On another un-noteworthy Thursday night, I drifted off to sleep. It was just a week or so earlier that I had reclaimed my ability to sleep peacefully throughout the night without waking repeatedly or being up for hours at a night. Many things in life have no price tag, and sleep is one of them. Especially with the impact it has on your mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing.
In fact, it was the return of this deep, restful sleep that makes this next mysterious situation so frightful. The next morning, when I awoke from this wonderful night sleep, I checked my phone. There’s an app I use for communicating with my clients and business partner every day. One of my notifications indicated I had received new messages in this app. I clicked on the notification to be met with an error message stating changes had been made to my account.
Odd.
I had to log back in to the account. I couldn’t. Even more bizarre it said the email address I had used to create the account was not connected to an account. How is that possible? I’ve used this email for the account for the entire time I’d been using this communication app. I created a new account using the address. That’s not a good sign I thought. If I could use this email to create a new account, and I could not access my old account apparently my old account had disappeared. While I slept.
I reached out to my business partner, and she said she had sent me a message in the dawning morning hours while I was still sleeping. Once you open a message in this app, it changes the status of it so the sender knows it’s been accessed. She indicated the message she sent a couple hours earlier had been accessed. She also shared I had left a separate group chat at 12:45 am.
That’s impossible. I was sleeping. I do not sleep walk. I do not take sleep aids. There’s no way I did this myself in the middle of the night. And then as I had experienced so many times before, the panic set in. I reached out to customer support of the company for an explanation and to see if they would be able to reinstate my access to the account. The response they sent me filled me with fright: You deleted your account, and your account has not been hacked.
I did not. I was sleeping. Not to mention, when you delete your account with this company/app they send you two emails. I didn’t receive any emails at all about the deletion of my account. My mind raced and my emotions spun. This is the type of thing that happened to Travis’s phone, and now he is in prison. What else is going on with my accounts on my phone that I’m unaware of? How do I stop it if there is something more happening, and how do I even see it to stop it? Will I end up in prison? Should I change my phone? My phone number? Should I delete all of my accounts?
And then there was my computer. I had created videos for courses I built for online learning 16 months earlier. The videos had been uploaded to the learning platform over a year ago, and I had kept the original videos on my computer. While the folder to these videos remained on my computer, the folder is empty. Every single video gone. I checked my trash bin. While there were items in the trash bin, none of them were the videos. I had not deleted the videos. How did this happen? It wasn’t just my phone it was my computer too.
Travis would have never known about the unexplainable activity on his phone, the messages being sent through an iCloud account he had never opened, his IG account showing he was in Des Moines when we were at home, etc if he had not seen it himself or friends had not told him it was happening. He never received a notification a different device had logged in to those accounts which these companies provide when you, yourself, log in to your own account from a new/different device.
Hacking is scary, and as had happened with other trauma triggers I experienced my mind ran away with itself about the possibility of what had actually happened leading to the deletion of this account. My brain searched for a logical explanation of what had happened, but could not find one. I have never been a sleep walker and have no history doing things in my sleep that I don’t remember the next day. The inconvenience of not having access to conversations was the most minor concern I had from this situation transpiring.
No explanation would be found to this situation, and I was left to create a new account. If anyone out there reading this is a tech genius and can provide me with any explanations or solutions, please send them my way!
Just a few days later I would not be able to log in to another account with the company who sends us our dog food. And then the same day I could not access an account that contains online courses I had purchased. In the midst of this, a family member told me they could not see any of my posts on Facebook since January 26th. This meant they would not have been able to see about 2 ½ weeks worth of my content. The panic repeated.
One question I have found myself holding repeatedly throughout this situation is ‘how did this become my life’? The amount of time I’ve spent soothing my nervous system after being triggered had turned into a part time job as I traversed unexpected situations such as this at every turn. But the level of self-love it’s cultivated has been beautifully amazing. It’s not the way I would have liked to learn self-love, but I am resolute to continue to collect the golden nuggets where I can find them.
It turns out there was a logical explanation to not being able to access the online course content. When I had requested for my information to be updated on their platform, there had been a typo. Once the typo was corrected, everything seemed to be corrected. And the family member stating they could not access my Facebook posts seemed to be a misunderstanding. I have no idea what happened with the account to the dog food company or with the messaging app. I am taking screenshots and documenting it in case these types of events continue to occur.
Another trigger revealed, more trauma healing completed. This experience has really increased my expertise and perceptiveness for trauma. I think it’s important to share more information about trauma and how to respond to it. Trauma is so common in our society we don’t always give it much consideration in our daily interactions. Just like receiving the information about Facebook that wasn’t accurate seems nominal on the surface, it caused me a great deal of stress, worry, and anxiety for nothing. And my response to an outsider could certainly have appeared to be an overreaction. Unless we know what someone has been through or what lies beneath the surface, we often write off trauma responses as rude behavior by inconsiderate people.
Only the person experiencing the trauma can discern what they need to move through the situation, and there’s vast ways in which people deal with trauma. Here are some of the most effective ways of providing support to others who are or have experienced extensive trauma:
- inquire with them about what they need
- ask permission before touching them if they have experienced assault or a physical trauma
- be incredibly gentle with them (i.e. wake them gently rather than startling them awake because their fight or flight response is working overtime)
- limit your questions and give them space to discuss only the things they desire about the events they endured
- refrain from offering solutions unless they asked for them
- give advice only when it’s sought
- don’t invalidate what they are feeling
- thank them for telling you about what they have experienced
- become trauma informed by reading or researching it
Great resources to begin research include The Body Keeps the Score and Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma.
If you or someone you know is muddling their way through the aftermath of a traumatic event, I would be honored to support you or them with effective, quick, and deep healing.
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Peace & Love,
Janessa