Turning the Tide on Trauma

"My childhood was bad, to say the least," Victoria (pseudonym) starts off. Victoria's parents were drug addicts, and were extremely abusive towards each other and towards Victoria and her younger brother. One particularly early memory was being unable to wake her mother and "my very young infant brother was hungry, so I was trying to – at like three or four years old – trying to feed him and, as a four year old, not very successfully. I think I gave him Cheerios with water in it or something." She adds "Most of the other memories I have from that really early childhood period are of violence in the home."

Life changed for Victoria when her family moved across the country and she started attending school for the first time. "I remember being terrified because I had no idea what school was. And I remember feeling super ashamed because all of these other kids could read a little bit, and they could do a little bit of math. And I had no idea what any of that was. I'm not even entirely sure if I saw a book before then."

Beyond being woefully unprepared for the entire concept of school, Victoria's life also changed in that she started being around others outside of her family. "Being with other kids my age, you don't realize that what you are living in isn't normal until you have that comparison. When you're born into something, you don't know if it's normal. You just assume it is. You assume that's life. That's what everyone else experiences. I realized pretty quickly that my home life wasn't right."

Victoria confided in an adult at school, and the "response to that was to tell my mother that I was telling stories. There were consequences when I got home." Her father wore a thick leather belt, which he used to punish her. Victoria, however, did not give up. She tried again with a different adult, but ended up with the same result. Even worse, her parents "realized that punishing me didn't work. But punishing my brother did work. Their response to me telling someone else … was to lock my brother and I in our bedroom for three or four days." During the first two days, they were not given food to eat and "I remember my brother crying because he's hungry… I'm telling him to push a pillow on his stomach to help it go away and I remember so vividly, realizing that this is my fault. I did this. … That was my fault. And I never asked for help again. I never told anyone else again. Because I couldn't do that to my brother. That was the last time I asked for help." However, that was not the last time that Victoria's parents inflicted that particular form of punishment, although corporal punishment was far more frequent in that household ("I mean, that could have been for anything").

Abuse happened in the car as well. One time, Victoria's mother reached back from the front seat and backhandedly slapped Victoria so hard that Victoria lost her two front teeth. In another instance, Victoria's father was driving while simultaneously physically fighting Victoria's mother. At some point, he got out of the car, but forgot to put the car in park. As the car idled forward, he lunged for Victoria, grabbing her by hair, and pulled her out. Victoria remembers waking up in a ditch and saw that the car had moved forward: "I was terrified about being left there. I had no confidence that he wouldn't just leave me there. And also my brother was still in that car and my brother was alone… There's two adults there. But he was alone."

Parental neglect and abuse had its impact on life at school: "In elementary school, I was made fun of so much. I was tormented. I was easy prey for the bullies, especially before I learned to do laundry because my mother didn't do laundry. So I was that smelly, dirty kid because I never had clean clothes. I rarely had clothes that fit well." Victoria remembers desperately wanting to develop friendships: "I remember one Halloween. She [a supposed friend] said, 'You can only be our friend if you bring us Halloween candy. We need ten pieces every day.' And I remember bringing Halloween candy to school because I wanted to be their friend." Victoria specifically remembers getting her first job at age 13 so that she could buy "clothes that fit that weren't from the 80s."

Although abusive towards their children, Victoria's parents were charismatic towards people outside of the family. Her parents "would go through friends like pairs of shoes. They would find people who they could convince to help them in some way or convince of some sob story. And once these people wisened up, they [the parents] would just move on. … It was never hard for him [the father] to find someone who he could convince of some sob story and get something from… Incredibly charismatic." This charisma allowed Victoria's parents to not only escape action by Child Protective Services (CPS), but also suspicion from neighbors: "Abusers don't just groom victims. They groom allies. And later on, I realized… it makes sense to me why the people that I would try to tell didn't believe me: because they were groomed and manipulated as much as my brother and I were."

Victoria summarized her childhood by saying, "The system really failed my brothers and I – we should not have been in that house at all… I know CPS had been involved a couple of times, but we were never removed from the home."

Growing Into Her Own

As Victoria aged into her teenage years and into high school, life began to change for her. For one, Victoria got to know some of the neighborhood families that she could visit for food. Consequently, the former punishment of being locked in a room with her brother no longer terrorized her and Victoria felt emboldened to escape from her room when locked in. Embittered, she almost welcomed the opportunities to defy her parents and Victoria began to tell others about how her parents were truly like. This candor interfered with her parents' ability to craft stories about being down on their luck and for the most part, they mostly left Victoria alone.

One time, however, Victoria's father became angry at Victoria and she went to her room to remove herself from the situation. Being angry herself, Victoria locked her door despite being prohibited from doing so (her parents believed that if she wanted privacy, she could pay rent). Victoria's father followed her to her room, which she did not expect. When he realized that the door was locked, he became enraged and kicked the door in as Victoria was rushing to unlock the door. In the heat of the moment, her father hit her hard, knocking her out. Waking up, she saw her younger brother on her father's back piggyback-style, apparently having rushed in to defend Victoria. Victoria's brother was beating his father, while his father was trying to get free. Knowing that her brother would be in for a world of hurt, Victoria snuck into another room to call the police, who arrived at a bloody scene. Victoria wanted to press charges, but the end result was that her mother sided with her father and they were able to kick her out of the house.

At this point, instead of working just for pocket money, Victoria frantically looked for jobs to support herself. She worked as much as she could, often at the expense of sleep and being able to prepare for school. Technically, state law only permitted high school students to work 24 hours per week. Victoria circumvented this restriction by working multiple jobs, including at one fast food restaurant, where she eventually became the night shift manager. At age seventeen, Victoria moved into her very own apartment ("$200 a month, and it came with free cockroaches").

Victoria also made some friends, including becoming involved in a romantic relationship. One day in her senior year, Victoria was talking and "I punched my best friend in the face because I didn't like something she'd said – I don't even remember what it was over – but I was so angry, I punched her in the face." Victoria remembers, "I was immediately horrified at myself. I was disgusted with myself because that's exactly what I didn't want to be." She realized that she had "a lot of work to do" and that "I don't think I'd ever seen adults have a healthy conflict. The entire time I grew up, I didn't know what that was like. They got angry. They hit. That's what they did. That's what you did." Although the relationship was never mended, Victoria deliberately chose a different path from that of her parents, adding "I did not like who I was or who I was becoming, or who I could be. … I still wish that moment hadn't happened, but at the same point, I kind of feel like it had to happen because that was the first time I had any awareness of 'I need to be careful or I'm going to become the thing that I hate most in the world.'"

Another event that happened in her senior year was that her family left for a different state without telling her or giving her a way to reach her brother. Earlier, when she had called their home phone number, the parents would hang up. Her brother also tried to connect with her, but was prevented from doing so ("abusers isolate – that's what they do"), and Victoria herself did not have a phone number until her senior year. When she did sign up for a mobile phone plan, she called her extended family, and eventually, one of her father's siblings told her that the family moved. Victoria anticipated that her younger brother would be neglected and at some point, would need a new family. However, Victoria was barely scraping by to feed and house herself and did not know how she could also provide for her brother. One of Victoria's friends generously offered to help her, by providing food and housing for her and her brother. Victoria accepted the offer.

Two months later, Victoria received a call from her family's local police department, indicating that her brother had been abandoned for two weeks and was caught shoplifting hot dogs when he ran out of food. Victoria's brother faced the possibility of entering the foster system. Victoria sprung into action, finding a lawyer who agreed to help her pro bono. In the meantime, Victoria's parents were found guilty of abandonment and sentenced to prison. To gain guardianship over her brother, Victoria's parents had to voluntarily sign paperwork. Separated by prison walls, each parent had a different reaction. Victoria's mother denied the abandonment, saying something along the lines of "I don't know how this happened. They say we were gone for two weeks, but we were just gone for, like, a day." Victoria's father refused to sign the paperwork unless Victoria deposited $100 into his commissary account ("He doesn't care what happens to his son or what happened to me... He wanted to see what he could get out of me."). Victoria added that "it was the best hundred dollars I could have ever spent in my entire life."

The Toll of Trauma

Between her friend's stable income and receiving guardianship over her younger brother, Victoria could start to relax. However, the effects of her trauma from her childhood began to unfold. Victoria explained that with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), veterans returning from war will often experience flashbacks when they have settled back into physical safety. Similarly, with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) – which Victoria was later diagnosed with – settling into a time period of emotional safety allowed previously built-up emotional trauma to surface. "That's when things get bad" and that happened for both Victoria and her brother.

Her brother began to drink heavily, adding to the tension in the household. Victoria, for her part, fell into a long depression, to the point that "I didn't brush my teeth for like, three weeks. You know how depressed you have to be to not brush your teeth for three weeks? That's disgusting." She escaped by reading ("two full novels in a day") and playing video games ("I would sleep, get up, and play World of Warcraft. I did that for like two years"). When asked about caring for her brother, Victoria says "I still work at trying to forgive myself. I wish I could have been there more [emotionally]. I wasn't available. I was definitely depressed. I could barely hold my head above water, so we kind of just drowned together."

When asked if she felt guilty at the time about not being emotionally available for her younger brother, Victoria responds "Imagine a world where you don't know what air conditioning is. You don't know that exists. You've never been in a climate controlled building ever before in your life. Would you miss air conditioning? Would you know what it is? Would you know how to describe it to someone? No, right? You don't know about it, so it doesn't exist for you."

Victoria and her brother survived that time period and Victoria moved back to California, trying out different jobs.

From Isolation to Connection

Several years later, when she was in her early thirties, Victoria decided that she should see a therapist. For a long time, the therapy seemed to have a limited effect on her: "If you've ever gone to therapy, the work in therapy doesn't actually happen in therapy. It happens outside of therapy. So it is possible to go to therapy but not do therapy and I didn't do therapy. I didn't realize until afterwards that I didn't actually tell her anything. It's not like I lied. I didn't lie. But there's a difference between being truthful and being vulnerable, right? I was truthful, but I was not vulnerable and therapy doesn't really work if you're not vulnerable."

Nevertheless, the therapist "offered a safe space without judgment but built on compassion and empathy. She might not have been able to intimately understand what I went through, but she understood that I wasn't connecting with my emotions even though I didn't even know it at the time… I suppose it might sound silly; I can see how what I'm describing might sound to some like she provided the bare-minimum that a therapist is supposed to provide and that's true to some extent, but she recognized what I needed and stuck with me for years until it wore my defenses down." Years later, the therapist shared that "she recognized I was not in a place where I was ready to be vulnerable, but she felt that, at the same point, she could be there. She could still be consistent and offer a safe space for me. … If she hadn't recognized that and she had pushed too hard, I don't think I ever would have gone back to therapy. So I don't know how she knew that, but in hindsight, I think that's the best thing she could have done."

Feeling safe with her therapist ended up having profound effects on Victoria, who in retrospect, had learned to protect herself from her parents' abuse by disconnecting from her emotions. As an example, Victoria shares that "I rarely actually felt any fear when I was a kid. There were extreme situations in which I did feel fear, but it was never fear for myself. It was fear from what would happen to my brother. It wasn't that there wasn't anything to be afraid of, I just didn't feel it and I didn't know I wasn't feeling it. It wasn't just fear though; it was true with happiness, joy, sadness, and love too." With the therapist, "It took years, I don't know what the catalyst was, and I don't even know when it started, but eventually I started to feel safe with her. In hindsight, that safety was the catalyst for connecting to my own emotions and that was a monumental turning point in my life."

Initially, the emotional effects were terrifying: "Events may pass into history, but the emotions events bring with them don't fade. It felt like I went from feeling nothing and thinking I was happy to feeling every bad feeling in the world and being completely miserable. I started having panic attacks and flashbacks, I was anxious all the time, and the confusion I felt at the sudden changes was terrifying. I didn't understand anything I was feeling; I couldn't even name what I was feeling because I'd never truly felt most of it. But, once I had a name for what I was going through, I had a path to move forward." As Victoria started to process her newly felt emotions, her CPTSD made it "extremely confusing because it feels like the emotions are present-tense. It feels like the extreme emotions are the result of whatever is happening in the present. As an example, I had a flashback at a hotel once because the neighbors got in late with their kids and I could hear luggage hitting the walls and floor, doors being shut, and children crying. Nothing bad was happening and it was all just normal noise from a tired family that had been traveling all day. But my brain heard all the times I was in the other room when my parents started fighting, which often led to my brother or me getting hurt too. The second the noises started, my heart started pounding so hard I could hear my pulse rushing through my ears, I started shaking from the adrenaline, and I physically could not stay still. I felt like I had to run, to escape, do something, but I had no idea what to do. On the outside, it looked like I was freaking out for no reason, but on the inside I was feeling everything a little kid feels when they are terrified for their safety and powerless to help themselves." Since the emotions were so confusing, Victoria started a practice where she "wrote down everything and took it to therapy with me." The therapist would help Victoria sort through her feelings, sometimes telling her that "whatever it was was a normal present-day reaction, but most of the time she would walk me through it to let me figure out that it wasn't a normal present-day reaction and where in the past those feelings were coming from."

Through these sessions, the therapist "also gently forced me to question my own self-doubt, which led me to the horrifying realization that I didn't trust myself or love myself. This was the first time she gave me homework. She had me start a list of all of the things that I love about myself. It started with surface level things, but she pushed me to find deeper things. I put those lists in a little book and I read it over and over again whenever I was struggling or going through a flashback. I read it so much and so often that I can still recite most of it from memory. I read it over and over again until I stopped disagreeing with it, until I started agreeing with it, and then until I actually believed it."

Additionally, Victoria later realized that "it was around the time that I started feeling safe in therapy that I made the first real friends I'd ever had and around that time that I started to really figure out who I am and what I want from life." On a tangential note, Victoria has made deeper connections with some friends, but "I realize now that the people who I have built meaningful relationships with are people who are emotionally secure and empathetically minded enough that they were able to relate to my emotional experience even if they couldn't relate to the situations in my childhood, but those people (at least in my experience) have been few and far between."

A Deeper Connection

As Victoria learned more about CPTSD and processed her earlier trauma with her first therapist, "we reached a point where we both realized and recognized that I'm kind of moving beyond what she knows, if that makes sense. Not that she didn't understand what I was going through, but she was very honest that she's like, 'I don't have a lot of experience with people who are where you're at right now.'" The therapist recommended some others who had more experience with CPTSD.

Victoria's mental health journey continued, although not in a straightforward, linear fashion. For one thing, a friend happened to suggest that Victoria search the internet for her symptoms, and that led her to a book titled From Surviving to Thriving, which she felt described her exactly. Victoria found the clinic that the author practiced at, but did not really connect with the therapists there. Another surprise in her journey happened when the COVID pandemic set in, limiting in-person therapy options, but opening the world of remote therapy (various states had temporary emergency orders allowing for remote therapy sessions). Victoria tried out BetterHelp and was assigned a therapist in Florida. It turns out that that therapist "had almost the exact same childhood I had," which Victoria found liberating. Victoria said the therapist was "the perfect therapist for me."

To explain the reason that the similar childhood experiences meant so much to her, Victoria offers this background:

"We begin to form connections with others through shared experiences and interests. Those connections are built into relationships through shared values and aligned perspectives. But when your experiences in life are so drastically different from everyone else you meet, it is difficult to form those initial connections and those that do form often don't build into meaningful relationships when your values and perspectives are so deeply impacted by traumatic experiences.

That means that I meet people who share the same interests and we get along well, but eventually people want to share part of their lives and it's normal and natural to expect that the other person will do the same. However, most people tend to distance themselves from me when I share some things about my life that I have shared with you. Some times I think it's because they have no idea how to respond to it so they just distance themselves, but most of the time I think the connection simply fizzles out because they can't relate to my experiences anymore than I can relate to theirs. …

This extends to therapists as well. I have never had a therapist distance themselves from me, but I still have to work to explain things to them in a way they can understand. It is exhausting to work so hard just to be understood by people. The therapist in Florida was the first (and still only) therapist who understood what my emotional experience was like and I didn't have to look for creative ways to explain myself to her. … For the first time in my life, I could truly speak freely about what I went through, what I felt, and how it's impacted how I look at myself, others, and the world because I knew she would understand; I knew I didn't have to be careful with my words to ensure that she didn't misunderstand."

With other therapists, Victoria was always unsure that they truly understood her, "so I never felt fully confident in their perspective or feedback for me." With this therapist, "knowing that she intimately understood my experiences gave me complete confidence in her perspective on what I was feeling or going through. Since CPTSD comes with a lot of shame and nearly zero sense of self-worth, that is invaluable in ways that are beyond measure. … we all need to feel seen and heard and understood." Years later, however, the temporary emergency orders ended, so Victoria could no longer be treated by that particular remote therapist. Victoria says that "I will always be grateful that I had her in my life for even a short time."

Another Twist

Another twist in Victoria's mental health journey started with her believing that she had an eating disorder. She went as far as consulting with a specialist who assessed her. The results were surprising: Victoria did not have an eating disorder, but the specialist suspected that she might have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Victoria visited a psychiatrist, who confirmed that she had severe ADHD and prescribed medication. It turns out that the connection between eating disorders and ADHD is not as random as it might first seem. Victoria explains "the dopamine deficiency present in ADHD causes your brain to seek out anything that will give it the dopamine it needs. People find it in many ways, but food (specifically sugar) is one of the most common and easily accessible ways to get a good dopamine hit."

As Victoria learned more about the condition, she felt that it was another way in which "the system" failed her. Previous to the diagnosis, Victoria "used to joke that my hobby was collecting skills because I couldn't pick one hobby. I would be just like, enthralled with it until it wasn't challenging enough, and then I'd be on to the next thing. So, I've made soap. I've done some carpentry. I've done some electrical work. I've done reupholstering. I can sew and knit and all this other stuff. How is it that no one else noticed that I have ADHD until I was in my 30s?" To describe what it feels like to have ADHD, Victoria described what it might feel like to clean the kitchen: "Let's say there's something that belongs in the bathroom in the kitchen. So in order to clean the kitchen, that thing has to go into the bathroom. But I felt like, okay, well, if I've got to put that in the bathroom, that means I have to clean the bathroom first. Otherwise, I'm just creating more mess in the bathroom. But then to do that, I need to take care of dirty laundry that's in the bathroom, which means I have to go do the laundry. And it's like this whole interconnected web of chaos. And then I would feel overwhelmed by this huge thing of chaos that I just wouldn't do any of it." After Victoria started taking the medication, she noted that "it's been like, night and day – it's hugely different. … Starting medication was kind of like being able to see how to clean just the kitchen without having to clean the bathroom first." With regards to seeking new activities or experiences, Victoria explains that "medication that helps increase and sustain dopamine levels reduces the drive to find it elsewhere."

Victoria adds, "I personally don't think ADHD is a mental illness or a disorder. I think it's just different. I think my personal opinion is that the medication helps me function in a world that isn't necessarily set up for me. I legitimately don't feel like ADHD is something that's wrong with me."

Onwards

With years of introspection, research, and therapy, Victoria has made great strides in processing her traumatic childhood. She notes, "The most dramatic changes and strides came in the beginning and it felt like I was actually 'recovering' from CPTSD. Eventually, the changes slowed and the victories became seemingly smaller. At first, it felt like I was failing to recover, but eventually I realized and accepted that there is no real 'cure' and that's okay. I may always struggle with some things and always have something to learn about myself, but I'm also finally living a life that is authentically mine and I am more than okay with that."

Looking back, Victoria felt robbed of her chance to attend college, and determined to rectify that missed opportunity. However, she has struggled with finding the intersection between what she wants to do and what she can be adequately compensated for. Asked what she would like to do if salary were not a concern, Victoria said that she would like to be a social worker: "I really want to work with trauma survivors… I want to be the person I wish I had had when I was 18 and 20 and 25." She thinks she has figured out her path forward and is preparing for a career as a therapist.