My Personal Journey as a Trauma Survivor
One of the most important lessons I have learned is to live life with a grateful heart and mind. It used to be so easy for me to take things for granted. I’d go through my day without giving any notice to any number of small miracles and blessings that were happening all around me.… Continue reading Living a Grateful Life
Today, my therapist brought up discontinuing our therapy sessions, citing that I am doing well. I felt an instantaneous resistance to the idea. I had been seeing a therapist every week or two for nine years. When she left the organization, I was given a new therapist, Margie. I connected with her right away. She… Continue reading Last Day of Therapy
The trauma I had experienced as the result of family violence and incest, the gang rape when I was twelve, and the rapes when I was seventeen and twenty-six resides in my body. Trapped in my cellular memory, these events permeate my very being. They are a part of every muscle movement and every… Continue reading Trauma and My Mind, Body, Spirit Connection
The most difficult things for me to do were to share with someone what I was going through and to ask for help. I had great difficulty trusting people. I wouldn’t let anyone get to know the real me. I had thought that, by sharing my feelings or asking for help, I would make myself… Continue reading I Don’t Have to Go It Alone
I’ve been plagued with nightmares since the abuse began when I was eight years old. Drowning nightmares. Nightmares in which I’m being chased by my brother Kevin with a knife in his hand. Nightmares in which I’m suffocating. Nightmares where someone is trying to break into my home. Nightmares that relive the gang rape when… Continue reading Nightmares
How can I describe the feeling of being fragmented to people who have always felt whole? Perhaps none of us feel completely whole. Perhaps we all feel that we have lost a part of ourselves along the way. As a victim of violence, incest, and rape it took a while for me to become truly… Continue reading Feeling Fragmented
Silence. Does such a thing really exist? I’m not so sure. My thoughts thunder like a triggered minefield. They criticize, they punish. They demand perfection. They repeatedly impose upon me the notion that I have nothing of value to share with the world. Negative thinking has been a part of my psyche for as long… Continue reading Battleground
