One of my favorite things about therapy — other than being able more and more to talk about therapy unselfconsciously, without fear of stigma — is that I can frequently learn new things about myself. My self-awareness and self-understanding is constantly evolving, and I often uncover new layers to what I thought I’d previously had a secure awareness of.

I grew up in a city in the South Shore area of Massachusetts. When my parents split up and my mother met someone else, and eventually relocated us to where he was from, I was unequivocally devastated. For years and years afterward, I clung to my identity as a New Englander in any way I could. Geographic references, clothing, sports teams, even my accent (which has since become pretty subtle). I will admit that it borderlined on obsession at times. For a long time, I’ve had this idea that my preoccupation with my home state was my way of holding on to all that I had good connections with. All the good memories I had, such as they were, came from there. My grandparents, my childhood friends, my pets (which we didn’t take with us), my neighborhood, local traditions and colloquialisms, everything I knew was there. Being forced to leave all of that behind was a trauma in and of itself.

What I hadn’t really considered until my therapy session today was just how much my hatred of the place we moved to is a mirror image of the love I have for my place of origin. I love Massachusetts; I despise the other place. Yes, a large part of that despising is tied up in the anguish of some severe trauma I experienced there. But I’ve generalized that pain to connect it to anything remotely related to that place. While all New England related things were good, anything associated with the new place we lived automatically became “bad” to me. As a child, I needed it to be that black and white in order to make sense of my new world. Fast forward over 20 years, I now live an hour and twenty minutes north of that place, and there are highway signs with the name of that place on it, indicating the route which would get one there. I have avoided that route at all costs for years (with two difficult recent exceptions I’ve written about previously, here and here). Just driving past the fucking highway signs is triggering for me. This is problematic, because it’s a main highway to get to many other places, both local and distant. Next steps in therapy now include working on destigmatizing the place itself in my brain, and being more specific in my thoughts regarding the trauma I experienced there. The truth is, that trauma could have occurred anywhere and would have been just as traumatizing. It isn’t the location’s fault.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that over the years I’ve focused more on my understanding of my feelings about the good place, and less on those about the bad place. While dichotomizing it like this was a helpful psychological survival tactic when I was a kid, as an adult it oversimplifies things. It’s not like I didn’t endure trauma in other places; I sure as fuck did! It really does go both ways. For a long time I have been processing bad things that happened in the good place, and I’m working my way up to processing the bad things that happened in the bad place. I’m realizing now that I could consider offering a bit of time and space to the idea that, maybe, some good things happened in the bad place. Or some benign things, at least. I hope that putting feelers out for neutrality will help take away some of the malignancy of my relationship with that place as a general geographical location.

It is not a bad thing to be proud of where you come from. Being from Massachusetts has really become an intractable part of my identity, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I also feel that it is okay to never want people to say that I’m “from” the other place, because that feels utterly untrue to me. But I spend an inordinate amount of mental energy each day on trying to pretend that place and my history with it don’t exist. That’s impractical and unsustainable. Someday, I want to be able to drive by the highway signs and not feel my blood pressure rise. I want to be able to comfortably mention non-traumatic experiences of that place without the sensation that I just climbed a mountain to do so. I will never, ever have love for the place. But I am aiming for neutrality. I am aiming to make peace with the fact that the highway goes both ways.