Terror is being woken from a deep sleep to the sound of footsteps outside your door, the nob slowly turning and being completely paralyzed and unable to move or scream before your perpetrator enters your room.
Helplessness is the feeling that you can't control your environment to keep your children safe. Danger lurks in the form of grandparents, friends, family members, cars, school, sports, cub scouts... everywhere.
Chaos is feeling like every cell in your body is flying around under your skin like a mass of frenzied hornets. Terror, Helplessness, Anger, Fear, Sadness, and Mourning all scrambling around inside you uncontrollably with no way to make it stop.
Shame makes you feel like you could unzip your skin and scrub your body with an SOS pad soaked in bleach... over and over and over again for hours and sometimes days.
Relief feels like pain. Physical pain is refreshing compared to mental pain. The pain of excessive weight lifting, running until your lungs feel like they will explode, biting your lip.... anything to make the Terror, Helplessness, Chaos, and Shame stop.
Numbness feels ambiguous. It's neither good or bad, sad or mad, angry or calm. Numbness is that place in the mind where one can go when over whelmed by the above emotions. Numbness is dangerous though, because when you feel nothing. You care for nothing. You hate nothing. You love nothing. Nothing is the black hole of emotions, because emotions are what make us human.
