I have written in past posts about my struggles with friendships, especially with women. I was clingy, insecure, deferred to others’ opinions versus having confidence in my own, and needed constant reassurance that people cared. And I didn’t always select the healthiest of relationships. Over time, I came to realize I’d been looking for my mother my whole life. Not the best foundation for a healthy adult relationship.
I don’t deny any of that. And I fully acknowledge that, try as I might to do better, the pattern repeated even as I didn’t want it to. I was mystified by my neediness and ashamed because my adult self viewed me as acting like a child. While I managed my professional life like the forty or fifty-year-old adult I was, why was I acting like an insecure teenager in my friendships?
As I worked with various therapists to overcome these insecurities, I kept failing. No matter how much we talked it through, I just could NOT get past it. Until one day, during some recent work with my current therapist, we struck on the problem.
We were doing a yoga exercise that involved my being on my back in a vulnerable position. Even as I relaxed into the pose, I found myself getting more and more anxious, afraid, and downright terrified. She called a halt to that work, and instead we discussed what had happened. She was quiet for a moment, then mentioned something about “somatic memories” and “object constancy.”
I’ll get into those in the next post. But for now, she basically explained that the reaction I’d had, as well as the insecurities and some other reactions we’d worked on, were all from a very early “pre-verbal” stage of life.
Trying to understand exactly what that meant, I asked my therapist if that was related to the sexual assault my father inflicted on me during a car ride when I was three. It was an assault I still remember clearly, but given my age, would that have been “pre-verbal?”
She shook her head and quietly said, “No. It would have been much earlier than that.”
I took that in for a moment. “How much earlier than being three?”
These next two posts will be a bit more technical. I know what I lived through and what I experience now. But I wanted to understand from experts what the mechanisms are that harmed me, and how I can help heal myself.
That said, I am not going to make this a science paper. For readers who may want to dig deeper, at the end of the next post I will provide some of the books, researchers/authors, and topics I used for my own answers. Also, in the text below, there are links to connect to. And, as I always recommend, a good therapist is priceless. They know the very latest information from new research.
What part(s) of the body are affected by trauma?
Most books and articles will talk about the “nature of trauma…its effects on a person.” Terms come up like HPA axis, stress hormones, body organs, immune systems, metabolic syndrome. So getting a short answer to “exactly what part of the body is affected?” is not that simple. And I am not being flippant when I say I wonder if the best answer to that question is “everything.” I am not a doctor. But I think that answer has a lot of truth to it.
When a traumatic event happens, the bottom line is that it impacts a person…the human being…the living organism and so, all its structures. The reverberations of that trauma course through the whole body. The degree of the effects depends partly on how severe, frequent, or long-lasting the trauma was. Part on the person themself. Maybe if it’s not severe or only happened one time, a person might weather it okay, fight off the stress effects, or quickly heal from any.
But what if one’s entire childhood, marriage, or life circumstance was a series of repeated traumatic events? Then those effects multiply and deepen. And they “cost” you in very real and multiple ways.
Until 2009, I didn’t really get it. Despite all I had lived through, I never considered that I had been “traumatized.” I knew I had been harmed, abused, even. But I never realized that “PTSD” applied to me, much less a diagnosis of severe PTSD with anxiety, depression, and emotional dissociation. I thought those things applied to someone else who’d had it “worse than me.”
But slowly, I started to grasp that the recurrent bouts of anxiety I felt so often were actually “emotional flashbacks.” That some of my health issues came from stress. And that the nightmares and medication for depression and anxiety spoke to deeper wounds than I’d ever understood. I’d written things off as I’d “just” been abused, never understanding how much harm had been done.
It was only slowly that I came to truly appreciate that severity… and how much work there still was to do. There were still so many things that I couldn’t get past and so many issues I revisited again and again. There is that saying that if life presents the same problem over and over, it means you’re not done with it. So my lessons were not finished.
There are times of relative ease in my work with my therapist. Almost placid. Moments of rest and regrouping. The months after Mom’s death were not this. And I will simply say that I am grateful for the support of my husband and son, friends, and the wisdom of my therapist. This is not a journey to undertake alone.
The sessions were frequent and intense, with Yoga breathing, cognitive behavioral therapy, and EMDR, a process I’ll talk more about later. Suffice it to say, it is a method to help release and finish processing trauma that was put away raw, alive, and unhealed. An understatement.
And there was painting. Lots of painting. The only journaling I could do was to jot down the things we covered in the sessions, any insights from them, and all the questions that needed answers. Essentially, that unsealed pit of long-hidden emotions was in the driver’s seat, revealing to us what the next work was.
And on this day, the mental wrestling of “Should I? Shouldn’t I?” came to a stop. We dove in, and it unloaded….
Eventually, those fog banks in my psyche concentrated themselves into a dense wall of black, looming ominously on the horizon. And all those aching, unidentified emotions were tightened into such a Gordian knot that only bold action stood a chance to untangle it. But…which thread to pull first?
And as a side note — I was also trying to hold all this at bay while I continued to work and manage the tasks of life. But there was no longer any stuffing them back behind any dam. They were out and letting me know there was more coming. So in my private moments, I painted, and tried to make sense of what was happening. And I learned that the longer you wait to begin, the tighter the knot binds itself together.
So, my choice was simple.
Do I spend the rest of my life avoiding “whatever it was,” forcing a smile, using “mind over matter” to pretend all was fine, and ignoring any evidence to the contrary?
In my first “baseline reading,” I spoke of emotional flashbacks. But, another fairly frequent “trauma companion” is nightmares. I’ll share more about them later, but as part of this “baseline,” I will give some background here.
While decades of therapy have healed much, nightmares still show up fairly often. Having dealt with them for years, I am *almost* used to them — at least most of the time. And generally, I shed their emotional upsets pretty quickly. In fact, in some of my recent ones, I even show up more as a fighter now than as that victim from the past. So, I guess that is progress.
But sometimes a nightmare will come along that can still blindside me with an emotional knock-out punch. That’s an indication that there is something I still need to work on because nightmares reveal where the heart is still bleeding.
The Trigger: Trip Planning
Yesterday I set up travel plans for us to go to visit our son in Savannah to celebrate my 70th birthday. Now it should be a short story — decide to go, settle the dates, make travel and hotel reservations, and then go and have a wonderful time. Yes. Maybe for many, that is the way it works. But…
For years I have struggled to “ask,” whether it be for help, for something I want, for some I need. It’s taken years but I am getting better at it. Yet even when I can now ask, I still struggle to feel I “deserve.”
So it was no small thing for me to say that I wanted this trip for my birthday. In fact, it was a major victory. I wasn’t interested in presents or big parties, just being with my immediate family — my treasure in life. But about that whole “I deserve” thing….
The alarm hasn’t yet gone off, but I am awake. I’ve been so since about 5:30, like many mornings. The oblivion of sleep, its escape from reality, at least on the nights I have no nightmares, is over. While my regular blanket keeps me groggy and warm, the weight of the other blanket starts pressing me into the mattress. It is the heavy sensation of feeling scared, hopeless, and like I have done something wrong and will soon be in trouble. I neither want to stay in bed nor get up. I wish I could just sleep in oblivion all day. Getting up means facing another day of writing, struggling to live with the pain it releases, and holding the chaos I feel inside.
I get up anyway, because by now, in my 7th decade, I know that this is part of my life, my existence, at least for the time being. Even as I felt great last night, felt ready to take on the world, yet again, this morning, the black cloud was there to greet me when my eyes opened and consciousness returned. But life has taught me that, like the weather, everything eventually changes. You just have to wait long enough. So for now, I just focus on my “routine.”
The routine. It is something I had to create after I retired from teaching at Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. When I was working, I didn’t have time to feel all of this. I had to get up, get moving, battle traffic, and then revel in the last job of my life — which was my total joy.
So let’s get something straight right now – because I am a direct person, all my friends know that, and I prefer to be clear. This is not a book about a person’s journey from harm to forgiveness. If you are looking for a tome on the blessings of forgiving your abuser or how to achieve it, I recommend you look elsewhere.
My journey is about healing…restoring my soul from a lifetime of trauma and pain that was inflicted on me, and that I have carried way too long. And just to be clear, to me, forgiveness and healing are not the same things. They may both come about, or not, but they are not the same thing, and for me, both are not required. So first and foremost, I write to heal.
If I am to be totally honest, I don’t give a shit about forgiveness anymore…about whether it comes or not. In fact, the next person who tells me that I must forgive because it is the only way to happiness, or repeats that all-too-often quoted trope, that withholding forgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, I will tell you to just keep on walking. Unless I am in a bad mood, in which case I may say it slightly differently.
Painting by author – Author as an infant on hood of her father’s car
Driven to paint
Before I share below a sampling of the visual elements I am using in my book, I thought I would share the “WHY” I not only used them, but HAD to use them.
Rebuilding my life
The book incorporates the story not only of the abuse I endured, but also of my journey from my parents’ house—the depression and despair—to my rebuilding, and my creating of a meaningful life.
Even after the initial crises of my escape and recovery with the help of good therapists and friends, I would return for rounds of therapy off and on throughout adulthood. Given all of the life lessons I had missed out on during my early phases of life, I looked at it as “preventive maintenance.” Why “wing something” when I wasn’t sure how to handle it and risk messing it up, then have to fix it? Better to learn as I went along.
The traumas of life
This approach worked well, and I thought I had finally put the past to rest…until midlife. Menopause hit. My husband almost died. The dog did die. My son left for college. All at once. But even worse, those new traumas blasted open a well of trapped emotions I never realized were even there. Like opening Pandora’s box, it unleashed a flood of unresolved depression, anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares…severe PTSD. At the time, I had no idea what was going on. Desperate and having major anxiety, I began working with a skilled trauma specialist who was and remains a godsend in my life.
This was fortunate because, in addition to everything that I was dealing with, I also began navigating the last chapters of my parents’ lives and their deaths. It was then that I realized just how much work I still had to do.
The past comes calling to claim its due
Those first decades of adulthood had been about building a life. Now, it was about returning to the past to address the well of unfinished business and unresolved pain that had come forward to claim its due. It had patiently waited a lifetime…my son came first all those years. But now, it was time for me…and that long-suffering child.
However, I had no tools to reach the pain, to know how much was there, or to express it. I only knew its presence through the agony of body memories and nightmares. That was when I made the discovery that art heals.
This blog shares excerpts of my draft memoir — working title: “I Thrive.” While not graphic, it will discuss aspects of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse I endured and my journey back to healing…and thriving.These entries start in June, 2025 and continue into the present. Prior entries cover other topics
Photo by author, circa 1959-1960
To be the illustration
Memoir expert and author Marion Roach Smith described the genre of memoir this way:
“Memoir is not about you. It’s about something and you are its illustration.”
Another author, Trish Lockard, added that this genre is not just a recounting of things that happened to you because, after all — “Stuff happens to everybody.” Instead, memoir captures one’s reflections about an event when enough time has passed for a change, a transformation, to take place. Those insights gained over time through effort are the gift to the reader—the takeaway.
To only write a list of everything done to you in life without the reflections is like dumping a pile of ingredients on the counter and calling it a cake. It is only a cake when that pile of ingredients has gone through the crucible of a hot oven and been transformed into the real takeaway — dessert. Only then does it have “purpose and meaning.”
I loved how one author, whose name I cannot find, summed it up:
“Don’t just confess. Digest.”
Digestion is change and makes something useful…nutritious. It gives back. And digestion is the unfinished business of my life.
After seven decades of silence, it is time for me to look back, digest the raw material of my life, and obtain the nutrition— the insights that give it meaning. It is not: “Look at what was done to me” so much as the answers to the questions: “Because of what was done, what am I doing with it? What does it mean?” So, my life will be the illustration of that “something” that might have meaning and nutrition for all.
28 years of abuse…and building a “beautiful mosaic”
Soul Mosaic 