The word ‘Trauma’ was an alien concept to me until 3 years back. I definitely had this word in my vocabulary since I am a voracious reader, but I associated this with accident victims like my dad. The concept that what I went through in my childhood and teenage years could be considered trauma not only shocked me but also helped me understand so much about myself. I was diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) roughly 3 years ago which led my life on a completely different path, which neither I envisioned nor expected. To understand how trauma affected me psychologically, I will have to peel some layers of my life.

My life’s journey has been bumpy since the start. There’s one incident that my mother shared with her friend once, that now while writing this gives me a different perspective of my life. She shared that in her first trimester, she could have had a miscarriage because the fetus (me) slipped during a dance. A midwife helped set the fetus again into position. Was this my first trauma? Maybe. Memories are very tricky. They pop up when you least expect them. You are having a very casual conversation with someone and bam they appear in front of your eyes. I grew up in a house where any situation could turn volatile at any moment. A simple thing as less salt in a dish on a bad day could escalate into a verbal or physical altercation. I remember my earliest memory of this since I was maybe 4 years old. My memories are vivid rather than repressed. Every detail is very easy for me to describe. The pain that these memories bring me is very hard to process even now as an adult.

Repressed Memories:

A memory of a mother walking out of the house as a result of a fight and then me, as a child of 4 years old, searching for her with my father is my earliest memory of the violence in my house. The ensuing years till I was 8 years were probably the happiest of my childhood. But now that I go back, I honestly do not remember much of this period. Only small glimpses of that period pop here and there. I am not sure if I repressed them because the bad parts of my life overshadowed the good parts.

Trust Issues:

The period from my fourth grade (8 years) to pretty much till I was 20 is the most painful period for me even as an adult. Living with a parent, who I now know has CPTSD (undiagnosed) was hell. I was an introvert but perceived as an arrogant child by friends. Trusting never came easy to me. Sometimes it is still hard for me to trust people and take any advice at face value without expecting some ulterior motive. I hate chaos and can never function in it due to the chaotic childhood I have had. Lying came very easy to me. Now, I hate lying or liars. Lying was a means of self-preservation in those days. But after lying, came the guilt and shame. The violence that ensued brought more guilt and shame especially if someone else in the house like my sister or my mother got hurt. Our pet dogs were treated better than my mother, me, and my sister in our house. The guilt of not protecting my sister from witnessing the worst form of violence still haunts me.

Body image:

I have never felt beautiful. Especially as a child and as a teenager, I never had a choice of choosing what I wore or where I went. It was practically dictated to all of us in our house. Looking back, I manifested all my frustrations and anger in any relations I had. Forming friendships was hard for me. My relationship with my sister slowly developed into a friendship during this period through the competitiveness that my father brought into this relationship still hurts me to this day. The undercurrent that this rivalry my father introduced between us is a disturbing relationship that pains both of us equally. Distrust, the frustrations due to the expectations of my father, anger, guilt, and shame were the emotions that practically were my foundations. Being blamed for my dad’s fatal accident which brought him close to death’s door took me on a downward spiral which now I realize was a path of self-destruction. Unfortunately, this spiral affected my career and was an additional layer of guilt and shame. I was disappointed in myself.

Being Vulnerable:

I still don’t feel comfortable in my own skin. Living in a society where women were groped in public transport, leered, jeered, and whistled at, was horrible and traumatizing. Taught at an early age that men always want only one thing from a woman has made me look through my shoulder all the time. This probably makes me very uncomfortable with my sexual life even now. The playful gestures that my husband sometimes does are crude to me and put me off. I call him upon those gestures which are just casual to him. I still am conscious of my body all the time. I am a petite woman and any weight I put on is a matter of contention with my parents. Growing up, I have seen my dad criticizing and ridiculing my mom for her weight gain and this calling out inherently comes in the category of self-judging.

Self-Harm:

Meeting my partner was a good thing for me but the turbulence that it brought into my already chaotic life was a spiral that didn’t leave me a lot of room to even breathe. The distrust that my father had for our relationship despite him choosing my partner was hurtful and shameful. My future husband was a loving person but the downward spiral I was in made me angry, distrustful, and lash out at him quite often. I remember defending my father quite often when my partner called out my dad for his actions. I was never diagnosed during this period but going back, I think I was in depression during this period. Anxiety, panic, stress, and this cloud of sadness were my constant companions. I tried to harm myself in one such period. My sister was the one who saved me and I still feel guilty and ashamed that I put one more layer of trauma in her arsenal.

Anxiety/Panic/Depression:

In the ensuing years, unintentionally I did dissociate from these memories and lived in a fog-like state. I got married, completed my law school, had kids, and moved to the US from India. From the outside, everything was perfect. But the inherent sadness and anxiety remained with me throughout. Some of the things in my family spiraled out of control and I was trying to fix them. Panic and stress were my constant companions. My first stress attack came out of nowhere in 2013. After this attack, I became more conscious of pushing back on things I was uncomfortable with. But with this, came sadness, guilt, and insomnia. I didn’t sleep for more than 3 hours for almost a year. My physician recognized this as a cause of depression and helped me with some over-the-counter medication. I never spoke to him about my abusive history because I still associated it as normal to my culture. I knew it was wrong but honestly didn’t think too much about it. After this period, I went into a very fog-like state. I existed only in a shell that performed to the occasion.

The fog-like state was a blessing in disguise for some time honestly. Nothing hurt me anymore, I stopped crying, I stopped getting angry or frustrated and it was easy to be me without feeling any emotions. My old self with depressed feelings would pop up at times but a small shopping spree would tamp me down. A small altercation with my father over the phone was the root cause of my second major panic attack and my diagnosis followed. Had my husband not disclosed that there was a childhood abuse in my history to the neurologist, I would still be undiagnosed. I was hesitant to even then to disclose it. I was still that child defending her father. That’s all I knew then and was imitating that behavior even as an adult. Since then my layers of trauma are slowly peeling off and the process of healing has begun.

Summary:

Even before I started the process of learning about trauma, I thought I was like a volcano where I had this fire and pressure in my core that was building up, and one day I would explode. I think the panic and stress attacks are those explosions. The secrets that I had to hide for my self-preservation by lying, not functioning in chaos, the anxiety, and panic in an unknown situation, the distrust in people, guilt, shame, and this idea of perfection that I still sometimes carry with me are all the results of the abuse I went through for a lot of years. I am healing steadily but slowly. I still get hurt and sometimes take two steps back before taking that one step ahead. It’s hard but not impossible.

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Shravani Bojja

Shravani is a complex trauma survivor and is a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach. She is a Daily Support Call Leader for CPTSD Foundation. She is a group facilitator for PostPartum Support International and Parent Helping Parents. She is a mom of two teenage boys and loves gardening, reading and nature photography.