The Body Never Lies
For most of my life, I didn’t believe I had trauma.
No one told me what I experienced in childhood was trauma, so it was just… normal to me.
I carried that belief into adulthood, despite studying psychology for years.
I couldn’t recognize myself in all of my research because I got so good at hiding it, I even hid it from myself.
I threw my trauma in a darkened room in my brain, locked the door, and tossed the key into the trash.
I Didn’t Know It Was Trauma
I’ve been in some form of therapy for the better part of 20 years.
I told my therapist some of what had transpired when I was a child, but I never disclosed any traumatic events.
I thought, I’ve already dealt with my past, it’s over and done with.
I knew what had happened. I’d already been wrestling with it mentally for years–
but I’d never called it trauma.
That word was heavy. That word was serious.
It felt like it belonged to other people, not to me.
I just considered there to have been negative events in my childhood, just like everyone else.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Nothing to make a fuss about.
But in reality, I was so wracked with shame that I was curled up in a fetal position psychically,
holding all of my secrets so tight to my chest because I was too ashamed to let them be spoken in the daylight.
Even now I want to cling to the shadows and deny it all.
For years, I believed I caused my pain.
Not all of it, maybe, but enough to make it feel solidly like my fault.
I thought the chaos in me was a reflection of who I was as a person, instead of what I was adapting to.
But what I’ve come to understand is that I adapted to the absence of psychological (and sometimes physical)
safety so well, I forgot I ever needed it.
Instead of destroying everything around me, I turned it inward.
I froze, I dissociated, I became functional, I became quiet.
I lost my self-esteem and felt dead inside–
but on the outside, I was “fine.”
“Shy.”
“Introverted.”
Being unseen taught me to disappear.
Even now I feel the pull to retreat into silence and pretend nothing ever happened.
If I Wasn’t Bleeding, I Must Be Fine
Since my life wasn’t total outward chaos -
no bruises, no drug addicted parents, no physical violence in the house -
I internalized that if my experience wasn’t loud, it wasn’t bad.
If I wasn’t bleeding, I must be fine.
If no one noticed, maybe I’m not worth noticing.
The trauma wasn’t obvious; it was subtle, constant, and suffocating.
It disappeared into my personality so completely–dressed as me–that I stopped believing I was hurt.
But something inside me never stopped aching.
Over time, the weight of that ache forced me to reconsider everything I learned.
The Shape Of My Suffering Was A Map
I’ve since learned I wasn’t the problem.
I was the one trying to solve it, to contain it, to do damage control, silently, from the inside.
Now I know: when a child goes silent, it’s not an accident–it’s learned.
I was scared of the consequences,
learned that pain is private,
and was buried under layers of spiritual gaslighting and emotional erasure.
I didn’t choose silence, it just felt like my safest option.
Sadly, the container where I buried all my feelings too big to name looked like shame,
like silence, like over-functioning, like being “fine” on the surface but feeling like a dried out husk of a person on the inside.
I came to believe my pain must be hidden, my needs made me unlovable, silence was survival, and being seen was dangerous.
The shelter I built to keep myself safe back then turned into a prison the older I got.
A prison of self-doubt, thick and heavy with boundless shame.
I have choked on that shame my whole life.
The coping mechanisms of my childhood are no longer effective, even to the point of actively harming me.
And so I return to the beginning, to shine a light into the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain.
I can only do this now because I’ve finally decided to admit to myself that I have a relatively traumatic past.
Because if it wasn’t real, I wouldn’t feel sick to my stomach when I think of my childhood.
If this wasn’t real, I wouldn’t ache in my bones with pain I can’t name.
If this wasn’t real, I wouldn’t have worn a coat of shame for so long.
If this wasn’t real, I wouldn’t have had to numb myself for decades.
If this wasn’t real, it wouldn’t be so hard for me to talk about.
I broke the cycle of self-doubt by recognizing that the shape of my suffering was the map of what happened to me.
I’ve learned that I didn’t make this up. I didn’t wire myself this way.
These aren’t personality quirks, despite what I’ve believed for years - they’re survival strategies.
My pain is the proof, my body the witness.
I’m allowed to believe myself, even if no one else did.
