“Can You Thrive After Childhood Trauma?
Recovery from traumatic events is never easy.
Posted Dec 09, 2014
Recovery from traumatic events is never easy. However, humans are amazingly adaptable. Unfortunately, survival does not mean thriving. A person can survive traumatic events and be scarred for the rest of their life. Trauma affects children particularly profoundly. Children do not just get over trauma; they live with the consequences for a lifetime.
Children adapt so they can cope, but if they are emotionally overwhelmed, their brain goes into survival mode, which changes the way it grows and develops. An early traumatic experience has a profound effect on the way in which a child’s brain forms and functions. A brain that grows in response to a perceived threat is in overdrive and senses threat everywhere. Stress causes the brain to work too hard, too often, for too long. This creates a foundation for psychological distress and mental illness later in life.”
As posted in Psychology Today
There are people who will read my writings through a filter of lies and years of invalidation by my foes (mostly family). They will not be moved. Then there are people who will read with their heart and mind wide open and know me for who I am.
Survival. There may be as many modes as there are people who create for themselves a way forward when all about is fear and chaos. Without this ability many more children would be lost.
I survived in a dream world. Reality was the necessary evil which I escaped as often as I could. It served me well as a child experiencing ongoing traumas. But living outside of reality failed as I grew to adulthood. Sadly, I had no comprehension of the true (real) state of my mind.
But I want to talk about survival the winter of 2008-09.
I had written the wrong book for the wrong people. Not many wanted to know me, and when they were through beating me down, I had no power to move forward. My money was gone, I’d risked everything to return to NY State, being a veteran resident of my many dream worlds I believed I could bring some peace to my family. I did not yet fully understand the incest family system I had escaped so many years earlier. They were ready with outstretched claws.
Nothing had gone as hoped for. Not living in reality, perhaps not ever living in reality, my downfall was swift, my depression and agony deep.
The biggest sadness was that I was stuck in NY State for at least the coming winter. How did I get to that moment? My mind could not work it out. The only thing I knew for certain was I would not make it through the winter if I could not get back to my family in North Carolina. I was destitute and desperate.
Then one morning I was drying the dishes at the kitchen window and a bright red bird landed on the snow laden branch of the Blue Spruce in the front yard. Of course, it was a cardinal. I had seen pictures. Then a tiny chickadee landed, and sparrows, and blue jays. My sister had just filled the bird feeders. The reality is that even the tiniest chickadee is equipped to withstand the frigid north, but in that moment reality meant nothing. I decided if they could survive, so could I.
After that day the birds easily filled my time, my mind, and my computer. I took thousands of pictures with the idea of using my best pics in a book of witty and uplifting life lessons and cheery anecdotes.
My sister and I had a lot of merry moments over the birds. But I was living in a dream world and that was not good for either of us. Photographing birds, and soon flowers also with some hazy idea of putting them to use and making money was helping to cope, but it did not put food on the table or money in my pocket.
Survival, for me, has never been pretty, and often seemed unkind, selfish, and kept me at a distance from loved ones. Survival was everything and the birds became a full blown obsession.
It was all downhill from there. The family pounced on me, I had to be gotten rid of. My eldest sister wrote me a cruel letter telling me if I would just be one of them, the family would welcome me with open arms. I knew that meant re-integrating with the incest family system. It meant denying my own memories and experiences, denying all the struggle I had lived through, and maybe even letting people believe I was a bad person instead of an abused person.
My sister had been co-erced into signing a statement saying her baby was not her brother’s child. For the sake of our sick family she denied her own life happened and all those years she struggled just to survive meant less than nothing.
I was not even tempted to deny my own life happened just to satisfy the family.
Nor can I ever. My life has often been a living hell in survival mode. I blamed myself. But I did not cause the trauma and chaos I was born into. Nor did I choose to abdicate reality for so many years.
Survival. It was not pretty.
The Road Forward 