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I am the person I am today because of my trauma, not despite it
My biggest battle is accepting my childhood trauma and the effects it has had and continues to have on my life and its overall quality. More accurately, I struggle the most with accepting that because of my posttraumatic stress responses, my role as a mother has been impaired. As a victim of childhood abuse and trauma, I am especially sensitive towards the fact that because of my own “condition” my child is suffering too. I can easily go down the spiral of blaming myself for not being the mother I wish I could be, for the things I have done or haven’t done because I wasn’t well myself. Because I am…
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How my son starting school is helping me heal trauma
For the last more than three months now I’ve been through a whirlwind of a storm. I’ve never thought that my son staring school will bring so much up. More and more I realise how isolated I’ve been and how much I’ve lost contact with the outside world. More accurately, I’ve suspected that but the clash of reentering seems to be taking me much more effort and costing me much more energy than I’ve ever imagined. I know there are many reasons for this – I am and always have been a very sensitive person and being away from work for 8 years now has put me in a very…
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Childhood emotional neglect – the hidden root of my pain
I just had my second EMDR therapy session. In EMDR we focus on a particular memory from our life – usually a traumatic one. I was working with an image of me when I was a child and my mother who was particularly unresponsive to my needs. Just to remind you, at the beginning of therapy my therapist confirmed that I was emotionally deprived/neglected as a child. Since then I read the book Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Dr Jonice Webb which further helped me understand my “diagnosis”. The book very well explains what emotional neglect is – it’s not about what happened but about what…
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My Pain is My Power
Two weeks ago I started seeing a therapist. During the two times we met, we talked and went over the details of my past. We started with memories from my childhood and moved towards the more recent past. We made a plan – a timeline of particularly traumatic experiences and we’re going to work with each memory and event separately. I haven’t had the opportunity to talk freely about my past and everything that has happened so far. I had a brief experience of therapy back in Ireland right after my sister died but at the time, I had no idea of the magnitude of traumatic stress I was experiencing.…
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“If I only could make them happy…”
My inner journey of healing and discovery is reaching a turning point. For the past 5 years, I’ve been digging and going deeper and more inward like it was my job. And it was my full-time job – I’ve taken this task of nurturing self-understanding and awareness so seriously, it became my primary focus and priority. Layer by layer, I’ve been stripping old programmes, paradigms, and conditioning. I was determined to get to the core of things, to the root of all pain and ailments, emotional and psychological. Last year in September, I stumbled upon one piece of the puzzle – my mother had suffered from a mental condition and…
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How my recent job rejection helped me heal and love myself
Last Monday I applied for a job position as a writer. It’s been many years since I worked as an employee and I’ve experienced a fair bit of disappointments on the professional front. But I thought all this was behind me now and since the opportunity was ticking my boxes and I met the requirements, I went for it with my best intentions. The hiring company was the online publication Bright Side and they wanted me to pass a test. After a couple of days of communicating with the HR, a broken link, and a slight delay, I got to the challenge. I didn’t pass it. But let me start from…
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An unexpected healing experience during the holiday season
I am writing this on 31 December 2018 and so far this holiday season has proven unexpected. For first time ever my partner, son and I got to stay at home for the holidays. No travelling, no other people’s traditions or expectations – we put the start and foundation of our family tradition. This is something I’ve longed for for a very long time. I’ve never had a strong family of my own and I barely have any memories of our time together, if there was any “togetherness” at all. Having my own family has always been like a guiding star for me – something I’ve always, even subconsciously, strived for.…
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How childhood trauma robs your power away and how to take it back
This summer I spent about a month at my father’s house with my son. It wasn’t our first time and, as I’d expected, it was tumultuous. A part of me knew it was time to stand up to some of the dysfunction in my family of origin and confront it. I could only hope that this experience was going to bring me some resolutions and it would prove empowering. And it did. For the first week or so the usual, generations-old, themes of guilt and shame, insecurity and inadequacy were saturating the air until it came to a boil. There were tears and screaming, anger and pain – suppressed emotions and…
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How trauma and codependency in childhood can cause toxic mommy guilt
I often question why I feel so much guilt as a mother towards my little boy. It’s not only crippling my own experience of being a mother but also sending inaccurate messages to my son which shape the way he views himself and the world. I feel stricken with guilt every time I feel the effects of my trauma. I blame myself for not being able to shake off the sadness or depression I feel, for the anger that sometimes I can’t hold or the negativity that my critical mind is keeping me a captive to. I feel shame every time I’m not at my best for letting my son down. When…
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The shame around being a “bad mother”
Sometimes I resent being a mother. That is not to say that I don’t love my child. Unlike my mother and some mothers who can’t love, I do love my son. With all my heart and soul, always and forever. I believe all mothers have moments when they resent motherhood. I believe that the contemporary expectation to be a non-stop happy and vibrant mother is not only unrealistic, it’s also severely shaming and stigmatising. It makes natural temporary feelings of dissatisfaction or unfulfillment fester into gnawing guilt. That makes me think how terribly unprepared and largely delusional so many mothers enter into motherhood, including me. I wanted my child with…
