15-A. How Winning in Family Court Revealed my Addiction to Chaos - Chaos Addiction Mini-Series Part 1/4

There's a pattern I see in almost every autistic woman who escaped a relationship they describe as abusive, that involved narcissistic patterns. We say we want peace, we beg for it, we pray novenas for it, we talk about it. And when the abuse stops, because we moved away or because we won in family court, we reject that peace. We don't want it, we push it away. It's the strangest thing. It's hard to explain if you don't dive into the inner workings of the addition to chaos.

This is the transcript for Episode 15A.

What you realize in most cases is that there was either a childhood or a relationship that was chaotic, and so the nervous system has wired itself to expect chaos. Our brains are efficient - the danger was predictable, and anything quiet or calm was suspicious. In those dynamics, calm meant "get ready, something's about to blow"... And then you add autism on top of that, it's the perfect storm. Because autistic nervous systems, we don't just react to danger, we remember it with precision. It feels safe, there's predictability in certain relationship dynamics, there's patterns for example in the cycle of abuse... and all of that feels safe even if it's harmful. It's sick, but that's how it works.

Chaos is predictable when you grow up with it or when you married into it

You've been in it for years, so peace on the other hand is not predictable. We're not addicted to suffering, we're addicted to certainty, to those patterns, to the cycle of abuse. Calmness can feel like the threat because peace has never been safe data in our system.

In my situation I've had to respond to repeated court filings for years.There was a lot of preparation and documentation I had to put together. If you're here reading this, you can most likely relate. For years I lived in a state of chronic fear and pressure. I could see those patterns that felt deeply harmful to me but I didn't initially have the tools and language or the support to explain them in a way that the legal system could understand. I kept losing because I hadn't learned how to navigate those dynamics, the pressure, the intensity of that system. I didn't understand how to present things, how to stay calm emotionally during hearings, how to act in a legal system that is not built to recognize trauma patterns or power imbalances.

After years of that and a lot of research on how to handle complex dynamics in front of a judge in high-stress legal environments, actually the entire situation turned around. I won in a way that completely shifted the long-term trajectory of the case and it rebalanced everything in my life.The outcome of that last hearing, it changed the entire dynamic and it brought a level of stability and fairness I had not had before.

You would think that was good news

You would think I'd be happy about it, I'd be relieved, I'd switch overnight from living a certain way, feeling a certain way for many years to, "okay we're good now", let's go dance in the poppy fields with my kid and my dog, everything is good now. No, no that's not what happened. Winning felt deeply unsettling. I'd become so accustomed to rulings that kept me over accommodating, over responsible that I just didn't expect anything to change. I was so accustomed to outcomes that didn't make sense, to bracing for impact after every hearing, to feeling unseen, misunderstood by a system that is not trauma-informed, that a positive outcome completely shocked me.

I cried for days. I would run into a friend, I would run into someone I know on the street, shake the priest's hand after Mass, talk to other moms at school and just start bawling because my nervous system could not handle that shift. It was a shock. It all felt foreign to me, it felt really threatening. I'd been living under layers of fear, pressure, emotional overload and a constant sense of being unable to explain what I was experiencing - or not being believed, or even being farther gaslit by my friends and all these people that meant well.

I'd carried the financial stress, the confusion and rulings that just kept destroying me more and more.

"All of that was gone.

Well, that sounds great but it had become part of my identity."

Who was I now? If I'm no longer caught in very harmful dynamics, surrounded by people that don't get it, who am I now? I sat with that question for weeks. As our routine with my son started to change thanks to that win, I had to start dealing with the fact that the shift had occurred and that peace had arrived - as threatening as that felt. I didn't know what to do with all this new bandwidth. For the first time in years I wasn't preparing for another round of legal stress, another financial shock. I wasn't having to hold my child with that old overwhelming fear in my body, the fear that something could happen that might separate us. That fear had lived in me for so long that its absence felt surreal. It left a huge void.

What I did is I tried to fill the void with:

• binge watching series. I think I watched all the Housewives (great use of my time!!!)

• sleep, I probably did have sleep to catch up on

• exercise

• changes to my appearance...

I just didn't know what to do with myself.

Until the day I named it

I realized I didn't know what to do with myself when I wasn't living in constant fear, pressure and financial strain. Let's name that: "I don't know how to look at my child without that old terror in my body that something could separate us at any moment."

I started to name it. It didn't happen overnight, but it started to happen and that was the beginning. The little signs that I was moving forward into my next chapter.

"Okay, here's who I am and here's how I feel."

I started naming all the parts of myself that existed beyond merely surviving for all these years:

• I'm a Mom,

• I live in this city,

• I go to this Parish,

• This person and that person are my friends,

• I enjoy this type of hobby,

• I plan on doing this with my life, (by the way... it's a good time to resume looking at the future instead of merely surviving).

  
  

All the parts of myself that had nothing to do with surviving for so long.

What I had to do at that point was to learn stillness

I think I would have moved forward with my life a lot faster if I had learned to sit in this discomfort, feel all the feels and be still in my new life. This is a pro tip I want to share with you because I think I wasted a bunch of time trying to fill the void. And so in the face of the discomfort of ending up in a peaceful situation, try to sit in it, be still in it.

There's a reason scripture says

"be still and know that I am God"

Stillness is the hardest thing in that part of our lives. And trusting God, when He's let this happen to you? That's also the hardest thing. It's uncomfortable as hell. It exposes the noise inside of us. It exposes the giant bandwidth that we find ourselves with, all of a sudden, and don't know what to do with.

When you break out of bondage,

because that was bondage, the devil's not too happy about it. He doesn't looooove the idea of freedom. He definitely doesn't want you to feel peaceful enough that you would start going into prayer. And so he tries to lure you back with the one thing you trust: chaos.

When I understood this, and it took me a long time, what I did personally was rely on all the tools I had at my disposal:

• daily Eucharist,

• confession, I think once a month,

• Holy Water on my body and in my apartment,

• blessed miraculous metals,

  
  

I understood that there was a strong demonic piece to this battle. I was finding myself at a key transition in my life from being very much dealing with heavy influences, to remembering that Jesus had defeated evil. He's defeated evil over and over and so I wanted to stick by Jesus. I wanted to seek his presence in the Eucharist, pray the rosary (remember that mama Mary is like the OG devil crusher, so I wanted to be close to her.)

These are the tools I started using way later down the road to help me enjoy that stillness and to have that knowing that he is God. There was surrender there.

"Surrender is the exact opposite of needing chaos."

So something to think about there that I wish someone had brought to my attention a lot sooner in the process.

So that's the end of story time. I wanted to plant the scene. Next week we're going to talk about the six tips to unlearn the chaos loop and start moving into peace and embracing peace. I've had to split the episode into two.This is the story and we'll do the tips next week otherwise it will be way too long. And then we'll move on to talking about the hormones in the brain that explain that addiction to chaos.

Remember always to take it one day at a time and we will see you next week for the six tips.