*Trigger warnings: sexual assault, children in hospital, labour*
As I was about to sit down and write this, I made myself a cup of tea. I make one every time I sit down to write an article for Substack. I know why, now.
The cup of tea to my left, isn’t just a refreshment. It’s a comfort, to make me feel safe while I pour my soul onto the page. I used to wonder why I ALWAYS had to have a cup of tea in hand for every call I joined for work. Now I know, it was my comfort, ‘a cup of safety’. Because the confident, smiling girl on the call was not feeling that inside. Far from it. She was masking a lot.
I wrote in another article “When life throws you lemons, you may well be able to make lemonade from it, but you’ll be wearing a mask while pouring it. A mask you didn’t even know you were wearing’. I know this sounds really downbeat, but unfortunately it sums up my life pretty well.
I’ve been thrown a lemon (or three or four). As I touch on them in this article, like everyone else on here, I am not looking for pity. The number one reason I am writing and sharing is for my own healing. To give myself a voice. Writing helps me process, even if it’s the hundredth time I’ve gone over it. And my second reason is that I hope someone feels they can relate to something I’ve been through, and as a result, don’t feel quite so alone. Healing from your trauma is desperately lonely.
My experience starts with losing my Dad at the age of three. When you lose a parent at that age, you can mistakenly brush it off. ‘Yes it is very sad, but I was only three’…etc. Well actually it is FAR more complicated than that. As an adult you can grieve a loss. As a child, you cannot even process what loss is, let alone know you should be grieving.
I have always missed my Dad in a way I cannot explain. I don’t really have memories of him, but I have this deep connection to him. I like to say ‘my heart remembers’. Losing him as a child forms a huge part of my anxiety;
It turns out even though I was ‘only three’ I needed to grieve for my loss. Over the last year my heart has been breaking for the Dad I never got to grow up with. And it still does. Just writing this fills my throat with a lump and an ache. I know that feeling will never go away when I talk or write about him, because no matter how much I process it, I still miss him beyond belief. And that’s ok. What isn’t ok is living with the anxiety as a result, but those things are improving, I’m heading in the right direction.
The second ‘lemon’ comes in the form of a sexual assault. I was nineteen and somehow found myself walking home from a night out on my own in the early hours of the morning. A man was following me. I won’t go into any more detail, but any sense of safety left my body completely. This is the moment my body went into survival mode. I was at university during this time and ‘forced’ myself to return and finish my degree, determined that my attacker wasn’t going to stop me living my life. My Mum tried to get me to have therapy, but I refused.
Over the following years, I knew the experience had tainted me but I thought I was ‘coping well’, up until this time last year. I was seeking therapy for my anxiety, and an hour after I discussed this particular event with my therapist (because I ‘thought she should know’), my body crumbled on me. 16 whole years after the experience. It turn out I I had never processed it. At all. I had in fact disassociated from it completely.
Therapy has since helped, but PTSD lives in the body. Unless you’ve been there (and I hope you haven’t), you cant begin to explain how something like an assault affects your confidence, the feeling that you aren’t worthy, that you should shrink yourself into a small ball, in case you get noticed. Part of me was stolen that night, I lost my voice and I now recognise my body has been living in survival mode since that point. So I hate not feeling in control, the frustration that bubbles up in me when my children aren’t listening comes from a far deeper place. I’m slowly teaching my body safety, through somatic practices, nervous system resets and showing myself a lot of compassion. I’m making progress but I still live with chronic tension, although I have hope that will get better, as I continue to live a slower pace of life and live in moments of peace.
My third and forth lemon are related to my children. My son who is now six, suffered with a viral wheeze from the age of 5 months to the age of four. At it’s worst, this resulted in hospital admissions every three weeks where he needed varying degrees of support (inhalers, oxygen masks, airvo machines, steroids). One trip was to the high dependency but every trip left me and my husband terrified. I thank his and our lucky stars that his viral wheeze no longer warrants hospital trips, if much treatment at all. However, I think it’s fair to say, that feeling of needing control and of living in survival mode would have heightened during this time. And my body still remembers.
‘Finally’ my forth lemon. My daughters birth. This one I find myself wanting to downplay because ‘it’s not that bad’. Every woman has a tough time in labour. My labour was induced through hormonal drip. At the final ‘stage’ my daughter came flying out. There was 10 minutes between being dilated 5 cm to her being born. I think my body went into shock and my uterus didn’t contract back as it should and the blood flow wouldn’t stop. In came the super hero midwives who injected me, gave me multiple tablets to signal to my body to stand down.
The following hour was excruciating and worse than the labour, but I was fine. However, what sticks with me, is looking across at my husband cradling my new born baby girl thinking ‘They are going to whisk me into theatre any second and I might not see them again’. If you find yourself thinking that, it is ‘that bad’. So being out of control is very scary to me. Control makes me feel safe. I am learning to find the balance and hopefully one day that will get easier.
I hold so much compassion for others who are feeling the same way, who are affected by traumas in their life. I have really struggled with the whole ‘why cannot I just get over this, others have it way worse than I do’. I cannot bare of thinking of others hurting worse than I am, but what I have learnt to say to myself and what I want to say to you, is that a trauma is a trauma. Dismissing your own experiences because someone has it worse off, is denying yourself the compassion you truly need. Offering yourself kindness and softness will allow you to heal without boundaries. And that is what you deserve. x
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