Freedom From Childhood Trauma (part 1/3): A guest blog by DP

Freedom From Childhood Trauma part 1

By DP

I remember the day when I took the 357 Magnum with hollow point bullets and put it to my head. I’d been rehearsing this for months. This was a way for me to get rid of the pain. I had bought a folding shovel so I could dig my own grave and the only thing that frustrated me was that I could not figure out a way to kill myself and burry myself afterward. I did not want to be found.

Today I look back at that behavior and clearly recall my pain. The insanity of my alcoholism, drinking every night, passing out over and over, drinking some more and itching. Itching all the time, all over my body.

I remember a time growing up when I was punished almost every day after coming home from school. One day the belt slipped and the buckle hit me in the eye leaving me with a black eye. My mother sat me down and told me about a “white lie.” Had someone confronted me at school the next day it might have saved me from the escalating violence that followed.

A few years later my father took me into his workshop and worked me over with a bamboo curtain leaving most of my back cut open with bleeding wounds. This was the first time I left my body in horror. I almost dared him to kill me. I knew the scars would last, and they have.

I’ve struggled with suicidal thoughts and suffered from PTSD for most of my life self- medicating with alcohol, drugs and sex to take away the pain. I finally wound up in treatment and learned that I was not only an abuse survivor but also a torture survivor.

Today my story has vaporized, gone like a puff of smoke, it has finally left me. Inside I am happy… very, very happy. Peaceful, serene and able to reach out to other people in ways I never imagined possible. At age 59 I finally got the help that I sought for so long. The help that it was my right to receive when I was an innocent 10 year old child.

My journey is long, much longer than the period of my abuse. I grew up in hell likely parented by people best understood as hungry ghosts and lived in hell until I created a hell of my own by trying to survive my abuse by acting out.

The first time I found a way to deal with my pain was when I found marijuana in high school. I was finally free or at least I thought I was. So I self medicated with marijuana for about 10 years until it cost me the most important relationship of my life.

And when I paid that price, the price of the most significant relationship in my life, I vowed to never smoke pot again. And so I stopped but the pain inside of myself continued and without realizing it my drinking escalated. When I started gaining weight I switched from beer to rum and then to vodka.

Not aware of the impact drugs and alcohol were having on my life I began having blackouts. The problem I learned much later on was that after a blackout one simply does not remember what happened. During the time I smoked pot I was jumbling up experiences in my life so that I could no longer recall what the heck happened and when the hell it happened.

Left without a way to cope with trauma my alcoholism worsened. I had no understanding about how alcohol would destroy my life even though I was overwhelmingly aware of alcohol abuse by the adult perpetrators in my family.

Experiencing even greater levels of despair in midlife I began reaching out for help while I was still drinking. I found a book and then off to a therapist who then sent me to a psychiatrist. I was prescribed large doses of Prozac so large that I began experiencing seizures. I had to take another medication to suppress the seizures so I could continue with the dosage recommended to me by my psychiatrist. And I was to take this medication every day for the rest of my life. Looking back I realize how important it would’ve been had the psychiatrist simply asked me if I were drinking. Not drinking like a normal man, but drinking to pass out over and over again all night every night. It never occurred to me that the seizures I was having might possibly be related to my drinking. Frustrated because we could never hit the “sweet spot,” the spot where I felt good about myself and connected with the world for very long. And so I stopped this medication thinking to myself, “what a quack.” It was of course the psychiatrist whom I perhaps labeled with my own disease.

It’s been a long process in recovery and quite difficult for me to begin making my story public knowing that in doing so I might be confronted by my family for coming out as a torture survivor. I am the black sheep in a long line of black sheep that passes through my ancestry. My father was the black sheep in his family abandoned an early age running away many miles to live on a farm to live off food he could steal until he was old enough to lie about his age and go into the military. I do not know about the trauma that set him up to become a perpetrator but I do know that he was a very violent, extremely angry man with psychopathic tendencies. He loved the look of others in pain. And there were a few incidents where he acted out with animals when I was a child. But it was when he acted out with me in a series of increasingly violent episodes that finally resulted in an incident of torture that would forever, or so I thought, negatively impact my life.

I’m reaching out today as a man who found the answer for myself the answer that I sought for my entire life to questions many of us have: Will I ever be free? Will I ever be at peace? Will I ever live a happy and contented life?

I found the answer and became the change I wish to see in the world. This is not a change that made me rich or famous but simply changed my energy. I changed the way I see the world, changed the way I react in the world and changed the way I give back to the world.

The answer does not include mega doses of medication but does include incredible, tireless determination to find the answer to the question no one else could give, “Do you know anyone who has worked through trauma and is now a happy functional adult?

I remember asking this question of my therapist, an Angel, whom I had seen once a week for 10 years, “Do you know anyone was worked through trauma and is now a happy functional adult?

The answer was silence. And it has always been silence.

I am now completing my journey by facing my fear of confrontation by family by giving back in a hopefully unpretentious and humble way to say there is an answer and to share that answer even if it’s only one answer, possibly one of many, but it’s the only one I know.

To read Part 2 click here.