyed.” He believes that this is why every illness is a teacher. “What is the teaching?” he asks.
What is the teaching?
Wow. There are so many teachings. For one, I no longer train to perform—I train to live. Do I do it perfectly? Well, I just tried to lift a trailer full of stuff and tore muscle fibers in my bicep—so, no. It is my first instinct to try to impress people with what I can do physically, and I have to consciously walk myself back from there. The new idea is that I train moderately, for optimal health and longevity. I don’t incessantly whack myself into oblivion anymore.
Another teaching is that I am aware of my trauma. I am aware of my learned patterns of behavior. That is the first step to making a change, and I’m interested in changing. I’m interested in evolving.
“Be your authentic self.” That teaching is trickier than it seems. For me, it means doing the things I have always loved—helping others, writing, making music, training, acting—but checking myself that I am doing it for the right reasons—not to be praised or celebrated. I need to make sure that what I’m doing is not in response to my own trauma.
Perhaps the greatest teaching is this: I need to be gentle with myself. As the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” It would have helped me so much to learn these lessons long ago, but it just doesn’t work that way. I usually joke that I take the long way to any destination—but if there is no destination, and it’s really just the journey that matters--I’m grateful for exactly the journey I have had.
Every last bit.
—Scott