The Weight of My Truth

My childhood was defined by extreme loneliness. I had siblings, but our household was one where suffering was solitary. Speaking up for someone else often meant becoming the target of abuse yourself. My father, who suffered tremendously from PTSD, ruled with an iron fist. His trauma, likely rooted in battles he couldn’t overcome, shaped our lives in devastating ways.

As Caroline Myss writes in The Language of Archetypes, “The generation of the 1960s was caught in a web of conformity, unable to process their pain because the collective energy was to survive, not to thrive.” My father embodied this struggle. Society didn’t provide tools for healing, only an unspoken rule to hide the pain and present a polished face to the world. Even when we tried to reach out for help, as when my siblings and I were placed in foster care, my father’s charisma and charm erased our truths. He convinced everyone we were just unruly teenagers making life difficult for him.

Loneliness hit hardest when I got into trouble. My father would send me to my room to “think about what I had done” for hours, sometimes entire days. Emerging from isolation, I felt awkward in my own home, as if everyone believed I truly was as bad as my father had declared. My father's punishments were unpredictable and cruel. On several occasions, he’d tell me to pack my entire room into boxes, hours later he'd laugh and say, “You’re not going anywhere—unpack your shit.”

I grew up in a world of chaos, where my brother and I were encouraged to fist fight at a very young age to handle our problems. These fights would often leave me cleaning my wounds alone.

Once, when my little brother and I were in trouble together, he tried to speak up for us. In doing so, he became the target. I watched in horror as my father lifted him off the ground and threw him across the living room. My brother’s small body slammed against the wall, sliding down in defeat and pain. It was one of many moments I’ll never forget—a chilling reminder that in our home, love and protection were warped, almost non-existent.

At a certain point I started to take pride in the fact that could endure so much physical pain. I started to hide away my pain. I fought to hide my reactions from my father, because I did not want him to view me as weak. Yet, I was trapped in a web of conflicting emotions—desperately craving his approval at times, and loathing him in others. I would scream and fight back with him, begging him to see the pain he was causing us, yet he never truly listened.

By the time I was 13, I found solace in the darkness of my closet, drinking from a gallon-sized whiskey bottle to numb the pain everyday after school. I was drunk and utterly alone, often consumed by thoughts of ending my suffering. Though I never acted on these thoughts, the idea of peace felt like a faraway dream. I started handling my eternal disfunctions in the same way my father had dealt with his all those years. I got suspended multiple times from school for fighting. I lived in defense mode, ready to attack anyone who hurt me.

My father’s abuse got worse as we got older. We were placed in foster care, after my father threatened our life. Consumed by his own pain, he sat in our front yard holding his shot gun, threatening to shoot us if we came home. My siblings and hid in the woods until he passed out in the early morning. The next day we ran away. Shortly after that we were briefly placed in foster care. Only to end up back in my father's care after he convince a judge we had made it all up, and we're rebellious teenagers.

When I finally left my father’s household, I truly believed I was free from the chains of my past. At first, it felt liberating, like stepping into a new world where I could finally breathe. I was still alone, but I was no longer suffering from someone else traumas. I even grew to have total forgiveness for the man who caused me so much pain. I love my father so much, and would never want him to feel any more shame or guilt than he already does about what happened to us as children. The shame and guilt still weighs him down to this day, and I'm afraid he'll never truly forgive himself.

As a young adult, I had a couple of serious relationships, but they weren’t what I’d call healthy ones. By the time I reached my twenties, I spent most of my time alone—and, surprisingly, I grew to love it. Solitude became my safe space. Whenever relationships started to get difficult, I’d disappear. It wasn’t a behavior I was proud of, but it was something I kept choosing. I had started to use dealing with things alone as a crutch. Sharing my pain felt like too much vulnerability, so I avoided it entirely. I rarely spoke about my past with anyone during this time. Another pattern of pretending things did not happen to me. If I didn’t let anyone in, I couldn’t be hurt again—or so I thought. Until I met my husband, running was always my default when life got hard.

As Lynn Andrews beautifully describes in Medicine Woman, “The marriage basket is a symbol of the sacred union, not just with another person but with yourself and your place in the universe.” When I met my husband, I realized how far I had come in finding that sacred union within myself, but also how much farther I had to go. Marriage, for me, became not just a partnership but a mirror for the parts of myself I still needed to heal—the parts that hid behind a shield of independence and fear of vulnerability.

My husband has been a different chapter in my story—a steadfast presence even in the face of unimaginable difficulty. Together, we’ve endured a terrible trauma from my past relationship, one that brought him discomfort in his friendships and life’s passion. Yet, he has remained unwavering to us and made tremendous sacrifices to be with me.

In therapy this past year, I worked on something I’d avoided for so long: relearning how to lean on someone I trusted during difficult times. As Brené Brown reminds us in Daring Greatly, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” I had spent so long trying to avoid vulnerability, convinced it was a weakness, but the past 4 years taught me that leaning into it was the only way to truly heal.

For years, I had avoided going to any check-ups related to my sex trauma. The thought of facing my doctor felt overwhelming. I carried a deep sense of judgment—not from the doctor, but from within myself—and I coped by trying to pretend it had never happened. Yet, I still regularly felt physical pain from the trauma during intimate moments. Even sharing that with my husband stirred embarrassment and shame.

During a session with my therapist, she suggested something that felt both terrifying and necessary: that my husband accompany me to my next gyno appointment. Despite the potential emotional toll, my husband agreed. He sat beside me as my doctor recounted, in painful and elaborate detail, what had happened to my body. Until that moment, my husband hadn’t known the full extent of what I’d endured; I had been too afraid to ask the hard questions during my initial check-up four years ago. The truth coming from a doctors view, instead of a " crazy woman" hit like a ton of bricks. It wasn't just my truth any more, it was ours.

It felt nice for someone else to hear the truth about what happened to me. For so long, the people involved with this trauma had rejected my truth, constantly speaking to me as if I had exaggerated what had occurred. Having my husband witness the unfiltered reality was validating in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I wasn’t alone in carrying the weight of my experience anymore.

Penny Pierce, in Frequency, writes, “Your personal frequency—the rate at which you vibrate—determines everything about your life. It creates your experiences and your emotions.” Sitting there with my husband, I realized how much my energy had shifted. The fear and shame that had once paralyzed me were giving way to trust and connection. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t without pain or confrontation, but it was healing in the truest sense.

Having him there—his hands holding mine—was one of the scariest but most healing experiences of my life. The vulnerability of that moment felt overwhelming, but it also reminded me that I didn’t have to face every shadow alone anymore.

I'm still learning to share my pain in a healing way. Not staying stuck in the past, but learning from every choice that cocreated it. I'm still learning a lot of things. Nothing about me is perfect. That's not what I aiming for either. Just because I speak to you about these insights doesn't mean I'm claiming to have mastered any of them. Like physical fitness, new patterns of thoughts and reactions take a tremendous amount of time to develop and change. In some moments you'll be triggered so badly that your most default behaviors will rise, and you lose sight of all that you have learned along the way. The question is how long will you let those set backs weigh you down?