The Purpose of this Book:

This is not a book about trauma as much as it is a story about hope and resilience in the face of trauma. I’m ok, and you can be too. I’m not “cured”, because I don’t know what that would even mean. The real purpose of this book is to start a conversation around abuse, and to normalize talking and understanding the legacy and impact it has on those you know and love — including yourself.

I spend my work life now working with people. The issues I encounter are often various permutations of the same themes — lack of safety, trust, and belonging, and the all too human knack for making up stories about everyone else around us. Fundamentally, these issues boil down to a lack of understanding, both of ourselves and others. We carry a lot of scars, we bring them everywhere, and they spill out into all of our encounters. We need to start acknowledging those scars, talking about them, and most importantly, healing them. I would obviously be overjoyed if we could all collectively heal enough to eradicate abuse in its entirety. I believe in order to get there, we first need to be able to normalize talking about abuse. They say hypertension is the silent killer — I believe instead it is the trauma that we all carry around as a result of the tangled, intertwined web of abuse. We need to speak it aloud in order to unravel it.
The stories in this book are real, so I guess in one sense this is a bit of a memoir. But not quite, because the purpose of the book is not to tell my story as much as it is to help you live yours.

I wish I had a resource like this when I was a kid. Something to let me know that I wasn’t alone and that I wasn’t the crazy one. To borrow a line from Elsa in Frozen, there’s a “kingdom of isolation” that envelopes an abusive environment. Part of that is the inherent secrecy of any cult of abuse — don’t speak of what goes on behind closed doors, because what happens in the family stays in the family. Part of it is the omnipresent fear and anxiety that comes with abuse, and the corresponding inability to think beyond anything more than immediate survival. The remaining piece is just plain ignorance. We only know what we know, and especially within the limited life experience of a child, there is no real sense of a different world beyond our own walls.

I wish I had this book when I was a young adult. When I went out into the world on shaky legs and began flailing about wildly. It would have been useful to have a calming voice whispering in my ear, alternating between telling me to “calm the heck down” and to “get the hell out there and quit being so damn afraid all the time”. Perhaps even a bit of pseudo-parental guidance to save me from some of the more egregious and life altering mistakes I would make. A voice of reason rising above the constant din of my addled brain.

It would be helpful to have a book such as this even now as a much older adult. Tales from a grizzled veteran of this war called life, reminding me that I’m doing ok. That I’m worthy just because I am. Pointing out that the good really does outweigh the bad, that love is real and hides in plain sight. A voice that reminds me that wisdom really does come with age, but fortunately I don’t have to wait for my own advanced years; I am quite free to learn from other’s wisdom.

This is my hope for you. That wherever you are on your journey, within these pages you might find nuggets of truth and pearls of wisdom. I hope you realize you are not alone. Most importantly, I hope you find encouragement, peace, validation, comfort, inspiration, and freedom. I hope you find you, because you are amazing, and the world needs to know it.