My Story

I’m the normal woman you would see in the grocery store or at a kid’s sports game. My hair is brown with specks of gray. There’s kids in my house that fight, dishes that always need to be done, and I live in an affluent neighborhood. I’m the normal person you pass on the street daily. And yet, I’m falling apart. 

To you I would seem normal. Some of you may even want to be my friend. But then when I raise my sleeves, you’d see the self-harm scars. Texts late at night wouldn’t be funny meme’s but would be cries for help because darkness is the worst time of day. Plans for coffee would get canceled as I couldn’t handle the noise and if you asked what I did that day, it would be a struggle to come up with something besides just try to survive. 

Complex trauma, PTSD, is hell on earth.

My life growing up was never normal. Most of it I didn’t remember, until two years ago. A lot of it I still don’t remember and those painful memories come without warning. I was abused. I was abused by my parents for my entire childhood. Yet I never said anything because I didn’t know. That childhood was my normal. I didn’t know that parents were supposed to feed their children every day. I didn’t know that the manipulation wasn’t true. I didn’t remember the worst of it because I blocked it out to protect myself. You might have a similar story. If you do, it’s OK. There’s still hope and you deserved better. 

I didn’t know the depth of the abuse but I knew there was some as I became a teenager. I knew that I didn’t want to live that way any longer so I became determined to change my future.

As soon as I could, I left that home and started college. I worked hard to create something wonderful and walked into marriage. Coming from an abusive home and never seeing a healthy marriage, I let myself believe that what was happening in my marriage was normal. But I had walked into an abusive marriage.

Decades into my life, I fell apart. I couldn’t hold onto the weight anymore and the childhood abuse was showing up in dreams and memories to haunt me. My friends didn’t know what to do so they left. The church rejected me because my life isn’t pretty.

But I found help. You can too.

After a lot of counseling and two solid people in my life who would walk into fire with me, I stood up to my husband. I cut off the abusers that were still in my life. I am trying to believe that I am worthy. I am trying to find my faith again.

I am overcoming. Slowly and painfully. But I am. You can too.