My eyelids are puffy from a pretty intense crying session last night. I’m at coffee shop near my house on a Monday morning and the only other customer just left. I’ve seen her here before and we have had some pleasant exchanges. She’s 83 and heading to work she says. She works at a charity shop up the road. Earlier, her granddaughther stopped by (I know this because she called the woman by ‘Nan’). The Nan tells her granddaugther to get a drink to take away. She shouts to the barista that she wants to pay for it. I know the workers aren’t concerned about her leaving and never paying. She’s a regular.
So am I. I have become a regular here after lockdown restrictions were lifted. The first time I was supposed to come here and meet a friend, I walked into a cafe two doors down, ordered food, and realized I was in the wrong place. The next time, I made sure to read the sign on the door. I’d tell you the name of the cafe and its location, but I have to be honest, I’m not so sure that’s a smart thing to do these days. (That’s for another blog post.) I won’t be as regular here pretty soon. I’m moving just under 2 miles away, and while not far in a car or on bike, certainly not the 3 minute walk that it is currently.
I’m moving because my husband and I have bought a house! I guess I shouldn’t get too ahead of myself because there are so many things that can still happen before all the official paperwork is done. But anyway, even being in the process of buying a home, with a husband, and thinking about our family life together is part of why I was crying so hard last night. I recently posted this on Facebook that sums it up pretty well:
Image of a Facebook post made on June 16 at 8:36amBST. Full text for screen readers is below.
This morning, I looked up the reasons why people read blogs. Apparently it is to learn something new, be entertained, and learn about your job industry (Pamela Bump, 2021). I’m not sure that I put my writings into the “entertainment” category but I do think I am a teacher at heart and have something to say about key sectors of employment. My blogs are of the personal type, sharing my lived experiences in hopes that it helps others learn more about themselves, the world around them, trauma survivors, anti-trafficking work, the healing journey, and about living and being.
Writing is also self serving. It’s healing for me. I used to write in a journal much more, but it’s become less of an organic thing. I’m sitting here writing this blog today because I’ve been composing several blogs lately. I’ve started typing a couple, talked through some in my head, and none of them have quite met the mark for me. It’s because of this question - Why blog? Why write and for whom or what purpose?
I have some answers to those questions for myself but for now, I’m just going to let myself write without needing to be so intentional, purposeful, focused, or measured. It’s enough for me that that writing “out loud” or writing to an audience helps me process things. And, it helps me to know that my process is heard. Not only that, I have been told many times that my writing helps others hear themselves and see themselves in my words.
So here I am. Rebuilding in so many ways. I sat down to write about building and rebuilding my life but I hadn’t thought that writing is a key piece of this. It always has been. There’s a line in a poem that I wrote in 2006: “I write so I exist”. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has ever written or uttered those words. When I wrote that poem, I was in the throws of extricating myself from an abusive birth family. This year, I celebrated 16 years away from that family, 16 years of freedom, I call them. I spent the first 11 of those 16 years focused on healing my childhood trauma and building some stability - emotionally, financially, and relationally. The last 5 years have still seen a lot of focus on my childhood trauma but I also had to face a newer, adulthood traumas: losing a chosen family that I built in those 11 years, and coming to terms with the fact that this chosen family and community was as close as possible to a cult, without fully becoming a cult.
Moving to the UK allowed me enough distance to see that the therapist I had seen up until that point for 12 years, was manipultative abusive and using to help sustain this cult-ish group. Despite being treated horribly by group members, being trained to psychoanalyse every situation, the therapist also promoted really helpful things too. Things like building community, learning about the neuroscience of trauma, understanding feelings as information and not problems to deal with…It was such a mixed bag but in the end, something drove me to move away from it. There were needs I was not getting met there. Thank goodness I also made chosen family outside of this group and continued social justice work in wider contexts - these two things probably spared me from being entralled in that group for much longer.
Five years after that secondary trauma (as opposed to the primary trauma of my childhood) sounds like a lot to me, but it doesn’t feel like a lot. I feel internal pressure to heal faster. By now, I should have grieved more, coped better, and gotten over it, right? Sadly, wrong. The pain of that trauma was too intense to grapple with and I had too much I had moved to the UK to do. I just started a PhD program and was preparing to launch an international NGO. I threw myself deeply into those endeavors, as well as tried to build a new community for myself. This was not easy but I managed to make some life long friends, finish my PhD, and became a wife and step mom. Oh and let’s not forget I also sprained my ankle twice and we’ve been in a pandemic for at least 2 of those years.
So…I guess I should give myself a break. But as I built the external elements of what I consider a good life, I have also had to build new elements of a good internal life. In some ways, it’s been easier to focus on building friendships and a life partnership, saving money for a home, and building a career. What’s not been easy is to face all the compounding feelings about more recent trauma, which also perfectly resembles some of my horrendous childhood trauma. Sifting through, sitting with, and tolerating the losses and pains has not been easy and the ongoing journey is what brings me here, to this blog. To start re viewing, revisting, celebrating, sharing, exploring, and articulating my inter-connected inward and outward journey. I have to come to find that this journey itself - my journey of being and my articulation of my journey of being - is something I enjoy. It is one of the ways that I find meaning and purpose.
So today I share more publicly that I am a survivor of an abusive therapeutic relationship. And it was this relationship, and its exploitation of my deep desire for family. that led me to participate in a cultish therapeutic group. I desperately tried to make that group a truly loving and inter-dependent community. The kind of community that most of us want and need and yearn for. Sadly, like my childhood, my love was not enough to transform a group of wounded people, so I have taken my love elsewhere.
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Text that is visible on the image above:
Today, the distance between my past and my present are a source of pain rather than pride. My lived experiences of trauma are off the chain - on such an extreme end of the continuum that even nearing the middle of the continuum feels monumental. My life is so wholesome now that it stands in stark contrast to the darkness it once was. The darkness comes into greater focus and it is darker than I could have felt when surrounded by it. It is the light that makes the contrast so evident.
The pain of this contrast is something I never feel I can adequately describe. I never feel satisfied in my communication of it. The pain is rage, hurt, frustration, exasperation. My formative memories are so dark. On some days I enjoy the light and on others I'm sunburnt to a crisp. No level of aloe is soothing enough.
It's not just pain of the old trauma that surfaces. It's the pain of the discrepancy between old trauma and the present - the present as a representation of what could have been. What should have been. And then the pain of doing the work to re-accept/to face again the life I have built. A beautiful one, but never one that will not show me the contrast to a traumatic past.