🗄️ The X-Files (Part 1): I Am Just So Angry
- Andromeda Siren
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
I can’t help it—and that’s a problem too. I spent like 7 years of my life learning how to control my emotions and "regulate," because I had actually over-therapized myself. I learned too much about psychology. I was making excuses for behaviors by others, allowing for life experiences I was aware they had gone through (or were going through), and basically? I used CBT to train my brain to NOT GET MAD.
I saw mental health professionals REGULARLY. I haven’t missed a mental health check-in—minimum of every 90 days—for over 10 years now. YES. Even when trauma still struck me and blew my life up as I knew it in 2023.
Having a husband with Asperger’s, two sons also on the Autism Spectrum, and my third having ‘high anxiety’ (can’t imagine why…), I literally trained MYSELF to believe that the WHOLE WORLD is having a struggle—and that I didn’t want to be another thing that fed that. I always went out of my way to say something nice to someone who appeared to be having a bad day. I looked at people who did act toxically or angrily, and felt nothing but sadness for them. Their ugly behavior and attitude couldn’t touch me.
Then came 2023. Trauma hit the whole family.
My marriage completely disintegrated just shy of the 25-year mark. Both my ex-husband and I were reeling, behaving in incredibly toxic manners stemming from our individual trauma responses. It’s a long story (that’s why there will be a SERIES). The separation happened in what had to be one of the most triggering aspects for my husband to have to endure, but I couldn’t dance around his triggers. For the first time in my life—maybe the second—I chose ME. Just me. Without a care in the world how it affected anyone.
I was staying with my last best friend. My first best friend had suffered a psychological breakdown from trauma (we had been staying with her trying to support and help her)—and her breakdown led to my diagnosis of CPTSD and complex trauma. After 20 years of estrangement from my in-laws, with nowhere to go, we reached out for help. What we found? Nothing had changed in 20 years, and we had made the best decision in our lives estranging ourselves in the first place.
ALL that, I think I could have survived, but my husband refused to stay with us—and I refused to go anywhere but what I called home: Texas. That’s where I had built my life with my kids. I had always loved it there. We had moved to AL for my husband's work, I got therapy, I tried to help the only friend who we actually considered family—the only “Aunty” my kids ever knew, the only “cousins” my kids had. None of them had been blood family, but they were OUR FAMILY.
So we lost that. Then, in a vulnerable moment, the in-laws imploded and my kids and I slept one night in an abandoned field because of their actions. I still worry about Gunner, who needs a heartworm test—statistically, it would be a very unlikely ailment for him to escape after that night, and that’s what we lost our dog Sunnie to in 2024.
Unable to feed my kids, unable to function, I called the last friend I had—and honestly, the one I trusted probably more than ANYONE in my life.
The Porch Confession
Somewhere around the time that I knew I was separating from my husband—who had been gone for like 3 months at that point and wasn’t doing well on his own in AL, leading to lower income. (Did I mention I was also one autistic child heavy? My nephew from the estranged in-laws? His mother just took off to another state upon the implosion of the in-laws, leaving him with no income and no idea how to ‘do life’—so I wasn’t leaving him behind).
ALL this was happening when, out on the porch, my best friend comes to me after I suggested we go out and he play wing-man for me at a bar. You know, I’m just dealing with CPTSD and Complex Trauma, and have been in therapy for my traumatic childhood issues nearly ALL my life, right? And he tells me he: “can’t give me what I need” but also “cares too much” to watch me at a bar.
At the time, I was pretty stupid about it. I didn’t hear how it probably landed in my head. AT ALL. He then basically told me that in all his marriage he had never felt the way he was feeling about another woman—and that woman being me.
I had not separated from my husband YET—it was just my plan. So there was no ‘need’ in the manner I think the comment was originally intended, but looking back? I’ve been gaslit so many times at this point that I still occasionally DO QUESTION how reliable my memories are. But they come back stronger EVERY DAY. I do know that my friend and I had a long conversation over days, maybe weeks. I agreed I’d maybe be willing to sleep with him if I felt I had done whatever I could to help him repair his marriage in the ways he had indicated it was feeling "off." And somehow, completely oblivious to how OBVIOUSLY NARCISSISTIC his wife was, that was one of my main stipulations.
The 7-Page Contract
These people were a part of my life for nearly 20 years. There is history. When I initially met his wife, I absolutely HATED her. Then over the years, all my healing made me think I was a judgmental, non-empathetic asshole—and I wanted to be NOT THAT. So in those 20 years, I was ‘friends’ with her for 5 years around 2011, and that’s it.
Coming back to TX and watching how she treated her kids, how she was treating him, how she was USING HIM to THREATEN her kids almost to the point of tears (a regular occurrence I am not alone in witnessing)? I honestly didn’t care anymore if she got hurt.
My separation was done. My realization was that she is possibly the worst person I have ever known. Someone who I consider probably the second closest adult person to me in my entire life was hurting… so was I.
I agreed to sleep with my best friend—but only after presenting a 7-page ‘note’ contract of rules and boundaries I expected him to agree to. I had no idea how toxic the dynamic within his environment TRULY ran.
But let me tell you how fucked up I was. Parts of that contract stated things like this:
If we lean on one another in this way right now, it’s just an act and our ‘significant’ others always take priority. They are both ‘ill’ and my separation does not sway my dedication to my (soon to be) ex-husband.
Our children cannot be affected. No matter what happens, we stand by maintaining the kids’ relationships. (There were 8 kids at the time between the two of us, and my first two born and his first two born had basically known each other their entire life).
I listed a hesitation—that I don’t think I could live with his children looking at me like a homewrecker. I implied that he ‘have my back’ in that regard should this go horribly wrong.
There was a lot more, but unfortunately, I gave him that contract the first time shit blew up.
HOW FUCKED UP AM I? JUST LOOK AT THOSE IDEAS.
First of all, like any of that shit was going to be in either of our control. Now that I don’t have trauma? Let me tell you what I see here:
I am going out of my way to place safe-guards on things not in any control.
I justify an affair because I was separated. I wasn’t cheating. I let my friend manage his own life (completely absolving myself from the responsibility)—which not only is an ASS thing to do, it’s ridiculously stupid.
Let’s just say what it was: I was hurting and thought sex would make me feel better, and took part in making a choice to do just that—FEEL BETTER. I’d say like a ‘drug’—but it wasn’t that for me. I was sexually assaulted at the age of 4. I had always had sexual promiscuity problems, but never had CHEATED in my marriage. I valued that. It was important to me, but who cared what choices HE was making? I was totally setting up to validate taking zero accountability—which ironically, I never actually did.
WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW:
She is a Narcissist. He is a ‘Dismissive Avoidant’.
And I had just stepped into the most toxic situation of my life which would lead to admitting myself to a psych ward after suffering my OWN mental breakdown, attempting to harm myself. In all my life—from childhood trauma, losing my mother at not even 13, escaping the abuse from my father who ‘got me’ after mom died, to emancipating myself at 15—NOTHING ever hit me in a manner that made me consider HURTING MYSELF (hello RED FLAGS).
But that’s not why I admitted myself to the psych ward. I did it because I felt my BRAIN BREAKING. I actually had an ‘out of body experience’ that had my psychiatrist watching me for Dissociative Identity Disorder.
EVEN AFTER THAT? I was over there magically turning every red flag into me waving a white one.
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