A couple years ago, I hit a serious wall. I was emotionally and physically exhausted, but didn't understand why. Sure, I was a mom, wife, graduate student, and ran a business, but this exhaustion went much deeper than my chronic state of busyness and hypervigilance. Sure, I knew I had a rough childhood and had gone no contact with my parents ten years prior. I got on with my life. I made many positive and deliberate changes so I didn't repeat their patterns, but I hadn't fully unpacked just how vast that black hole of childhood trauma was. For me, awakening to the impact of my childhood trauma has happened over many years, with thousands of tiny steps toward recovery. But one day, the truth of it hit me so hard, I had to drop everything to process it. I had no choice because my body and brain simply gave out. I had to grow or succumb. I chose to grow.
I threw myself headlong into the task of really looking at my issues. You could say I was hypervigilant about trauma recovery, and you wouldn't be wrong. I found a trauma-informed therapist and started EMDR therapy. I read all of the books. I joined online groups. I researched. I studied. Did I mention I was hypervigilant? As a result, the scales fell from my eyes and I really saw the impact of my own trauma. I gained much deeper insight into why I didn't feel successful in spite of success, why I felt responsible for things that weren't my fault, the source of what was making me physically ill, and how I coped to survive. As I made more connections and opened more doors into traumas locked away, I entered into a process of deep, soulful grieving. Much of it had been stored up in me for over forty years with nowhere to go. Grieving became my priority and I learned to ride its wave. I learned that grief doesn't really end. Like the ocean, it thrusts and recedes in a constant flux.
If you are looking to go down the path of trauma recovery, chances are you're feeling some form of anxiety about it. It's a hard road. Trauma recovery requires great courage, and it happens on its own timeline. But if you're like me, eventually it becomes a necessary road. For much of my life, I knew there was unprocessed "stuff" I had to deal with, eventually. When I got to the place where I had to choose between growing or succumbing, I decided whatever was behind those locked doors in my mind couldn't be as bad as the consequences of a life of denial and fear of the unknown. I am so glad I chose to confront the terror of my past, because I was able to learn who I really am. I finally got to free myself from the clutches of abuse and neglect.
[To read the rest of this article by Abuse Survivor, click here.]
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