My Story
Only in my pain,
did I find my will.
Only in my chaos,
did I learn to be still.
Only in my fear,
did I find my might.
Only in my darkness,
did I see my light.
~ Unknown
I had a very painful and traumatic childhood. I was an only child who suffered every type of abuse – emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual, all at the hands of those I trusted most in the world, my parents. Both of my parents were alcoholics, and there was constant turmoil, tension, and chaos in the house. They fought much of the time, and when they were not fighting, they left me alone to fend for myself. I tried in every way possible to get them to see me and to pay attention to me, but they were so self-absorbed, that I felt invisible. Their primary priorities seemed to be drinking and partying, and when they had people over for parties, they gave me strong medicine to make me sleep so that I wouldn’t disturb them. From the very beginning of my life, there seemed to be no place for me where I felt seen or loved.
My mother was drunk most of the time that I remember. I actually cannot remember a time when she wasn’t, and as a result, I didn’t like her one bit. She was rough with me, uncaring when I hurt myself, and had no time for me unless she wanted to parade me around town in cutesy dresses like I was a doll or some other kind of prop. As she did with everyone else, she tried to buy my love and appease me by getting me things, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all. What I wanted I would never, ever have...her attention and her love.
My father was a real dichotomy for me for so long. As a child I truly was daddy’s little girl, seeing him the way I wanted to see him, putting him on a pedestal, and focusing only on the good, as all little girls do with their daddy. This was not the truth of who he was at all. He, too, was an alcoholic, and a very selfish man as well. He was lazy and a cheater and was cruel to my mother. I repressed a lot about him, because, in truth, I had to have an assigned “good guy,” a reliable character in the mix, and he was it, which is funny because he betrayed me most of all. I always had a sense that perhaps there was some sexual abuse that had occurred between us, but I had no concrete memory of it, no proof, only a feeling. While I did have a clear memory of sexual abuse by a pediatrician when I was young, the clear memories of daddy’s sexual abuse eluded me until I was in my 40s and could finally face the full truth of it. This, of course, was the ultimate betrayal.
My parents never acted like responsible adults, and so I had to be a parent to my parents, from a young age trying to help them and get them to feel better so that I could feel safe, but no one was there for me. I tried to break up their fights and helped my mother when she was hungover. They were both miserable, lost people, and as a result, I felt unsupported, alone, and afraid from the time I was a very little girl. There was no support and no safety in my life and I believed that my parents were unhappy because of me, so, I took all of their pain on myself in an attempt to heal it. This is a pattern that endured long into adulthood in all of my relationships.
When I was eight years old, after many overdoses and failed suicide attempts, my mother committed suicide. This of course altered the path of my life forever. As my young mind struggled to comprehend what had happened, I felt as though the ground had opened up under my feet. There was no ground to stand on…anything that seemed to be solid and dependable before was gone forever. In my child’s mind, I struggled to make sense of what had taken place, and all I could do was blame myself. I interpreted her actions as information that something was wrong with me, for how would a mother leave a child who was lovable? I blamed myself and I believed that I must be inherently bad or flawed for this to happen. I felt more worthless, confused, and alone than ever before.
Me with my mother Allynn in 1975Following my mother’s death, my father offered no emotional support to me. He leaned on me, an eight-year-old little girl, with his grief, telling me he wasn’t sure that she was really dead, which confused me all the more. As a result, it would be years before I would be able to even begin to accept the fact that she was gone. Daddy had always hated my mother’s family, and so he took the opportunity to cut me off from them completely, even though they only wanted to love me and would have offered me the love and support I so desperately needed. Now I had no one and was left to try to process what had happened on my own.
He had been having an affair with my stepmother before my mother’s death, and he brought her into my mother’s home within a month of my mother’s death, which I knew was way too soon. I disliked her right away, feeling that she was trying to take my mother’s place, which turned out to be completely accurate. In the months following my mother’s suicide, they sold most of her things, sold the house that she and my father had built and basically erased mostly any traces of her, including photo albums. My mother and the events surrounding her death were not brought up by them again and life went on as if she had never existed.
Karen proved to be the epitome of a “wicked stepmother”, as she was emotionally, verbally, and physically abusive throughout our ten-year relationship. As a result, I experienced even deeper levels of worthlessness, fear, self-loathing, and isolation as the years went by. I was emotionally alone and afraid all of the time. Years of verbal and physical abuse followed, with my father sitting idly by and doing nothing to stop my stepmother’s abuse. I had no privacy, she would regularly go through my things, tried to control my every move, and manipulated my thinking to the point where I didn’t know up from down. To add to my pain, there was no escape, no other family or friends that were supportive of me. I continued to feel isolated and alone, hating myself and continuing to take the blame for all of the pain around me. The consistent emotional undercurrent was “you aren’t good enough” and “you will never amount to anything,” which were ideas that were constantly being implanted into my mind by my stepmother, confirming what I already believed to be true. I continued to take these ideas in and make them my truth. I felt sure that there was something very wrong with me, and over and over again I took her words to heart, making the idea that I was a horrible, worthless person the foundation of who I believed myself to be.
My emotional pain and self-hatred led to extreme insecurity, anxiety, depression, love, and sex addiction, years of alcohol and drug abuse, financial issues, failed relationships, and years of work as an exotic dancer. I hated myself, I hated life and at the same time, I was desperate for love. For years I stumbled around feeling completely and utterly lost, as a blind person, having no tools with which to navigate life. I went from one painful relationship to the next, desperately searching for the love and acceptance that I never received as a child. I was absolutely miserable and knew that I could not continue to live in the same way I had been living, and the only other alternative to suicide was to work hard to change my life. I literally could not go on the way I was living.
Finding the Healing Path
At the age of twenty-two, a friend recommended I see a therapist, and that was the beginning of my path to healing. Even as I continued my path of transformation, I was, of course, still living with many of the same limiting patterns of fear, lack, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and unprocessed emotional pain from my childhood. I was terrified of facing all of the pain I had repressed for so many years and I was afraid of accepting total responsibility for my life. Things changed a lot over the years in amazing ways, but I was still stuck in the same core patterns of victimization and fear. I felt like something was wrong with me that needed fixing, and I was convinced that I, in fact, could be fixed. I didn’t understand that this kind of thinking, that I was somehow broken, was at the root of so much of my suffering. It took me a long time to fully understand that.
I was introduced to alternative healing and new-age spirituality when I was 28 and took to it right away. I started learning about all kinds of healing and spiritual ideas and was more excited than I had ever been about anything in my life. I felt that I had found my calling...to be a healer and to help other people like myself. I knew I had to make what had happened to me count for something, and I felt that this was it, that I had truly found my purpose. Over the next twenty-plus years, I would receive multiple certifications and do healing work ranging from massage therapy to hypnotherapy to trauma recovery coaching and everything in between.
A Time of Massive Change
Following the breakup of a very painful relationship not too many years ago that left me spiritually, emotionally, and physically empty and traumatized, things really began to change and open up for me exponentially. At that point, which feels like a major turning point, I realized what a high cost I was paying by running from taking responsibility for my pain and for my life. I had backed myself into a corner where I truly had to make a decision to live my life fully and accept total and complete responsibility for all of it or to continue to be in immense pain and paralyzing fear. Since I was afraid and not willing to make the same choice my mother did with suicide, I had to choose to fully live my life, and with that, accept full responsibility for that life to the best of my ability. Since that day, things have continued to unfold for me in sometimes painful and massively transformative ways that I could never have anticipated.
Then I did the very thing that scared me the most, the thing that I knew I must do, which was to spend some time alone. I had always been terrified of abandonment and of being alone, and without any family, for me to be alone was to be truly and utterly alone, and that terrified me. I knew that I had no choice but to face this fear head-on, otherwise, I would have continued to go from one painful relationship to the next as I had been doing for so many years. I spent two years alone and during that time decided to face my fears and my unprocessed emotional pain. I began to face my unresolved grief from my mother’s death, my father’s neglect, his abuse and betrayal, and my stepmother’s abuse. The time spent alone taught me that I can truly rely on and trust myself. Through this, I learned to accept and trust myself more, and finally began to value myself and make better choices for myself and my life. I decided that I would never again settle for less than I deserved in my life.
As a result, my life changed in beautiful ways. My healing practice was busier than ever, I was able to save more money than I ever had before, and I made huge strides in healing my autoimmune condition and feeling happy.
Finding True Love
While things were going well, I did still long for true love. After going from relationship to relationship for so many years, and settling in many ways, I knew I never wanted to do that again, and if I were to be in another relationship, I would not do that again. What this meant was that I had to come to terms with that, at the age of 45, I may just end up alone as I feared. I did face that fear and decided that there was no way that I was going to settle in love again, and so I came to terms with the very real possibility of winding up alone. While that was certainly not my preference, I knew that my well-being and making the best choices for myself that I possibly could was what I deserved. I decided that I could not and would not settle just to avoid being alone.
It wasn’t long after that when I got together with my husband. He was someone I knew from the dog park, and he was not someone that I would conventionally have been attracted to, and I knew that was a good thing. The reason for that is that I had long been attracted to people that were bad for me in some way…narcissists, emotionally unavailable men, people who wanted to change me, and those who just didn’t seem to care about me in the way I cared about them. I knew that he was different and that he was a healthier, more balanced, more mature person, and a better choice for a partner for me. I knew he was a good match for me in the long run and I was right.
Everything happened very quickly, and after just six months together we picked up and moved across the country to the mountains in North Carolina, which was something I had wanted to do for a long time. It was wonderful, and our relationship was to be the healthiest I have ever had by a long shot.
Over the five-plus years that we have been living together, a lot of good changes have occurred in my life. Now that I was finally in a place where I felt safe enough and secure enough, with a partner who fully loved me, accepted me, and supported me the deeper work could happen within me, the shedding of the deeper layers that couldn’t come before now.
Pitfalls On The Healing Path
I have to share with you where my path took me and what some of the potential traps and roadblocks on the path of healing are so that hopefully you can avoid them. The suffering created by a childhood filled with abuse and neglect is bad enough without the added pain that we unwittingly heap on top of it when we try to escape our emotional pain.
The lies we tell ourselves are the worst lies of all. The pain created by abuse and neglect is extremely challenging to overcome in the best of circumstances. When we attempt to avoid the truth and ignore the anguish and tortured cries of the wounded parts of ourselves, our pain is multiplied exponentially. As a result, we remain frozen in psychic pain, unable to move forward, existing in a time capsule of sorts where vital parts of us cannot ever possibly grow, mature, thrive, or do anything other than suffer just as much as they did when the original trauma took place. It is our job as adult survivors of childhood trauma to become loving parents to ourselves and rescue our wounded inner children. Ultimately, we are our only hope for a better life.
Little did I know until a few years ago that I had been spiritually bypassing for many years. I knew of this concept, but I was in deep denial of my own participation in it. Spiritual bypassing is where we use spiritual concepts to deny our trauma, darkness, and our pain. Ultimately, bypassing is an attempt to “jump over” our pain to “get to” better feelings quickly, but it does not work and winds up creating a lot more pain. The only way out is through.
When I discovered new age concepts in my late 20s, I leaned hard into the whole magical thinking land of love and light, “you create your own reality” and all of the new age rhetoric. I was so excited to learn all of these wonderful things, and it all felt good to me at the time.
Little did I know that these things can be a slippery slope for those of us who have mountains of unprocessed emotional pain from childhood trauma that overwhelms us daily. When we spiritually bypass, we see only the “ultimate truth’’ of who we are in a spiritual sense, which is that we are at one with everything, that we are spiritual beings living in a holographic reality of our own creation, and that all problems are merely flaws in our thinking and perception.
When we live in this way, we believe, as I did, that if we just address our faulty thinking and our emotional reactivity, we will be able to transform our lives into the lives we have dreamed of living, “living in abundance,” living our soul’s purpose,” and creating “heaven on Earth.”
This attempt to escape our pain and to only live in the light (seeking enlightenment) does not work, and it is a trap: one of the primary pitfalls on the spiritual path. This is because pain is a part of life - we can look around and see that this is true. This is just the nature of human life on planet Earth, and the goal is to learn to accept it so that we don’t create more pain for ourselves. When we do try to fight it or escape the way of things, we wind up heaping more pain on top of our original pain, locking it in, creating suffering for ourselves.
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
Haruki Murakami
Ultimately, this kind of thinking would prove to be my biggest downfall, keeping me locked into patterns of suffering far longer than if I had just accepted life on life’s terms long ago. I believed that there was nothing that I could not overcome and I was in deep denial of the truth of my own humanity, and the depth of my own trauma.
My denial of the truth led me to believe that I had done most of the work necessary to overcome my childhood abuse and that it no longer affected me that much. After all, I had been doing so much inner work for so many years...how could that not be true? When issues did, inevitably, arise in my life, I made myself wrong, usually taking all of the blame, and harshly judged myself, believing that my emotional reactivity was a personal weakness and failure.
Now everything is crystal clear. Even though I had been doing personal healing work for so many years, I had been in denial and I had been lying to myself the whole time. I had still been running from myself and my unprocessed pain. I had been fighting myself and I had been pushing myself to a ridiculous standard of spiritual perfection. In my defense, and in the defense of anyone who has been stuck in this same way of thinking, it makes absolute sense…who wouldn’t want to get away from their chronic pain and finally feel happy and at ease? We all deserve that, but life just isn’t that simple.
Finally, I hit a wall, and I hit it hard. I had what is conventionally called a mental breakdown, which I see now was, in reality, a huge breakthrough, even an awakening of sorts. I see so clearly now how cruel I have been to myself with all of the attempts to fix myself, to evade my dark and messy humanness, and my attempts to achieve some spiritually perfected state and to save the world. In addition, I finally received a diagnosis that I never had received before, because I never had requested one. I found out that I have Complex PTSD from years of childhood trauma, neglect, and abuse.
Now, in a very real way, this did not come as a surprise because of everything I went through, but something was empowering about having someone diagnose me. Now it was confirmed to me that I was not a failure, but instead that this is a natural response to very adverse ongoing circumstances that I could do nothing about as a child. This was a total reframe for me, and the beginning of real healing and emotional maturity.
I am happy to know the truth and I am happy to not feel like I have to or even want to run away anymore from reality, no matter how painful it is. I am grateful for the painful breakthrough I experienced for landing me squarely in plain old, messy, painful reality. Now I have finally pulled my head out of the clouds of uber spirituality that seeks to rise above humanity and I am dropping my roots deep down into the earth and living squarely in reality, as painful as it can sometimes be. While it hurts, I now can accept who I am, and with acceptance comes great power. With the acceptance of my diagnosis, I now have been given access to the part of me that is a survivor, a warrior, a compassionate teacher, for we cannot have the “good” without the full acceptance of the “bad.”
Where I Am Now
Now at 52 years old, I can accept that the wounds from my traumatic childhood are a part of me that will not disappear, and I am learning to be ok with that. I navigate the ups and downs of my life better with each new day. I no longer have to hide and lie to myself and I no longer have to strive and push to be someone I am not. There is, indeed, perfection in the imperfection of my humanness.
Now only the truth remains. I know that true healing means staying grounded on planet Earth in what is real while working to rise above whatever limiting circumstances I may have to face. I know now that despite the words of my stepmother and my inner critic, there was never anything wrong with me. None of what happened to me as a child was my fault, and it was not my responsibility to save my mother or make up for what happened to me in any way. It was never my job to save anyone except myself.
Now I am…four years sober, in the healthiest relationship I have ever had, and happily married to the love of my life, a homeowner, a mom to three fur babies, a beautiful monthly women’s circle facilitator, and taking responsibility for my health through fitness and nutrition. I am in my Intermediate year of training with Somatic Experiencing International, which is truly changing my life. Nervous system work is the grounding element that is helping me to embody all that I have healed and learned over the years. Today I am grateful and blessed. Today I thrive.
