Member-only story
The Art of Healing Childhood Trauma: It’s a Cosmic Joke
This title can be read two ways — with the obvious bitter cynicism, or with a sense of absurdity and joy, even gratitude. I’ll take the latter.
Heal or die. That’s the hand I was dealt. As a child and adolescent, I survived and managed to grow up by a classic means: total memory suppression of my pre-age-six sexual trauma. My pre-age-six monster trauma, I will add, and leave it at that.
I created an internal vacuum, a black hole into the abyss of which I cast all the bad stuff, which, in the screaming universe of my insignificant but insistent little being, allowed me to remain planted on this earth, which I found to be so lush with green beauty and bunny rabbits and playmates that memory suppression wasn’t even a choice. It just happened. Was there volition involved? I really don’t know.
Like countless other abused children in every time and culture from prehistory onward, I chose to live. Of course, I was alive, ergo… I would stay that way. With no resources available for me to heal at that young age, simply to forget was a magical solution.
In a case of cosmic reverse-engineering, moving forward into adult life seduced me into looking backward into the face of trauma. It…
