For the first time in 3 months I ate food from one of my favorite restaurants. While this might not seem like a big deal, when you live with Complex PTSD your life becomes about navigating triggers and this restaurant was a trigger I didn’t even know existed.

3 months ago I met the person I reference in one of my earlier letters at this restaurant. We’d been apart for 17 years and decided to go out as friends and catch up on our lives. As someone who struggles with complex PTSD and relational trauma I have issues cultivating and maintaining healthy relationships and boundaries. Unfortunately, this person seized upon my vulnerabilities (wether he knew it or not) and after that night began a “relationship” with me. I use the quotation marks around the word because looking back now, I can see what happened between the two of us wasn’t a relationship, it was a way for him to use me and I allowed it.

Which brings me to the restaurant. I love Olive Garden, there’s nothing like the unlimited bread sticks and carbohydrate loaded happiness one can find in a bowl of pasta. But, this was where I met him that night and this was where he whispered all those things in my ear that my traumatized brain so desperately wanted to hear and have be true. That night was when I started allowing myself to be used by him for his own selfish gratification and needs without listening to what my head was saying and establishing healthy boundaries.

So, I couldn’t bring myself to go back. When he abruptly ended things, I was back to being in a dark place mentally and I reacted in ways that were less than healthy and ideal. I took his behavior of ghosting me as a judgement on me as a person and absorbed the pain and decided that once again it was something I had done wrong that had caused another person to abandon me, again. I took it as a personal failing that he had abandoned me, obviously if I’d been better, prettier, more attentive, more flexible, just better than I was then he wouldn’t have left. I was reliving and replaying all of the times my family had walked away from me over the years and taking on all of that pain all over again. So, I avoided one of my favorite restaurants because it reminded me of that night and brought up all those feelings again. It was triggering me and I didn’t even realize it.

So, tonight, for the first time in 3 months and a month after he ghosted me I ordered takeout from the restaurant. I couldn’t bring myself to go inside the restaurant but at least this was a step in the right direction. I could be in the parking lot, smell the smell of the bread sticks, hear the cheesy Italian music being piped through the speakers, and not want to crawl out of my own skin and hide.

I reclaimed just a little bit of my power tonight and it felt great.