Regression?

[Trigger warnings: childhood trauma/wounds.]

Apart from the heavy sexual jokes and the feeling isolated because I’m unable to socialize with people in the chorus, the other big factor making me feel uncomfortable not only during rehearsals but even for hours and days afterwards is that I cannot recognize the person I become when I’m there: and I hate this. 

Despite my initial shyness in new groups and my being mostly an introvert, I am a friendly person, I have learned to make friends (or, at least, aquaintainces) quickly and easily in various settings, and have even become quite confident (or, at least, comfortable) within most groups and/or with strangers — the latter being something that has become easier for me as I feel and look more aligned to my true self. So this incredibly shy, skittish person that I turn into at choir rehearsal, curling into themself and unable to socialize or hardly utter a word, is someone I don’t recognize: it isn’t me. Or, rather, it hasn’t been me for years. But it used to be me in many circumstances years ago. That’s child me, me in elementary school, me in middle school, me in some groups of people where I couldn’t be my true self. This version of me that wants to be seen, yearns to be seen, but is also terrified of being seen because they feel they don’t belong is me from my childhood, me from the years I was forced into a “binary female role” that didn’t fit. 

That’s regresssion. 

It’s scary. But it’s also infuriating. And I believe that part of the fury I felt on Sunday night — I really “saw red”, wanted to throw stuff or punch something — is due to that: the re-emergence of feelings that hurt me so much, and for so long, in the past, in situations that I fought so hard to change and/or to leave behind me. And here they are again: those situations, those feelings, that version of me that I don’t want, that I don’t like, that I don’t deserve, that I fought so hard to liberate myself from. 

What is happening to me? Where is this regression coming from? What is causing it?