You Are as Sick as Your Secrets.: Trauma Understands Trauma

Chapter 1

I Got to Live

We were on our boat in The Bahamas, anchored off from Eleuthera. Mother and Father had been drinking that night. I recall there was hardly a night when they weren’t. My father warned me before we all went downstairs to bed that I was not allowed to get up in the middle of the night. He mumbled something about pirates in the area. I was ten. When I got up for a glass of water, I was standing at the top of the stairwell and saw my father peering up at me with a gun cocked and pointed towards my forehead.

I froze.

He pulled the trigger.

It jammed.

I remember thinking, surely he saw me? Why would he pull the trigger? Was that an accident? Did he do it on purpose? It didn’t make sense.

Immediately he started yelling, ‘Look what you made me do! I almost killed you! Do you see what you’ve done?’

I felt sorry for him. I was worried he would find it difficult to cope with what he just did. We never spoke of it, ever. I doubt my mother ever knew. I doubt he even gave it a second thought. The most disturbing part of that story to me is not that my father almost killed me, it’s that a little ten-year-old girl was more concerned that her father would be burdened by his actions. It’s the starkness in the girl who didn’t even flinch because trauma by that age was a normal event.

This is my story. It’s my parents’ story. It is my intention as I tell the story that it links to many stories, my own and yours, the reader. The story you see is fixed in its truth. However, through the narrative, the words and the tone, it can be woven into something hauntingly beautiful. A tapestry hanging proudly, its intricate patterns created by those who conquered the fiercest battles. I would hang that tapestry backwards, as the truth is not in the perfect image.

Trauma hides, it is found in the chaos behind an interwoven mess of knotted, hanging threads. The true journey is in the complexities of fear, pain, anger, grief, shame, illusions, reconciliation and lack of reconciliation, forgiving versus unforgiving, choice, hard work, hope, expression, truth, vulnerability, acceptance, courage, standard, grace, humility and love. This is where the real story lives. That is the story I am here to tell.

It is not important or even possible that I list every grave or morose memory. This is not written to trigger you or to make my trauma the focus of this book. You are the focus. Through my own story, I hope to pave the way to how one can navigate through the darkness of trauma and the web of secrets.

I invite you on a journey into my mind as a survivor of abuse. As a counsellor specialised in trauma for over twenty-five years, I will offer my perspective as the victim, survivor and as a therapist to thousands who have bravely shared their own stories of trauma. I will highlight many of the tools I developed along the way, whether they were gathered by my own innate survival, gifted by strangers, friends or passed down by my mother, herself a talented therapist. Tools I’ve developed from years of studies in East, West, Celtic, Norse, Caribbean and Mexican belief systems or passed down through my cultural lineage of Scottish/English/German/Norse descendants. I was looking for anything mind, body or spirit that could lead to the path of healing myself and ultimately others. After all, my life was not a straight path but a fight along sharp uncertain corners, steep unrelenting inclines, turbulent declines and many cliff edges. Why would I expect my studies, my quest for answers and the tools of navigation that would save my life and keep me from falling off the edge to be anything linear?

I invite you to be a witness to the way I perceive things and how I learned to reframe, integrate, rebuke, cast out, reauthor, reprogram, reclaim, release, stand up, armour up and how I finally created a life in which I no longer had to fight for my right to be. I invite you to stand in the ring of fire with me, beside me, as we proudly voice our truth and share the stories that threaten to define us. These are the narratives we can take hold of and rewrite into the wellness of our bodies, our minds, our identity, our souls and our destiny as we reclaim the life and person that so dangerously almost got snuffed out.

It is my hope that sharing my story will inspire you to pause when meeting others and remind you to be kinder, always, as love is our only hope. Remember that some of the deepest wounds belong to those who are the loudest, brightest, funniest or deemed too much.

Challenging your own foibles, insecurities, hurts and unresolved subconscious triggers, I invite you onto the pathway toward a better, more conscious humaning. Much more than just being a human, humaning is the ing, the action of doing: loving, giving, supporting, sharing, truthing, rewarding, creating and celebrating being human.

A Secret (noun): Something that is kept or meant to be kept unknown or unseen by others.¹

There were so many secrets in my family. Inherited long before I was even born, we were raised to hold them close. I do not believe it is personally cathartic or beneficial to others that all of one’s secrets are revealed. This forced purging under the guise of therapy or spiritual enlightenment is dangerous. Deep traumas and secrets buried in the subconscious mind are often done so in self-preservation. This is the wonderful power of your subconscious mind, whose job is to protect you—let it! Opening vaults or revealing all would not only flood your body and mind with a tsunami of emotions strong enough to crack you, but it would also leave you open to re-injury.

The real problem with keeping some secrets, however, is you continue to carry them. Not facing them and doing the work within yourself passes the responsibility of those burdens onto others. One cannot hide such hauntings as they seep out through your behaviours, choices, relationships, projections, attachments and re-enactments, bleeding into the next generation, until someone digs deep, draws them out and holds them up to the light. Exploring them, understanding and accepting them can then begin the process of watering them down.

There is no cure for such sufferings but the watering down through the generations allows them to fade away, so much so it can feel like a cure. This can only happen, however, by consciously acknowledging they exist, as they belong to a part of you that has been dying to tell their stories. It involves waking up from the slumber of denial and the darkness they have hidden in for so long; buried in shame and fear, they only sink deeper.

This is my goal, the real intention in my endless pursuits for truth, self-awareness, self-actualisation and my purpose for my family, clients and all those who seek more. I do it in the hope that one day, as my picture holds the helm of the family tree, those generations after me will be better, live freer, feel and be healthier. They will be proud of their history, of the legacy of their name and of the standard I did my best to reclaim, for me and for them. I will pass the baton, knowing I did all I could to clear the inherited debt that left my family so deficit; two out of us four siblings died far too early. Under the insurmountable weight of the secrets they ingested, their minds were haunted and their bodies ravaged until they just couldn’t take anymore. Some secrets, therefore, must be brought to the surface and forced to face the light of truth, set free in the narrative of the only person who has the right to tell it—the victim; a word used to describe many of us who have endured trauma.

Victim (noun) (1): one that is injured, destroyed or sacrificed under any of various conditions (2): one that is subjected to oppression, hardship or mistreatment (3): one that is tricked or duped.

Synonyms: casualty, fatality, loss, prey²

I have never been fond of the word victim. It is a powerful word, used to describe the subjective and collective experience that gives voice to what we endured, however long-term we risked identifying with it.

We are not our trauma, but we have experienced trauma. If left too long the word victim festers into a permanent fabric of who we have been told we are, rather than who we choose to be. Imagine the residual destruction to one’s psyche if imprinted with the belief that they are a casualty, fatality, loss or prey. When we go to the undercurrents of words, we find deeper meaning unseen to the conscious mind but inherently understood by the subconscious. Therefore, a casualty is an injured soul; a fatality is death to whom you could have been, loss is to a part that will always leave you seeking and prey is the perpetual victim. How we go about transcending the word victim and many other disempowering, devaluing, demoting and destructive words will be discussed later. For now, I will use the word victim from the experiencing point of reference only.

I strongly believe trauma victims need to be heard, seen, witnessed and provided with tools for expression both verbally, subconsciously and somatically. Not having therapy can lead to mental health, relationship and identity issues, as well as severe health complications later in life. The mind and body can only take so much. The fear of reaching out is still a reality for many, however. Not telling and maintaining secrets is a learned or trained behaviour and becomes a survival instinct. It’s sustained by fear of further abuse or retributions. Unspoken contracts were made in exchange for favouritism, money or mere survival because of the belief no one would come to your rescue. Signed in blood, that belief formed because no one ever did. Even when those brave souls reach out later in life, many fail to continue the arduous journey of expression, truth or therapy. Their worst fears are realised when they finally tell their story to the per son who doesn’t have the tools to receive it.

There is a panel of judges sitting in the minds of the untrained individuals who show up in various forms as: therapists, doctors, friends, families and lovers. Intentional or not, they view the symptoms of trauma as neurosis, embellishments, a blithe on your character or even an undiagnosed mental health issue. The victim can see it in their eyes, hear it in the tone of their voice and feel it in the energy that congests the space. That judgement is very painful to a victim of trauma. They have already endured years of not being heard, seen or believed. In fact, their mere survival was dependent on developing this acute and uncanny sixth sense. At times a gift, at times a burden, one can’t simply turn it off. It can make casual social events or relationships challenging. Sensing how one really thinks and feels isn’t always pleasant. It is the ability to see every micro-expression, hear the slightest distinctions in one’s tone of voice, what is said behind the words, feel the shifts in mood and read behind the eyes. Who a person is and who a person isn’t is always in the eyes.

The symptoms of trauma, raw and unhealed, are deemed by many as ugly, unfitting or just too much. A tsunami of rapid speech and body tics vomit out wildly in a fury of untamed, incongruent and fragmented pieces. It looks like, sounds like and is chaos. It is dark, complex and has many layers that create cognitive dissonance in the victim. This imbues a sense of unreality, confusion and a mindset of not trusting their perception of the abuse, the relationship to the perpetrator and ultimately all relationships, past and present. It can leave the victim vulnerable and exposed to more abuse from other covert predators that sniff out and prey on their exposed vulnerabilities. Cyclical patterns may have formed, creating attachment issues where the victim unconsciously reverts to the child and the lover becomes their parent. Desperately fearing abandonment, rejection and judgment, they work harder for those who dismiss, denounce or devalue them. This is a dangerous web many victims often find themselves lured into as predators so easily recognise their malleable boundaries.

Imagine receiving a puzzle with pieces missing and there are no instructions, not even a lid with a picture to reference. This is the starting point for both the victim and the therapist working with them. Therefore, it takes skill. It takes time. It takes a mind, body, spiritual approach, incorporating a multitude of evidence-based therapies and mindful, creative and ‘embodied’ modalities.

There is no one measurement of trauma as it is defined as an umbrella of conscious, subconscious and body-felt sensing, experienced at a psychological, physical, emotional, sensory, intuitive and energetic level. How one defines trauma is a subjective choice and right. The incongruence of how trauma is experienced gets encoded through our senses like shards of broken glass. These fragmentations regurgitate through: nightmares, triggers, somatic tics, re-enactments, learned helplessness, abusive relationships, avoidant attachment styles, alcohol /drug abuse, over-eating, hyper-sexual activity, nervous system hyper and hypo arousal, fight, flight and freeze responses, shame, feeling unlovable, abandonable, not good enough, not worthy, cognitive distortions, procrastination, foggy brain, not feeling safe, dissociation, de-personalisation, de-realisation, anger, revenge, resentment, embitterment, depression, anxiety, co-dependency, constant scanning (distrust), sleep issues and a sense of being different from everyone else.

Trauma is the belief there is no bottom, no limit to the sadistic perpetrator’s ability of power; that regardless of how bad things get it can always get worse—and did. There is always another level.

Trauma is also defined as:

‘Psychological Trauma is the unique individual’s experience of an event of enduring conditions in which the individual’s ability to integrate his or her emotional experience is overwhelmed (i.e., His or Her ability to stay present, understand what is happening, integrate the feelings and make sense of the experience) or the individual’s experiences (subjectively). A threat to life, bodily integrity, or sanity.’³

‘An inescapably stressful event that overwhelms people’s existing coping mechanisms.’⁴

‘Traumatic events can lead to physical and mental health conditions including heart attacks, strokes, obesity, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, PTSD and chronic inflammation.’⁵

Since I was three years old, I always coloured just outside the lines. Through the stories I’ve been told or from my own memories, I identified a few small but poignant things I innately carried which I now know are the beginning staples of resiliency:

• Intuition

• Courage to step outside the lines

• Innate optimism

• Innate empathy

• A sense of humour

• Deep gratitude

• A sense I was a micro part of something macro

• An insatiable need to TALK

• A keen observer

• The courage to stand back up

I’ve had moments of serendipity throughout my life where one person somehow appeared at the right time and gave me a gift in a word, a sentence or a phrase that altered the direction I took. Those are the sliding door moments. I have always recognised them as destiny sending me a message, perhaps from my deceased ancestors, reminding me that I am OK; that despite what I was experiencing, somehow hope was mine to behold and that I didn’t deserve it and I would get through it. It’s been my life’s work to understand why not everyone survives their trauma. I’ve seen firsthand what a soul looks like when it breaks. The measurement is seen in the eyes and sensed, felt and heard in the micro expressions of the body; a sound so loud it’s inaudible.

I’ve seen trauma kill through years of depression, self-harm, binge eating, anorexia, addictions, immunity issues, self-sabotage, mental health, shame, grief, low worth, lack of reconciliation, secrets, or the final stages of disease—heart attacks and cancer; the nervous system can only handle so much.

I don’t subscribe to quick fixes or ‘cures’ of such layered and systematic complexities, however, with the right tools you can be well. It’s the kind of well where joy fills the marrow of your bones, where love can feel safe, where home exists and where you can truly connect to the incredible, worthy, beautiful human being you are.

I am not your guru, nor do I profess my system is the only way or the cure to all that ails you. I am one of you, a child of extreme trauma, a woman who has had far more regurgitations of that past than she ever deserved. I do not believe in the saying ‘life doesn’t give you more than you can handle’. I know it can smash you and knock you down until you are face-planted on the ground. But there is a way to stand back up. Whether you do it in leaps and bounds or in tiny micro steps, the forward motion is the energy toward you rescuing yourself. Always, just keep moving forward.

In this book, I will take off the cloak of my identity as a therapist of twenty-five years and stand up to face my own vulnerabilities, fears, lessons, battles and secrets in my family. It is the foundation of my work, my passion, my mission, my purpose and at the deepest core of who I am.

Every morning I wake up, I stand up. I stand up for my mother, my precious gem, who endured a childhood of trauma only to sustain another fifty-eight years of a marriage riddled with abuse. I stand up for my sister, who died too soon under the insurmountable trauma she couldn’t find her way out of. I stand up for my brother, who died only months after my sister; a victim of extreme and complex trauma that shook the essence of his mind for most of his adult life. I stand up for every client that bravely comes to see me and entrusts me with their journey. I stand up for everyone who still feels shame, fear, disconnected, unsafe and unheard or is lost in their own self-destructive inherent patterns.

I stand up for me.

I am me.

I am you.

So, take my hand and walk with me, beside me. Let me share my truth, the truth I hope will begin the process of you standing up for yourself.

¹Oxford English Dictionary.n.d.www.oed.com (Accessed February 24, 2023).

²Merriam-Webster. 2022. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. www.merriamr-webster.com (Accessed February 24, 2023).

³ Giller, E. (1999) What Is Psychological Trauma? Sidran Institute. Available at: https://www.sidran.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/What-Is-Psychological-Trauma.pdf (Accessed: February 24, 2023).

⁴ van der Kolk, B. A., and R. Fisler. 1995. ‘Dissociation and the Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories: Overview and Exploratory Study’ Journal of Traumatic Stress. United States National Library of Medicine 8, no. 4: 505–25.

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02102887.

⁵Harvard Health Publishing.February 12, 2021 .‘Past Trauma May Haunt Your Future Health.’Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/past-trauma-may-haunt-your-future-health (Accessed: February 24, 2023).

Chapter Two

Trauma is Viewed with a Wide Lens to Get the Full Angle

We all know the key to a good home is the foundation it’s built on. There is a clear and consistent image in my head of what