I’ve been thinking lately about just how I came to be in the position where I could attempt to recover from the trauma and abuse in my childhood. Because I didn’t get there by choice. I was dying from my addictions, alcohol and drugs, the medicines I’d used to stop me feeling. The chemicals that kept me numb, on top of being numb or dissociated. I remember the first time I got really drunk at a school party. It felt like being released into another world. I felt safe. Warm and safe, cocooned in this feeling of not being able to be touched, by anything. From that moment I had found my solution to living. When I discovered drugs, they only doubled down on that sensation of being in a bubble. Free, without a care in the world. And so I continued for another 15 or so years, reaching my rock bottom at 30, locked in an old psychiatric ward, set up as a detox unit. Locked away for my own safety, yes I could have left, but by that stage there really was no where left to go, and I knew it. Afraid of dying, afraid of living. How to live ? That was the question. How to live without the self medicating that had kept me going. I had to learn another way to live if I was going to be clean and sober, if I was going to stay alive. So, I did what I was told, by the staff in the detox unit, the people in the 12 Step meetings I went to, and later the women I would be in a group with, and my counsellors in rehab. I did everything they suggested, staying sober and clean, and then after a while I started to thaw out. I began to feel. That’s when the real work started.
It’s the feelings, the unlocking of all those emotions and memories I had used on, that got me thinking recently about the beginning of my healing. Because now, 30 years later I’m still recovering, the same way, through getting in touch with emotions I was not allowed to feel, I could not feel as a child. Feelings I had to forget, to dissociate. Feelings I did not understand, that had no where, no one safe to go to, except inside, to my internal system. So, it’s been my world of emotions, experiences and memories, all those parts of me, forgotten, that I had to leave behind, in my mind and body, that I decided to commit to in my early sobriety. I made a decision, when I realised the full extent of how much the little girl I was had to bury, to allow that child to feel whatever it was she needed to feel, to be able to tell me everything that had happened. I made a promise to myself I would do this for as long as it took to become free. And I believe that is what I have done. Obviously not alone. With the help of wonderful people, counsellors, a best friend who always saw me and loves me, and of course my daughter, Grace, who brought a love with her that saved me.
I allowed the child in me to finally feel, to remember, to talk, and I carried on doing this, until they had told me everything. Along the way I discovered I had more than one child who needed to talk. I was living with an adaptation to extreme childhood trauma that is known as dissociative identity disorder, but I was not properly diagnosed with this, until much later in my recovery. Quite simply I had created many parts to my personality, all of which had held the trauma I had to forget, to survive. All of who protected me consiously from the truth of unbearable experiences along with the unspeakable emotions attached to them. I say quite simply, but living this way to survive is not simple at all. It requires a tremendous energy to suppress such trauma and it takes a huge toll on the body, carrying all of that unfelt, unexpressed suffering. Getting clean and sober was my opportunity to uncover all of that stuff locked inside, what was dissociated in my early years and which had been further suppressed by my addictions. Addiction though is also a great way to try to get seen. Out of control, anti social, raging, promiscuous, don’t give a fuck behaviour. Shock value that cried out, see me.
The simple part for me was how I dealt with those frozen, young parts of me. The children. I treated them as I would have treated any child. Like the children I worked with for years in child protection social work. I noticed them, paid attention to them, listened, I allowed them to feel and to talk. My job as I saw it, was as mother. I needed to make them feel safe and I believe that stopping the chemicals in sobriety was that first step in achieving such safety. When I stayed stopped after a while, they started to know I would allow all their emotions and memories. That it was finally safe enough for all of them to have a voice, because I as mother was giving permission. The freedom I had never had once as a kid. And so over the course of many years it has become safer and safer to allow those parts of me to reveal everything. That has meant going right back in age, in time, reliving the trauma and creating a new story of triumph and hope. Mothers hold their child’s pain, until it has passed. They say I am here, you can tell me anything. They allow the screams , the tears , the thoughts and the pain. They hold it for as long as it needs to be held. Until it has been felt. And then it starts to subside, with mother and child having a new knowledge of what it was they survived. Realising they are awesome, made of fire, made of love because they carried this, all this with the one goal. To stay alive. So we see the great love and commitment this takes on behalf of the child we are holding and hearing. We are changed through this experience, and one by one as each child comes forward we become whole, we become a family , who knows each other, supports each other and knows full well what we all did to live. No matter how painful this way has been, it has been my way to seeing the truth, so my way of becoming free. I could not have achieved this without committing to EMDR therapy. It was the only therapy which accessed the dissociated trauma stored in my brain , so I could truly relive it and feel it all. Until I found EMDR all of the children in me were still , up to a point invisible. They are not invisible anymore I made sure of this. All I had to give them to heal was free, a commitment to love them, to understand them and to be there.