How I Recovered from Trauma

I was traumatized by my parent’s constant arguing at home. Twenty years later, I’m finally recovering.

I stood at the gates of my weekend Chinese school, waiting to be picked up by my parents. My brother and I spotted their car pulling up and walked over to meet them. As soon as I opened the car door, I was greeted by loud yelling from my mother and father. They were in the middle of a heated argument, which I guess started before they even left the house and drove the five minutes to the school to pick up me and my brother. This was not the first time I found my parents in the middle of an argument when being picked up from school. Many children in dysfunctional families are anxious when coming back from school because they do not know what they will find. I never knew whether my parents would be arguing when they picked me up from school, but they very often were. I could guess when the argument started based on the level of hostility between them.

Much of my time at my parent’s house was filled with similar arguments. I would hear arguing through the walls while I was studying in my room and my parents were in the kitchen preparing dinner for us. I lived in a state of hyper-vigilance in my parent’s house, highly attuned to my parents’ yelling. My heart rate rose and stress levels spiked whenever I could hear voices being raised in aggressive tones. As a child, I felt guilty when my parents’ voices were raised, feeling like I must have done something wrong to set them off. Nowadays, I still have the same reaction when people who remind me of my mother raise their voice in irritated tones. In essence, I am triggered by situations that remind me of my parents arguing.

When I lived at my parent’s house, I would be woken up some mornings by loud voices coming from the living room. I could hear it through the walls even with all the doors closed. It was a very unpleasant and stressful experience to encounter this first thing in the morning. There has been a lasting effect on me which is likely post-traumatic stress; I have a hard time falling asleep when I’m in the room with someone awake. I prefer that everyone else in the room is asleep, then I can feel calm enough to let my guard down and sleep as well. It is because I can then be sure there are will be no sudden loud noises to scare me.

I knew my parents had PTSD from their experience as refugees. It took me a while longer to admit that I have taken some residual trauma from them as well. My family is dysfunctional, not only in the sense that it didn’t function well, but that its members are being exposed to repetitive trauma. The trauma cemented many fight and flight responses in my psyche when I hear loud, harsh tones of voices nearby (in the same or adjacent rooms). I wasn’t aware of my trauma when I didn’t encounter triggering events. When I am triggered by people and situations that remind me of my experiences at home, I start responding in the same ways as I did in childhood. I get hyper-vigilant about any noises around me. I can’t concentrate because I’m stressed. I think someone is going to start criticizing me and I’ll be stung at any moment.

It has taken many years of observation, reading into the subject of trauma and triggers, and talks with my therapist, for me to realize that I have this post traumatic stress. It is present somewhere inside me and is showing itself through my repetition of harmful family dynamics. Once I was able to recognize it without judgement, I could process it by writing it down, talking with my therapist, and mourning the sad state of what happened to me when I was a child. I made efforts to replace old responses with healthier ones; for example, when confronted with a mother-like figure who is irritated, I tell myself, “It is not about me, it is about them. This person is not my mother. I am not a child in her house anymore.” This helps me avoid falling into the guilty trap. Nowadays, I have found some relief from the pains of my childhood. The traumatic response hasn’t gone away entirely yet, but I find I am much less often triggered.

Another harmful family dynamic I developed in response to my parents’ constant arguing is the habit of rushing to defuse tension. My parents’ arguing spilled out into the public, where they often attracted the attention of strangers with their hostile yelling. I sometimes tried to shush them in public when people started staring. I had to act like a parent while my parents acted like children throwing a tantrum (a form of parentification and codependency). As an adult, it became a compulsion of mine to jump in and resolve tension for other people (in case they started arguing like my parents did). I noticed I would do it at the slightest hint of tension, like a knee-jerk reaction. One of my therapists had told me before that thought-out, authentic responses are signs of healing, while knee jerk reactions are not.

The healthier way to proceed is to change the knee-jerk reactions. Instead, I should define my area of responsibility and draw a boundary to keep out the rest. When I do this, new possibilities become possible. I can speak “no” as a whole sentence. I can stop rescuing people from what I see as bad choices. I can stop worrying if I am offending people and assume I will get feedback if anything I do is problematic. I can make decisions that are in my best interest even if others do not agree with them. I can tolerate it if people do not understand my choices. I can make my own choices and maintain the love of those important to me.

With this much focus on my parents’ feelings, I did not notice or address my emotions. I didn’t realize I was lonely, hungry for affection, fearful, anxious, and tense. I was really sad as a kid and distracted myself from the arguing and emotional neglect with books and music. Many difficult moments passed which I did not process emotionally because no one was available to help me talk them out. My father even walked into my room once to find me crying but did not know how to comfort me. He walked back out of the room without a word. I buried my difficult feelings inside instead. I focused on surviving by not making any trouble or being disobedient.

What I needed as a child was consistency, safety, and unconditional love. I needed my parents to be attentive and responsive to my needs and present to comfort me when I became distressed. I needed a sense of predictability and dependability in my house growing up to feel safe and like I could trust the people and world around me. Fortunately, I found this for myself later in life. I found friends who notice when I’m tired. I found a therapist who knows how to help me work through all the unprocessed trauma. Being able to build a community of support like this around me has made me realize I have the power to ensure my emotional needs are met now.

The trauma I experience affected who I chose to spend time with. I realized I was attracted to people in crisis because they reminded me of my parents. Their lives had many hills and valleys. After I began to heal, I started to notice the chaotic state of the lives of some of my friends. I also realized it was becoming too much for me to hear about this level of drama. It dawned on me how drama-filled my own life was up until recently. I started making choices to spend less time with friends who were constantly having crises and concentrated my energy on those who were calmer and happier. I knew this was a sign that I was healing and my preferences were changing as a result. Excitement and spontaneity unmasked themselves as drama and irresponsibility. The former was no longer appealing to me after I processed some of my unresolved emotions.

The fact that I was traumatized in childhood is less important than whether I have managed to process what happened to me. By bravely admitting to myself what I suffered and facing it again with all the knowledge I have acquired in the past twenty years, I can place my anger in the correct context and use it to identify unconscious harmful family dynamics I was influenced by. I can understand what I am defending against, realize the threat is over, and thus let the old family dynamics go. The emotional injuries which were holding me back fall away and new possibilities open for me to develop the life I want. When we realize that the disaster we are fearing has already happened and we have survived it, we know what we are truly capable of. We realize how resilient we are as women and know that we can overcome our past traumas.

I can see now that my parents did their best to raise me in the way they knew how. I had trips to Disneyland, Universal Studios, and Legoland, birthday parties, saw my cousins often, CDs and cassettes of my favorite artists, cherry-picking outings, board games, bike rides, plenty of toys, plastic cars to ride in, a little kids’ table to eat dinner at while watching The Simpsons, Christmas trees and presents, and Halloween trick-or-treating. I even had vacations to Hawaii, China, a bunch of U.S. national parks, Canada, and the Bahamas! My parents came to all my award ceremonies at my Chinese school. The moments of my childhood that I found traumatic were moments my parents couldn’t handle either. They were fighting demons of their own. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize what an impact this has on their kids, but I can’t blame them for it.

The world needs more adult women who have reckoned with the truth about their childhoods. The more healed women there are around, the more of them can share their difficult journey and inspire others to find the courage to do the same. Only then can we stop the self-sabotaging habits that women learned from their wounded mothers, grandmothers, and society. Only then can women feel entitled to all the success, happiness, pleasure, freedom, and fulfillment they truly deserve and strive towards it.