Day 12 Reflection: Heal

I have been in a state of healing for most of my life.

I grew up with childhood trauma — sexual abuse and rape, bullying, an unstable parent. I will talk about resiliency later in this series, because today I want to talk about healing.

This is hard to write, because society tends to tell survivors to ‘get over it already’. The heart and mind don’t work that way. Childhood trauma changes one’s whole trajectory — how one sees oneself, what one believes is possible, how abnormal one feels compared to the children around them who haven’t faced the trauma and who blithely live their lives without picking around the traumatic experience.

I didn’t start healing until I left my hometown for college. Before that, I was still immersed in the toxic culture of the town and could not see my life as anything but pain. In my new life, however, I met people who loved me for myself, wreckage and all.

It was only then that I began to heal. I think love is an integral part of healing, because it shows us that we are more than the sum of our damage. It’s hard to let love in as an abuse survivor, but I had friends who persisted in loving me, and I became the person I had been denied.

I’m still healing, many many years later. It’s much better; the nightmares come rarely, and the memories have faded to neutral-toned snapshots, devoid of the pain. Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out if I hadn’t had the childhood I had. But my life has turned out so much better than I had dreamed as a child, which I credit to healing.

I will likely heal for the rest of my life, as do many (if not all) of us. But healing is possible.

I’

Day 7 Reflection: Resilience

Resilience is a concept that has passed from the psychological lexicon to everyday language. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors” (American Psychological Association (APA), 2019). More simply put, it is the ability to bounce back.

The person with resilience as a trait recovers from being let go from a job by planning to regain employment rather than falling into helplessness. They recover from life-altering trauma stronger than before. They star in our inspirational stories, and we admire them for their blossoming in the face of adversity, their ability to bounce back.

We need to remember two things about resilience. The first one, as the APA (2019) reminds us, is that resilience is a common trait. People in general have displayed this trait countless times, after major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina; terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and Oklahoma City, as well as during common events such as illness, death of a loved one, and loss of a job.

The other thing we need to remember is that resilience is fostered by a series of internal and external factors. The biggest factor in resilience, according to the APA (2019) is “caring and supportive relationships both inside and outside the family“. This is not a small thing; people need other people to make sense of adversity and tragedy.

Other factors include:

· The capacity to make realistic plans and take steps to carry them out.

· A positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities.

· Skills in communication and problem solving.

· The capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses. (APA, 2019).

To become resilient, we can work to develop these networks and skills. Those of us with disordered childhoods or other challenges may choose to see a therapist to get coaching on how to develop these skills, and we should view counseling as a positive.

We can also contribute to others’ resilience by providing that community support needed to foster resilience. As such, we need to embrace people in their messiness and neediness, allowing them the process of bouncing back from their crises and challenges. As much as we want to take the pain of the crisis or challenge away from someone, our role may simply be to listen and hold space for that person.

Resilience is not a rare gift. It is a key aspect of our humanity, to be nurtured and developed.

American Psychological Association (APA) (2019). The road to resilience. Available: https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience[March 12, 2019].

Still thinking about it …

I’ve been thinking some more about whether I should continue to write. What I’ve discovered turns out to be rather complex — but why expect my life to ever be simple?

Here’s my thoughts:

I love to write — I always have.

I’ve been writing since (as far as I remember) third grade. I’d like to think I’ve gotten better by then 🙂

But I’ve always liked to show people what I’ve written as well. Why?

My writing is personal. For example, this is very personal. I want people to know me.
As a child, I experienced a certain amount of abuse, with which came what is now known as gaslighting — being told my observations of being abused were invalid.
I still silently thank my junior high English teacher for actually reading and liking what I wrote — especially as my mother would always read my writing and say, “I think your sister writes better.” Apparently, she never expressed to my sister that she wrote well, so you can guess what was going on there.
My junior high English teacher was my lifeline during those years. Truly. I had spent my childhood bullied (for being “weird” — but not the type of “weird” that encourages teachers to introduce the class to sensitivity training) and this culminated in a horrifying sexual assault which I, of course, didn’t report. I will admit that I was at risk for suicide in eighth grade. I will always see writing as my lifeline, but it’s nice if someone’s holding the other end.

When I get really stressed, the importance of the second point outweighs the first part.

Believe it or not, I’m not an anxious person. In fact, usually my stress is because I’m wrestling with tendencies of mine, including:

need for external validation (probably for the reasons above)
need to not feel alone/isolated (probably for the reasons above)
wrestling with perfectionistic tendencies (probably for the reasons above.)

So, in other words, the question “to write or not to write?” gets influenced by the stuff above. Conclusions I’ve come to include:

Recognition from “out there” will never be enough. Why? Because nothing that happens to me as an adult can erase the fact that I had that childhood. “Inner child” stuff is extremely real. As an adult, I’m the only one who can reassure myself when I get in these moods. I just don’t know what to say to myself yet.
I will never know how good my writing is, so I might as well give up trying to do so via Google Analytics (where I got that stat that the average user spends 30 seconds on my site) or book sales.

Now all I have to do is figure out whether the time I spend on writing is worth it … I’ll get back to you.

Divergence — Trauma and Fairy Tales

“No amount of something you don’t need will substitute for something you do need.” — Bernard Poduska

I wrote the following essay to explore why I felt jealous of Grace, my current protagonist. Because she has been strongly focused on developing her musical talent, adolescence was something she had little time for. However, on her adventures, she has to deal with Ichirou, who is about her age, and Greg, who is a few years older. She’s definitely starting to notice the opposite sex as I write. And I got jealous of her:
*****

I suspect everyone has a fairy tale of their own writing that they hug to themselves, as a spell against trauma. The existence of the fairy tale fills that hole in their heart that the terror tore out of them, the recitation of that fairy tale to themselves chains and locks the dungeon door so their demon can’t escape. Moreover, if they could live their fairy tale to the end, the demon would be slain and the hole in their heart would be healed.

The fairy tales are as varied as the people who hold them and the trauma they’ve suffered. But they include this one word, as an incantation: “If …”

If the prince would fall in love with me, it would take away the terror and pain of my adolescence. That is my fairy tale.

My adolescence resembled Stephen King’s “Carrie”, without the ability to torch my tormentors. One of the acts perpetrated against me obliterated my innocence and stunted my adolescent development. I was thirteen at the time. I had all the crushes a typical teen girl entertained, but shame at even thinking of men as men shrouded my reverie.

Hence the fairy tale — if the prince would fall in love with me, I might be normal …

But no amount of something I don’t need will substitute for something I do need. The prince will never be enough, because only in fantasy does the prince truly understand the extent of damage
I suffered, and understanding is the key to the fairy tale. The prince can only interact with me at the current moment, and I am married, no longer that adolescent who needed healing. The hole in my heart will be there, will always be there, although it doesn’t ache as much as before.

The reality of life beyond the fairy tale is that everyone has a hurt that their fairy tale will never fix.