Telling Stories, Undoing Shame

Shame and surviving trauma go hand in hand. Sharing our stories about who we are undoes the work of shame. Shame survives in secret.

I remember the first time I told someone my story. I was in a recovery program for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I had just “remembered” my repressed trauma about eight months before finding the Gatehouse, a government-funding centre with programs for survivors of childhood sexual assault (CSA). I was sitting in a room with eight other women, most around my age.

 Our first exercise required us to write out a big secret, one we wouldn’t want anyone to know. I scribbled my secret down on a ripped piece of paper and folded it as small as it could go. I squeezed it in the palm of my hand, praying that it would disintegrate through my skin and remain stuck inside my body for another thirty years.

That didn’t happen. Instead, we all passed our ‘secrets’ to the person to our right. We each took turns reading each other secrets out loud.

When my secret was read aloud to the room, I broke into tears - the tears of thirty years came pouring out of me.

The facilitator asked me how do you feel now?

And I told her I felt ashamed. Then everyone in the room, told me about their experience with the very thing I wrote down: it wasn’t my fault; I didn’t cause it; it happened to them too; the didn’t judge me, and it was okay.

For many years – almost thirty to be exact – my body and my brain kept my childhood traumas a secret from me. For the most part, I always told people I had a pretty good childhood. That my parents, for all their flaws, tried their best.

Then, approaching my thirtieth birthday, I woke up with night terrors, repeatedly. I kept reliving what I call my original ‘big T Trauma” for nights on end. Eventually, I reached out to people in my 12-step community for guidance in what became yet another life-altering journey.

Indignantly for the first while, I weaved my survival of CSA into almost every conversation, every Instagram post, every chance meeting with a friend; I desperately needed to be witnessed and validated. I needed someone to say “yes this happened to you. This happened to me too. This is how we find freedom”. I asked myself, every day following my remembrance did that really happen? How do I know? Am I imaging it? How come I didn’t remember earlier? If it was true, wouldn’t I know?

I was at an AA meeting one evening, sharing my story from the front of the room to a group of about 100 other drunks. I shared that I am a survivor of CSA and incest. At the end of the meeting, a kind, older friend told me she understood. She recommended I look into the Gatehouse, and come over for tea sometime.

Thrown onto a waitlist (as is the case with all Ontario mental health services), I held on tight until the first program opened for me in January – three months later.

On the first evening of our program, there I sat, together, with eight other survivors.

In AA, people always say they find a “tribe”. Family groups belong to each other and know each other intimately. Groups of friends stay connected in high school, university, and beyond. Me? I never felt like I belonged anywhere, with anyone. Until I was in this room, until other women opened their mouths and shared their stories. Then I shared mine.

Once I heard their stories, and once they heard mine, all of the pain in my body began to melt away. The shame I felt over simply existing, began to unfurl itself from my bones. The disgust I had for my own body that, in my early teens manifested as an eating disorder, began to become clear to me, and began to lift.

Sharing our stories about who we are undoes the work of shame. Shame survives in secret.

Shame is isolating. It cuts me off from my body, myself, and my ability to connect with others.

After 16 weeks with these women at Gatehouse, I finally understood what it meant to be in a ‘tribe’, how it felt to finally belong. 

From that time, being a CSA survivor no longer was the centre of the world. Instead, writing and telling my story, speaking my truth become the central refuge of my life and my recovery.

This is why I write. Writing and speaking the truth can be costly. It has cost me friendships, family relationships, and even relationships with different parts of myself.

Undoing shame is an ongoing process. I encounter it in the wildest of moments: when I’m sitting on the bus and listening to music on my headphones, when I make a mistake or feel like I’ve done something wrong, when I hear someone’s response to something, or when I’m relaxing on the couch in the evening time and just watching TV.

Shame, after CSA, becomes who we are. It takes on life as a big black hole inside your stomach and eventually, encompasses your whole mind and body. Undoing the tangled web of shame is a long and arduous process. But it is lifesaving.

Talking about the things we feel ashamed of is the only sure way to find freedom.

Talking about shame is the way we find ourselves again.

Being ‘The Problem Child’, or: Growing Up With Narcissism.

Six years into my journey of recovery from narcissism and childhood abuse, I understand with a comforting familiarity what Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘it was not that I didn’t remember, it was that I could not bring myself to remember.”

I grew up in a home that was constantly praised by people on the outside for its charity, its strong women, and its endurance. My mom liked to ‘take in strays’ as she called it, and express that she didn’t need a man to support her. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like an advanced, modern, feminist home in the ‘90’s, wherein my mother was raising two strong, young women to be independent and self-determining. But my mom was (or I guess, still is) a covert narcissist.

On the inside, my childhood home was a condemning, violent, shame-filled and unstable place. Police officers frequently knocked on our door during yelling matches. I was forced to work as early as 12, and hand money over to pay for rent and food, instead of my mother seeking proper governmental support for being a single parent. Where people saw my mother claiming she never needed a man to fulfill her, I heard constant vitriol about my father and how terrible all men are. Where people saw a supportive mother who wanted to be close to her children, I had a mother who asked if she really had to show up to my school plays, concerts, and recitals and wasn’t I a little old to need so much attention? Where people thought I was spoiled, I experienced a mother who, each year, told me this birthday was going to be my last. I was manipulated, scapegoated, gaslit, physically and sexually abused, publicly humiliated and blamed.

By 13 years old, I was suicidal. By 14, I was drinking and smoking heroin. By 16, I was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and I rarely made an appearance at home during evenings, weekends or holidays. I quickly became what any dysfunctional family unit would call ‘The Problem Child’. Afraid to face their own truths, most of the negative attention of the family was directed at me. I took on the blame for the general misery and toxic environment that was my childhood home.

 This is manipulative work of a narcissist: the projection of an outward image of perfection while creating a cruel and cold environment with their families.

For many years, I felt very confused. Once I got sober, the confusion seemed to intensify: Drinking was an amazing way to numb the pain of lost memories and a short-lived childhood riddled with neglect and abuse.

 It has taken me thirty years to come out of the fog of narcissistic abuse. I am still emerging from the fog on a daily basis. Sometimes, I will simply be reading a book that triggers a realization and suddenly, I am in a black hole of grief. For three days, I will be thinking to myself ‘how did I not remember that?’, then I am left reliving and re-feeling all the pain that was not safe for me to feel as a young child.

After being in the work of untangling my life from abuse for the past six years, I realize there were signs that there was significant abuse in my childhood all along. I just didn’t know how to read them. 

1.     My childhood memories were all hazy

For many years, I only remembered what I would call ‘black spots’ in my childhood. Before the age of 13 or 14, there were big swaths of time that seemed to be completely erased from my memory.

I would try to look back and think about my childhood, or what it was like growing up and I couldn’t. Not only could I not recall what I now know to be abuse with any clarity, but I could not recall ‘the good times’ either.

My entire childhood was a black hole that I could not see through until I gained some physical and mental sobriety.

Outside resources such as ACA, therapy and reading about CPTSD has helped me to identify the abuse. They’ve also helped me to recall memories from my own childhood.

2.     Something felt ‘off’, but I never knew what

Things always felt terrible when I was a child. There were countless days that I would be ‘sick’ and not go to school. I frequently missed class in high school. I was constantly exhausted, suffering severe migraines, stomach pains and intense body aches. I would have mystery illnesses for days that no one could diagnose. They would just one day disappear. I had an eating disorder.

Going home always felt like a death sentence to me. After a day of school or a weekend at work, coming home felt like crawling into a coffin. Coming home after spending a weekend at a friend’s place felt like burying myself again and again. And I spent many weekends at friends’ places.

I could never put my finger on why I hated being at home so much, or why being around my family caused so much anxiety. I could never figure out why I had such severe panic episodes, depression, and dissociation.

Eventually, I learned about covert narcissism and the dysfunctional family unit. It was as if someone pinned my life on the donkey’s ass, for the first time ever.

The gnawing feeling in my stomach that I have felt my whole life, intensified until eventually it moved into my throat and came out as I spoke my truth.

3.     Alcohol and drugs felt grounding to me

The only thing that got me through the things I could not bring myself to remember was drugs and alcohol.

Growing up, I was often stuck in a day dream, not grounded in reality. Day dreaming was a huge escape for me as a child. I had to be able to dream that somewhere, somehow, life was better and easier than this.

Once I found drugs and alcohol at 13, I felt my feet touch the ground. My shoulders relaxed. My jaw unclenched. I laughed easier. Not only that, the thoughts of dying and hating myself started to float away.

It became my only ark in a flooded plain of abuse and terror.

Alcohol brought me to myself before it brought me to my knees. (But after that, I needed community-care of course).

In recognizing the signs in the past few years, much of the fog created by abuse and narcissism has lifted. I am still pulling on strings and seeing what belief system or memory unravels with a simple tug. I am constantly amazed at the well of memory in my body that needs to be released.

When you begin to heal from growing up in a narcissistic home and undo the damage of being the generational Problem Child, you begin to see them everywhere: in the grocery stores being ignored by dad, on the streets being shamed by mom, even in your friends homes, being bullied by their older sisters. Each time I encounter one of my own, I pass on an immense amount of golden light, casting a protective shell around them.

I pray that they too will be lifted from the fog. If not today, then tomorrow, or the next day. But I pray for them that it happens, just as it happens to me, and that one day they can speak the truth that is silenced inside them for years to come.