Your Interior World: What it means to feel the need to cleanse your inner world after manipulation
Anybody remember how you used to have to rewind a cassette to hear your favorite song again? Or what about rewinding the same song over and over and over? I still do that but now it’s so much easier on Spotify.
This song, these lyrics specifically "Sometimes I feel cold, even paralyzed. My interior world needs to sanitize" (The Hype by Twenty One Pilots) were on repeat for more than a year. They were hauntingly specific as if someone else wrote these words to explain my inner world exactly as I was experiencing it. I could not stop listening.
Leaving the highly toxic relationship I was in allowed me to see things without confusion, to think clearly for the first time in a very long time. I felt strong for the first time in nearly two decades. I was proud of myself, hopeful and even excited to be able to breathe and relax a little. The more time passed though, the more I had this otherworldly need to understand the dynamics of what had happened to me. The thoughts took over me and refused to let go. That’s when I fell apart.
Understand this though, because it matters:
I wanted out of the relationship, so I wasn't falling apart because we were no longer together, I was falling apart because the illusion of everything dissolved into reality and I began to understand the relationship for the first time.
I felt frozen, unable to move. I felt as if I had been covered in something sticky that would not remove itself from me, it seeped deep inside. Mostly inside my brain, my mind, my thoughts.
It was a mixture of depression (cold), shock (paralyzed) and disgust (an incredible feeling of needing to cleanse myself). And then a heavy dose of what my therapist calls “sacred anger”.
There is a place where your thoughts form before they become words and a place inside us where your values live and your instincts originate. This is the place where your sense of what is real and true and good about yourself and the world around you quietly exists.
When manipulation is sustained and intimate enough, that interior world is hijacked and overtime we lose ourselves. We become inhabited by someone else's voice.
I wanted to cleanse every part of my mind, every thought that was placed there by someone else's deep seated wounds and need for control. Every belief about my body that wasn't mine. Every doubt about my memory that I was made to believe had failed me. Every instinct I overrode because I was told it was wrong. Every dream I quietly folded and put away because there wasn't room for it.
I wanted what was left when all of that is removed.
I needed to know what my own thoughts were without the whispers of another person's voice. I needed to understand my own values. I needed to fully understand what happened and what it means. I needed to know my own strength. My own gifts. My own dreams. My own life.
Not a life built around someone else's story about who I am. Just mine.
After a year of trying to cleanse myself of this toxicity and listening to this song on repeat, I now understand a few very important things a little bit better.
But, we have to go through it, and we have to understand it if we want to heal. We have to name all of it. The things we don't understand or have words for stick to us, inside us. And they can eat away at us. We have to learn the words that describe what happened to us and by doing so, they can act as cleaning agents to remove what was never supposed to follow us after we left.
Say the words out loud, without worry, and without regret.
Coercive control, Manufactured insecurity, Identity erosion, Crazy making, Gaslighting. And (if it fits) especially say this word: Narcissist. I was so afraid to say it and I was told not to use it. Use it. There is a huge list of words you should know so I put together a free comprehensive list of as many terms as I could think of - check it out.
Learn as much as you can, not for them, but because this allows you to free yourself from that cold and paralysis, from the ruminating thoughts that make you think you might be losing your mind and because your interior world deserves to be yours again. Cleansed.
Once I named all the things that had happened to me, I began to feel strong again. That feeling of "I am going to make it" that I felt right after leaving but before breaking down came back to me. I remembered that I am resilient and extraordinary and beautifully stubborn enough to heal from the trauma. I am not 100% of the way there yet but I am definitely en route.
And it took me naming it to get here.
And even though we can't always comprehend why someone would do these terrible things to us, or anyone for that matter, we can move forward.
Every time I come across another word or phrase that explains something I lived through, I feel a little more cleansed and a little less contaminated.
What this does to your body
The frozen feeling is not a metaphor.
When the nervous system has been under chronic threat and when the interior world has been a contested space for years, the body responds with exactly what Tyler Joseph describes. Cold. Paralysis. The inability to move. And a deep desire to rid yourself of all of it.
This is the dorsal vagal response. The deepest and oldest branch of the autonomic nervous system. When the threat is inescapable and prolonged, the body stops fighting or fleeing and begins to shut down. Freeze. Dissociate. Go somewhere else inside while the outside continues.
The sanitizing that comes from the naming, the writing, the walking, the connecting, the slowly rebuilding of an interior world that belongs only to you is not just psychological work. It is nervous system work.
Every time you trust your own perception, you send a signal of safety to a system that has been in alarm for years.
When we finally come to a time when we can say this happened and I remember it, it has a name, you regulate.
When you connect with someone who reflects your experiences back to you accurately, your nervous system updates its threat assessment.
Every time I learn more about a word or a phrase that explains something I lived through, making it real, I feel a little bit healthier.
The thaw is biological. The warmth comes back. Slowly.
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