The Survivor Archives Project

A childhood trauma has disabled you all the days of your natural life and you haven’t yet fully recovered from that trauma.  You now have a pattern of disassociating yourself from pain, and you’ve taught yourself to walk around numb and desensitized to the feeling of pain, both given and received.

Down you went, what a fall.  You took your broken heart and ran away, disassociating yourself from the pain that it brought while minimizing the event that caused that pain.  Can’t you feel the pain even now as I speak?  I was so crushed of soul and heart when my trauma occurred, that I thought I was going to die.

At the age of thirty five I took the time to write about my feelings from my childhood trauma pain, and I expressed the great pain of what happened to me.  I diligently worked at journaling the pain away about my childhood trauma.  It was very difficult getting my painful feelings out, but I did the work it took for me to get out of me how the trauma that occurred in my childhood bad start had made me feel.  Only, without knowing that I was to continue to sweep my heart clean when pain was felt, I returned back to my same old pattern of dealing with pain as I continued to stuff pain into my heart and minimize the events that brought offense to me.

But at thirty five, when I expunged my pain, I cussed and screamed and called foul names the person who traumatized my name.  As I wrote about the pain of my trauma, I told the person who caused me my great hurt that I hated their guts.  The pain I felt from my childhood trauma hurt like a son of a bitch, and at the time that person who brought the pain was a son of a bitch, in my opinion, as I called him the foulest of names that I could think of for hurting me so badly as I spilled my guts out in my writings and acknowledged my pain I felt he had brought.  I let him have it in my writings as I wrote and dispersed all the pain out of me of the event that traumatized me, and I spoke to him about the pain he had brought to my heart.  I expressed all my pent up feelings and thoughts, and in so doing, I let go of the pain that I had stuffed within my heart never allowing to come back out.

I had to revisit the pain that the trauma brought.  I had to finally give that painful event the acknowledgment and the expression it deserved.  I had to let my pain back out of my heart where I had stuffed it while trying to forget that horrid event.  I had held onto that trauma far too long, and my heart was killing me because it was in such pain by the time I finally took pen in hand and puked that pain back out.  I took pen in hand and allowed myself to revisit the event that caused me the anguish that I had felt, and I wrote and expressed my anger, my hate, my furry and my pain, as I cried and wailed and shook my fists in the air.  I let the person who traumatized me know exactly what he did to me, and how that made me feel.  I expressed what I wish I could have spoken at the time of the horrid event.

I had held onto these feelings for almost three decades by the time I finally couldn’t stand the pain in my heart any longer.  I had held the pain of that event deep within my heart, in silence, for the whole of my life while never allowing it a way to come back out.  It became time to clean house in my heart because my heart was too full of pain, and the pain had become too unbearable for me to endure any longer so, I did what I needed to do in order to get my hearts pain out of me as I spoke to whom my pain belonged.  Then I addressed more pain from others in my childhood past whom I felt had also hurt my heart.  I wrote to all the people from my past that I felt had brought pain and hurt my way.

I wrote of the pain that I felt that my Grandfather, Mother, Father, brothers, sisters, girlfriends, teachers, classmates and childhood crushes had given to me as I was growing up.  I spoke to each of them of the pain that I felt they had given to my heart, as I expressed myself on paper, and I told each of them just what I was feeling as I addressed what I felt they had done that had hurt me.  I got all the poison out that I had stuffed down in my heart. 

After I got the initial event out of me that traumatized me in the first place, it made me feel so much better that I ventured in and started writing about every painful childhood memory I had never given expression to, and I puked that pain out, as well.  I let all the pain out that was buried within my heart. 

It tasted like death as I revisited the pain from my childhood bad start.  The poison in my heart was sucked out of my heart by giving expression to the pain that I had stuffed down, that I had never given expression to before that point in time.  I let the pain out through expression of what that made me feel, while preparing my heart for love to come back in.  Expressing my held onto pain was like the preparation to a bone marrow transplant, only it was a heart transplant.  I did this so love could replace my pain.

But then I returned to my old habit of stuffing pain without realizing I was to continue to do the work it takes to express pain when felt, so love still wasn’t able to take hold within my heart.  But I did at least realize that I had to release my held onto pain so that my transplant could take place.  It couldn’t take hold; I didn’t allow for it to take hold, because instead, I continued in my habitual pattern to stuff pain, and I participated in this habitual habit, once again, for the rest of my life.

 In order to find true loves start you have to puke all your held onto pain back out, all of it not just some.  You have to puke it all out so that your heart transplant has the ability to take hold, and then continue to do so as hurtful events take place in your life, which I failed to do the first time around this mountain.

  It will taste like death to revisit your pain, but do it anyway.  Spit out your words of expression about the pain of your childhood trauma, and go through the pain of the event that traumatized you.  You have to revisit the pain of your childhood trauma that you’ve never given expression to before now, in order to get the horrible hurt which broke your heart and shattered you out into the light of day so you can heal from your childhood bad start. 

Once you’ve dealt with the pain from your childhood trauma then start writing about every single painful event that hurt you in your past.  Give thought about the people that you feel have hurt you from your past.  Speak to them on paper and give a voice to your held onto pain, and tell that person how what they said or did made you feel.  Speak your grudges and resentments held, and get them out of you.  Cuss and scream your guts out if you have to.  Cry and wail and stomp and shout, as you get it all out.  Do what it takes to get the pain out that you’ve been holding onto for your entire life. 

First, write about the one event that traumatized you, and then write about every event that brought you pain from your past to present date.  Speak to all the people you feel have hurt you.  As you give expression to that held onto pain and write about it, telling them how what they did made you feel, you’ll release the pain that you’ve held far too long and it will make you feel much better.  You’ve held this enormous pain from all the hurts of your childhood past for as long as you dare, as best you could, for your whole of your life, but it’s time to let it out.  It’s time to let go of the pain that you feel anyone from your past has given to you.  Then throw your writings away and let that pain fly.
Cry, scream, shout, rant, rave, cuss and feel the pain as you revisit that pain.  Your voice will have wings as you write the trauma of that one event that was yours that traumatized you.  Then when you’ve puked the initial trauma that murdered you and shut you down in the first place, you can write about all the other events that have hurt your heart.  Write about all the pain from every person or event that hurt your heart along your life path to present date.  Get all of the pain out, all of it.  It’s a heart transplant that you’re undergoing, and its part of the transplant procedure, it’s you’re part to play in the healing of your heart.  Do this so there will be room in your heart for the light of love to come back in.

A child’s only skill for coping from a trauma is to run deep inside themselves.  A child has no skills for that kind of a situation so you did just that.  After your trauma occurred each one of you ran and hid deep within yourself.  You were trying to survive, but each of you has lost yourself inside your pain never allowing that pain to come back out again.  Instead you developed and established, for yourself, a pattern to stuff pain and minimize the event.

You were forced to blame the one who you felt caused such great pain to your heart as you held onto the pain they gave you.  Yes, your heart blamed them for causing you such pain.  The thing that happened to you that shut you down did happen to you and it hurt like hell, of course you blamed the one who you felt had given you such excruciating pain and hurt.

Wake up.  Wake the hell up and remember the pain it brought.  Get out of your rivers of denial about being traumatized as a child and stop denying the condition your heart is in.  Get your head out of the sand and run like hell out of your rivers of denial about the true condition of your heart.  Run for your life and come back home to yourself, you’re delirious. 

You’re all walking around in an illusion, so wake the hell up.  Wake up to the truth of what I speak.  Something very harsh happened to you that caused you to run, hide and desensitize yourself to the feeling of pain for the rest of your lives.  Own the truth of that, damn it.  This happened to you rather you like it or not.  Whatever happened to you caused you to run deep within yourself, and you’ve been hiding from the feeling of pain for the rest of your life. 
There was an event, with someone in your life, that was very important to you, and that person traumatized you and breeched your trust of the world.  The trauma that they gave to you murdered your heart.  You died from the pain it brought to your heart; it was more than your heart could ever bear.  You were innocent before this happened to you, and you and I both know that it hurt more than words could ever express, but you’ve become frozen in time as you shut your feelings off the moment the trauma occurred.  You numbed yourself to the feeling of pain as you minimized the event, and you’re still sitting there shut off numb as hell, desensitized to the feeling of pain whenever it’s encountered again.  You were defeated by the pain the event brought your very soul so you ran deep within yourself trying to survive the pain of the event and it became you pattern for life, and that’s why you feel so empty, lonely and miserable all the time.

You’ve held onto the enormous pain of your childhood trauma all your life, haven’t you?  There was nowhere to go with such pain and hurt, was there?  Who was there for you that would see you through the trauma?  There was no one, right?  You were on your own and you were forced to keep that pain and hold it.  It became your possession; my, what a quandary for a small heart. 

What you did, instead, was say to yourself, “I’ll hold this pain and hurt and I’ll carry it for the offender, but I’ll blame them for hurting my heart.”  To blame them for the pain that you thought they brought your heart is a natural response for a child.  To blame the one, who you felt hurt you, is a completely normal response of a child’s heart.  You were a child at the time of your trauma so to think like a child is normal when you’re a child.  To have a child’s mentality about things that hurt you, as a child, is normal.  To rise up in blame for the one you felt had murdered your heart is a normal thing to do as a child.  As children, before the trauma of your life, you could actually feel all of your emotions.  You knew joy and happiness and now all you ever feel is hurt, angry, lonely, worried and fearful.

A child knows who’s at fault for the pain they’re feeling from a trauma that was brought, and they know exactly who gave them that pain.  A child would know who the person was that was at fault for giving them the pain that they were forced to endure in silence for the rest of their life.  Every child has a brain and eyes to see with, they know who perpetrated the trauma that murdered their heart.  It was experienced by them and they know who devastated their heart.  Of course, as a child, you blamed the one who brought you such pain.  That’s exactly what you did, and then you were forced to carry for them what happened to you because they wouldn’t or couldn’t be accountable for such a great offense being given to your heart.

You had to bargain with yourself to make such a decision to carry, for them, the pain for what you felt they did to you that crushed your heart.  You ran to your little mind and tried to reason how to handle the hurt and pain you had just been given.  That pain was a crushing pain and you had absolutely nowhere to go with your pain did you?  That horrible event handed you a pain that was so enormous that your heart broke.  That event absolutely shattered you.  Whatever breeched the love you had for the one who you felt brought you the pain, is the trauma that struck your heart.  Face the pain of your childhood trauma and admit to yourself that there was nowhere to go with that pain as you were forced to ask yourself, “What the hell do I do with such a great hurt?”

The catastrophic event that was yours to endure was done to you and felt as though it had been handed to you from left field, like out of nowhere.  You were cold cocked right up side your head with the event that traumatized you.  The person that traumatized you was very important to your trust of the world.  You may have been betrayed by a parent.  That would devastate a child because a parent is responsible for your very sustenance.

Maybe you were handed some sort of physical defect, such as a curved spine, that spoke a lie to you saying how deficient you are, and that was your trauma.  Maybe the deficiency of a curved spine is what traumatized you, as it appeared out of nowhere one day and suddenly devastated your life.  Whoever the person was or whatever the event was that traumatized you; you never expected the episode that was brought to your life.  It devastated your soul, but that’s where you got stuck. 

You’ve been stuck right in that very spot since your childhood trauma for the rest of your lives because from that moment on you continued to stuff every other pain that ever came your way, down inside.  A lifetime of this pattern of dealing with pain, in this fashion, is what has brought you into feeling desensitized to the feeling of pain, both given and received, and as an adult the only thing you feel now is numb and desensitized because you’ve used this pattern every time someone offends you.   

You feel like you’ve become a robot and a member of the walking dead, don’t you?  You feel like you’re on automatic pilot, don’t you?  You can’t feel anything but pain, worry, loneliness, fear and anger in your life, can you? 

It was from the point of your childhood trauma to this point in your life that you’ve felt numb, because you’ve taught yourself to stuff any other event that brought you an offense that you couldn’t bear, for the rest of your days.  Stuffing pain is what you taught yourself to do with pain, instead of giving your pain a voice, and you’ve stuffed every other painful event that ever came your way from that point forward to this. 

Whatever age you were when the event of your trauma took place between you and another that breeched your trust of the world, and was perpetrated upon your heart by that significant other, was when you dropped.  You took in that enormous pain that the event brought and you never let it back out.  You let pain come in to stay and have blamed another every time you feel they cause you an offense, since that moment in time. 

With every event that has caused you to feel offended since the time of your childhood trauma, you’ve repeated this pattern of sending blame out in front of you and have place that blame squarely upon the other person who you feel causes you an offense, and you’ve done this procedure for the rest of your days every time an offense is brought to you once more, and now you’re completely desensitized to the feeling of pain.  You can’t even recognize the feeling of pain when given; you’re too numb for having never acknowledged any pain from any of the offenses given by another person throughout your lifetime. 

You died that day as you emotionally cut yourself off from the world; you shut yourself down so you couldn’t feel such pain again, right there on the spot.  You vowed no one would ever be allowed to hurt you that way ever again, and then you tried to hide yourself away behind such a stupid vow.

Own it and admit to yourself that you’re numb as hell.  You don’t feel vibrant and genuine with yourself.  You feel down all the time and incongruent with yourself, don’t you?  It’s time to get real about the condition of your heart, it’s more than time for you to admit to yourself that you feel broken up inside and are barely hanging on.  You feel incongruent with yourself and you feel defeated every day of your life.  You need to stop lying to yourself about how you feel, and you need to stop pretending that you’re okay.  Stop walking in an illusion.  You feel miserable all the time, and it’s time for you to get out of the river of denial about how you always feel.  It’s time for you to stop ignoring your feelings.

Blaming others for causing you an offense has become a habit and a pattern that you’ve taken on for life.  Blaming others for the way you feel has become your addiction.  You’re an addict to blaming others for how you think they make you feel, and you’re held captive to the cycle of verbal abuse because of this pattern that you’ve developed.  You keep reacting in your relationships because you’ve taught yourself to react when someone offends you and this reaction pattern began at your childhood trauma.  This pattern of stuffing pain and refusing to feel it, and reacting when offended by someone, has been going on for you all the days of your life, even to this day.

It’s more than time to journal about the pain from your childhood trauma and the pain from all the other events that hurt you in your lifetime.  The trauma and all the other events that hurt you throughout your life that brought you an offense, is buried deep down inside you even to this day.  You’ve developed, in yourself, a life-long pattern of blaming others for how you feel because all you know how to do is stuff pain and not feel it, and instead blame the one who makes you feel offended.  Now blaming is a beast you’ll need to tame.  You’ve walked in this pattern since the day you shut down and you have years of this behavior to tame and overcome.  The behavior pattern of stuffing the feeling of pain and refusing to acknowledge your pain is a habit that has become a beast in your life, like “King Kong,” and it’s going to be hard as hell to tame this beast you’ve created.

Can you see yourself in anything I’ve spoken?  Please tell me you’re hearing me and that you can understand the words I’m speaking.  Go back and read the definitions to cycling in verbal abuse and tell me you’re not participating in the cycle of verbal abuse in your interpersonal relationships.  It’s become a lifelong pattern of behavior in all of your interpersonal relationships to spin in the cycle of verbal abuse.  It was the style of communication that you were taught to use as a child.  If you would take the time to reflect on your life, you’d see that this is the way that you’ve related to others all your life.  You’ve blamed others for the way you think they make you feel all the days of your life.

To cycle in verbal abuse became the pattern of communication that was developed in us from our childhood starts.  This communication style was the only skill given to us to communicate with because it was the style of communication being taught in all of our households, and we all marched out into our life with the ability to cycle with each other in verbal abuse because it was taught to every one of us in every household on the face of the earth.  Like I said, we were all equipped in the art of cycling in verbal abuse with each other, from our family of origin. 

The end result was that the cycle of verbal abuse became the communication style in all of our interpersonal relationships.  We’ve all been structured together to fit.  Communicating in this fashion became the only verbal skill we took with us as we left each of our perspective homes.  We carried a bag full of misery out into the world as we left our homes because we had no choice but to adapt to the style of communication that was being taught to us.  We had to relate in the fashion that was being presented to us to be able to communicate with each other. 

Don’t we all sound like we’re always babbling among ourselves?  Hum?  Don’t we all sound like clanging symbols?  Hum?  Isn’t it hard to relate with one another without feeling tore apart when you try?  Haven’t we become a confounded people?  Hum?  Think about it, we sound like we’re babbling.  Hum?  We’re going in circles with each other every time we try to relate.

So, are you surprised? Are you shocked? I bet that you never thought the day would come when I could and would put the rape behind me and heal myself. So many of you thought I would never get here, a place where I am a survivor, not a victim.

I think of the different reactions from those who I told in the beginning, the people I needed to support me. Some of you did not know what to say, so you said nothing, or something ignorant. Some of you were so hurt that I was hurting, that you floundered about and again did not know what to do, even if I gave you suggestions. Some of you dismissed it as no big deal, or tried to make light of it by comparing things that you had been through as being the same thing, when they weren’t even close. There were those of you who listened and acted empathetic when I told you, but then did nothing after to help me, not a phone call to check in, or a visit to see if I needed you. As far as you were concerned, we talked about it and that was that, like I had just told you I had a bad day.

There was one of you that was supportive in the beginning, but as time went on, your support went away, and in place of it was pity or worse, resentment. You said it was long enough. I should be over it by now. In fact you threw my recovery in my face, said you had made too many sacrifices to help me and you were done. You were the worst person of all for me to deal with, the one I leaned on, and just as I was almost to the top of the hill, you cut my rope, my safety net.

In the beginning of my recovery, I only told those who I trusted the most about what I was going through. I know how hard it was for you to hear what happened. I know no one likes to talk about rape, let alone see its affects on someone they love. But just because it makes you uncomfortable, you abandon me. You only tolerate it for so long because it is hard to deal with, or worse, it annoys you to deal with me. What a selfish thing to do.

I heard the comments, the reactions, things said behind my back. "She must be doing something wrong with her recovery. She should be better by now." "Her therapist must not be doing a good job." "I am tired of hearing about it." " You need to pull it together, this is hurting people to see you like this." "If you had more drive, you would be through all this. I thought you would be over it by now." Think of it from my perspective. I am doing everything in my power to work through the most horrific thing that I have ever dealt with, and you stand in judgment of me. 

The common thing about all was that you lost faith in me. Do you not know how painful that was for me to deal with? The people who I love most in the world don’t have faith in me when I needed to have faith in myself the most. So instead of helping me and supporting me, you added another obstacle. Now I had to deal with your reaction to my healing process.

What was funny was people I barely knew would tell me what a strong person I was to be even dealing with what happened. Strangers had more faith in me than those who love me.

But now, here I am. I am well and kicking. I love life again and have found love. I am not only healed, but stronger than ever before. The scars are there, and it will always be part of my life, part of me. I have faith in myself again, and faith in people again. And no one can take that away from me, no matter what you say or think of how I deal with whatever comes my way.

To the few that supported me through my entire recovery or who stepped up and educated yourself and in turn became my biggest advocates, and you know who you are, I want to say thank you. I hope you know how much your patience and faith in me means.

Pam