trauma

It's been a while since I've posted on my blog. It is part being busy with the new job, part getting stuck in my own head. In my past months' radio silence I've started and abandoned pieces exploring body dysmorphia, my Asian identity and accountability... all to have them shut down by the shame gremlins in my head.

I opened this word document to write about trauma. And as I started typing I felt my self-doubt creeping in. So instead of talking myself out of creating anything, I set a timer and promised myself that at the end of this hour, whatever I had, so help me I was going to publish it.

[Note, I hit the snooze button at the end of that timer, wrote on and off over the past 24 hours, and here I am, finally putting in this little italicized note before I promise myself I’m uploading it and hitting publish.]

So here it goes. TW: This blog dives into trauma, sexual abuse and suicidal ideation. It's not for the faint of heart, so I completely respect it if this where you decide to stop reading. For me, I just had to get it out.

The other night I had a nightmare.

It's been a long time since it happened. For a while, my nightmares, or as my psychiatrist describes them, night terrors, were almost a nightly occurrence. It wasn't uncommon for me to wake myself up screaming in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat and shaking. Poor Blake can attest to this fact, having been awakened more than once by the distressed rustle of my body and unintelligible screams.

For a long time, I used these night terrors as an excuse to drink. I was so afraid of what was going to happen in my dreams, drinking myself into a state of black out was the only way I could face sleep. I'm getting emotional writing about this because it's scary to look back on those days. For one, I was exhausted. Secondly, I had no idea that the kind of freedom I have today was possible. I couldn't imagine a life where I didn't have to self-medicate to address these horrible nightly occurrences. I didn't know it was possible.

At that time in my life, I wasn't ready to even acknowledge my trauma history. Minimizing my own experiences, I'd tell myself that I was not traumatized. To call myself such, I decided, was cruel to the actual traumatized people. As if to acknowledge my own experience would be to minimize theirs. It was just another way I was self-sabotaging, closing my world in on myself and letting it get as dark as it possibly could.

For years I lived in that darkness. Slowly killing myself with alcohol just to not feel the pain that I didn't even believe I had the right to feel.

"What is wrong with you?" was a question I'm sure many people wanted to ask me, as I checked in and out of rehabs, outpatient programs and hospitals.

It was a question I'd been asking myself since childhood.

I grew up feeling like something was just wrong with me. Since I could remember I'd carried the weight of shame, self-hate and failure around, letting it pull me deeper and deeper, like Edna in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, walking into the ocean and welcoming death.

"If you had my life, you'd drink too," was something I'd tell myself as I drowned.

I teetered on this line of self-pity and self-admonition, simultaneously thinking I was doomed for unhappiness and that, in reality, I really had nothing to be unhappy about.

I would have died on that line with my alcoholism, I’m sure, if I had not gotten sober. And for me, getting sober and working on my trauma have gone hand and hand.

I tried for years, to get sober without doing the deep and challenging work that is trauma therapy. I could not, for the life of me do it. I remember my mom pleading with a therapist once, explaining that I desperately needed to work on my trauma or I would never stop drinking. We didn’t understand it when the therapist told her she was just meeting me “where I was.” For so long, I was in a place where I wasn’t ready to work on my trauma, or stop drinking. For me, I had to get desperate enough to do both, and thank god that happened when I entered rehab in the fall of 2020.

As I've described previously, I entered rehab with barely any will to live. For the first few hours, I seriously considered AMA-ing (a rehab term for checking oneself out against medical advice) going to a hotel and drinking myself to death.

I think it was partially pre-guilt for making the hotel have to deal with my dead body, and mostly that I couldn’t move I was so sick from withdrawal. There was the fact that I thought, that maybe if I could finally fucking do this I could actually be with Blake in the end.

In reality it was the staff there at Mirmont Treatment Center that kept me alive. The nurses were so kind and so reassuring when I told them how hopeless I felt. They kept me there, alive and safe ‑ heroically that first weekend.

During those first few days, I was raising all the red flags for suicidal ideation. If hopelessness could have finished the job for me, I wouldn't be here today. As such, it was no surprise when Carolyn, the therapist on call that weekend, came walking into my room one day, offering to talk.

I'd been asleep when she walked in and she gently told me she'd be there all weekend, I could come by her office once I was rested up a bit.

At first, I thought I'd dreamed Carolyn up. But when it dawned on me that there was actually someone there I could talk to, I threw off the covers and with no regard for my disheveled appearance showed up at her door, sobbing.

Finally, by the grace of god I had reached the point where I was ready to address my trauma and stop drinking.

I unloaded everything on Carolyn. And she just listened. And saw me. And kept handing me tissues.

I still, to this day cannot tell you why I believed it, but when Carolyn told me everything was going to be okay, I believed her.

She saw me for who I was in that moment, a terrified little girl who'd never healed from a lifetime of trauma. Who in trying to power her way through life, was left with that constant question of "what is wrong with me?" Who for years before she'd ever understand it, had been blaming herself for the very things that traumatized her. Convinced that it was all her fault. Because she was bad. Because something was wrong with her.

This is where I'm going to tell you part of my trauma history. Not to shock you, or justify why I consider myself a trauma survivor, but to hopefully show how it impacted my life, and how it became possible to start healing from it and actually live.

But mostly to process as I'm sitting here amidst this amazing life I never thought I'd have, visibly shaken from that nightmare and honestly just pissed that he gets to live his life while I continue to be impacted by his actions from over two decades ago.

I was molested when I was a child. I start here, because for the majority of my life, I let this fact define me.

It happened one time, that I remember. Notice I don't say "it only happened one time." Even just that small way of describing it demonstrates a behemoth effort and countless hours of intensive therapy.

My word choice of "that I remember," is very intentional too. Because my brain and body's initial response to the incident was to shut it down.

I tried, soon after it happened, to tell someone. A girl. A child like me. I still feel guilty for dumping it on her. She didn't know how to respond.

"Why would you say that?" she said in a panic. "Don't say that to anyone."

So I didn't. Even to myself. I repressed the memory. And I spent the next 10 plus years, traumatized and none the wiser, completely unaware of it and how much my brain and body were doing to try to be "normal," despite going through this devastating psychological mind fuck somewhere around the age of five.

I want to say it worked for a while but it really didn't. Now that I know the signs of childhood sexual abuse, I can see clearly how certain aspects of my development, personality, really my entire fucking life were impacted by what he did to me. Without the knowledge of my trauma and oblivious to how it had sent my existence into a constant state of survival mode, I lived through my life with that same question always nagging me. "What is wrong with you?"

"Why do you do this?"

“Why can’t you stop?”

"Why are you convinced of your inherent badness?"

"Why don't you want to live?"

For most of my life the answer to those questions was hidden in the back of my brain where I kept my trauma locked away. It wouldn't be until I was 30 years old that I'd finally learn that many of their answers were interwoven with the survival mode that had actually activated years before the molestation and had nothing to do with my molester.

It started with abandonment.

Growing up, I always considered myself lucky that I was just a baby when my Dad separated himself from our family. It wasn't until entering into trauma therapy for the first time that I began to acknowledge abandonment as a trauma experience.

Today, I understand that I was not spared from that experience just because of my young age. After all, babies have feelings, and whether or not I’m prepared to admit it, my Dad’s departure left me terrified of being abandoned again.

It manifested itself in a variety of different ways I never understood, but have since learned, were just my defense mechanism against the pain I was feeling. As Medical News today outlines, childhood abandonment can result in:

• constant worry about being abandoned

• anxiety or panic when a parent or caregiver drops them at school or day care

• clinginess

• fear of being alone, including at bedtime

• frequent illness, which often has no apparent physical cause

• isolation

• low self-esteem

I cannot tell you how hard it is to look at this list.

It’s painful, to see each example and think back to the point of my life when these manifestations of my abandonment overcame me. The terror I felt as a child when it was “bedtime.” That anxiety that panged every morning when I left my mom behind and got on the school bus. The inexplicable illnesses, one of which finally lead me to a neurologist who was the first to ask about a trauma history.

This next part is messy.

I don’t like associating my Dad’s absence, and the subsequent maladaptive coping skills I developed as a result, with any of my other trauma. Full stop.

I do not blame my Dad for having to leave when he did.

I don’t blame him for what happened to me.

The only people I blame are myself and the sick individual who did it. And even that I’m working on.

But the reality of my life has been, that many of those bullet points above would compound the effects of and in some cases precipitate the trauma that would come later in life.

Take a child afraid of being alone at bedtime, and she doesn’t put up a fight when her babysitter suggests postponing bedtime to lay on the couch with him. Take a child with no self-esteem, desperate to please and convinced of their own unworthiness and tell them that what happened to them was their own fault, they’ll believe you. In fact, they’ll live the rest of their life blaming themselves for it.

What is wrong with me?

This question never went away. And when other traumas came, I looked at myself as their common denominator. What was wrong with me, that these horrible things kept happening to me?

It wasn’t the fault of the emotionally abusive “friend” who sexually exploited me for years or the roommate who broke down my door one night and attempted to force himself on me.

It was my fault. Always had been. So I thought.

I’ve been in trauma therapy for a little over a year now. It started that day when I walked into Carolyn’s office and verbally deposited a lifetime of self-hatred and blame.

It continued through meticulously planned experiential therapy groups throughout my 30+ days in treatment. It continued, thank God, even after I was discharged, when a non-profit sponsored me to continue working with that same experiential therapy program even when I couldn't afford it. I also started seeing my individual therapist, and to continue my trauma therapy further. And even when my terrible health insurance had me cutting down to fewer session than I needed, that nonprofit came to my rescue again, extending my funding and paying the $69 for the 45 minute sessions I needed twice a week.

These days, I see my therapist every other week. We’re still working on my trauma and doing “inner child work.” It is hands down the most uncomfortable work I’ve ever done. And this is coming from an alcoholic who fought the good fight that was getting sober.

But here’s the thing: it has been working and it continues to.

As of today, by the grace of God, I have one year, four months and four days sober.

That night terror was the first one I’ve had in over six months. Slowly but surely, I am healing from my trauma.

And perhaps most importantly, I no longer ask myself: what is wrong with you? Because through all of this ridiculously hard work I've learned: the answer is nothing.