Introduction
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung
I first heard the word trauma in reference to myself was when I was attending a week-long intensive outpatient program in order to deal with yet another crisis of the mental breakdown variety. Over the years I had experienced many of these. These experiences were anywhere from what I call mini meltdowns where I was having panic attacks, anxiety, and chronic overwhelm to full-blown mental breakdowns that left me hospitalized with suicide attempts or voluntary hospitalizations knowing I was heading in that direction. Having your stomach pumped is an unpleasant experience and I’d learned over the years that although it felt like I was going to die, I didn’t really want to die – I just wanted the pain to stop.
The intensive outpatient program I attended was one of those times when I had been hit hard by a life experience and didn’t have any positive ways to cope with it. At the time, my fiancé had just called off our wedding after I told him about an abusive situation I had experienced when I was a young girl, and he felt that it was too much for our relationship to handle. He was angry that I hadn’t told him sooner, and I was devastated by my worst fears coming true: his rejection of me because of my past trauma. I had only just started getting intense flashbacks and didn’t know how to deal with what I was experiencing. I was also dealing with the humiliation and embarrassment from having to call off our wedding after finally getting engaged ten years into our relationship. My parents had rented a house in Mexico for the wedding ceremony, friends and relatives had bought plane tickets, and gifts had already started arriving at our home. My feelings vacillated from anger and rage at the betrayal to despair and depression as a result the selfloathing and shame I was experiencing. I spent several days curled up in a ball crying and wanting to die. So, the gifts went back to the store and I went to treatment.
I do want to mention here that he and I are very good friends and have an amicable co-parenting relationship with our daughter. Many years later I’m grateful for that moment in my life. If he hadn’t had the courage to make the difficult decision to call things off, I may have never hit that bottom and had the opportunity to take a deep dive into my trauma issues. Intuitively he knew that we had both been significantly affected by trauma, and that we hadn’t dealt with it yet. We didn’t have the tools to handle the outer manifestations of our own inner demons much less navigate the tumultuous waters of our relationship. We were both self-medicating, he had been unfaithful to me with several women over the years, and neither of us could stay present for each other long enough to communicate effectively and build trust in order to make things work. We loved each other dearly, and truly wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, but it wasn’t enough.
I learned about trauma for the first time during the intensive outpatient program I attended after the breakup. I felt both baffled and relieved at the same time to discover that trauma was the underlying issue. I was baffled because when I thought of trauma, I thoug