Surviving Childhood Trauma: My Story Pt. 1

From the outside looking at my life, most people would have no idea all that went on with my family. And that’s the way we wanted it. We kept it secret like it was something to be ashamed of and that’s because there was a lot of shame. 

Mental illness runs in my family. 

Just this past year, I found out that it goes back at least 5 generations to my great great grandmother. She was known to shut herself away for extended periods of time during what sounds like severe depressive episodes. 

Growing up, I was aware that my grandmother struggled with bipolar personality disorder. She was stable with the help of a lithium pill every day, but she wasn’t always like that. Psych ward stays, medication, and mental breaks have been regular occurrences throughout my family’s life. 

Cracks in my “normal” reality began to surface when I was in the third grade. Everything shifted and chaos hit when my sister was diagnosed. That became our secret. The one that we used as an excuse for all our problems. We created a false narrative that this diagnosis was the pinnacle of our issues. That narrative defined and divided our family system.

My family of four existed in the same house, physically together but mentally and emotionally far apart. My home was no longer a safe haven, but a war zone. Screaming tantrums, wailing puddles of tears, pointed accusations of paranoia, harsh judgements and blame became a routine part of daily life. Communication broke down. We lived for years in fight or flight. Stuck in highly reactive states, even the smallest and most ordinary interactions could turn into a fight for honor and survival. This downward spiral divided us until we became isolated on our own personal islands of misery. 

This became my new normal. I wouldn’t be able to escape the tantrums and emotional outbursts for many years. I got through the rest of elementary school hanging onto the hope that things would get better. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Things only seemed to get worse. 

So what exactly happened?

When I sat down to write this, I fully intended to share something more concrete. In fact, I wrote a different version of this blog post a month and a half ago, but in that short span of time, the story I wrote is no longer true to the narrative I have now. 

You see, the truth is that I’m still making sense of it myself. The full picture continues to come into focus. Parts are blurry and obscured. Memories are fragmented. Details of the trauma are still raw. As I piece together and process the past, my story becomes more defined. Not because actions changed, but because my perspective evolves as I uncover new information. 

In my first draft, I tried to tie it all together by starting at the beginning. The first point in time that I could pinpoint when everything started to shift. But, in the end, that didn’t feel right either. What I experienced was not one moment in time, but a series of events linked together over my life and the lives of family members before me. What happened is the legacy of generational mental illness and trauma. 

There’s no simple story, but a complex entanglement of narratives. My experience is only a piece of the puzzle. Each person in my family experienced this trauma in distinctly different ways. It played out exactly the same and yet manifested uniquely for each of us. To share my story would also mean sharing part of theirs. And while I decided to make this part of my healing journey public, they have not.

We are all at different points of healing. The last thing I want to do is infringe on that process by sharing an unbalanced perspective. I’m not sure how to share what happened to me without a good guy/bad guy archetypes. And that really wouldn’t be a fair assessment of what happened. It is not black and white. It doesn’t begin to capture the full story. 

I haven’t always had this nuanced outlook on my childhood. It’s developed over years of therapy, wrestling with emotions, building empathy, and dedicated inner work. Back then, I saw things much differently. Anger, resentment and fear fueled my perspective. I blamed my sister and saw my parents as villains. 

Armoring up to Protect Myself 

The chronic emotional chaos took a toll on my childhood. I shouldered a load of responsibilities that a child shouldn’t have to bear. I had to grow up fast and take care of myself. I didn’t have the tools, resources or coping mechanisms. By fifth grade, I was getting impatient. I was tired of waiting for things to get better. I was tired of making myself invisible. I was tired of feeling alone. 

My family inherited unhealthy emotional ideologies from past generations. My father was raised with a “toughen up, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep on trucking” mentality. He was always the “strong and silent” type. On my mother’s side, there was a hierarchy of emotions into a good/bad dichotomy. Happiness was good. Sadness and anger were bad. Instead of healthy habits of feeling, processing, and sharing emotions, repression was the primary method and modeled behavior. 

I learned to manage my emotions by denying and suppressing. I didn’t want to hurt any more. I didn’t want to feel sad and afraid. So, I decided I would protect myself by putting on a suit of armor, hardening my emotions and distancing myself from everyone around me. I’d bottle up all the bad emotions, push them under and hope that it wouldn’t blow (which inevitably it always did.) 

By middle school, I was deeply depressed (as was everyone in my family). I would soldier on through the day, pretending everything was fine. Practically every night, I would cry myself to sleep. Once the door was shut and the lights were off, only then would I allow myself to feel all the anger, sorrow and loneliness growing inside me, bubbling just beneath the surface.

I experimented with self harm as a way to validate the invisible and intangible suffering. By creating physical pain, my emotional pain had a tangible source. I contemplated suicide and leaving all this misery behind. 

By seventh grade, my parents forced me to go to therapy. I stonewalled my therapist week after week. Refusing to talk freely, only willing to answer her if she asked the right questions. I felt so hurt and alone. I needed her to prove to me that this was a safe place to express myself. Slowly, we built trust and I opened up to her. 

A year later, I was diagnosed clinically depressed. The doctors explained that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain that can be fixed with antidepressants. “Take this pill and it will make you better.”  I was so grateful to have a solution that was so simple!  Although, I found it strange that no one was pointing to my environment as a cause of my depression. 

For the most part, I was naturally a happy, successful kid, but my family and home life were major stressors. It seemed obvious to me that my environment created the circumstances which caused depression. But, the doctor said this pill would help, so I took my medicine each morning. And for a little while I did feel better. However, over time the effect wore off. Soon I needed a higher dosage and at 13 years old, I was prescribed an adult-grade antidepressant. 

My Way Out 

There were two saving graces in my life that kept me protected: school and creativity. 

I was good at school. I knew what to expect and excelled academically. I didn’t look forward to the end of the day when the bell would ring for everyone to go home. At home, I hid out in the basement staying busy with creative projects. 

Creativity has always been a strength for me. From a very young age, art was something people encouraged me to pursue. It has been a powerful force in my life that I am grateful for everyday. My art practice acts as a form of therapy. Working with my hands grounded me from the chaos. It gave me a safe space to slow down and focus on something outside of my circumstances. It provided a way to process and connect with my emotions. It built confidence that created resilience and carried me through the trauma. 

My academic and creative strengths were key in my hope for a different life. Starting in middle school, I began devising an escape plan. The way out: college. I am incredibly fortunate to have grandparents who could financially support me to go to any college of my choosing. I only had to make it through to the end of high school — then I’d be free.

USC was my number one choice. The day I received the acceptance letter, my heart swelled with hope. I believed if I could remove myself from my circumstances then everything would get better. I could start over. I could move on and away from my childhood. I could live a normal life, free from depression and trauma. 

College was a new beginning for me. The distance gave me the space I needed to begin healing, but it wasn’t as simple as moving to a new place and starting over.  What I came to find out was that trauma isn’t something we can just leave behind. Trauma doesn’t just affect the circumstances we are in. Once we experience trauma, it lives within us, mentally and physically. It is something that we carry with us until we properly deal with it. 

I thought that I had achieved my escape plan only to find that there was so much more work to do. Moving to Los Angeles was only the beginning of my healing journey.