With so much against me on my road to recovery, it was important to be able to assess what I actually had going for me. It’s easy to minimize the positives when things seem so hopeless – and so, so easy to get stuck in a downward spiral of despair. All of the pain and powerlessness and isolation of childhood returns with a vengeance. The truth could be staring me in the face, and yet at times it was impossible for me to believe it. This is where gratitude has played a huge role.
As often as I go back to count my blessings, I am reminded that those dark dreadful days of the past really are gone – ‘I am a big girl now’, able to protect myself, I know that I am a worthwhile human being, and I am surrounded by people who love and care about me. And I have needed those reminders constantly.
You’ve heard of people ‘not playing with a full deck’. My problem was that I was playing with two decks. One deck consisted of the cards I was dealt as a child – all the things I had come to believe about myself and the world as a result of the abuse, all the distorted core beliefs and irrational conclusions I had reached with my immature, untrained mind in order to keep myself safe and cope with living in such an impossible environment.
The other deck I had collected throughout my adult life, based on mature reasoning and a very different set of experiences. But because the childhood experiences and conclusions had been buried so deeply, I had never been able to examine them in the light of adult reasoning and see them for what they really were. I couldn’t consciously compare the two and see the glaring discrepancies. Ultimately the subconscious internal conflict simply became too much to bear, and the memories began to surface.
Then it took everything I had – every resource I could lay my hands to – to keep me sane and functioning in any degree. We all have resources – internal resources, external ones, and more that we pick up along the way. I couldn’t afford to take any of mine for granted. My primary external resource was and is my loyal and loving husband. If I was a female Frodo in Lord of the Rings, then my husband Leonard would be my Sam. My best friend since I was 16 and he was 21, we married just a year later. It wasn’t a relationship that anyone knowing better would have expected to last. 32 years later he remains my constant companion, faithful and unwavering, who would bear my burdens himself if he could, who would follow me into the river knowing he could not swim, in his dogged determination not to leave my side.
Who can imagine what it must be like for a spouse to have to witness everything that he has witnessed? He has stood beside me in his own agony as I have relived feelings and events that no human being should have to endure. He has held me as I have cried - deep sobbing that had been locked away for decades. He has encouraged me lovingly and admiringly as I have made baby steps into integrating my child and adult selves. He has been patient when I have spent days and weeks in bed, incapacitated by the conflict in my head. He has grown with me as we have forged new paths together, forming a renewed and deepened relationship that only ever comes out of life-changing adversity. We have faced the enemy together. And this is a man who tears up when one of the grandchildren get the slightest scrape. I have yet to meet anyone so simultaneously soft and strong. He is the love of my life, and my eternal companion.
My Fellowship of the Ring consists of my seven amazing, loving, responsible, talented children (they can fight over who gets to be Legolas). All adults now, some already have beautiful growing families of their own. I know that they are all with me to the end. At first what tortured me most was not knowing how much my husband and children had been short-changed in all of this – how much had my partially frozen mind negatively affected my own children’s development? As time has gone on and we have been able to share our thoughts and feelings on the subject, I have to take some comfort in knowing that I did the best I could at the time, and as long as we live and breathe we are blessed with more opportunities to love and nurture each other and heal whatever unintentional wounds have been created along the way.
The next resource that I cannot ignore is my faith in God. When I was 21 Leonard and I became members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in a loving Heavenly Father who knows and cares for each of us as individuals. We believe in the atoning sacrifice of His son Jesus Christ. We also believe in eternal marriage – that the love and progress we share as a married couple here is a relationship that does not end with death.
Part of our membership in the church includes living in accordance with a health code called the Word of Wisdom. We don’t smoke, drink alcohol, tea or coffee, or use illegal drugs. I have always enjoyed living my adult life free of these things, but had no idea how much I had been protected by my faith until I started reading about the predominance of substance abuse amongst people who suffer with PTSD. It is so widespread and common, in fact, that part of recovery usually includes the management of addictions. The unrelenting stresses of the illness drive people into self-destructive behavior just to find some kind of relief.
The Church also provides a wide array of educational programmes including family relationships and parenting. This gave me the foundation that I used to teach my children. On my own I had nothing. Much of their stability and goodness is attributable to what they learned as a result of our religious beliefs. The Church also encourages journaling. It has been a source of fascination to me to go back over my old journals and discover so many signposts that something was wrong – if only someone had known what to look for.
So those three things - my husband, my children and my faith in God - are much of the glue that has held me together. My internal resources have played a part too, of course – but that’s for another day.
PS On the subject of resources, I have been working away at the ABC list of Resources (Post #3) and have added quite a few interesting videos into the mix - be sure to check them out!
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