Written in a workshop with Beth Dunnington, August 2020
I started doing this thing, this imagery thing, when my PTSD got triggered….maybe fifteen years ago. Maybe more. I don\’t recall exactly when, but the images are in my mind forever.
My four-year-old–the age I was when the traumas happened–needs me.
She is in the bedroom of my toddlerhood, of which I h ave a crystal-clear and photographic picture in my mind. She is under the bed. I picture myself, me, the adult, getting into my car and driving the six or so hours to my hometown. I picture it like a cartoon–an out-of-proportion-sized cartoon car on a cartoon map-zipping up the line that is a highway in real life.
There are only 5 or 6 roads between where I live now and my childhood home. A little over three-hundred fifty miles. But it may as well be another galaxy.
I arrive at the house in my mind….go in, and into the front door of the first-floor apartment. Through the living room, the dining room, past the kitchen and bathroom into my room. I encounter four-year-old me under the bed. Traumatized, yet no one sees it. Because we didn\’t know back then. Because no one knew she was Highly Sensitive, an empath, an Indigo child. Holding not only her own trauma, which was too much already, but the energy and feelings of all those around her.
So, so much for a four-year-old.
Sometimes, I join her under the bed. Sometimes, I rock her in a rocking chair (that must have been specially created for this practice, because there was not a rocking chair in my room). Sometimes, I scoop her up and put her in my car, which does the cartoon-map-trip in reverse, and bring her back home with me.
Knowing full well that the next time the trauma button gets pushed, she will be back there.
Here is what trauma recovery has taught me: the healing, the liberation, the FREEDOM does not come from her never being in that room again.
It comes from staying connected to her–to that deeply frightened, frozen four-year-old in me–and knowing when she needs me. And going to her.
Relcaiming her is not a one-time event.
Reclaiming her happens over and over.
Something was stolen from me, at that tender young age. Many somethings. Each time I go back to that first floor apartment in that two-family house, I reclaim bits and pieces. It\’s not always apparent or clear what they are. I mean, I am on a rescue mission when I go get her. Just grabbing what I think I need to help her flee that very real sense of danger.
And yet, after we get back here, sometimes soon after, sometimes a long time after….I find the pieces that I brought back. Over the years, I\’ve started to keep the pieces together. More recently, I\’ve started to stick them up on the wall. You know what? Some of them fit together, like puzzle pieces. I love when the shape of the edge, or the color, matches up and one piece makes that satisfying *click* into another, like a jigsaw puzzle.
And slowly, I feel certain it will be for the rest of my life, I reconnect the pieces that broke apart all those years ago. Broke apart to save me. For a long time, I hated being in pieces. I felt ashamed, broken.
But now I get to reclaim the pieces. And put them back together how I want them to be. Especially after a lifetime of feeling doomed to stay broken and ashamed, it is a beautiful, human, imperfect gift.
[image: puzzle pieces of various colors, overlapping, not fit together]