***

I recently read an essay by Melissa Febos, “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act,” from 2017, which was later expanded and now appears as the first chapter, entitled “In Praise of Navel Gazing” in her 2022 collection of essays “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.” I read the original article on my laptop as I ate comfort food at a wooden picnic table near the lake. I had run away for the afternoon, taking time with myself, sorting through some uncomfortable emotions, and feeling raw. As I absorbed her story, tears appeared on the horizon. I was moved both by her compelling arguments about the transformative power of the truth but also by another layer of realization of my own hard stories pulsing in my veins, chanting in the half-darkness, waiting in the wings for their moment in the sun.

***

“This is the way adults love each other.”

“This is a grown-up secret, just between you and me.”

***

I’m seventeen, and I’ve agreed to check into Long Beach Memorial Hospital for a substance abuse treatment program for teens. I see the gray melamine meal tray, complete with a wooden spork and green Jello, in my mind’s eye. I am filling out a questionnaire. “Have you ever been sexually abused?” I mark the yes box. I feel defiant and strong. I am finally telling the truth. Do I understand the true freeing power of honesty at that time? It’s not how I do today, but somewhere in me, I am so tired of keeping secrets. My adult cousin had molested me when I was about 3 or 4.

I hadn’t thought that checkmark all the way through to the avalanche effect it was about to have. I was underage. My parents had to be told. Was it going to have to be reported?

Big surprise, they weren’t surprised. They already knew. Apparently, I had told them when it happened. Why did I still feel so betrayed? What could a young child have possibly told them anyway? Did they know to ask the right questions? Why was nothing ever done? Why did I still feel so unsafe? Why was my dad still buddy-buddy with this man who did what he did to me? Why did I feel like it was my fault?

***

“Men will only ever want one thing from you.”

***

My dad told me this multiple times, starting in junior high school. There was always a “look” and a “tone” that went along with this. I assume he thought he was protecting me. In high school, he told me I looked like a prostitute once and made me change my clothes.

My dad also repeatedly told friends and family the story about the summer I was developing, and he saw me in the rear-view mirror but hadn’t seen my face, just my body, and found himself gawking at me. Internally, I cowered in shame. Why was he proud of this fact? Why did I feel so dirty? What did I do wrong?

***

“If you really knew me and all my secrets, you wouldn’t want me, love me.

You’d run screaming in the other direction.”

***

The point in my life when I finally stood in the face of the truth at last and looked eye to eye with my own alcoholism and destructive patterns, my own Jekyll and Hyde, the wasteland of my tattered soul, was the same timeframe I started writing again. Among other things, writing saved my life and resurrected my sanity. The true transformation took root; my pen and ink were soil and water. With guidance, I began to look with clear eyes at myself and question who and what I was and what the hell was I doing in my life, not to mention asking and answering the questions starting with why. I dismantled secrets, washed clean the lies (including those I told myself of what was and wasn’t ok), and turned the clean laundry back right-side-out. I had lived in an inverted reality and didn’t even know it. The shame rode so deep in me. I couldn’t look you in the eye. I most certainly couldn’t even hold my own gaze in the mirror. I was dead inside. Too many secrets. Too many lies. For far too long.

***

“I had to walk back through my most mystifying choices and excavate events for which I had been numb on the first go-round.” – Melissa Febos

***

As I laid myself bare on the table, ink drained from me like blood. I felt like I was in a detective movie, making one of those link charts of stories and suspects, causes and conditions, trying to unravel an unruly ball of tangled yarn. I spoke of all my personal unspeakables, first on paper, then out loud to another. I told the stories and mistakes. I told how I hid and lied and cheated. I told things I could barely understand the meaning or implication of at the time. I recounted what I experienced, what had been done to me, and how each unhealed trauma had deepened my predisposition for the next, how I had become so broken and bent that I didn’t and couldn’t attract anything else. I had come this far and understood at a deep and visceral level that if nothing changed, nothing would change – that if I didn’t bring absolutely everything into the sunlight, then the simple truth was that I may not be able to move forward. And I already knew what backward looked like. No longer acceptable. Hope only lay ahead, in the unknown, in the light of day.

What happened next appeared gradually, like an acorn transmuting into a sapling, eventually growing into a mighty oak. Or maybe the better analogy is the beautiful lotus flower rising up out of the muck and mud at the bottom of the pond. I no longer have secrets. I may choose to keep something private, but the chains of silence no longer bind me. There is nothing that I have experienced, thought, said, or done that at least one other human being knows about. And there is sheer freedom and joy in this. I no longer feel the need to hide. I meet my own gaze in the mirror, and I know that someday, my stories of transforming my lived experience will help others transform theirs as well. No mud, no lotus.

***

“I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.”  — Melissa Febos

***

I began to feel grateful for pieces of my story. My escape into alcohol and, later, drugs may have been killing me, but it also medicated me and kept me alive in some ways. The pain that I endured both at the hands of others as well as at my own is a touchstone to growth. I don’t necessarily want to purge my past. Purify, transform, transmute, yes, but my battle scars are well-earned and, at times, even treasured. This is the rich and fertile soil that can help others transform their own.

. ***

“Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you. For many years, I kept a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet tacked over my desk: ‘The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.’ ”  — Melissa Febos

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Adina Lynn LeCompte

Adina Lynn LeCompte is a sixth-generation Californian. After having lived in varying parts of the US and abroad in Florence, Italy, she has come home to roost, splitting her time between the Central Coast and the Foothills of Yosemite. She holds her Bachelors of Arts from UCLA (Language & Linguistics), her Master of Arts from Middlebury College School Abroad / Universita’ di Firenze (Language & Literature), and studied 4 years in the MDiv program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Over the years, she founded several successful local businesses and worked as an interfaith hospital and hospice chaplain.

Adina is a working writer, an award-winning poet, and is working on her upcoming book “Spilling Ink: Write Your Way Into Healing”. Additionally, she has designed an interactive transformative workshop by the same name that uses writing as a tool for healing from trauma, especially abuse and grief. She is also co-author of several compilations of poetry with her husband, John LeCompte, who is also a writer. (“With These Words, I Thee Wed: Love Poetry” was published in 2023.)

Her most recent exciting endeavor is being a part of the Bay Path Univeristy’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction, with an emphasis in Narrative Medicine.

writeyourwayintohealing.com

I had a weird tension in me about it

Like other techniques, we also employ the idea of a “safe place,” where he helps me anchor into safety before we do any deep work or regressions. I have always used the same safe place since I have been seeing Dr. Gabe: the beach in front of my grandma’s house, now our second home. As we began chatting at the beginning of the last session, I realized I was feeling a little hesitant about “going to my safe place” because, in reality, this was where I had broken my wrist a few weeks prior, and I had a weird tension in me about it.

So, all the things we normally do and go through to work through deep-seated trauma from the past, we went through the same process on the trauma of breaking my wrist. That was our starting point. First, I re-experienced the crack of my bone that I heard and the onset of the fear I experienced. I was scared and alone and had no way back up the small cliff I had descended to the rocky shore. (I am quite good in emergencies, and this was no exception. I simply trespassed onto a neighbor’s property, used their private staircase, and thanked them later for using it.  They have offered for me to use their stairs down any time I need to since I won’t be going down or up on the climbing rope for a while at least. It’s when the emergency subsides, and the adrenaline rush crashes that emotion tends to overwhelm me, and I cry and shake and get embarrassed at my reactions.)

As we followed my subconscious, it led me to the scene in my home when the ambulance arrived.  Fire truck, too. There must have been 15 people all congregating around me. People were sticking my veins for an IV and missing. Pandemonium. My parents happened to have just arrived at our home because we were all going out to dinner. When I called my husband, John, and told him I had broken my wrist and was coming up the neighbor’s stairs, my parents were already there. I was still somewhat in shock, and the pain was amplifying exponentially from moment to moment. I just needed a minute to process everything. I wanted to see my husband, hug him, and figure out the best thing to do. I was still evaluating how badly I had been hurt. My dad took over and called the ambulance without my knowledge or approval; he just did it. Ultimately, I am glad I went to the ER that night and that I did so in an ambulance, where they were able to administer pain medication during the hour-long drive to the hospital. But all of a sudden, I saw the pattern clearly of how my father always made “executive decisions,” as he sometimes called them, and put situations in front of me where he had already made a decision and effectively removed the element of my own choice from me. Over and over from a young age until it seemed normal.

But I have a voice today. Sometimes, I still have to speak up forcefully to get my dad back in check, and I do know he means well and cares – and I am truly grateful for that. But it was ultimately nice to recognize how pervasive that pattern had been in my life and how and why it has taken me a lifetime to speak up for myself and make my own best decisions. It still amazes me how we think that trauma is about one particular thing, and then we do the work and find all these other things mixed in and attached in ways we hadn’t ever even realized before.

And my safe place is safe again.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Adina Lynn LeCompte

Adina Lynn LeCompte is a sixth-generation Californian. After having lived in varying parts of the US and abroad in Florence, Italy, she has come home to roost, splitting her time between the Central Coast and the Foothills of Yosemite. She holds her Bachelors of Arts from UCLA (Language & Linguistics), her Master of Arts from Middlebury College School Abroad / Universita’ di Firenze (Language & Literature), and studied 4 years in the MDiv program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Over the years, she founded several successful local businesses and worked as an interfaith hospital and hospice chaplain.

Adina is a working writer, an award-winning poet, and is working on her upcoming book “Spilling Ink: Write Your Way Into Healing”. Additionally, she has designed an interactive transformative workshop by the same name that uses writing as a tool for healing from trauma, especially abuse and grief. She is also co-author of several compilations of poetry with her husband, John LeCompte, who is also a writer. (“With These Words, I Thee Wed: Love Poetry” was published in 2023.)

Her most recent exciting endeavor is being a part of the Bay Path Univeristy’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction, with an emphasis in Narrative Medicine.

writeyourwayintohealing.com