A Window with a View: Childhood Trauma

I guess now is a good time as any to start talking about my recovery from childhood trauma - I recently had experiences with my parents this past weekend that I am still processing, and maybe a post about it will help me move on.

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My parents struggled to be a unit while they were still married.

I went to church with my father and his wife this past Sunday, and the Sunday School lesson was on how to strengthen marriage and family relationships. The lesson was taught by a college professor and his wife, who was the leader of the women's organization for that congregation. One of the first things they taught was that "Husband and wife have the responsibility to love and care for each other" which is then followed by "and their children". The question was asked why was love of spouse put before children? And was there a reason for this order?

Before I could stop myself, I blurted out that this order is intentional, because how can a child learn how to love others when their parents don't love each other?

My dad agreed with this - it's because he knows this now, only after attending therapy with me over this last year.

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My mother is mentally ill - whether it's a direct result from her own family abuse, or if it is a separate issue that couples with trauma from that abuse, I don't know.

No one may ever know, because my mother is the least self-aware person you will ever meet, as well as the most adept at masking you will ever meet. My mother was only properly diagnosed in October 2024, because her issues landed her in the hospital - her mask finally slipped far enough for doctors to see what was really happening.

Picture this: you are born into a family where your mother, the person who is supposed to be nurturing you, helping you understand how life works, and giving you safety and security when things appear scary, is a time bomb, waiting to go off. It's not a matter of IF it will go off - it is a matter of WHEN. And the thing that sets off the time bomb changes every. single. time.

Do you think you, a child in that family, would have a high likelihood of becoming a functional adult?

It's possible, if the other parent is able to ground the child in reality.

So again, picture this: you have a time bomb of a mother, and the other parent, who could protect you, or remove you from their presence, or give you context for what is happening, is instead a war veteran, accustomed to the bomb going off, and focused so much on preserving his own sanity, that his protection is spotty at best.

Maybe you don't get the full blast - there are times when the parent has removed the time bomb into the other room, while you sit there wondering why the bomb even went off in the first place. So you don't get the full blast, but you are left with no context. Or the bomb drops, and removes itself from the room, so the parent gives you some context of surface level triggers for the bomb. You still got blasted, but at least you got some context. But when you try to avoid the triggers from last time, a new trigger causes the bomb to go off, and you're left reeling.

And your siblings? They are just as clueless as you are in dealing with all this. No one has taught them how to have compassion - so everyone finds their own way to deal with the bomb going off.

People may think that trauma in a family can bring affected family members together - It can, if there is one parent who oversees it. My reality is that this did not happen.

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You grow up thinking this is normal. Your parent does not teach you that people don't grow up with bombs in their house. People who visit your home, or see her outside the home see your time bomb as a wonderful, kind, happy person, because her mask is perfect - for a few hours. You only realize what you grew up with is wrong, when you spend time at other homes and see other family units operate. And you realize just how robbed you were growing up.

I didn't know this at the time, but up until 2020, I was mentally and emotionally 6 years old.

Because my parents were not able to support my growth, I was stuck mentally and emotionally at about 6 years old.

Starting in 2018, when I started therapy, I have had to parent myself into the adult I am becoming today.

I left my home in 2010, and got married in 2013.

Let me ask you - do you think I was an effective spouse during these last few years?

The answer is no. My husband and I both realized that I was not able to handle the stresses that marriage brings, and so our relationship was very one-sided for a time. It has only been within the last year or so I have been able to fulfill my role as a spouse. But as this is a new change, pitted against years of a different, more familiar dynamic, my spouse and I have struggled to find the new normal for our roles.

It's a battle between what we know, and uncharted territory - it's exciting for me, but it's also scary for me.

And the reason it's been such a battle, is because of how much my parents want to spent time with me.

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So this last weekend:

I was not at home, but at a garage sale for my local SCA group - we had some stuff to sell, and I had a great time there! My husband went home in the middle of the day, to take care of our dog.

While he was home, my mother decided to drop in on us uninvited.

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I have cut off contact with my mother until she takes her diagnosis seriously and does all she can to address it with medicine and therapy. I have told her in a letter how she can do this, and who to report her progress to. She is not to come in contact with me until she has done these things to the satisfaction of those she is reporting to.

So far, she has not made any notable progress. Yet she tries to get in contact with me anyways.

I have blocked her through Facebook, email, and cell phone. And yet, she still persists. I was gone on a trip this past March, and she attempted to visit me at that time too. My husband was there, and he had a small conversation with her. Then he let slip that I was going to therapy with my dad.

This is a sore spot for her, because she has wanted me to go to therapy with her. Unfortunately for her, I will not go to therapy with her, because she refuses to be introspective to any degree meaningful for positive healing and change.

So when she was told that I was going to therapy with my dad, she exploded.

I was told later that she used words to convey the idea that "my daughter is dead to me".

My response was to laugh and accept that I am now dead to her - in killing me, she agreed to not bother me at all. I never considered being killed off as a welcome outcome in this scenario.

But apparently this has not stuck - she has since made feeble apologies, and attempted to visit this past Saturday after returning from a trip to visit my sister. She dropped off a bag of goodies she picked up while there, hoping, I'm sure, to restore some good feelings and restart this relationship on her terms of thoughtfulness.

In response to this, I wrote a letter to my mother telling her I already told her how she can restore this relationship, and stated she should not come to our house again. I placed this letter with the bag of treats, and my husband, the sweet man and support he always has been, took them to her home. Thankfully she was not at home when he visited, so he left it on her doorstep.

This is a long-established pattern of my mother's attempts at control over me.

As a child, she wanted control over my actions. Now, as an adult, she wants control over how she is perceived.

I don't like her.

I have good reasons to not like her. And it drives her NUTS.

But her attempts to rewrite history, gaslight me, talk badly of her former spouse, and pretend nothing is wrong with her (masking) no longer hold sway over me - the best way for me to love my mother is to insist she gets help before we re-establish this relationship.

In the meantime, the best way to love myself, is to not be in her presence.

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After the garage sale, my husband and I went to my dad's house.

We had been planning this trip for a while - it's the first time in a LONG time I have gone to his home willingly, without a family gathering happening at the same time.

My father and I have made extremely good progress in therapy. There have been multiple times where I was able to express my point of view, and he was able to sit with it instead of being defensive or dismissive. I have been able to process my father's choices more clearly in that room. It was in that therapy room I made the realization that I was only mentally 6 years old when my parents divorced when I was physically 17. And it was in that room where he made the observation that his choices as a parent were not as helpful as he had originally believed.

Many healing things have happened in that room, that I thought I was ready to go visit him at his home. I also dared to hope that I might actually end up liking one of my parents, despite hurtful things that happened in the past.

I held onto a lot of anger arriving at his home, because of what my mother attempted to do earlier that day. And because of that initial push, I was already not ready to handle understanding my father's character.

I'm not going to go into specifics on what happened to show off my father's character. But I am going to talk about one exchange that led to a change in behavior.

My father spent a good amount of our time talking badly of his former spouse. I had to stop him at one point, and show him how that behavior was coming across: I explained that when mom did this, she was trying to rewrite history, and make herself look better. I told my dad that when he does it, it comes across as him reassuring himself that he made the right decision. I then point blank asked him if he regretted divorcing my mom. He claimed he did not. So I then asked him why he felt the need to talk badly about her?

He explained that he was trying to honor our past home life - he recognized that in the past, he has talked about how happy he is in his new marriage, and that my sisters and I were hurt, thinking he was erasing our past. I agreed that this past behavior was also not helpful.

I then told him why I love my chosen family so much: I told him that I can literally talk with them about anything. Sometimes we talk about our past, but more often, we laugh about nothing. We discuss hobbies and interests and celebrate our accomplishments. All without putting other people down. 

My father and I didn't quite know how to utilize this in our current relationship, but agreed to do better moving forward.

~

The next day, we had a good morning, talking about camping!

We talked about how we did not like camping the way we did it growing up. He talked about how his current wife likes to camp, but doesn't have time for it. And I talked about how much I love MY version of camping in the SCA.

This was most certainly a win for us moving forward.

Unfortunately, I left that weekend feeling disappointed.

I had hoped that our therapy sessions would allow me to love my father more fully.

I can appreciate him without my trauma brain interfering - but ultimately, we don't have a lot in common, and I don't like his character, based on other experiences I won't be sharing.

And that is a devastating thing for me right now.

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I was reminded by a friend last night that I don't HAVE to love my parents.

And that's true - I want to honor them as God commands, but I don't have to be blind to their faults.

I don't have to idolize them. I don't have to do everything they tell me to do.

And I have control over how I interact with them.

My mother requires very strict no-contact until she makes sincere progress in her health journey. My father doesn't require this, but I do see the need to make interactions with him as positive as possible.

I won't be visiting my father like I did this last weekend, but I am open to more family gatherings with a religious activity as the focus. My goal is positive interaction - and this appears to be the main way I can have that with my father.

I recognize that things change. I am hopeful that one day, I can be in a parent's home and not worry about how things will go.

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Psychologists and psychiatrists have started recognizing that children can experience a specific form of childhood trauma called "CPTSD", or Pediatric PSTD, specialized forms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I feel in society there is a mixed understanding/appreciation of this designation. P-PTSD is not a common form of childhood trauma, yet many children or former children of abuse may claim this was their experience. Plus, there's mixed reception: On the one hand, victims cling to the label and insist people treat them differently as a result. On the other extreme, combat veterans are angry that childhood trauma appears to be on par with the stresses of battle.

I think both extreme thoughts are wrong.

Victims don't have the right to cling to it like it's an identity. A disorder is a reality, but it's something to be overcome, not something that should be allowed to dictate your day to day life. Get help, find the strength to parent yourself, and move on with your life.

And veterans need to understand that even though children don't experience war, there are parallels. In both cases: A person is subjected to extreme circumstances beyond their control, and the expectation is that they accept the circumstances as they are, and move on, with little to no context or support. Symptoms of suffering look like panic attacks, flashbacks to trauma in dreams, irrational fears, personality changes, and behavior that is damaging to self and others.

In other words, maybe there's no literal bombs going off. But if there are mental/emotional/physical/sexual assault "bombs going off" with no context or support, there can be a parallel of reactions to PTSD. Some children are more resilient than others when it comes to mental/emotional assault. Some aren't. And very few children can withstand physical or sexual assault in the home.

It's the same with soldiers: most guys can handle the sound of guns firing in the background; maybe some can't. But very few soldiers can handle seeing their friends get wiped out right in front of them.

The main difference is that a veteran has an adult brain, and previous life experience to put their life in context. A child is still developing their brain and has little to no life experience to draw from for comparisons for context.

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To supplement this view, I did a very casual search on the internet about children and P-PTSD. I found a psychiatric article posted in Psychiatric News, Volume 59, Issue 2, printed on February 1st, 2024.

The article's title promises understanding of children's Pediatric PTSD, and how to treat it. What it really talks about is that brain scanning of children with Pediatric PTSD shows underdevelopment of emotional regulation, and exaggerated survival functioning of the brain, that there are populations more susceptible to it, that P-PTSD can manifest with classic PTSD symptoms, and/or manifest as anxiety/depression, and allows detrimental behaviors to cope with it. Then it talks about how a bus hijacking incident in 1976 was the event that kickstarted study for P-PTSD.

You can access the article I found here: https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/epub/10.1176/appi.pn.2024.02.2.32

The solution for children to overcome this form of PTSD, as cited in this article?

"effective recovery from pediatric PTSD may involve helping youth restore their brain’s threat circuitry and executive function..."

Well, no duh genius.

The thing that frustrates me about this article is that it spends the majority of the article justifying the need to treat children undergoing PTSD symptoms, and doesn't go into what is truly involved in rewiring a messed up head:

• Removal from the trauma-inducing situation.
• Going to therapy to both understand what happened (the aggressors actions, and how the victim responded to those actions), then put what happened in a healthy context (ergo, that was not a normal or healthy thing to happen to that person, and what they need to do to move on).
• Taking medication if needed.
• Utilizing a support group to re-enforce healthy mindsets and habits.
• Involving yourself in hobbies that bring joy and give you healthy ways to exercise behavior.
• Continual support during regression of mental states, and behavior.
• Setting firm boundaries with people and activities that do not honor your recovery process.

What people don't seem to realize, is that it's the same process for PTSD survivors AND drug abuse survivors. But on hard mode, because children don't have the same rights or opportunities that adults have.

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I have not been formally diagnosed for anything other than general anxiety.

Part of me is grateful - a diagnosis for anything mental is still a death sentence in the workplace. Even with all of society's general acceptance of mental disorders in general, many people with mental health problems do not receive support in the workplace.

But I see this article stating girls of high intelligence are among the highest demographics at risk of P-PTSD.

My oldest sister has a very high IQ - she technically didn't graduate from high school because we moved to another country during that time. And yet she still scored a 32 on her first and second attempt at the ACT. And yet, she appears to have not been affected at all by the trauma we girls experienced.

My second oldest sister is socially intelligent - she went to dyslexic camp at a young age, and struggled in school subjects. But she always had friends around her. And she probably suffered the most when compared to my oldest sister and myself.

And me?

I like to tell this story to people who are not familiar with my family's dynamics:

Dad would go around the dinner table asking how everyone's day had gone when we were younger.

The oldest girl would say she learned this, and did this math problem, and read this book - basically go through talking about what she did in the classroom.

Then, the middle girl would say she did this, and talked to this friend, and did this activity - basically talk about all the playground activities she did at school.

And when my father asked me how my day was, I would respond: "Good."

My parents would try to get more information out of me, but often my other sister would interrupt with more about her day, or something - else - would happen to interrupt.

It wasn't that I didn't have more to say; I imagine if I felt safe enough to share, I could be persuaded to elaborate. But the word "good" conveyed the information that summed up my experience for the day. I felt good, therefore my day was good.

I remember when I became a teenager and moved away from a place I loved was the first moment I perpetually felt bad. Hindsight has the context, which was me grieving from a loss of friends, a great place to live, going to a place where I felt like an outsider, and STILL dealing with a time bomb and broken family support.

Basically what I am telling you is that though I may appear mentally intelligent, my true intelligence lies in emotional aptitude. And even though I didn't suffer as much as my middle sister in terms of the number of problematic encounters, the few experiences I was witness to felt wildly offensive, in the form of verbal assault and emotional explosive disruption. My reaction to those things was to withdraw, not trust people, become fiercely independent, and not tell people how I really felt. And those experiences and my reactions to them have taken literal years to rewire in my mind.

But my body still remembers - it retains stored memory of how situations made me feel long ago. My brain has to work extra hard to reassure my body that it is not experiencing trauma from 15+ years ago.

And I had to do that this last Saturday night.

I'm not going to talk about that experience - it doesn't do well to dwell on problems. Just know that with my husband's help, I was able to successfully pull myself out of a downward trauma spiral. It was a difficult, yet positive experience, and I am so grateful my spouse was there to help me.

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I'm listening to Studio Ghibli movie music as I type this - I find it has the perfect balance of honoring difficulty, while encouraging hope. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I started this journey believing that when I was "done", I would never feel triggered or hurt again.

I was naive - I had my period of mourning when I realized this was a lifetime journey, not an easy 1-2-3 step program.

But then I moved on.

Because at the end of the day, I want to be able to say my day was "good" again.

And the good news is, most days, I do have a truly "good" day - despite not having a job. Despite not having parents I like. And despite not having many positive things happening to me right now.

I can confidently say that most days are truly "good". And that brings a wonderful amount of peace to my soul. 💝

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Thank you for being here to read my story - this one has taken YEARS for me to properly understand in a way that I can share without being hateful about the people involved. I hope it makes sense, and I apologize if I rambled or went on tangents that didn't really connect.

Please let me know if this helps you, or if it may be helpful to someone you know. I truly believe that if someone benefits from my experiences, then my suffering is not in vain. It would be nice to know if this blogpost helped in some way.

Thank you again

XOXOX