Healing Trauma and Living Authentically

Me, Grandma Lock and my cousin Kimberly on my 3rd birthday

Just for clarification and so that we are all on the same page about trauma I want to start by saying that trauma in all forms is equal. Whether it be sexual, emotional, verbal, or physical, if it started early in childhood or later in your life, it doesn't matter trauma is trauma. If something happened to you that shaped who you became or how you show up in the world now then healing what hurt you all that matters in the healing process. There is no scale of how much more painful what you went through is compared to someone else. If it happened to you and it was traumatic to you healing it is all the matters. I'll start with my story...

I was 45 years old when I realized I was raised by not only an alcoholic(my father) but also a raging narcissist(my mother) that hid in plain sight. Growing up outward appearances were always more important than how anyone felt on the inside and at no time were the things happening in our house EVER to be discussed outside of the home. And if I'm being truly honest here they also really didn't need to be spoken about in the home. This created a multitude of limiting beliefs, programs, and imprints on my soul that lasted far into adulthood.

I would definitely say my golden years of life were from the ages of birth-age 7. I still look back at the pictures of my 7th birthday party with great fondness. In fact every picture I have of my birthdays before the age of 8 show a smiling happy girl with a cake in front of her and family and friends around her. I would say that those were the years that my parents did their best to keep their own demons in check and provided a mostly loving and stable home environment. I never even saw my father drink alcohol until after he had moved out of our family home. There were the occasional anomalies when my mother packed up and left all 3 kids at home with my dad (we were all covered in chicken pox)to go vacation in California, and of course the time my dad's "friend" from work came over and we went to see Ghostbusters in the movie theater but being a child I had little awareness of the issues that existed within their marriage. Birthdays and holidays were always filled with family and friends, and the love and attention I didn't receive from my mother was in no short supply from my Grandmother Lock. I didn't realize until only this past year that my mother's emotional distance and lack of physical touch were definitely not a normal mother/daughter behavior. But I did receive love and affection from other sources, my dad, Grandma and Grandpa Lock to name a few, so I never remember feeling sad about not getting it from my mother. It's just the way that it was. And then their marriage fell apart and I would say the real trauma started.

When you're 7 and living in a highly dysfunctional house you start to learn how to become a people pleaser. My first memory of this was walking to the car one day to go to the grocery store. My new friend Crystal and her cousin were walking down the street towards me and they stopped to ask if I could come and play. I really wanted to go and play so I asked my mom. Her response are words etched in my brain so deep it has taken me years to get them out, "Well you know Carrie, two's company and three's a crowd!" I am quite certain that at this time I had no idea what this actually meant consciously, but subconsciously this stayed with me for the next 38 years. It has affected every single friendship that I have had to this day. But more importantly it was the first time(in my memory) that my mother "the narcissist" had been able to get me to do what SHE wanted just using words. Gaslighting is also another form of manipulation used frequently to control. These patterns continued for another 38 years until one night she challenged me so arrogantly that I immediately had to go no contact and start getting into (shadow work) why her words had so much meaning to me.

The straw the broke the camels back? July 6, 2024 when she had taken 2 of her medications together and made herself sick a conversation was started about my plan to become a Holistic Energy Practitioner. Anything that deviates from the normal therapy/pharmaceutical modalities of healing was not to be trusted in her mind and she looked me dead in my face and said "You'll never be able to do what you want to do." She simply could cannot fathom that you really can be anything that you want in this world if you show up as your authentic self and work hard. For all of my life I have been told that I am chained to the addictions of my family lineage, the depression I used to be lost in was a chemical imbalance that I could never overcome, or that I just wasn't as smart as I thought I was or needed to be. That is still her favorite line to all of her children "You're not as smart as you think you are!' In fact it was said to my sister last night. Turns out we are actually SMARTER than we thought we were we just weren't ever given the tools to develop our self-worth and self confidence and at every possible opportunity were told we were less than and not capable of whatever goal we wanted to achieve. A pattern that still continues to this day with her and my children(I am no contact). My children are 18 and 20 so the choice of whether they want to continue a relationship with her is theirs and theirs alone I will say that they are becoming less frequent because as I have healed I have been able to heal my children and show them that they can do anything in this world that they want. Any good thing and do it well! And if they fail, that's ok too! My love is not based on the conditions of them making me happy. I only want their happiness and for them to show up authentically in the world and be who they are! This is not a pattern of parenting that was ever modeled for me but in order to break the generational trauma that I incurred was a must for me when I was doing my healing work. I can accept that this is how my mother was raised and looking back blind respect and children being seen and not heard was the societal norm of the Boomer generation but this is not a way of parenting or even being in the world that we should model going forward.

So no I didn't suffer any physical or sexual trauma in my life but I did have trauma that was invisible to everyone around me. The years of 8-18 were all about surviving in chaos and toxicity that I could talk about for hours. and I am sure one day will. Getting out of her house and going off to college was life changing and life saving for me. And when I moved by myself to Florida I thought I had a real shot at being happy, and then she followed and proceeded to take over my life. From my apartment, to where I worked (yes she literally got a job at the same restaurant I worked at!), she inserted herself into every part of my new life and still nothing was ever good enough for her, or even made her happy. For years I lived with chronic and debilitating depression, low self worth, anger, resentment, an addiction to food/sugar. This presented itself in my life in physical manifestations of disease such as, Diabetes, Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, Morbid Obesity, Depression, High Cholesterol/Blood Pressure, eating disorders. But then I started working on myself, really looking at who I was and why I was the way that I was and I found out there are many ways to get out of the cycle of trauma and pain. Boundaries and forgiveness are the two that I started with. They are the foundation of healing trauma (with love) and living an authentic life and I cannot recommend them enough. They have saved my life and ended the generational trauma cycle that I have struggled with for as long as I can remember. And for that I am truly GRATEFUL!