About Me

Hi, I’m Hayley. Welcome to my blog whatdoyounotice.com. I’m here to discuss child abuse and the trauma it causes. I want to talk openly about child abuse, to try to be fearless and honest. To begin this I’m going to share my own experience, how I’ve tried to overcome to become free, when sometimes it’s 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 it, it dealt with me showing me the truth by working itself out through my mind and body. I got ill a lot with tonsillitis as a child, no surprise my throat and voice were affected because of how I was being silenced. Like many survivors I became an addict, self medicating my pain. I was misdiagnosed with mental health labels, and took huge risks, putting myself in danger, usually resulting in damaging consequences. I had abusive relationships, tolerating them, as if they were normal. For me those types of relationships were what I was used to from my family. I became a runner, something which has saved me. Running for my life, as if I was running from the people who abused me. I’ve done a lot of work to try to get free from my past, I believe I can say that I’m free now in so many ways.

Today I know who I am because of what I suffered. I’ve been able to feel what my childhood was like, I’ve felt the waste land it was. The truth has been made clear to me, since I got clean and sober. I no longer have to repress or dissociate my emotions and body memories. I have the truth because I have felt it. I know it through the holding of my pain and I have reached peace from giving myself this care. I can use my voice to speak this truth and attempt to give hope to other survivors. It has taken a long time, years to get here. Along the way I have been helped by a lot of good people. I have discovered going through this very painful process, a love and wonder for all the children I had to become in order to survive. I was a fractured child, fractured by trauma and so I became many parts, many children lost to each other in my mind, all carrying a different memory, having to bear that alone in order to protect me and my consciousness. I live with the diagnosis Dissociative Identity Disorder as a result of this adaptation to the trauma. Through completing 7 years of EMDR therapy I have integrated all of those fractured child parts, they have come together as one. I now live with an internal family of small warriors. It’s a beautiful thing, a complex adaptation created to deal with unbearable suffering, that through a lot of work I’ve transformed into a soulful way to live. I was not loved as a child, I accept that now, but I did have a family in Nature. A sanctuary for me in trees and birds, flowers, animals and all of the natural world around me. Nature held me with my love and fascination for it. Today I live free of abuse and free from power and control. That’s a huge thing to achieve when you come from a family like mine. I’ve had to fight so hard to get here, internally and externally. It’s been a battle, an extremely painful one, with lots of obstacles along the way. I’ve never given up on the commitment I made when I got sober, to the child I once was, to allow her to show and feel all the pain she had to forget in order to survive. I think I can say that all the pain was worth it to become free. To feel my pain is to be true to the child I once was. That girl who couldn’t feel, because it wasn’t safe to do so. I finally made the emotional pain of the trauma my friend, the exile come home to me, to us. 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 being 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’s such stigma attached to it and victim blaming. Actually being believed by the organisations meant to protect us is an issue I want to talk about, as I too have been let down by those organisations. I want to share because I’m 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.