How I Turned My Childhood Trauma Into Victory

…unabashed and unapologetic

“Hold on to your your inner child with compassion and love.”

Nicole Dyer

“What we change inwardly will change outer reality.”

Plutarch

“Healing from trauma can also mean strength and joy. The goal of healing is not a papering-over of changes in an effort to preserve or present things as normal. It is to acknowledge and wear your new life — warts, wisdom, and all — with courage.”

Catherine Woodiwiss

Here’s a short intro to add a framework for this piece — thank you for reading ❤️

I was created from the loins of two very progressive people, at least in my opinion. Soon after my birth, in 1971, my father removed the veil that had covered his sexuality by announcing that he was gay and he and my mother divorced.

On the home front my father was raised in a devoutly charismatic Christian home. Being gay was an “abomination”. On the medical front homosexuality was deemed a psychiatric disorder until 1973. On the social front…well, the battle rages on.

I would rather not add too much here. This was the journey of my father and he and I have not fleshed out enough detail yet for me to discuss anything other than the facts as I know them. My grandmother was, and still is at the age of 99, very grounded in her Christian world view. The words of the Bible are held closely to her heart and she believes every word as truth, empathically. My fathers sexual orientation alienated him from his family and from society at large. From my fathers accounts my grandfather was accepting and loving towards him and his partner after he and my mom divorced. My grandfather was a quiet man, my grandmother was a charismatic woman — the volume and tone that she presented overshadowed the quiet gentleness of her husband and a Christian belief system on the perils of homosexuality dominated the household.

My mother was an officer in the US Marine Corps. Very rare for a black woman during that time. So rare I am not able to find the date of the first black woman Marine Corps officer. Nor any stats or percentages of black female Marine Corps officers in the early 1970’s. My mother has a picture of her graduating class from Officer Training School. There’s about fifteen or so white women and two black women — my mom and her friend Debra. My mother left home the very night she graduated from high school to join the military. She left her graduation ceremony and jumped on a bus full of hope for her future, leaving behind a life of poverty. She enlisted in the Army and simultaneously went to college. Then she joined the Marines as an officer through some sort of program they were offering at the time.

My earliest childhood memories start at the age of three and are littered with physical and sexual abuse. My dad left. I don’t remember him. He said that he was involved in my life during those formative years, but I don’t remember him. I do remember him visiting once when I was about four or five, but I didn’t know who he was. My mother’s demanding job made it impossible for her to raise me by herself, so she started sending me to her mothers house for summers and some school years. Without the oversight of either parent, and with being hurled into an incestuous family dynamic, I quickly fell prey to the onslaught of sexual advances by two of my aunts and two of their male cousins who were brothers.

I was a fiery, emotional, rambunctious little being. By the time I was six years old it wasn’t quite so easy to violate me without a bit of a fight. If I didn’t want to do something it was difficult to get me to acquiesce. I was in the living room with my aunt and her male friend who was “exposing” himself while we were playing a board game. I didn’t want to play anymore and got up to leave the room. The room started spinning out of control and I wasn’t able to keep my balance, although I struggled fiercely to do so. I could see an open doorway to the bedroom and my intent was to hurry and make it to the bed to lay down. I missed the door way. I was so hazy until I ran right into the wall and hit the ground. I heard my aunt and her friend break out into a thunderstorm of laughter. It sounded like there were thousands of laughing sightseers, all laughing at me. I have no recollection once the sound of laughter went away. From that point on I would go to bed alone and wake up in someone else’s bed with them. That was incredibly scary for me. It took some years for me to realize that I was being drugged.

By the time I was ten or so I had been groomed, along with two of my cousins close to my age, to ask for money and gifts from men who had a thing for the prepubescent. I was also being experimented on by my mother’s (and aunts) male cousins who were brothers, to see if my body had grown enough to be penetrated.

Of course it was demanded never to reveal what was happening to me, “or else”. Part of that “or else” was that all of this was my fault because I was a whore and everyone would find out if I said anything. At the age of fourteen my aunt came to me to let me know that I would be “spending the night” with her and her boyfriend, and sleeping in her bed with the two of them. I am not quite sure what came over me, but I could not bare anymore. In a split second I decided that she would have to kill me or be killed. I was not going to agree to another demand from her, ever. I had absolutely nothing left to lose.

I looked her square in the eyes and said,

“No!”

She paused momentarily and turned around and walked away. No duel to the death. Not even any back chat. She just walked away. I was never sexually or physically abused again, by anyone.

So much damage had been done. I had separated from a part of myself in order to endure the physical pain brought on by my mother’s two male cousins. They were incredibly cruel. I had been forced into sexual relations with two women and I was not a lesbian or bisexual myself. I had been unknowingly drugged and given alcohol in order to be more submissive. Being submissive went against my very nature. I had been brainwashed into believing that if I weren’t such a whore then none of this would have ever happened. I was completely broken, shattered into a million tiny little pieces. And now, instead of being abused by others, broken-heartedly, I abused myself through my reckless behaviors. I just didn’t want to keep living.

By the time I was eighteen I had slipped into a state of “madness”. I was insistent on God having enough mercy on me to never allow my eyes to open again each night that I laid down to sleep — when I was able to sleep. I wasn’t sure who this God was, but I had heard about him through family members and television. Instead of being institutionalized, medicated, put in therapy, or it even being acknowledged that I needed help, I was shipped off to college. How I was ever able to make it far enough to get accepted into any four year university in the US is really beyond me. Despite all of my unusual, unorthodox behaviors throughout my childhood and the abuse, I seemed to always do well in school.

I went off to college and stayed in a beautiful apartment off campus. All of the dorms had filled up and I would need somewhere to live while attending classes. The classes I barely went to. Eventually, the classes I never went to. I was severely depressed. For whatever reason that word, depressed, just does not seem to give justice to what I was going through. However, I had not been “diagnosed” with anything because I never received any help. I am not complaining about not receiving help, I actually feel as though, on some level, that HELP may have been one of the best things that “never” happened to me. Who knows, I may have been locked up in a small room with a straight jacket on, drugged up on prescription meds. I really have no idea. But what I do know is that I was able to turn my life around without the straight jacket or the prescription meds.

I was now about 250 miles away from home. I had no friends. I didn’t make friends — living off campus and not attending classes. I did not have a phone. I had very little money. I alienated myself from the world and it was just me and my obsessively destruction mind. For a frame of reference I would liken it to a mix of bipolarism and PTSD. For me, a state of madness for sure.

I will fast forward here because what I really want to get at is how I went from shattered into a million tiny little (mad) pieces to the alchemical process that took place — a process in which I am now able to function from an internal experience of compassion and love and an external experience of self empowerment.

Somewhere along the way I had just had enough of living in such a defeated existence.

No, I did not start out abusing myself, this is something that I was taught. It was not something that a three year old can control. The mind is malleable and I was duped into believing that the abuse was just my lot in life. But this knowledge was not going to change my experience on it’s on. I was going to have to actually put this knowledge into motion. But how? Not only did I not have money for what I had concluded would possibly be a lifetime of therapy (I was convinced I would need to meet with someone at least three times a week to keep me off every ledge that I walked by), but I also did not trust anyone formerly trained with the ability to manipulate our thoughts. Little did I grasp at the time that I would be utilizing these very skills to heal myself.

And so, I went to work — on myself! I made a decision to deal with all of my conscious triggers through the use of my mind. I had a lot of them…triggers. I devoured books on psychology, neuroscience, and read a book by a neurologist who, before his near death experience, was an atheist and had turned his life over to a belief in something with a creative force. I even contacted him to try and better understand how our minds work. Once my appetite had been satisfied with the academia of my research I devised a plan to rewrite my script. I focused on my body and began to “feel” the triggering in the midst of it rather than after I had an experience with someone that left us both feeling confused and powerless. As I felt my body react by the sound of a slamming door or by a smell or by someone’s choice of words (etc. I had a lot of triggers) I developed counter measures in my mind to diffuse the affects and channel the energy in an empowering way. My main tools were movies that I created in my mind that steered the journey of the trigger to create a new pathway in my brain instead of the pathway that I had been on since childhood in order to survive. I created detours, if you will, by alchemizing the trigger into the victory. I totally dived into my child like imagination. If I felt myself being triggered and I wasn’t able to take my mind through the journey of a movie that I created, then I would sit if I was standing. Or stand if I was sitting. I would take a few steps if I was standing still, or stand still if I was walking. I imagine that I looked to be more confused than ever, but I was redirecting my energy. Acknowledging it, and intentionally redirecting it.

I created mantras that I would recite in front of a mirror. Initially I would cry, they were so hard to believe in this context. Words that no one had ever said to me before with the intention of loving me, but rather with the intention of manipulating me into making their violation against me a bit more effortless for them. Words like, “I love me”, “I am beautiful”, “I am courageous”, “I am thankful.” I would do this all throughout the day. Eventually synchronicity was settling in with newfound manifestations. Strangers would walk past me and remark, “You’re so beautiful”, and keep walking. Women meeting me for the first time would tell me how when they look at me they see love. I would get called on time and time again to “stand up” for the rights of the employees at various jobs because I was a Warrioress.

I slowly began to heal. Even when I didn’t see any results, I kept at it. Determined to heal. Something in me just would not give up. I’ve never gone back to my days of bipolarism or PTSD, not even once. It was a lot of work to pick up each of those tiny pieces of shatteredness. At times I would — figuratively — cut my fingers and bleed profusely and cry it out. I would tell myself,

“It’s okay, I will start fresh tomorrow. I love me.”

It wasn’t easy, but I did it. And YOU can too. In your own way. I am just here to SHOUT…that it can be done!