Depending on who you talk to and what they believe to be true, you will hear various ways to describe what I am sharing with you today, and this is just my own version, from my perspective, and from my personal experience.
Childhood Trauma that is complex is literally like tornadic activity.
It’s coming.
You know it’s on its way, but you don’t know exactly when or where it will hit.
So you prepare.
You are ready “just in case.”
Always.
Being “at the ready” was helpful to me as a young girl-literally my way to survive and still feel like I had some sense of control over my surroundings and what happened to me. This was a skill that worked. And I worked it.
As I have mentioned here and in my book, this doesn’t hold up long-term.
“Always being prepared” was just my outward expression that my tiny brain and body had been suffering from severe anxiety. It was an indication that I wasn’t living a normal life.
And as an adult that is something that I have accepted and manage.
But being spit out of an ongoing cycle of tornadic activity also left me off-kilter.
As an adult I found myself reeling in anxiety.
Ready for things that probably weren’t coming.
I hadn’t learned how to look up, and rip off the chains of shame.
I couldn’t figure out why my life felt like it was hazy and my brain was in a fog. I couldn’t see my path. I didn’t know which way to go or who I was supposed to be.
Fourteen years of sobriety offered me fourteen years of opportunities to learn, heal, and grow.
Each day I walk a little bit further away from the ashamed, lost, anxiety-ridden girl who just wanted to disappear.
During the process of facing my triggers, recalling sketchy memories, forgiving myself, and embracing the idea of radical acceptance (That I cannot go back and change who I am, where I came from, or what happened to me) I have also learned that alignment is key for my personal peace and growth.
Other people might say this: “I have found my true self” or “I am following God’s will for my life.”
Being aligned with my true self, for me, has been eye-opening.
At this point in the journey, it’s about surrender all over again.
- Except for this time around, I am not admitting powerlessness-I am welcoming the ease of putting on my own skin and walking tall.
- This time around, I am not fighting the past, I am asking God to show me more and more of who I am and where I am supposed to be putting my energy.
- Instead of making lists of my defects, I am counting blessings and learning to recognize all of the forgotten things I am good at and where I am naturally drawn.
And I am doing more to walk toward those things with intention. I am not fighting to be someone I am not, and I am not tirelessly trying to change the past. I am just—being. Learning to sit and to be. And it’s incredible.
It’s just a daily decision to embrace who I truly am without any holding back. No fighting to be anything I am not. No trying to change things I have no control over.
A few real-life examples:
Art.
I LOVED drawing as a child. I carried around a notebook. I wrote short books and created a mini-series. I illustrated. I drew people and trees and flowers. It was something I adored. Color has always made the hair on my arms stand straight up. It was what I enjoyed and I was good at it.
And as time passed, I began to use it as another escape. It became another way to drown out the pain, to ignore the disgust I felt for myself, and the guilt I carried with me for allowing things in my life to happen that I believed at the time I should have stopped or avoided.
Art became a distraction from the chaos.
And I stopped.
Interestingly, at 37 I decided to get back into it and it felt as if I had reconciled with someone I loved. As cheesy as that sounds, it felt like home.
Art is not an escape from my reality-it’s a tool I take advantage of and enjoy for healthy expression of my emotions and to soothe anxiety.
Exercise.
I couldn’t tell you a time in my life where my relationship with food or my body was healthy. Even now as I sit here sharing my brain with you, I can’t tell you I am fully comfortable. But I can tell you that I do work on me-for me. And I don’t work on myself to impress anyone, to earn love or attention, or to compete with anyone. This has always been more about me versus me. I just needed some time to assess why. Why was I so self-critical. Why did I feel shame when I looked in the mirror.
Today, I choose to exercise for my mental well-being. It doesn’t cure depression or make my anxiety disappear. But it helps me feel emotionally regulated. It helps me clear my head. It helps me remember to breathe and take time for me. I exercise because I am proud of what my body can do, and what I can do if I put my mind to something. I do it for me.
(Disclaimer- I do not have an eating disorder. I have always struggled with poor self-image, including body image. If you or someone you know is struggling with ED, please contact a professional)
Parenting:
I want to break cycles and show my kids I am a fighter-that for them and because of them, I try to be a badass mom, every single day. What I have realized is that this doesn’t mean I am a better mom than my neighbor. It doesn’t mean that my kids are perfectly groomed or hair brushed and polished every single time we leave the house. It is more simple. I am the best me every day that I can be, and when I screw up-I talk with them about what I did, and why. I apologize. I remind them of my humanness. I have learned to live in the moment with them as individual people. Breaking cycles is just the slow process of handling conflict and high-stress situations different than what I experienced. It is an act of dedicating my time and energy to building new traditions and listening to what my kids are feeling and what they need.
Breaking cycles is not living every single day obsessed with creating a perfect environment or focused on my own parents and what they did or didn’t do. I can only choose one path at a time, and I have chosen to focus on this new thing God is doing-instead of fighting to hold onto hate and resentment that will only infect this new thing.