I choose to move forward. It is a real choice, rather than the usual New Year moving me forward while shutting down the memories and loss of the last year. I made my choice this AM January 3rd, 2020 while lying in bed mourning an added dimension to the usual painful reality.

The painful reality is me. I must remember that, live with it, both what has been done to me, and what I have caused in my turn. The former does not haunt my steps; the latter is like a yappy dog nipping at my ankle tripping me up and taking me down.

“Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you
yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate
relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do
you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you
surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated?” The Body Keeps the Score Bessel Van Der Kolk

My flashbacks are not of my childhood, but of my children’s. They are moments of searing pain condemning and shaming me. I cannot outrun them. I cannot deny or justify them. I say I cannot live with these apparitions glaring at me, but that is my choice, to live with myself, not because I deserve the torment, but because the torment is there.

Years of my life have frittered away escaping me, and still I fail. All that is left is to turn and face me. I am both the obstacle in my way and the doorway to freedom.

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves” Elvin Semrad

As I drove away from Maria’s house I felt an emptiness that I had often experienced during a meltdown, but this time I also felt hopeless, and hope is the one thing I had never run out of completely. I headed to the relative safety of Monarch Behavioral Health center in Cary, NC.

I was out of my mind with grief and loss. Someone handed me a box of tissues and I began yanking them all from the box to let them drift aimlessly to the floor.

“These are all people I’ve lost, every one, my children, grandchildren, family. So much loss I can’t go on. I can’t lose anymore people, I don’t know what to do!”

Someone called for help to get me to the hospital. I began to calm down. In the hospital I would be safe.

After 5 days at Wake Med in Cary, I was transported to Statesville for 9 days. Nothing significant changed in those 14 days. As always I was discharged more in control of myself only to await the next breakdown.

Living in my car gave me lots of time to think. At first I felt resentful of Maria and I looked outside of myself for the cause of my current situation. All the “If only” statements ran through my mind, and the ultimate “why me.” But something else nagged at me. I saw the events precipitating my move to my car as in one column and my reactions in the next column. It was becoming clear to me that my over-reactions had a hold on me.

I did not know yet what the answer was, but I knew I could not continue down the same path. I had to make it right with Maria. I could not lose one more person I loved. We sorted through the debris and have continued to be friends through a few of my ups and downs.

In March, at last settled into an apartment, I began Dialectical Behavior Training to learn how to regulate my emotions. It has been nearly two years now and I get continue to reap the benefits.

“Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.”

—Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

The first time my life stopped I was 3 ½ years old. I remember being nudged out my brothers bedroom door, the click of the latch as it slid into place. There was no going back. I stood in the hallway amid the winter clothes line hung heavy with drying sheets not knowing how to go forward. It seems like an eternity standing stock still breathing in the scent of detergent before I could move toward the stairwell and down the stairs.

Life went on, yes, but the me I knew was gone. I wondered who I was now after that horrid thing happened. I never found that little girl again except in times of great pain and chaos.

Life became a series of stops and starts, every time I had a flashback or a vivid nightmare straight from childhood, or a new sexual event like the flasher at the City Island Library in Daytona Beach, or sexual harassment at work that cost me a job. Each time I shattered the job of picking up the pieces fell to me. And life went on, until it stopped again.

In the spring of 2017 I made a decision, well several decisions, that have brought me to a healing place in my life. I came back to North Carolina to try one more time to live here without falling apart. This time I came to Raleigh. A new start. The Charlotte area had become for me a maze of anguish and stumbling blocks and painful memories triggering me left and right.

It has been difficult still for many reasons. For one, I brought me and all my baggage with me, unaware how much I still carried. Add in the uncertainty of not having any fixed foundation beneath my feet and I was again on my way downhill. I arrived at my friend Maria’s house in the spring, and by September 2017 I admitted myself for my 12^th psych ward stay since I was 20 years old.

I was frantic, frightened, and on the edge of hopelessness.

The rest of the story later.

“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.

If you are not aware of what your body needs, you can’t take care of it. If you don’t feel hunger, you can’t nourish yourself. If you mistake anxiety for hunger, you may eat too much. And if you can’t feel when you’re satiated, you’ll keep eating. This is why cultivating sensory awareness is such a critical aspect of trauma recovery. Most traditional therapies downplay or ignore the moment-to-moment shifts in our inner sensory world. But these shifts carry the essence of the organism’s responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the body’s chemical profile, in the viscera, in the contraction of the striated muscles of the face, throat, trunk, and limbs.17 Traumatized people need to learn that they can tolerate their sensations, befriend their inner experiences, and cultivate new action patterns.

In yoga you focus your attention on your breathing and on your sensations moment to moment. You begin to notice the connection between your emotions and your body—perhaps how anxiety about doing a pose actually throws you off balance. You begin to experiment with changing the way you feel. Will taking a deep breath relieve that tension in your shoulder? Will focusing on your exhalations produce a sense of calm?

Simply noticing what you feel fosters emotional regulation, and it helps you to stop trying to ignore what is going on inside you. As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

Trapped inside my body with all the excrement of childhood traumas I continually mistook my mind and body as the enemy. No matter how hard I tried to “just let go” in order to please people who found discomfort in my refusal to “just be happy now” I could not escape myself. If love could conquer all it would have seen me free to live a life with my children, watching them grow, being there in the present moments of their lives. But even love could not disintegrate the hold my childhood had on me. Trauma does not work like that. I did not know.

For decades I rode the roller coaster of intermittent peace, therapy, medication and so many times I felt elated at a new recovery path, a new drug, a new perspective only to see my hopes dashed and depression settle back in. By 2017 I was as closer to hopelessness as I had ever been,

That is a longer story to be told another day. For now one particular day in September brought me to Dialectical Behavioral Training, mindfulness, and yoga.

How many years I saw my body and mind as my enemy. They held the memories, the words, scent, and feel of traumatic events that I could neither shake off, bury, or escape from. I could liken it to a puppeteer pulling my strings to make me go this way or that. I felt defective, weak minded, stupid, and “inherent evil” for all the people my behaviors harmed.

I have now been in twice a week training for 2 years to learn how to embrace all of me, all of my thoughts and feelings, and begin to take control. It is working. After decades of drugs and therapy and failure, capturing this little spot of peace is remarkable to me.

My mind and body no longer own me, we are friends, partners in this new enterprise that is me. It is bittersweet success, however, at 66 years old I finally learn to own the reality of my childhood and it sets me free.

My experience, some research, and my gut tell me I was never a good candidate for motherhood. Though I thought, as a teenager, that I knew what to do as a mother because I had witnessed the destructive patterns in my family, I brought train loads of poisonous baggage to adulthood. I thought, “Once I get away from home, I will be okay, master of my own ship, under my husband of course.” ( it was the early seventies) I did not have a clue.

There were things I did right. I kept them fed, clothed, and clean, and my main means of erasing the coldness of my childhood was lots of hugs and kisses, snuggling, playing, cooing and plenty of smiles and laughter. I got that right.

Unfortunately, I also brought train loads of baggage to motherhood. I tried to just be happy, let it go, move on, but I only ended up disappointed in myself, ashamed of my weakness, my stupidity. Now research into the mind on trauma tells me it was not me hanging on to the past, but the past took up residence in me and would not let go.

To further complicate matters nightmares brought childhood forward nearly every night waking me to the morning light with misery, fear, and shame to start my day. It was like living two lives in one body. There was the girl traumatized by a childhood of witnessing and experiencing horror, and beside her stood a woman striving to stave off the horror and be a good wife and mother.

My sister Valerie had an abortion back in the seventies. She said she could not bear to bring a child into the world to suffer as she had. meanwhile I was popping out babies in a life as unstable as my marriage and my mind unhealed.

It is all so simple to judge who did the right thing when we are talking about other people. Valerie chose to never give birth because her childhood was stark and cold, mostly silent with intermittent rages, beatings and sexual assault. I had children because I thought I would be loved and because it seemed to be expected. I wanted to do the right thing.

I do not and never can regret giving birth to my children. I do regret, however, the chaotic, depressed, immature mother they inherited. I would not wish that pain on anyone.

So what is my point here? Heal yourself before bringing little people into your world, because they are not there for you, you need to be there for them.

“The elementary self system in the brain stem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal. To people who are reliving a trauma, nothing makes sense; they are trapped in a life-or-death situation, a state of paralyzing fear or blind rage. Mind and body are constantly aroused, as if they are in imminent danger. They startle in response to the slightest noises and are frustrated by small irritations. Their sleep is chronically disturbed, and food often loses its sensual pleasures. This in turn can trigger desperate attempts to shut those feelings down by freezing and dissociation.11

How do people regain control when their animal brains are stuck in a fight for survival? If what goes on deep inside our animal brains dictates how we feel, and if our body sensations are orchestrated by subcortical (subconscious) brain structures, how much control over them can we actually have?” The Body Keeps the Score Bessel Van Der Kolk

It turns out that mindfulness, meditation, and yoga are all helpful in gaining control.

Who knew?

I didn’t know. I can only imagine what other people felt when I went into fight or flight mode. I did not see because I was “out” of my mind.

How many times have my emotions taken center stage while casting the rational mind aside leaving me afterward hating myself for not being able to “control myself” thinking I was just weak and stupid? How many times did I commit myself to hospitals because I needed a “safe” place to feel the decades of triggered memories that threatened to consume me?

Of course, there are those who insist I had a terrific childhood, but they were not there, or in some cases they are flat out lying.

But I have not or ever shall live the life of a little girl untraumatized.

I think about the children who are punished, arrested, man-handled because they are out of control. What traumatized them? What memories are they reliving.

There is much being done to help children but there are so many who will think a beating on the butte will straighten the kids up. Just what they need, more trauma.

I get that people do not want to know how wide spread sexual, physical, and verbal abuse is by the families of these children. Do you think for a moment I want to know? I lived it and lived it and lived it. There was no escape.

But while people turn their heads and walk away, the children are left to deal with it whatever way they can. For me, I set out to please everyone, agree with everyone, played a doormat for all, and spent years in my mind dreaming of a nice elderly couple coming along and adopting and loving me. I spent a lot of time with my imaginary parents, and a lot of time out of reality.

I’m a little sad because I am sick with a cold or something and my regular routine is disrupted, as are my thoughts. But I felt a need to reach out. Will be back on track soon.

It is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently. It

is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension.

—Carl Jung

As all people do, I have carried upon my heart and mind the imprint of trauma. I didn’t choose it or choose to carry it. The imprint happened. I did not know.

None of my traumas have altered in any significant way. They remain as fully in my memory as the mind that kept them. It is no longer a story I tell, but a story that tells me. I no longer work in vain to push it away, bury it, or otherwise distort with excuses, rationalization, or minimization. The imprint I carry reflects the pain, confusion, and horror of my childhood and beyond.

People have tried to own my story pushing and pulling at it as though it were a lump of clay to be shaped as they saw fit for whatever agenda they had. And how much I wanted the more acceptable version of me to be true, to settle into a softer version of me that could live and love and play with the abandon of an unsoiled child.

But I remained me, trauma imprint and all, and mine was indeed the only life before me to live. The stories and lies and assumptions were for other minds and hearts to feel better, or to feel absolved from any responsibility to help. After all, if you say it never happened you are free, your conscience is clear. You sleep soundly in your righteous belief that I am the problem and not anything you have done to me.

No, nothing has changed and yet everything looks different. I remember thoughts and feelings as my brother led me up the stairs to his room. I remember pretending it was not me. I remember standing in the hallway afterwards among the fresh washed sheets drying inside out of the cold NY winter. And I remember not knowing what to do, who I was now, what happened; I just stood there with the detergent scent in my nostrils knowing nothing and everything had changed and knowing I could neither go back or forward.

What is the knew dimension that makes the same truth look different? Knowledge. With knowledge comes acceptance of me after decades of fighting against being me. Knowing that it was not my fault, knowing the trauma altered the very air I breathed, the way I saw, felt and acted. I can finally own all of me though so many people still sit on the fence grappling with the truth that only my brother and I know. He will never tell, and to many, I cannot be believed.

I use to care. I use to feel a need to prove I was who I said I was and what happened to me, especially to those I love. But that was not the key to the door of freedom. I needed to own my own life, be proud of me, accept me, and befriend me.

My traumas will never look exactly the same again. They are a major part of me and I am okay with that. Now there is a hope of those empty words “move on” actually happening, but not by burying or turning away from it, by embracing all of me and treating me with the love and kindness I have denied myself so long.

I am not through learning, but the landscape already looks like endless possibilities stretching out before me.

“PROLOGUE

One does not have be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the

Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a

child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on

their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of

us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother

being beaten or hit.

As human beings we belong to an extremely resilient species. Since time

immemorial we have rebounded from our relentless wars, countless disasters

(both natural and man-made), and the violence and betrayal in our own lives.

But traumatic experiences do leave traces, whether on a large scale (on our

histories and cultures) or close to home, on our families, with dark secrets being

imperceptibly passed down through generations. They also leave traces on our

minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our

biology and immune systems.

Trauma affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those

around them. Soldiers returning home from combat may frighten their families

with their rages and emotional absence. The wives of men who suffer from

PTSD tend to become depressed, and the children of depressed mothers are at

risk of growing up insecure and anxious. Having been exposed to family

violence as a child often makes it difficult to establish stable, trusting

relationships as an adult.

Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable. Most rape victims,

combat soldiers, and children who have been molested become so upset when they think about what they experienced that they try to push it out of their minds,

trying to act as if nothing happened, and move on. It takes tremendous energy to

keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter

weakness and vulnerability.

While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is

devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good

at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the

slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive

amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions, intense

physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic

reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control,

survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and

beyond redemption.” The Body keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

When I speak I speak for many millions. Trauma is trauma, no more destructive from going to war than from childhood trauma, domestic violence, or rape. The imprint of trauma will be unique to each individual like a fingerprint as will be the road to recovery.

We all know victims of trauma whether we know it or not. They walk among us doing their best version of the “just get over it” dance or feel the weight of not being strong enough, smart enough, or brave enough to do the dance.

In the book The Body Keeps the Score I have found both knowledge that perhaps I was not “inherent evil” as I named myself in the late 1980’s and the anguish of being the unintended instrument of pain for those around me. I find a reason to hope, along with the hopelessness of knowing it is too late for me though in truth it is never too late.

I get confused. Some days I am all in for this new beginning. Other times I yearn for the darkness of a safe haven where no person may see me, reach me, or inadvertently trigger an over-the-top emotion that further savages myself and drives them away. I cannot bear the thought of driving more people away. I press on.

I encourage all to read the book. If not for insight on your own trauma imprint, then to understand others better. And do not say to people in crisis to “get over it” or “just be happy” as though we are able to turn it off and on like a light switch. It is both demeaning and impossible.