The Longest Journey

PTSD – post traumatic stress disorder. War veteran mental health issue. Word cloud sign.

Healing from trauma is a long journey. Lifelong, for some. In my late 40s, my own journey is just getting started. There is a lot to work through and I’m not exactly sure where to begin however I know it has to happen if I’m ever going to start thriving. Since I was 17, it’s just been surviving (and sometimes barely, at that).

Usually the advice is just to start at the beginning, square one, but we’re talking about going back to before I was born, with my mother’s toxic relationship with my father, her dysfunction in the way she treated my grandmother, and my grandmother’s own dysfunctional upbringing. This realization that it goes way back prompted me to purchase a book entitled It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn. My daughter, who is going through her own healing process, bought it about 4 years ago and strongly recommended it to me. It addresses generational trauma and PTSD with studies backed by leading experts in neuroscience and post-traumatic stress.

At its most basic, it affirms that in histories like mine (and by proxy, my daughter’s), some of the behaviors I exhibit may not come from abuse handed to me throughout my life, but may be pre-programmed types of reactions to things that happened before me and have been passed down genetically. It would seem the genes we carry are programmed for far more than blue eyes or big thighs. Mental states, even reactive memory, too can run in the family.

This honestly takes a lot of pressure off. Instead of asking what’s wrong with “me,” now I can go back and see that it wasn’t me. It does not become a matter of shifting blame for a rotten situation – I am not looking to blame – it instead becomes a matter of, “where did this come from – this trauma response to every little thing, this fear, this anxiety and regression, depression, these trust issues, this inability to relate to others or hold a relationship, this inability to care for myself, this inability to thrive?” Once that is sorted, the next question becomes, “how do I heal?”

I know forgiveness is going to be a major hurdle in healing as I am nowhere near ready for that yet. My dad (who I met finally when I was 24) taught me that forgiveness does not mean saying what a person did was acceptable. It means that you – the forgiver – are willing to acknowledge it happened and essentially erase that debt, let it go. It does not mean necessarily forgetting. It simply means moving on. As of today though, even hearing the name “Brenda” automatically makes my jaw clench, my body tense, and triggers me to either fight or ball up and cower. That is the power she had over me and still does even though she’s finally deceased (and I do not regret feeling relief and even joy over that fact).

And this is why it is finally the right time for me to begin this journey through facing the pain and abuse, facing the fallout, and clearing my path to healing. I don’t want to carry all this trauma the rest of my life. It’s too much. The burden has kept me from so much happiness, health, and success that I can no longer accept having the baggage.