Alright, so at this point I know I need to create a trauma blog to express what I am going through.
I just can't say enough how intense this is, trauma therapy and the nervous system reorganizing.
It's something like a very long drug trip that never ends, where you never go back to how you were before.
I feel good being able to describe what is happening with adequate analogies. If only I can get an analogy:
1) It finally makes sense to me, and
2) I know that I can pull that out of my hat if I need to explain it to someone else.
Another one I came up with earlier was that these abandonment triggers are like going through drug withdrawal in rehab, but having the drugs you are withdrawing from given back to you and taken from you randomly, so that you oscillate between your nervous system crying out for them and going through physical (HPA axis, digestion, energy, physical symptoms) withdrawal and then what feels like complete relief and euphoria and everything being as it should be again. (Where when you feel that the person is distant and you can't talk to them/be around them it's like drug withdrawal, and when you are in touch with them and things are good between you again it's like being satisfied again.)
The more trauma I process, the more strongly I feel these two poles. The "complex PTSD flashbacks" are so intense and so physical that I worry I might be physically harmed or get sick from them, and sometimes I do develop a sore throat. But as this article states, the feelings are always easier to handle if I just allow them and don't try to make them go away.
It's funny because the past few times when I have gotten back in touch with my partner after a time of crying out and needing them "no matter what" (it feels), I have felt such intense and wonderful physical relief. I felt it again now just thinking about that situation, of not just feeling safe but feeling capable.
It sounds perverse but I feel so capable and great in the world when I can call my partner 20 times when he is in the library and doesn't want to be called and finally he picks up. That is like "Major Success" for a baby. That's what the attachment system evolved to do. I get a very big built-in reward for doing that. My body says, "Good job baby for not giving up, for continuing to cry. You saved yourself from certain death. Here are some wonderful chemicals for your trouble. Keep it up!"
Maybe I can just run through a "positive outcome" for attachment trauma in my mind over and over, where I'm a baby crying in the forest ... or where I'm in "that place" (people with trauma might know what I mean), and then I cry out and reach out and someone or something comes and then All is Right With the World again.
They say that that kind of therapy is useful for survivors of adult trauma: where you relive the event but do something that shows your capability to protect yourself, like using martial arts on an actor who is play-acting your traumatic scene with you.
It's almost too much to imagine reliving that story with a happy ending. That "place out there" has seemed until now way beyond the reach of any human being, somewhere that only existed for me. It's just delicious to imagine that someone else could be with me while I felt it that perhaps if I cried out while I was there, someone would come.
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