trauma

She is so young, small, and close to the ground that she has a bird’s eye view of the litter from her mother’s nightly disgrace. Empty bottles and cigarette butts. Clothes strewn around the living room where she sleeps with an unfamiliar man on the old, stained sofa. Vomit to the side of the room, the little one grabs something made of cloth and mops it up. She does this every night because she loves her mom, and she has no choice.
Height is an issue. You get to see things straight on, like what happens on that couch. Things that are seriously not helpful to see. Or right. To make it right, she protects her moms’ stories with silence and searches the house for food. Nothing.
She and her slightly bigger sister walk unaccompanied to the local food store and beg. Luckily there is always someone to help, offering crackers, soda, bread, chips. It will do. They eat as they walk home giggling out loud while secretly dreading what lies ahead.
What lies ahead is more of the same. And worse. Now, it makes sleeping at night impossible. When she gets into bed it is very important that she falls asleep immediately so there are no memories. No recall. No images. No sensations. No faces. She drinks like her mom to forget.
Vigilance is necessary to ward off terror, and not your everyday terror, but the root of all terror: The worst ever. She feels debilitated, crazy, one crisis after another. She stays busy, busy, busy, all day for as long as she can, then crashes at night with clever ways of coping that change from one decade to the next. She feels guttural, no longer human, and cannot remember when she ever did.
“I want out” her mind says while her body recycles the trauma constantly preparing for the worst. Her nervous system is stuck in a freeze, fight, and flight mode, surging from one minute to the next. She had consequently become tolerant of and angry toward her body, her behavior, her thoughts, her feelings and all the situational consequences of coping.
She had persuaded herself to be super kind to everyone else, especially the innocents, while feeling globally bad on the inside. She had learned to demand health by putting her body through harsh exercise treating herself the way her mother did. But, as a last option, kindness won. She had not considered that kindness toward herself was ever an option, but this torture, this cruelty was enough.
So, she whispered lovingly to her aching body, welcoming the feelings of her wounded child, sweetly toward her sore heart inviting her whole self to safety. Day by day she is learning to soften. And sleep.