About Me

Hi, I’m Hayley. Welcome to my blog whatdoyounotice.com. I’m here to start a conversation about childhood trauma. I want to talk openly about child abuse, to try to be fearless and honest. To hopefully begin this I’m going to be sharing my own experience of childhood trauma and how I’ve tried to overcome this and become free, when sometimes it has felt impossible . I’ve spent all of my life having to deal with the trauma of being abused as a young child. Before I started to consciously deal with the abuse, it dealt with me showing me the truth by working itself out through my mind and body I was remembering my trauma and telling my truth through other means than voicing it. I got ill a lot with tonsillitis as a kid, no surprise my throat/ voice was affected because of how I was being silenced. I was an addict. I was misdiagnosed with mental health labels. I took huge risks and put myself in danger, usually resulting in damaging consequences for me. I had abusive relationships and tolerated them as if it was normal because for me it was. I became a runner, something which has saved me. Running for my life, literally, as if I was running away from the people who abused me. I’ve done a lot of work to try to get free from my past and I believe I can say that I’m free now in so many ways. Today I know who I am because of what I went through. I have been able to feel what my childhood was like I have felt the waste land that it was. The truth has been made clear to me and I no longer have to repress it or dissociate it and not feel it. I have faced it and felt it. I know all of it and I now have peace within and a voice to speak it.It has taken a long time, years to get here and I have been helped by a lot of good people along the way. I have discovered going through this process a love and wonder for all the children that I had to become in order to survive. I was a fractured child, fractured by trauma and I became many parts, many children lost to each other in my mind, all carrying a different memory and having to bear that alone in order to protect me. Through the treatment I have completed all of my children are now integrated and have come together as one. I have an internal family of small warriors. It’s a beautiful thing, a complex wonderful way to deal with unbearable suffering. I was not loved as a kid I accept that now, but I had a family in Nature, a sanctuary in the trees, birds, flowers, animals and all the natural world around me. Nature was holding me all the time even though I did not know it, but I do now. Today I live free of any abuse, free from power and control. That’s a massive thing when you have a back ground like I did. I have had to fight so hard to get here, internally and externally, it’s been a battle, extremely painful with lots of obstacles along the way, but I have never given up the commitment I made to the kid I once was, to get out from under the pain and suffering that was given to me by adults who didn’t give a fuck whether I lived or died. I can say now that all the pain was worth it to get here. To feel my pain is to be alive.To feel my pain is to be free and true to the children I once was who couldn’t feel that pain because it wasn’t safe to do so. I finally made my emotional pain my friend, the exiled friend come home to me, to us, and when I did this I did not feel alone anymore. I saw that all the suffering I had been trying to avoid was me, was us, and I could no longer reject myself. It is so, so lonely to be a survivor of child abuse. It’s not something you can talk about with anyone, despite it being an experience so many of us have suffered. There is stigma attached to it when there shouldn’t be and actually being believed by the organisations meant to protect us is a massive issue I want to talk about. I want to share because I am free now, I have my voice and for so long I suffered in silence because it was the only way I could survive. I’m hoping others will join me in sharing. We all deserve to be free from a painful past and live safely with ourselves and those around us in the present.