My Story: A Journey of Remembrance
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” — C.S. Lewis
I preface this writing by sharing that I’m honored you’ve chosen to read about me. In a fast-paced world where we often see others as a fleeting encounter with a human body, and rarely for the lived experiences that have shaped their inner world, it’s meaningful to me that you’ve dedicated your time to read my story. So I thank-you for choosing to show up here.
I share my journey with the intention of not only having others understand me and the depths of what I’ve overcome, but with the hope that perhaps in reading this, you too feel seen and understood, as I know my personal experiences are not an outlier in this world. But more importantly, perhaps my story will help awaken the remembrance of your True Self within you, and the inherent knowing that your past experiences do not define you.
With that being said, I provide a trigger warning of childhood SA, multiple forms of abuse. This writing is a reflection of my own lived experiences, memories, and perceptions, and the meaning I have made of them throughout my journey. It is not written to shame, condemn, or seek retribution against any individual, but to deliver my own truth and the path that has shaped me.
While those who know me personally may recognize certain experiences or relationships, no names are used, and this writing is not intended to judge another person’s character or experience. Every story is viewed through he unique lens of the one who lived it. My intention is to simply bear witness to my own journey, trusting that truth, compassion, and personal responsibility can coexist. May these words be received in the spirit in which they are offered, as an act of remembrance, reclamation, and love, rather than judgment.
I grew up in a dysfunctional family in semi-rural Pennsylvania with 5 siblings, in a religious Christian home, which I now view as more closely resembling a cult-like experience due to the forms of religious abuse my siblings and I endured. Though I don’t have as many memories of my childhood as my siblings do, a trauma response created from living in a perpetual state of nervous system dysregulation, I’ll start by sharing the moments of my childhood experience that not only shaped my childhood, but also many years of my adult experience.
Living it, I didn’t really realize how dysfunctional my family was until I was many years beyond living at my childhood home. I didn’t consciously understand the depth of my traumatic childhood’s impact on my life, until I began to heal from my past. Instead, I normalized my experiences, and allowed them to perpetuate my own suffering into adulthood. I suppose sometimes we don’t really understand or know ourselves deeply, until the life has a way of showing us otherwise. And of course we had our beautiful moments and joyful experiences as a family, but it ended up being my trauma that shaped me in more ways than fleeting moments of joy ever did.
My father was a deacon at the Baptist church my family attended, and the authority of Christianity was used by my parents as a method of enforcing obedience to strict rules. The rules often made no logical sense to me and contradicted both my parents’ actions and the loving God my parents proclaimed to believe in. I was taught that girls and women should dress modestly for God, and my sisters and I were forced to wear only skirts and dresses while my brothers had no Biblical dress code. I was teased at school for what I wore, until my mom came to a bit of her senses and allowed my sisters and I to wear pants and shorts in middle school and beyond. My sisters and I were forbidden from piercing our ears or cutting our hair, and my hair grew to well below my waist, allowed only infrequent trims.
Although we left the church when I was quite young, and I have little recollection of attending church events, my parents carried the distortions of religion into the way I was raised through my entire childhood. My dad especially spoke terribly about any other person that didn’t share his religious or political beliefs, race, nationality or anyone he deemed less than, and made this known through regular hateful rhetoric, despite proclaiming to believe in a loving ‘god’.
I was also largely sheltered, rarely allowed to watch TV or movies until we grew much older, nor granted the freedom to listen to anything other than Christian music. I was told that God wouldn’t approve of it, rarely listening to music at all until I bought my own car in high school. I never fit in at school, having little connection to the experiences other children shared in common. I grew up having very few friends, and fewer friendships that actually lasted, instead living mostly in the isolation of my inner world and hopeful imagination. Growing up on 5 acres of farmland, my siblings and I were tasked with summers of working in a massive garden, as we grew, cooked, and canned a majority of our family’s food. It’s actually a small miracle that I love gardening today. And truly, I am deeply in gratitude for nature, as the land on which I grew up rescued and healed me in more ways than one.
My siblings and I were harshly physically punished for even the smallest of infractions, using the humiliating rituals of physical abuse, under the premise of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, a presumption not actually found in the Bible my parents proclaimed to be the infallible ‘word of God’. I was forced to unclothe my lower half in front of my brothers and sisters, forced over a bed, chair, or my parents’ lap, while whatever tools my mom and dad had at their disposal, including belts, yardsticks, and wooden spoons, were used to hit us until we were screaming and crying in pain. It wasn’t even so much that I knew my actions sometimes deserved discipline, but that my mother especially seemed to enjoy hitting me. I recall that she’d get this vicious smile, scream ‘bend over’, and laugh as she hit me. Not only did I witness her rage all over her face, but I felt it deeply in every strike as well. This abuse went on well past puberty, and I vividly recall the humiliation I felt at being physically exposed in front of my siblings, and especially my father and brothers.
I also witnessed my dad’s severe beatings of my older brother, to the point that my mother recently admitted she almost called the police on several occasions to stop him. She never did, and from what she’s shared with me, likely believed a ‘good Christian wife’ should always obey and submit to the leadership of her husband. My dad used pieces of wood, a belt, or whatever he could get his hands on in a moment of rage, and would take his anger out on my brother. It was horrific to witness, and I felt completely powerless to do anything to prevent the beatings. I feared my own father and mother as a result of their harsh physical punishment.
My dad also would harm our family’s dogs. On one occasion I recall rather vividly, he beat one of our family’s dogs by enclosing him in the garage. I heard the cries of our poor dog’s torture from outside of the garage, again, feeling completely helpless to prevent it. Afterwards, I remember seeing our poor dog’s blood splattered all over the garage floor. He wasn’t the same after that incident, and neither was I. But I stayed silent, afraid my own father would direct his rage at me instead. And though I don’t recall this specifically, other than of our family’s first dog’s just completely disappearing one day, my brother shared with me that he believes our dad shot and killed our first dog. He heard the gunshot early in the morning one day, and after that, the puppy was never seen again, while my parents proclaimed he was taken to a new home.
I witnessed my dad verbally, physically, and emotionally abuse my mother. They yelled at each other often, and when they weren’t yelling, the energy of the air was thick with the friction between them. It was frequently the silence and unspoken strife between them that spoke louder than their words. But my dad would also call her names and complain about her spending because he was the sole financial provider, as my mom left her job permanently after becoming a mother. He’d also tell her that he never wanted six kids, leaving me feeling like I was a burden to my own parents.
A memory permanently scarred in my brain was witnessing my mom screaming in pain while my dad twisted her arm behind her back and screamed at her, while my sister and I wailed and begged him to stop. He’d often tell my siblings and I that our mom was in a bad mood, and that we’d better behave or else, which meant we’d better be prepared to face his wrath when he returned from work, if we had upset her in any way. I recognize this shaped my hypervigilance to others’ emotions, and also my people pleasing tendencies.
Both of my parents were also emotionally numb, negligent to the attunement of my emotional needs as a highly sensitive child. My dad was emotionally distant, and made little effort to connect with me as a child, maybe because I wasn’t a boy and didn’t share his love of fishing or hunting. He was often working or doing a chore for another family, and rarely made time to be present or engaging with me, especially as I grew older. Even now, my dad and I rarely speak, with only surface level interactions when we do.
My mom always carried this air of distance and perpetual sadness about her. I remember always doing my best to be a ‘good little girl’ so that I wouldn’t upset her further. I would sometimes find her crying quietly, and would do whatever I could to make her feel better or cheer her up. While she worked endlessly to cook meals, clean, and do laundry for six children to meet our physical needs, she had little attunement or patience for my emotional needs, so I begged to be seen by helping her with chores as much as possible. I also became smaller by doing my best to behave and expressing no needs or desires that I felt would burden her further.
But my mom’s emotional numbness also deepened to a physical incapacity to support the depth of my emotional expression. Sometimes when I cried and wouldn't stop at her verbal command, she’d hold me on her lap with my back against her chest, holding her hands over both my nose and mouth, until she stifled my cries by suffocating the breath from my lungs. And so I shut down, completely, and the nervous system response of freeze or fawn became my part of my programming.
I stopped expressing my needs entirely. Whenever I was hurting, I suppressed my emotions, pretending to be fine, until I could find the privacy — which was a rarity in a family of 8—to cry on my own, or not at all. Once, I even fell directly onto my elbow while rollerskating in the basement, and despite the sharp throbbing pain in my elbow and inability to move it properly, likely fractured, but I never told anyone. To this day, if I touch my elbow in a certain way, it still sends sharp pain up my arm.
Suppressing my emotions and needs became a pattern that continued long into adulthood. As is the case when we choose to view others through the lens of empathy, I now recognize that my parents did not have the capacity for addressing my emotional needs, as they likely weren't even meeting their own emotional needs, and had been stifling their own emotional expression.
I don’t recall being told that I was loved by my parents in childhood, and I grew up feeling largely unloved. Instead, I was told Jesus loved me so much that God sacrificed Jesus as his only son for MY sins, so that if I believed in Jesus as the only son of God and as Lord and savior, I wouldn't be doomed to burn in hell for eternity after death. Writing this today, I can’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of this claim that an unconditionally loving God would possibly condemn anyone to an eternity of suffering.
Moreover, the use of this religious narrative to convince a child that they’re personally responsible for the death of God himself in the flesh, as a means of controlling and enforcing obedience, is nothing short of emotional abuse, especially to the developing brain and nervous system of a young child. Add the harsh physical punishment into the mix, and I learned to blame myself for everything. This was just one of the many religious distortions that traumatically shaped my childhood.
I was also sexually abused, by not one, but at least two male family members. I never told anyone about the abuse until my late 30s and early 40s, and carried the burden of my abusers’ own trauma for many years without ever allowing myself to feel that pain. Though for many years I didn’t consciously recall the details of my earliest sexual abuse, my body knew, and I held onto the trauma. As an adult, I did know that something happened to me quite young, with the gut sense it was around age 3, but it wasn’t until I chose to start facing the pain of my later sexual abuse that occurred when I was about 9 or 10, that repressed memories of my earliest abuse began to surface through several modalities of somatic healing.
I always remembered that when I was young, I was absolutely terrified of being kidnapped. I recall that as I lay my head on my pillow each night to fall asleep, I would hear what sounded to me like footsteps walking up my family’s gravel driveway, as my heartbeat’s blood rushed through my ear, indicating a likely state of sheer panic within my tiny body. I fell asleep each night terrified that someone was coming up my family’s driveway to kidnap me. I could never understand why I was so afraid of being kidnapped, to the point of waking with nightmares often, while my siblings never were. My mom later revealed to me that she had no idea why I would awaken with such nightmares, confused as to why I kept expressing fear of being kidnapped. But she never asked me, or dug into why that might be.
A few years ago, my terror of kidnapping all made sense. During a craniosacral therapy session with my trusted and spiritually attuned practitioner, my body experienced a profound physical and emotional release, as the repressed memories of the sexual assault of my early years resurfaced. Mid-session, as she worked on my left leg — the very same leg in which an abnormal case of severe gout that required surgery surfaced in my foot in my early 20s* — a flood of memory swept through me, of my abuser assaulting me on the ground outside of my childhood home. He held onto my leg as I tried to escape, while threatening to kidnap me from my family if I ever told anyone, suffocating me with the smell of his cigarette smoke as he sexually assaulted my little body.
Finally, after almost 40 years of wondering, it made sense to me why I had been absolutely terrified of being kidnapped as a child. My childhood self carried the burden of the assault and terror of his threats, all alone, for decades of my childhood and adult life. (*My bizarre experience with gout made sense when I later discovered that the kidneys store repressed fear. Kidneys are responsible for removing excess uric acid that causes gout. Repressed emotional memories are stored in the body’s cells, tissues, and membranes, later showing up in the body as physical ailments when left unaddressed, which is precisely why such a severe case of gout formed in my foot.)
Within the past two years, after keeping my abuse a secret most of my adult life to protect myself and my abusers, I shared with my mom that I had been sexually abused as a child. Her reaction alone was quite unpleasant, as she demanded to know whom and proclaimed that I needed to reveal my abusers to bring them to justice. One is dead, and the other I do not speak to. Later on, in subsequent discussions, after I wouldn’t reveal my abusers, she disclosed to me that she knew at what age I had been when the abuse had happened. Shocked, I asked her how, and she then revealed that at around 3 or 4 years old, our family’s pediatrician advised her — and I will spare you the details — that I had physical signs of sexual assault. No one did anything then, not my mom, and not the pediatrician, who was a family friend. They just brushed it off like nothing had happened. No one asked me questions, nor followed up. And just like that, my little self was shown yet again, that she wasn’t worthy of being protected. It has taken me quite some time to process the depth of that particular betrayal, and I will share more about that later on.
Around 9 or 10 years old, another family member sexually abused me as well. He lured me into his hiding place with the promise of spare change, and exposed himself to me and attempted to force himself upon my little body. I don’t recall the extent of his abuse, nor how many times he molested me, just the terror and disgust that arose from his actions. If you understand the brain’s survival mechanism, we often hold conscious memories of only bits and pieces of sexual trauma. Thankfully, I was able to get away from him and learned to avoid him entirely. But again, I told no one, because I didn’t want him to get in trouble. This same person also sexually molested my sister, apologizing to her later in life, but never to me.
I can’t quite put into words the shame that results from multiple events of sexual abuse, incest in particular. It led to deep shame, shame that was never mine to carry. And I didn't share what had happened to me with anyone until I realized that avoidance of feeling the emotions of those experiences was deeply hurting me, and causing patterns of reactivity, avoidance, emotional numbness, as well as normalizing and enabling of abusive actions of others towards me.
To add to these traumatic experiences, my parents were (and still are) hoarders of physical possessions, collecting a tremendous amount of items, from junk mail, clothing, and knick-knacks filling the house, to tools, miscellaneous yard sale items, and old vehicles filling the garage and scattered in piles throughout yard. I still cringe at the sight of my childhood home, as it slowly deteriorates into an unlivable home for my parents, who still occupy the home. I feel helpless to help them, as my siblings and I have tried, to no avail. As a child, I never brought the few friends that I did have to my home, embarrassed at the state of my home. I even lost my only two friends in middle school because they didn’t understand why I never invited them to my home, and I never told them the truth that I was completely ashamed of my own home. I never had a room of my own growing up, sharing a small bedroom with bunk beds stacked high, with two of my sisters.
The house I grew up in never really felt like a home to me. It was not a safe, nurturing space for little me. So instead, I spent most of my time outside of the house. With 5 acres of land, we had a large space to play outdoors, and it became my escape. Nature became my place of safety and peace. My siblings and I spent our summer days building forts in the woods, picking wild berries, riding bikes, and playing in the creek, and playing in the snow in the winters. In that way, I fully attribute the natural creations of God for healing parts of my wounded child self, and I’m truly grateful that I found a healthy escape from the dark reality of my childhood through nature.
Deep-rooted emotions of fear, guilt, shame, anger, and sadness were born within my child self from my childhood experiences of physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and religious abuse, compounded by very few truly loving actions. My inner child learned very young that simply existing in life was unsafe, and that the very people who claimed to love you, hurt you immensely, especially when you made a mistake. And emotion that doesn’t get seen, understood, and released gets stored within the body, and the nervous system seeks ways to resolve our childhood experiences in our adult relationships.
I went off to college at 18, two hours away, happy to be finally free from the horrors and shame of my childhood home and experiences. Because I hadn’t yet fully developed a healthy sense of self-worth or self-love, self sabotaging patterns began to emerge in my behaviors throughout college. I drank heavily and sometimes blacked out. I didn't always honor my body. I also made two unsuccessful attempts at taking my own life in college, feeling as though I was utterly unlovable and unworthy, and that no one would miss me if I was gone. I couldn’t yet see why patterns kept showing up in my life, and didn’t have the capacity to understand the impact my past traumas were having in exacerbating my own harmful choices.
My junior year of college, I met the man who would later become my husband. The red flags were there, from the beginning. He mirrored the childhood abuse I experienced, expressing as first as verbal abuse and sexual abuse, and deepening into emotional and physical abuse later on. That version of me wasn’t yet capable of recognizing that by staying in the relationship, I was teaching him it was okay to treat me with disrespect and harm, while simultaneously enabling his abusive actions to continue. But he made me feel loved, in the only way I knew as love, by telling me he loved me at first sight, and saying “I love you” quite promptly after our relationship began, even though his actions often shoed just the opposite. To the girl that was rarely even told she was loved by her own family, and starving to be loved, he made me think I was loved, even though his actions didn’t always reflect love. It wasn’t until much later in our relationship that I recognized it was rarely actually love at all, rather a bond over shared experiences of childhood trauma, a bond that mirrored the same chaos in which we were both raised.
I became pregnant with our oldest daughter at 23, and gave birth to her at 24. I loved the way he was unafraid to face the fear of becoming a dad so young, and I loved becoming a mother. But the unresolved emotions of our childhood traumas continued to show up throughout our relationship. We’d have huge blow up fights, screaming at each other, and sometimes shut down for days afterwards, barely speaking to one another. He would say horrific things to me, using a slur of insults any time he would get angry with me, including telling me he wished I would die and telling me that he hated me. He threatened divorce often, and as a young mother that left her career to become a stay at home mom at first, just as my mom had, fear kept me trapped. The abuse progressed to me being hit and strangled on a few occasions, and I sometimes reacted physically in response, on one occasion even giving him a black eye in return.
We got married after I gave birth to our second daughter, and we had two more daughters after a ten year gap. Over a 20+ year relationship, the cycle of abuse continued. It began to feel like running on a hamster wheel from which I could see no path to escape. With four daughters, and the underlying Christian distortion that marriage meant ‘until death do us part’ running my subconscious choices, and the fact that I feared to reveal what was going on behind closed doors, I remained far longer that I should have. Our older two daughters witnessed several of the incidents of abuse, and I started to realize the harm that I was causing them and myself by staying. But I had also left behind every career, including a teaching career, that had required me to return to college for a grueling almost three years while raising two daughters, to obtain my Master’s degree.
I remained in the marriage, until I could no longer bear the harm I was causing myself and my daughters by staying. Looking back, there was never a defining moment in which I chose to end our marriage, rather a series of events that slowly revealed to me, over several years, that nothing would ever change between us until I chose to prioritize myself and my own emotional wellbeing above protecting him and the façade that had become the face of our marriage.
One catalyst was my decision to begin healing my childhood wounds that were perpetuating trauma within my marriage and making me feel as though I could’t leave. I started to despise the mother that I was becoming to our daughters. I noticed how snappy, reactive, numb, exhausted, and burnout I had become, similar to my own mother’s actions, despite vowing to myself to never become her. All the while pretending that I was fine and portraying just that to the world around me. I felt all alone in my marriage, and entirely unsupported in raising our daughters, as he worked long hours for his business and was rarely present physically or emotionally present when he was home. Looking back, our relationship mirrored similar chaos to that of my parents relationship, and my patterns of behavior mirrored my childhood nervous system responses of freezing and fawning.
As a mother, I took on the role of caring for our four children and managing a busy household, while simultaneously working from home for his business. I even continued to work for his business immediately after giving birth to our two younger daughters, without taking maternity leaves either time. Carrying the burdens of what should have been shared responsibilities between him and I, while neglecting my own needs and desires, deeply wore me down over time. Not meeting my own needs, meant I wasn’t able to fully meet the emotional needs of my own daughters. Our relationship had progressed to such deep disconnection that he slept on the couch for years of our marriage, and we rarely spent any time with one another. Feeling alone in my marriage, the cracks between us continued to deepen even further. And my understanding deepened that my adult relationship with him mirrored that of my childhood.
As it often goes, when we begin to awaken to the ways in which we perpetuate our own suffering with our choices, we are led to exactly the right people and spaces that can expand our journey. I connected to a woman via social media who shed light on the fact that my traumas were leading my life’s choices. I joined a group of women that were led by her in dedication to fitness, trauma healing, and soul expansion. I dove deep into healing, addressing every wound, belief, and story about my past that was running my subconscious programming. I started to share bits and pieces of the depth of my traumatic childhood experiences with others and my then husband, after exposing very little depth to him over the years, out of fear he would judge me, in particular over the sexual abuse, which I did had not yet shared with him.
Perhaps one of the more defining moments of the deepening fractures within our relationship, was when I eventually disclosed to him that I had been sexually abused as a child. We were driving home from a rare night out together, and he began to accuse me of cheating on him, saying I had become distant and suggesting that I was cheating during the times that I had been actually making time for myself by attending yoga classes. Furious that he was falsely accusing me of cheating, and adding insult to injury by accusing me of such while I was trying to connect and restore safety within my body from childhood sexual assaults, I abruptly disclosed that I had been sexually abused as a child. It just came out, and in terrible timing. I blurted it out like vomit that had been held within me for decades.
He slammed on the brakes of the car, stopping the car mid drive home, and flew into a fit of rage, demanding I tell him who had abused me. I refused to disclose, feeling unsafe to do so, and his rage deepened as we returned home. He continued to demand that I reveal my abusers, and when I refused, he hit me across the face, twice, sending jolts of pain through my head and jaw and ringing though my ears, while I struggled to regain my composure. It was the worst of the physical blows he’d ever committed against me, after I shared one of the most vulnerable aspects of my life. I guess I always intuitively knew it wasn't safe for me to reveal to him what had happened to me. Months later, I came to understand, in part, why he reacted that way, however, it is not my place to share the depths of his own pain that may have caused his explosive reaction, nor was his reaction an acceptable way to act.
I left that night to drive over an hour to my sister’s home, fearful of what he would do to me if I stayed, while he repeatedly called me and my sisters, leaving enraged voicemails. He even told me to get out of the house when I did return home the next day, blaming me for his horrific reaction to my revelation. But as I always did, over the weeks beyond this incident, I let him back in to my heart and my life. We even went on a family vacation just over a month afterwards, after canceling the planned vacation that had been intended as a birthday gift to me, after the incident, but rescheduling it. I was continuing to live a lie, shoving down the pain his actions had caused me, and pretending to be okay for my daughters. I thought I was protecting them, but not only was I doing just the opposite, I was also harming myself, while simultaneously enabling him.
A few months after that incident, while continuing facing my childhood sexual abuse, I was divinely led to Saprea, an organization that holds free healing retreats for adult women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I flew to a retreat where I met 7 other survivors of sexual abuse of all ages, and shared, cried and healed alongside them. This experience deepened my understanding of how sexual traumas in particular shape a child’s brain and nervous system, and how these particular traumas had been shaping my adult choices. While feeling less alone, I didn’t actually feel much better after that retreat, feeling even further ‘broken’ and ‘damaged’, and even more like a victim of the abuses. It did allow me to become more attuned to my own emotions and reactivity, and to begin to notice my self-sabotaging patterns. But what that experience really did was crack me further open to begin to ask, “Who am I, outside of my past experiences that have shaped my adult choices? What do I really want in life, beyond healing from past experiences that were never my fault?”
From there, I was divinely led to partake in a plant medicine journey several months after returning home from the retreat, and there, my deeper spiritual journey began to unfold. At the retreat, I met and deeply connected to two very precious souls, Kara and Ashley, who have become soul sisters to me. From the moment we met, in a series of synchronistic events, it was as if we had known each other for lifetimes, and honestly, we probably have. Their support and encouragement led me through some of the darkest days of my life. I will share more of the plant medicine experience itself at a later time, as the profound nature of that experience deserves its own spotlight. In hindsight, that is where so much began to shift for me, both internally and externally. Through the revelations of that experience, I gained a newfound connection to God within me, spiritually, beyond any connection I had ever had with the religious ‘god’ I was taught of in my youth. And finally, I had connected with people who truly saw me, for me.
More beliefs I had previously held as truth began to crumble, revealing the distortions underneath. I questioned everything I had previously thought to be true, seeking and consuming spiritual books, content, and courses that revealed new perspectives and shed light on the questions I had always held within me. I studied everything from healing, to nervous system regulation, how our past experiences shape our present, and how our bodies always hold onto unresolved trauma.
Shortly after I returned from the plant medicine retreat, it was as if I had finally awakened to the deep harm that my marriage was causing me, including struggling with semi-severe gastrointestinal issues that I had suffered with for years. I realized in a the one and only therapy session we attended together at his request, that I was living in a state of perpetual nervous system dysregulation, fearful of the next time he might boil over into a fit of rage. There was no way to anticipate when he might experience the smallest trigger, and somehow find a way to direct his rage at me. Did I purchase the correct coffee? Was there enough milk in the fridge so that he wouldn’t punch a wall or a door, in front of our children? I had to be prepared for any trigger that might lead to slammed doors, a fist in a wall or door, him throwing my belongings in the trash or ripping decor off the walls, or shouting insults at me.
But just like in childhood, I silenced myself, because even if I spoke up about how his actions were hurting me or called out his behavior, he rarely listened or became angrier, sometimes for days afterwards. I rarely recall him apologizing, and there was not accountability, nor changed behaviors, which would’ve been the only true apology. He programmed me into silence through abusive reactions, just as my own parents had done to me.
If I brought up his behaviors, even days later, when he had calmed down, as I did days after he locked our then 17 year old daughter out of our house on Mother’s Day evening for forgetting to empty the dishwasher at his request, there was little self-reflection. He denied the harm he was causing others, holding steadfast that his actions were warranted, and refused accountability. No longer willing to protect him at my own expense or that of our daughters, I finally gained the courage to end my marriage, fully awake to the depth of pain he continued to project onto me, revealed to me through continued experiences of abuse, gaslighting, and manipulation.
One night, shortly after announcing that I wanted a divorce, I even called the police on him for the first time in our 20+ year relationship and multiple events of abuse. I recognized that nothing would ever change between us until I took action and took steps to change the course of my life. I was particularly enraged when I found out he had lied to the police about the nature of the incident, falsely proclaiming to the police that our fight was over ‘my multiple infidelities’, when the truth was that our argument involved me refusing to give back the gun that he asked me to take from his possession about a month prior. After this incident, my therapist referred me to a domestic violence advocate, who connected me to my lawyer who specialized in divorce cases of involving domestic violence. I filed for divorce while he attempted to manipulate me into giving us another chance.
Through the grueling process of divorce, selling our home, and moving into a home on my own with my daughters, I slowly began to remember, to reawaken to the divine truth about myself. That I am not my traumas. I am not my past experiences, choices, or mistakes. I am not the hurt that was projected onto me, nor the stories I told myself as a result of a lifetime of abusive experiences. I am not the labels or the insults projected upon me by others. I do not deserve to be wished dead by someone that claimed to love me.
The safety of being in a home on my own slowly began to heal me, in body, mind, and soul, unraveling decades of generational trauma that had been passed on to me. I finally had the courage to face the fact that by enabling abuse in my marriage, I had been setting a horrible example for my daughters. I turned inward, deepening with courage to face all the ways I had not only let myself down, but also my daughters, and even my ex-husband by enabling his abusive actions over the years. Because real love doesn’t enable, coddle, or settle for disrespect and abuse. Love reveals and exposes distortions, and I now understood that his actions were operating as a divine mirror for me, to expose within me all the ways my actions reflected a lack of self-love. And I can personally confirm that what they say is true, love heals, and for me it was restoring self-love that changed my personal choices.
My journey over the past several years has led me down a path of seeking healing through an expansive list of modalities, including somatic movement, breathwork practices, journaling, meditation, hypnotherapy, craniosacral therapy, talk therapy, shadow work, body work practices, various modalities of energy healing, and even completing Reiki and IET trainings. Each of these healing modalities had their role in my journey, but I started to realize another pattern: I was chasing something outside of me to ‘fix’ me, to make me feel whole again. I was still identifying as that wounded inner child version of myself that had experienced multiple abuses, and the adult version of me that had experienced domestic violence.
But those versions of me aren’t me and never were, because we are not our bodies, or even our minds, nor the past experiences that have shaped our brains and programmed our nervous system responses. I have since decided to stop carrying the burden of my childhood traumas, recognizing that they never were my burden to carry, choosing instead to remember the truth about myself. My spiritual journey led me to remember that all I really had to do was let go of every false identity I ever held about myself, so that I could remember the single truth about myself: I am love.
And in remembering my own truth, I was able to remember the divine truth about those that had deeply hurt me, from my parents, to my those that sexually abused me, to my ex-husband. They too are souls, each inhabiting a human body that has also experienced all sorts of traumas and hurt over their own lives, especially as children, just like me. Restoring divine love within my own heart enabled me to see those that had hurt me with their words and actions, not as the harm they had caused me, but as the divine souls that they too are, despite the harm they may have caused me. Understanding brings deeper compassion, not only for others, but for ourselves.
Consciously choosing to cultivate compassion, empathy, and forgiveness has allowed me to see my parents not just as my parents, but as the child-self versions of them that showed up in their actions. I saw my dad as the child who was also physically abused, picked on by his older brothers, and harshly raised by two emotionally immature parents who had also experienced their own deep suffering, from suicide of a parent to quite likely sexual abuse and incest. I saw my mom as the child that never had an emotional connection to her own parents, the lonely child that felt like the black sheep of her sisters, as the young adult who lost her mother to cancer, and as the mother who never had the chance to heal her relationship with her own mom and raised her children while she also was being abused. I saw my sexual abusers as their younger selves, who had also quite likely been abused themselves, as often is the case in sexual abuse, and therefore the reason the trauma of sexual abuse quite often gets passed down through generations of families. I saw my ex-husband as the little boy who, from what he has shared with me, experienced horrific, unspeakable abuses in his own childhood, and even as the part of him that had been hurt by any of my own actions throughout our relationship.
Seeing those that have hurt me through the lens of love, instead of through the lens of the pain I carried for so long, shifted something so deep and eternal within me. It has led me from feeling like a victim of my experiences, to instead evolving beyond them and becoming empowered by them. Yes, I was a victimized by experiences of abuse, but that story no longer defines me. This journey has led me to have so much more compassion for others, and to accept all emotion that arises within me to be embraced and let go, with love and compassion. It has led me to deepening self-love that I recognize had been severely lacking within me. But perhaps most importantly, my past experiences, many of which were of unloving actions, have led me to understand what love truly is.
Love is the only thing that is real and eternal. Everything else is a distortion, born from the illusion of separation and the human actions that resulted from repressed emotions, both within ourselves and within others. We have a choice to use our emotions as teachers to lead us back home to love, to wholeness within our hearts, or to allow them to perpetuate continued suffering in our lives. I had to learn to accept my emotions, allow myself to feel them, and then let them go. And yes, that’s much easier said than done.
But in doing so, I learned to surrender to the truth that we are all divine expressions of One unified, infinite and eternal Consciousness, ever connected to God, to the Source of all creation. All of my experiences and the pain born from abuse were not orchestrated to break me, nor to punish me. Instead, they were the doorway within me to remembrance of my divinity, my true nature, my True Self. And not just within me, but also every other expression of life, including within those that have done me harm. Remembering our inherent wholeness, our True Self, is quite possibly the most freeing experience one can possible have in life. I remembered the truth because of the very pain that led me away from my divine nature, as a whole and magnificent expression of love itself, living a human experience.
Today, and every day, I now do my best to show up consciously, with love as an embodied state of being. I make conscious choices about the foods I eat, how I care for my body, the way I speak to myself, and how I view myself in the mirror. I choose love in deciding with whom I choose to surround myself. Consciousness shows up in the ways I show up as a mother, allowing my daughters a voice and a safe space to be themselves, to express their emotions, and be heard, supported, and cherished. Love shows up in the ways I interact with strangers and friends alike. And I mess up, every day, honestly, and that’s part of the journey. But every day, I choose to dedicate myself to being love.
And with that, I leave you with this beautiful quote by Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist,
“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”
If you got this far, to the end of my story that is really just a new beginning, thank-you. It means a lot to me that you’ve chosen to read about my journey. I hope it has touched a part of your heart and awakened a longing for remembrance within you. I appreciate you being here, and wish you peace, healing, and the remembrance of love within your own heart. You deserve it, and you always have.
In love and light,
Holly ✨
It is my intention to reawaken divine love, inviting those who feel the call, into toward deeper awareness, authentic connection, and remembrance of our shared humanity. If I have in any way touched your heart, and you feel called to gift an offering to supporting my dream for co-creating Heaven on Earth, you can do so here: