Dearest little L,

It is not okay that your father left just before you turned four and will refuse to ever explain what happened.

It is not okay that your mother bit you till you bled to teach you not to bite your brother when you were not even school age.

It is not okay that you were held responsible for begging her to have medical treatment that would save her life. The fact the she refused medical support after that meant that she suffered many years and blamed you. That was NOT YOUR FAULT.

It is not okay that you are not allowed to express your feelings. It is not okay that you are mentally, verbally and emotionally abused when you take a stand to say that something is unfair.

It is not okay to be forbidden to go to university. It is not normal for a parent to refuse to sign the paperwork that will mean you can get funding to go.

It is not normal to be repeatedly called selfish and lazy when you couldn’t do any more to help than you do. Believe me, Little L, if your grown up children did ten percent of what you did around the house, I’d be grateful.

It is not normal to have to walk three miles along roads with no paths to school because there is no bus and no one can be bothered to take you.

It is not normal to be dragged out of the home by your hair because you ask to go to the cinema with your friends.

It is not normal for a man to refuse to talk to his daughter for a year because she is driving 200 miles and running half an hour late for dinner.

It IS, however, normal, to feel angry about this. It is normal to call people out who treat you this badly. It is normal to not want people like that in your life. You have nothing to feel ashamed of if you say no to this kind of behaviour.

I am doing this for you now. I am saying to you that whilst you have no choice but to stay put as a child, you will have choices as an adult. You CAN protect your heart from abuse. It will take you many, many years to even begin to feel that you are worth enough to do that but you will get there. You will learn more lessons on the way. Some of them will hurt like hell and you will feel like you will never heal but you will. I promise you that you will. I promise you that I will not abandon you. I will cherish and comfort you when you cry. I will see you, really see you, on your bad days and love you anyway.

I can tell you that you are as precious as any wished for child. I can tell you that even though your parents considered you at best a possession and at worst an inconvenience and the most selfish person they ever met, you are NONE OF THOSE THINGS. You do not have to prove your worth to anyone. Just as a flower just IS beautiful, so are you.

Little L, you are a good friend. You will do anything to help others. You have a lovely smile and you can make people laugh. You will one day be a brilliant, compassionate teacher and have children of your own. You will break the cycle of abuse and always be a safe haven for them. You must also learn how to be a safe haven for yourself.

One day, I hope you learn that all the love you never received is in you. You don’t need to find it in others, you just need to keep throwing it out into the world. It will find its way back to you.

I spent two and a quarter hours with a psychotherapist today. With the aid of a whiteboard, green and red pens, a few tissues and a glass of water, we created a picture that showed my significant relationships. Every single one from my past involved invalidation of me, of my feelings. In the middle was a circle with the words “I don’t know who I am.”

The therapist (let’s call him H. He will be a regular feature so he needs a name of sorts), took a step back from his scribblings and observed that it is no wonder I am not too sure who I am. “I’m amazed you are standing”, came his response.

I am the sum of my coping strategies, I suggested. The children are testament to my ability to break a cycle of abuse. “Your children and grandchildren will reap the rewards of your ability to cope. Now let’s help you find value for yourself in all this” (or words to that effect; I am paraphrasing now, because I am pretty tired).

So, the wound analogy. The plaster is off. It’s been taken off before and the wound re-dressed by two courses of counselling and a course of CBT (if you justifiably need validation, don’t do CBT). I have many times removed the plaster, had a peep, and put the plaster back on. I am good at growing scabs.

The infection is real and ugly. What I thought would happen is that the plaster would come off and stay off. That I would have to wander around between sessions in H’s office with a gaping wound for all to see. What we did instead, with some validation and optimism, is put a clean plaster on for the week. I have been given some advice on how to keep it clean this week (let’s move away from the analogy for a moment – this means “look after your body, be gentle with your mind and here’s some emotions homework for you”).

H warned me that the process I will be going through is uncomfortable. It will be painful. It will involve recalling distressing events and trying to react to them in an authentic way. “When we see if a baby is okay in the womb, we check that the heart is beating before we check that the brain is growing.”

So how to proceed? By being careful, for now, to connect with validating people (I’ll learn how to cope better with the triggering, invalidating ones. This isn’t for my ego, it’s to stop causing myself distress while the wound is so raw). By practising exquisite self care. The coping strategies I have used are all worthy (when not taken to extremes), so they must continue. Therapy for the brain doesn’t mean that the body can take a back seat.

Finally, I need to believe that this will all feel better one day. I’m drawing some more circles now. Full of names of the people who love and support me. The people I trust. Both my past and my present are realities. I need to grieve the past realities and learn to really feel the full joy of the present ones. I think I will.

I have started, ever so slowly, to breathe again. I know that the only way I am going to clean this wound in me is by continuing with some exquisite self care while the damage gets examined and cleaned. With help.

I feel like I finally ripped the plaster off and what I found underneath horrified me. I knew it was messy and not healing. I just didn’t realise how deep the damage had gone. My instant reaction was that I was so infected I would never feel well. Never feel normal. Always feel like an outsider. Infect others. My next reaction was that I wanted it out NOW. That now I knew what was eating away at me, I could just get rid of it.

That’s not how trauma works. The effects of this infection have worked their way around my entire body (life). Now the plaster is off, I can spend some time reflecting on how it feels. I need help with that too. I need to access my anger and my sadness about the way I was treated as a child. I need to learn that it is okay to feel whatever I feel. I need to rebuild in a way that is sustainable, to stop outrunning pain and to connect with myself.

So what might happen? I might figure that all the methods of coping I have used haven’t worked and throw that baby out with the bath water. Or I could be sensible and gentle with all the parts of me that are tender and bruised and realise that all that self care WAS worthwhile. I just need a little help too.

So I will still exercise but not to an extreme. I don’t need to go faster and further all the time. I will still eat sensibly but not deny my body what it wants (today it was a whole avocado, two carrots and some hummus for dinner). I will go to bed early because I want to nurture my body, not because I want to switch my brain off. I will catch up with friends to enjoy and revel in their love and care, not because I hope they can take away my pain.

Today I travelled steadily and gently through the working day and afterwards had a cuppa and a natter with a dear friend. I thanked her for walking alongside me as we travel through life. I thanked her for loving me. I didn’t apologise for taking her time. I didn’t apologise for burdening her with information about the chapter of my life that I am in. This is massive progress for me. Maybe I am further along this journey of healing than I have given myself credit for.

On Saturday I will meet with a therapist who I hope can work with me to alleviate the impact of the emotional flashbacks. I hope we can work together to dial down the volume of my inner critic. I hope one day to get to the end of it having given my childhood not a moment’s thought. I think I deserve that. Actually, I KNOW I deserve that.

Now I know I can drop the twenty foot high walls around me, I have to choose my support team carefully. Before now I have practised being vulnerable in a less than wise way. I have chosen people who replicate those abusive parents. Psychology says that I am predisposed to do that, both because it feels so familiar but also in an attempt to repair the past. Imagine my psyche’s delight when the last person I picked to be vulnerable around was likely to abandon like my father AND blank me when it suited like my mother. All wrapped up in his own vulnerability and warmth. And not all bad. I refuse to believe anyone is. “Hurt people hurt people” is true. But as I read today, “making yourself available to be the punching bag in someone else’s battle doesn’t make you a good person. It just makes you available” (and means you get punched).

Back to me. Today I picked my team. I disclosed to two colleagues what was going on in life. The woman who sits next to me was a great listener and gave me the longest hug.

After work I then met with another woman. I have never discussed personal stuff with her before, though she is a high esteemed and trusted colleague who I had a good feeling about.

Reader, I struck gold. This woman listened. She didn’t just listen, she saw and heard me. We discussed the places I feel safe at work (not many, but thankfully my classroom is one). She got that I don’t feel safe. She understood that with her heart. She said she will be a safe place for me. We talked about using noise cancelling headphones to dial down the noise in the office that I find so threatening at times. She held my hands as I cried and stroked my hair. She talked about the little girl I had been and gave me a picture for her. She said this:

“Little L, you have been given a treasure chest. You open it, look at the things that people have put in it for you and say “these things are not for me”. But that is not the treasure for you. Look in the lid.”

I knew what she was going to say and I cried some more. In the lid is a mirror. “Little L, YOU are the treasure.”

I told her I felt like an oak tree. Again, a picture arrived (interesting, as I work in pictures too). She said “I sense you are the oak tree frightened of being struck by lightning. The fact is, the lightning will strike (has struck), but support will be put around it and you will grow into a new shape, more beautiful than before.”

She also said that she had a vision of me “abandoned to the joys of living.”

I want that so much. I am reaching the point where I KNOW that is what I deserve.

Today has not been all good. There have been points where I have felt scared and put my armour on. I have reached out to people who I definitely don’t need on my team. You know, the “there is nothing wrong with you” tribe. I mean, no, there is nothing wrong with me, but some wrong things have certainly happened and I have a right to feel angry about that.

I hope you have your team cheering you on, too. Let me tell you, it makes a world of difference to the challenges ahead.

I am the absolute QUEEN of superficial self care. I don’t drink alcohol or smoke. I exercise regularly. I eat mostly fresh, unprocessed food. I reach out to my friends. I get early nights.

What is not so good? The underneath stuff. The “getting brave about why you need so much self care” stuff. Sure, I know what the problems are AND what has caused them, but I keep letting them happen. There goes my inner critic again. Treading the line between dealing with stuff and berating myself for not doing it better, sooner.

I feel like I have uncovered a disease. For years I have been playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms and not realising that it won’t get any better until I treat the actual disease gnawing away at me.

Self care can help with symptoms but treatment is needed for the cause.

However, the self care stuff is still important. I still need to, more than ever, be very gentle with myself. Eat well, get some air, connect with reliable people who I know love me, do some work, sleep. I am adding in a regular sports massage (I am a ball of tension, as you may be able to imagine) and I have enquired about therapy. £££ but I’ve thrown everything except money at this and nothing has worked quite well enough yet.

My medications of choice so far for the searing pain have been love, sex, a marriage, exercise, crochet, climbing, being a workaholic, eating too much, eating too little. The list goes on. Let me tell you – none of them have worked.

Hi. I am 45 years old. In a couple of days I will be 46. For the last forty years or so, I have suffered the pain of trauma and its aftermath. I would like to deal with the pain (which I accept I may have to live with forever), but I am done suffering now.

There are no quick fixes for the disease that is childhood trauma. Nothing can easily repair the fractured sense of self I have as a result of abandonment by my father and emotional abuse by my mother. I have found many coping strategies to mask the symptoms, reduce their impact, and people who know me would say that I basically have my shit together. I am self aware, kind (though not necessarily always to myself), successful in my career (hi, perfectionist!), fit and healthy and I have quite a few people who really love me. I broke the cycle of dysfunction well enough to raise two children who, whilst they have their own battles, basically have their shit together too.

What does happen, though, on a daily basis, is that a war wages in my head. That’s what I need to dial down, before it eats my poor brain so much it will not function.

I would like to find ways of turning down the volume on my inner critic (I’m even telling myself off for not seeking therapy earlier when I have been a bit busy keeping life together for my children as a single parent for ten years). I would like to find ways of reducing the impact of a flashback (some last seconds, some last MONTHS) and mostly I would like to feel good enough. Move away from the perfectionist and gently nurture the desperately sad child in me so that I can get on and enjoy a regular, good enough life.

I could write this in a journal, but if I put it out there, there’s a chance it might help someone else. And there’s a chance I will get brave enough to let people in so they can cheer me on too. Life is better shared, eh.

Thanks for joining me.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton