“After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those

who don’t. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be

trusted, because they can’t understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses,

children, and co-workers.” The Body Keeps the Score Van Der Kolk

The moment is as clear today as the day I walked downstairs after being nudged out of my brother’s bedroom. My sister Valerie was sitting on the sofa nearest the dining room, a deck of cards in her hand and the light brown game board stretched across her lap. She was smiling at me. “Do you want to play a game?” she asked. “No.” I said and walked away still numb from my experience, but somehow certain that things would never be the same between Valerie and I again. I had a secret I must never tell, would have no words to tell, indeed, a secret I could not tell myself.

I was 3 ½ years old the winter after the family trip to New York City. On that particular day my only doll broke along with the only me I had. I felt a wall being constructed between myself and the rest of the family. The wall still stands.

I am also still standing, the black sheep, or scapegoat if you will, for all the family’s difficulties, the woman who destroyed the family with one fell swoop of truth. It is pain layered with pain and trauma upon trauma to be me, yet I move forward, because the thing that happened 60+ years ago that people say they don’t care about lives and breathes inside of me.

In Dialectical Behavior Training I am learning and practicing how to live with myself, no longer trying to bury my childhood or put it behind me but to embrace it as it is, a part of who I am.

How grateful I am to be in control at last.