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.

Growing Up Poor: Money and Shame.

I grew up poor and in poverty. I grew up with intense shame about my lack of money. Poverty completely fucks up one’s relationship with money (I mean, obviously, right? You’d think so – but I didn’t know that!).

I’m not going to give you some spiel about how ‘money is energy’, and ‘all we have to do is manifest and believe’. That is for a Karen who can’t acknowledge how privilege functions in the world. What I will say is that, I am sitting here, having just paid the most I ever have in taxes because I just had a 6-digit year. In the past year alone, I cleared a personal debt, all credit card debt, a medical loan, and my student loans. And yet, I was able to save some money as well and start investments in a TFSA and RRSP account. 

This might all be normal or obvious to you but, to me, to a girl who grew up poor and had no idea what a savings account was until she hit her 20’s, this feels like a moment.

I grew up watching my mom live pay cheque to pay cheque, and struggle to feed and clothe us. While there were always presents under the Christmas tree, we always knew my mother was crushed under the weight of her surmounting debt, while buying dollar store finds to make sure Santa still visited. I heard about her debt and her money woes often, and by the time I was a pre-teen, I had to pitch in.

Money, and my lack thereof, was a great source of shame. Both growing up and into my adult years.

My relationship to money went from ‘I don’t have enough’ to ‘I finally have some, so I have to spend it all on other people’, to ‘holy shit I don’t owe anyone anything for the first time in 15 years’. (Are these the official three stages of changing your money mind? Yes, I’m sure of it.) I had to work hard to get to this moment: a moment where my relationship with money has completely revolutionized.

It’s not a pretty story. (reader: I cried a lot) 

I’ve written about starting work at 13, and eventually starting my own business at 27. So naturally, my relationship with money would have to evolve.

As a young teenager, watching my mom work multiple jobs throughout childhood with no spousal support and not taking any government support, I resented money. Money was my enemy: it sucked the life out of my mother, it took all my after-school hours away from me, it stole my weekends. I hated it, and I resented that I didn’t have enough of it, that we didn’t have enough of it, ever. Filled with so much rage and resentment towards money, when I got my hands on some (at $6.70 an hour – the minimum wage when I started working), I had to get my hands off of it.

So, I spent it.

I would dutifully hand some money over to my mother for rent, food, and phone bills and the rest would be spent on making me feel better. During my high school years, I worked four days a week, while managing a full course load. The outlet for my resentment was cute new underwear from La Senza (it was cool back then, okay?), lattes at Starbucks with friends, and on-the-go meals in between my busy work and school schedule. I lived off of Subway sandwiches and had a wicked smoking habit, spending $10 a pop on Belmont’s every few days.

At that age, and with that intense resentment, saving money had never occurred. Only when I wanted or needed something (a cute new dress, shoes, a larger cell phone plan, or my tuition for University), did I momentarily think about saving my bucks. None of it went into a savings account, and I was often in the red. After all, I used to think, why shouldn’t I spend it? It made me feel so bad, wasn’t it time it paid for me?

I’d love to say that by my twenties these attitudes shifted and I began to realize how much being alive cost. But they didn’t. Instead, these attitudes shifted over to spending money on drugs and alcohol. I remember one day waking up and literally thinking ‘you know what’s a good idea to make some fast cash? Being a bartender’. So, I saved up my pennies from working at the HMV (it was cool back then, okay?), and took a bartending course to get fully licensed and smart-served. Within weeks, I had a new bartending gig and started making bank.

 Here’s the not-so-fun part: My intense hatred and resentment towards money did not dissipate. It grew stronger.

Now, I was serving people who had more money than me. Getting them their fancy steaks, and making them their mojitos. How dare they have more money than me? And here I was, the backbone of their fun night out, making eleven dollars an hour. I felt like I was conning people into tipping me, and that was my retaliation against their cruelty for having more money than me. Fuck you for having more than me, I would think as I smiled and asked if they wanted another bottle of red wine.

With my foray into bartending, my addiction to lubricating the life experience also grew stronger.

Obviously, I couldn’t stop using and abusing money, when I was using and abusing alcohol. My abuse of money was an abuse of myself. I felt I did not deserve wealth – because I had no inner wealth. I was too busy being drunk AF.

By the time I got sober, I had little money or possessions to my name. I had been working for ten years in rudimentary, basic skill level jobs, bursting at the seams with wanting to be significant, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. Not even a savings account.

The pinch of being poor really hit me once I was sober. My resentment towards money and everyone who has it was ever-present, glaringly obvious to anyone who had eyes. But for me, I could no longer drink it away.

When I started my business at 27, I thought things would naturally just be different in my relationship with money. I thought, maybe if I had some, then it wouldn’t be so bad, and I wouldn’t be so angry and enraged – I wouldn’t feel ‘less than’ all the time.

 My business was successful. Within my first year of business, I broke the six-figure mark and gained international clients. I had clients contacting me from all over the world, inquiring about my business and my work. I scaled my business up, secured a strong team, and focused on steady, easy-does-it growth.

But within a year, I found myself without, once again: No savings account, a racked-up credit card, and no idea how to save, prepare for the future, or invest. All I knew was want. I was eyeball-deep in debt, between my personal and business credit cards, and unsure of the way out of the dark, high-interest rate tunnel.

I realized at this time, that maybe I had been approaching the money thing all wrong. My very loving boyfriend sat me down and said: just because you have some money, it does not mean you need to treat everyone to dinner.

Pardon me?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you need to. That means buying your friends their coffees when you go out with them every other day.

Excuse you?

This entire time, I had been afraid to hold on to money of any sort, because I learned very early on that money always seems to leave any way.

Growing up poor, you have no choice but to spend the little money that you make: groceries, bills, electricity, rent. I remember scraping together money for friend’s birthdays thinking ‘I hope I will have enough to eat this week’ – but never once did it occur to me that it doesn’t have to be like this. I would throw $200 in a card on my way to a friend’s wedding, feeling the intense shame that I was down to five dollars in my bank account. I was raised living pay cheque to pay cheque, and I did not understand that it could be anything else. (I’m not the only one with poverty shame, see? It’s a real thing. I’m not making this up.)

For the past twenty years, I have never once been without a job.

And it is only in the past two years that I started saving any of my income. I am not proud of this fact – but I am no longer ashamed to talk about the poverty I have lived in.

Starting, having, owning, and running a business taught me a lot about the value of money. It taught me about demanding what I am worth, and not taking on pittance where pittance feels unacceptable to me.

The truth (for me) is and always has been that money isn’t just energy. Money is a conditioned relationship and response, typified by my past experiences. My understanding of money is inherently connected to the money blueprint created in me in my formative years. With this blueprint, I continued to build a house, once I began to make my own money, reinforcing everything this blueprint taught me. The unfortunate fact is that the foundation built from this blueprint was either completely unsteady, full of cracks, or like that half-assed job your cousin does as a favour.

In my late twenties, I had to rewrite my foundational understanding of money and its relationship to me before trying to earn some.

Only then, was I able to demand my worth, and see the value in saving and investments. I had to get uncomfortable in investigate the stories I told myself about how much I deserved such as the following hall of fame winners: money will come but it will go faster, going in to debt will make you happy because you can buy things, debt is normal and you will always have it.

After astute investigation, a couple of big, snotty cries during a few tax seasons and calls with my accountant, I began to feel the release of poverty shame.

Revolutionizing what money means to me is, of course, ongoing. I haven’t veered completely in the opposite direction where I don’t buy ANYTHING, but I will say I cook more meals at home. I have learned that I can nourish myself with money and my savings habits. I can handle my investments as a way to nurture myself. I can stop hitting the panic button when a letter from the CRA comes in the mail. I can find a reasonably priced course online and consider my options.  

After living in poverty for almost three decades, I can, and do, believe in the value of investing in myself.