I am a therapist, wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, and woman. And within all of these, I feel the echoes of trauma.

I grew up within a family marked by incredible dysfunction. To list them doesn’t do it justice. And even as I write this I feel the tension of how we all see it so differently, and in the lack of sameness lies even more pain. I want to honor all the stories that come from my family, even if they disagree with mine- they, collectively, are the truths of who we are. This is just a sliver of the truth of mine. I hope this small opening into my heart, my body’s memory, and into my story may help you know that your story can find solace here.

I have been on my own healing journey for almost 12 years now. This journey did not begin with a gentle siren calling into my consciousness, a pull from the Divine, or a single moment of awakening. It began with a shove.

I always knew that we weren’t normal, we definitely weren’t healthy, and we absolutely were not fully thriving. But I did believe that we managed to survive by becoming a band of women. My father struggled with addictions, empathy, shame, and on it goes. My mother, my sisters and I managed by going through it together. My healing journey began with me viscerally being kicked out of that band.

I was told I was pathological. This did not match my experience of myself. But it was said in unison, as if it was the golden truth, as if there was no room for anything else to be true. This was the starting line of my healing journey.

In this place of isolation, I began the journey of learning my story and finding my way into wholeness.

If you know me, I greatly desire to be known. So, when someone shares their experience of me with me, I take it as feedback, I sit with it, never just discard it.

I sat with my family’s description—pathological—and I tried to learn and see what they saw.

I learned that my pathology was anger and my anger was just trying to be a good parent when I didn’t have one to protect me. As you might have read already, I don’t know how to do fake, so when other’s in my family might have learned to be a peacekeeper and cause no hiccups or to be the life of the party and to always be fine, I was real with my anger. You can imagine the contrast that was.

I learned to embrace realness and honesty as my modes of operating, and the outcome was that I needed anger less. But in this realness came the flood of emotion that had been numbed by my anger. This flood caused anxiety attack upon anxiety attack because I was doing it alone and I was out of practice of actually feeling. I would find myself in the fetal position, weeping on pee-stained public restroom floors, with a different band of women witnessing me.