Oh Deer.

A story or two about trauma brain:

Last night, on our way home from a beautiful Thanksgiving celebration with friends, our car struck a deer. Hard. It came out of nowhere. I didn’t even see it until I observed it tumbling across the road to its final resting place. The aluminum pan full of green bean casserole I had been holding in my lap crunched like an accordion upon impact. This was not a good situation.

The front end of my vehicle is in bad shape. We won’t know until early next week just how bad the damage is or whether the thing will be declared totaled. My husband is calm and resolute. “We’ll just figure it out as we go,” he assures me.

I do not share his inner peace. I am rattled. We just bought the car in April. We can’t afford for it to be totaled, but that’s exactly where I find my mind determined to wander—to the worst possible scenario. In my head, it’s a lost cause, we’re screwed, and I’m going to end up driving a 1970s minivan with shag carpet and tinted windows because that’s what I really deserve, and God is obviously trying to teach me a lesson, and I’m just too hard-headed to learn it without these extra knocks upside the head.

For the record, I know this theology is a gross distortion of the Father’s heart for me. It is, nevertheless, a default setting in my brain that I am actively working to reprogram. It’s totally a control thing. I’d rather brace myself for the absolute worst than be completely blindsided by it the way we were blindsided by that poor, sweet, very dead deer. Somehow I’ve convinced myself that if I can plan for it, it won’t hurt as badly when it comes.

Hope is such a very heavy thing to hold, even despite the countless miraculous reminders of the Lord’s provision in my life.

One morning last spring, I received an unexpected text from an unknown telephone number. “Hi,” it read. I initially wrote it off as spam, but then the next text came: “Hi Kaeley. I have your number.”

I felt the blood rush to my face as I thought to myself, with great irritation, “How the heck do these stupid bots get my name?”

I went to block the number, but then I zeroed in on the area code. I recognized it. It was from a small rural county in New York. It also happens to be the hometown of my abuser.

The panic was swift, and it was visceral. I felt my chest tighten and my face flush, and my brain switched instantly into catastrophe mode. “Why is he contacting me? Is he going to try to convince me it never happened? Is he going to launch a smear campaign to destroy me? What if he threatens suicide?”

By this time my eyes were already filling up with tears, and my hands were shaking. I had my debit card out ready to pay whatever ungodly amount of money was necessary to purchase a reverse phone number lookup on the internet.

Then I remembered one of my old school sleuthing tricks. I remembered that if I typed in *67 before entering the phone number, it would block my number from view of the person I was calling. My hope is that my call would go straight to voicemail, and I would get proof of the identity of this mystery texter.

No such luck.

A booming but familiar baritone answered, “Hello, this is Daniel.”

As in Daniel Harms, my amazing husband and protector. Daniel my personal bodyguard. Daniel, the man who would gladly take a bullet for me. Daniel, who apparently was texting me from his new work phone, which just happens to be registered in New York.

This, folks, is how trauma returns to visit even after two decades of healing and therapy. And this is how fear can wreak havoc on objectivity and reason.

I say this carefully because it’s already hard enough for abuse victims to be believed or taken seriously. But in that state of fear paralysis, I was not able to ask myself the very basic questions that would have kept me in a more reasonable frame of mind- questions like “You haven’t heard from the man in 20 years, and you’re a serious threat to him. Why on earth would he call you?” Or “There are thousands and thousands of people in that area code. Why in the world do you assume it’s him?”

I go most days of my life without ever giving so much as a thought to the man who abused me. But the body keeps the score, and old wounds still carry scars that rear their ugly heads in situations you would never expect to find them, such as vehicular collisions with the local wildlife.

Sometimes these scars can cloud your judgment, and sometimes they can enhance it, and I think we have to be open to naming both realities. I may be a hypervigilant stress case with adrenal fatigue, but I’m also incredibly perceptive about a number of dynamics that aren’t even on other peoples’ radar. Trauma lenses can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you use them. It’s important to learn to hold these truths in tension.

This takes work. It takes compassion. It takes humility, and it sometimes takes courage. Catastrophizing is a subconscious choice to wage war on hope. I don’t ever do it intentionally, but my efforts to combat it must be very intentional. It doesn’t help to rebuke myself for being a coward. It does help to say, “Hey, Kaeley. You’re a work in progress. God is happy with your efforts. You’re doing good, hard work. Hang on to Him.

Here’s to the silent acts of bravery no one else knows you’re choosing every day.