Adulting with Childhood Trauma
How childhood trauma impacted my psychological development from adolescence into adulthood
TRIGGER WARNING:
This post makes references to child abuse, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and dissociation. Gentle reminder to ground in your personal safety and take good care of your mental and emotional hygiene.
“If you don’t deal with this now, it’s going to come back to haunt you later in your life. This doesn’t go away.” I can still see the gravity of her ominous words in her eyes, and I can still feel the firm grip of her hand on my right shoulder as she spoke. She was my elementary school principal who came to my aid once my abuse was revealed, and she was imploring me to accept help from a psychotherapist. All I wanted was to feel “normal.” I wished it had been a lie. So after a brief yet re-traumatizing visit from two armed officers and a handful of therapy sessions in deafening silence, the whole “situation” faded into the subconscious where it was left to fester.
Life after that year - sixth grade - into high school is difficult to piece together. Retrospectively, I would describe myself as different people living in one body, or like a chameleon that masterfully changes colors at will as a means of protecting itself. My ‘outside’ self - the one I wanted to believe I could truly be and that I wanted others to see - was the AP English student who wrote rich stories about heartbreak and resilience but nearly failed ninth grade algebra. She was a dancer, a piano student, a drill team colorguard, bullied by some, yet a bully to others, longing for acceptance by her peers. At home, she wrote poems and personal essays portraying the shadowy desolation that consumed her psyche like an insidious poison. When the stream of words ran dry, or the fiery anguish burned too intensely, she would cut herself, the searing pain and droplets of blood serving as a salve for the turmoil in her soul. And in moments when she lacked the will to do even that, she would lock herself in her room, turn the music to its loudest, and imagine all the ways to end her life until she’d fall asleep and into nothingness, even for just those few hours.
As the first in my family to be raised in American culture, an only child, stumbling into young womanhood, along with the confusion and hormonal angst par for the course in coming of age, compounded with the debilitating shame and denial of what had happened to me, I remember the most how lonely I felt. I was closed off from my parents in spite of my dad’s saintly patience and heroic attempts to break through to me. Circular arguments with my mother typically ended with me running away from home, disappearing into the night, if only for a few hours at a time. I was smoking cigarettes, getting into strangers’ cars to take me wherever. Reckless. But fearless - naively, stupidly fearless. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk framed this phenomenon in a way that resonated with me when I first read it in his book, The Body Keeps the Score: “Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hated, and self-destructive actions. Nothing feels safe - least of all your own body.”
I wish in all my attempts with therapy, that one of them might have considered complex PTSD. It was not until I got curious and started working with a Trauma Recovery Coach that I was able to connect the dots. It’s through working with her, and the psychoeducation she provided me in my sessions, that I’ve been able to come home to myself. I still struggle with anxiety and irrational fears, and shame still looms over me, ready to pounce at an opportunity to send me back into a spiral, or as Brene Brown calls it, a “shame shitstorm.” I know now that healing is a lifelong, sideways, backward, forward, upside down, twisted path. But now I am equipped with an arsenal of tools and modalities to help me stay regulated and I’m still evolving and learning.
It turns out that for me, what I needed the most to begin to heal didn’t come in a bottle or a pill, it came from within me. I had it all along. I had to learn how to love me.
