The non fucking linear healing journey. You arrive at ‘I’ve got this’ and before you know it you feel thrown back into pain.

It helps me to visualise the non fucking linear healing journey (I have similar mindset to the inner fucking child, that of love and hate), I have a graph in my head which I can see, it helps me to take account of progress.

I am feeling it this week. Confronted head on with triggers of childhood sex abuse (husband no 1) along with triggers of husband no 2 my brain feels muddled and I am feeling strands of emotion. It still surprises me, that even now when I am ‘cured’ from CPTSD that my ‘body still keeps the score’, it rarely happens but when it does the nerve endings in me jangle and actually ‘hurt’, I know now to cold dip to reduce the inflammation, but until I can find somewhere to do it every movement is a reminder.

As I was emerging akin to a butterfly, from the cocoon like confine of CPTSD, the regressions would propel me into panic. Is this it. I’m back, I won’t get out. But now I know they will pass and each time that it does I will return stronger.

In fact these throwbacks often hit when I have been feeling invincible, when I feel I have got this, and I suddenly return to feeling shaky and uncertain. But I now no longer have the ‘fear’, I know it will pass in a matter of hours or just a couple of days. I have learnt to sit with it, something I never thought possible. 

I use this mental graph - in fact maybe I should frame the mental image I have literally, so my children have the constant reminder too - to talk to my eldest daughter as she battles her individual CPTSD journey. I think it is one of the most important things to know, to hold onto, so when you are feeling your most fragile you can see that you will come out of it.

‘Trauma is not just an event that took place in the past - it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain and body’ - Bessel van der Kolk

I think this is the hardest thing for people who haven’t experienced it to realise. I have been confronted with comments, most notably from one of my eldest’s previous school teacher (I actually stormed out of parents evening throwing the books to the floor), ‘it is in the past’, ‘these things make us stronger’. Because they don’t make us stronger, they make our bodies weaker and we have to work damn hard to support our bodies healing.

One of the reasons I was determined to create ‘Mermaids’ - because the first thing that confronted me on the MOSACS website was that I was more likely to be raged by autoimmune disease and chronic illness because of the impact on my body and mind. But this also served to make me fight so this wouldn’t happen to me. 

I upped my twice weekly yoga to almost daily, diarised acupuncture weekly but this was accompanied by increased Malbec and Marlboro, and a hope that my yin yang approach to healing would balance. And I have to hope it has. It has taken time to drop the Malbec and Marlboro, but I have. 

“The body keepts the score: if the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenchiing emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems…this demands a radical shift in our theraputic assumptions” Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

We know that the provision to support children who have been abused is negligible, and I am very grateful that I have been able to pay for proper therapeutic support for my children (not enough and I know my youngest is in dire need of it but I have to prioritise the school refuser as she approaches her GCSE’s). But provision for mothers of sexually abused children (MOSACS) is nada. And these mothers, who more often than not became sole parents in the process need trauma support more than ever.

I know I am viewed disparagingly by others for letting a 15 year old vape, but I know only a fraction of what her body feels (she was the one violently and sexually abused) and if vaping helps her to regulate, it is akin to me turning to red wine. A need greater than what society expects, particularly when that society does not provide any therapeutic provision or support.

Trauma provision is not grounded in practicality or reality and as I was ravaged with CPTSD I felt the shame in the choices I made - despite knowing they were right for me.