Is Connecting with the Authentic Self After Trauma Possible?

For me, there was no authentic self for a very, very long time.

Before recovery, my life was dark and lonely place where I was cut off from my authentic self. I was a shell of a person, carved out by childhood and narcissistic abuse. I eventually turned to drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of my own disconnection from self. There was a void inside me where the authentic self should have lived.

Having recovered from many things – childhood trauma, alcoholism and drug addiction, codependency, narcissist abuse, and above all: disconnection from many parts of myself, including my authentic self, I believe this disconnection from self to be the most exquisite type of pain we can experience in our human form.

What I can tell you is that the climb back to that authentic self is the most rewarding journey one can embark on; I’ve done it myself, I’ve seen others do it; I’ve coached women through it; I’ve held partners, lovers, and friends’ hands through it.

I’d love to tell you that this is an overnight journey, that it is just a couple of self-help books and a few months practicing daily meditation, that it’s just one Yoga retreat in Bali away. Of course, we both know, that it isn’t. It’s sobriety. It’s daily recovery. It’s facing your trauma down. It’s feeling all the goddam feels. It is pure fucking determination to feel something other than the void inside. It’s a snot-cry here and there (eventually the snot-cry is not every day, but when you’re in the thick of it, it’s pretty fucking frequent). It eventually leads you to freedom.

When I get into enough pain, I will typically be hell bent on getting the F out of it. By the time I came into recovery, the intense pain of disconnection from myself forced me to face all my patterning, my core beliefs, my negative self-talk, my traumas, and yes, my shadow self.

I can’t tell you what you should do. But I will tell you what I did. And how I did it.

(Prepare for the absolute worst and most daunting to do list of your fucking life.)

Here’s how I connected with The Authentic Self After my (big T) Traumas (plural). (Yes, it’s fucking possible, can you believe it?).

1.     Stop Medicating with Drugs and Alcohol.

You’d think this was self-explanatory. But it isn’t. An old AA sponsor once said to me that if I am taking any pill, any food, any drink, or any drug to alter my state of mind or get a sense of ‘ease and comfort’, then I am not sober.

That revelation fucking sucked. Here I was popping Tylenols because it helped me with whatever pain I was in each day. My Tylenols days ended right then and there, a mere three months after my drug and alcohol days ended. Fuck, had I no vice? There was no fucking way I could do this.

It’s only through living a non-medicated life that I’ve been able to truly reconnect. Yes, some of us are really out here just raw-dogging reality.

2.     Find Community Support and Care.

Don’t do this shit alone.

I needed support. I tried healing, I tried therapy, I tried addictions counselling. I tried yoga, I tried dieting, I tried dating, I tried not dating. What I needed, and continue to need, is authentic and safe connection.

Coming from a place where connection was dangerous and life-threatening, this one was hard and slow, and took a very long time to open myself up to. In a nutshell: I hadn’t developed safe attachment and attunement with my caregivers – so safe attachment and attunement with others felt impossible. But it was (and is) necessary for my healing. How the hell did I do that? Ugh. That’s a whole OTHER blog post. Ear mark this for later.

3.     Meditate and Journal, daily (if not two or three times a day).

I know it sounds super basic and spiritual by-passy, perhaps very ‘love and light’ of me. But I had to get still with myself in order to connect. I have been journaling almost daily for the past nine years. I rarely journal about my days or my inner thoughts. I’d rather journal about my gratitude, my goals, my affirmations and aspirations. Even my beliefs in the law of assumption (ok, a whole other blog on this too…).

But at the core of it, and at the very beginning of my journey into recovery, if I wasn’t able to get still and sit with my feelings, I wasn’t ever going to get well. If I wasn’t going to get well, there was not chance in hell I could connect with what is my true, core, authentic self.  

Since becoming able to meditate, and witness my own thoughts and patterns rather than engaging in them, I have been able to recognize the shifting nature of the self; That nothing, including myself is permanent. That includes my feelings, my trauma, my flashbacks, my triggers but also my joys, my success, my celebrations.

Meditation and journaling has helped me witness myself, and let go of myself all at once. 

4.     Witness Your Traumas.

Someone else was unable to witness the harms they caused you or the harms someone else caused you and now, you need it to be seen. This has become your job now. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fun. But: it is the only way through.

Gabor Mate sums this up beautifully. He says ‘trauma is not what happens to you, trauma is what develops inside of you as a result of what happened to you’. If I grew up in a volatile home, and no one was there to help me through it, then the trauma stays within me. Unlike, say, a friend of mine who also grew up in a similar home. But, they had a trustworthy grandparent or aunt who they could talk to, a safe place they could go on weekends, someone who witnessed them in the pain of what was happening.

When our pain is denied, it continues, it persists. It stays inside of us – an energy that cannot find its way out.

Witnessing my traumas has allowed me to witness all of my self – all the parts of myself that have been hidden away for years. I mean all of them: the sad, scared girl who carries the shame of my sexual abuse, the over-compensating manager who seeks my mother’s approval, the angry teenager who rages and drinks and flirts, the suicidal preteen who just needs to be hugged.

I have sat with all of my inner girls and I have witnessed them as wholly as I can. (Believe me, I cried a fucking lot).

5.     Then write it all down.

What does it mean to witness my traumas, and witness my inner girls who experienced these traumas? I have written down their stories. I have written down the incidents that have been most harmful to their sense of safety. I have written down everything ever “done to them”. I have written down their thoughts, their prayers, their plans for escape.

I literally meditate, and affirm to myself that I am safe and what I am about to do may bring up a lot of emotions, but it is okay because the danger is over now. Then I sit and I write. Sometimes for twenty minutes, sometimes for three hours. But I write until it is out and I don’t know to write it down any more. Usually, what I end up finding is that I had done nothing wrong but as a young child or teenager who was never taught how to self-regulate, I blamed myself for many of the abuses I suffered. I carried that shame with me for many years and acted out of it, in defence of it, and to protect myself from it.

Once I began writing out my traumas and situations, (this is going to sound weird), I would get physical symptoms. I would burp a lot, feel like I was going to vomit, not be able to sleep for a night or two, need to scream and cry. But I knew that these were all pieces of energy attached to the traumatic situations that needed to just leave my body. So I moved with them (seriously, like writing on the floor, crying with snot dripping from my nose, and getting burps out), to help get that trauma energy stored in my body to finally be released.

I’m lucky enough to have a partner who has done similar work. He has been able to coach and guide and love me through these difficult processing and witnessing moments. If you can, get somewhere peaceful, quiet, and safe. And take a safe person with you who knows what this heavy stuff is about. Someone who will help you regulate when you need to, and remind you that you’re doing a good job in the middle of that snot-cry.

Eventually, I began to write down my inner girls’ dreams, their hopes, their desires – which became mine again (this is called integration).

6.     Forgive yourself.

I’ve heard a lot of shit about forgiveness. Shitty therapists have told me I need to work on forgiving people (my mom, my dad, family friends, ex boyfriends). I haven’t forgiven many people in my life except for myself and the people who have asked for forgiveness (Soundoffinthecomments).  

The most important forgiveness has been of myself.  I have had to forgive myself for the pain I have caused others with the way I acted when I was in pain; I have had to forgive myself for not knowing any better; I have forgiven myself for accepting abuse and thinking it was love; I have forgiven myself for sliding back into old behaviours and patterned ways of thinking; I have forgiven myself for moving on too quickly or not quick enough; I have forgiven myself for the bad days, and for the days when I felt I didn’t deserve anything good.

Self-forgiveness is an ongoing process, like much of my journey to connect with myself. This is a daily practice.

7.     Regulate your Goddam Nervous System.

Easier said than done, amirite? The slightest energetic interference will throw my nervous system regulation out of whack. Sometimes, I am convinced that I’m not as introverted as I think I am, I am actually just traumatized (lol).

Meditation, journaling, prayer, exercise, yoga, stretching, breathing, getting in touch with my body and emotions have all helped me to regulate my nervous system. Working with community and other people (safe people) has helped me to learn what a regulated nervous system could feel like.

Quick tip: Have you ever felt warm and fuzzy in the presence of others? Maybe like, it’s a friends-giving surrounded with fun, delicious smells, hugs, and cozy feelings? And it feels like a warm hug that starts in your belly? That. That, for me at least, is optimal regulation.

8.     Realize That You Are More Than A Survivor.

Because I am. And you are. Surviving my worst days is not who I am. Surviving the worst days at the hands of my abusers is barely the beginning of who I am. My identity does not end and begin with survival of hard things.

Reconnecting with what feels like my authentic self (holy fuck, maybe I’m way off base and this ain’t it???), has taken the larger part of a decade. It is a daily commitment that, over time, has taken less energy and focus than it did at the very beginning.

 I am not what I have survived. I am nuanced. I am layered. I am multitudes. And so are you. 

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.