Rewriting my Story

Why do we “trauma dump”?  

I’ve thought about why I do, and the conclusion I’ve come to is this.

The feeling I get that makes me desperate to word-vomit out everything bad that’s ever happened to me, is an indication that I’m desperate to process my trauma. I’m worried that my trauma is affecting who I am. I’m worried that my experiences have warped my view of things, changed the way I present myself and started taking control of my personality, making me show up to situations as a person I never intended to be.  

I desperately want to connect with people, but I can’t, and I want everyone to understand why. I want to shout at all my new acquaintances, “Hey! Just so you know, I say weird stuff because my mum abandoned me!” “Hey! FYI, I can’t stop talking about this thing someone said to me on the bus because my childhood made me feel inadequate!”

You can’t really do that. I wish you could, but realistically, you probably shouldn’t when you’re sat in a lecture or talking to a customer.  

If you feel that urge to “trauma dump”, just know, it’s not attention seeking. It’s not playing the victim, or a sign that you will be afflicted with this pain your whole life and you’re broken now. It’s a message your soul is giving to you that it’s unhappy and it needs your help. So think about why you feel it.  

Are you feeling shame for mistakes you made in your past that you never put right, or feeling abandoned by people who betrayed you and never explained why? Are you avoiding living your truth, or wearing a mask? Do you have questions about your childhood that are unanswered? My answer to all of those questions was yes – so I decided to write my entire life story. Not for anyone to read, just to understand myself.  

This action set off a huge cascade of unintended new paths. There were so many gaps in my memory – so many things that I’d just accepted as having happened, but once I wrote them down, they started to not make sense.  

For example, a huge chunk of my trauma comes from being left by my mother. I started to write about how my Dad told me when I was four that he and Mum were splitting up. I made the decision to go and live with him, and my mum took my 3 brothers with her to Luton.

Naturally I’d wondered why I was given the choice, and assumed that it probably was actually my parents that had decided that and not me- but that’s as much as I’d ever thought about that.  

As I wrote, I realised, that’s not what happened. That’s just a story my Dad has been telling me for the past 26 years. And I have played Chinese whispers before, so I know there’s almost no chance that’s how it went down. So how did it go down? 

I would be writing down something my mum had done that had upset me, some story I tell myself all the time on auto-pilot as a reason for me being the way I am now – when it would suddenly occur to me… why did she do that?  

Not, the usual, “Why did she do that to me?” 

But – “Why did she do that?” 

How did she feel when she made the decision to do that? Why did she drink so much? How did she feel, or what happened to her that caused her to neglect me physically and emotionally? Why did she struggle to bond with her children? What experiences did she have with her parents, or with men, that affected the way she processed her emotions? 

How did she feel living the other side of the country all those years? Did she feel guilty for leaving me, and did that put her in a shame spiral that lead her to put in even less effort? What was going on in her life that made her act as though our relationship wasn’t important? What was going on in her head that made her act like she didn’t care about my mental health problems and suicide attempts? How was she feeling while all that was happening? Does she have mental health problems too? Has she even considered that? 

What if all this was nothing to do with me, and I was simply an extra in her life, the same way everyone else is an extra in mine?  

What if the things that are happening to me, are actually just… happening? 

Telling stories

All my life I have been telling myself these stories, thinking that they were somehow the building blocks that made me the person I am. But what if they’re not? What if they’re just stories? What if they’re nothing to do with me? 

Stories are written by the person who has decided to write them, they’re not scientific facts. They’re not quantitative data. They’re not points on a graph, they’re subjective. The entire substance and feel of a story can be changed by a small handful of words, or deciding to use one punctuation mark over another. How can I base my entire life story, personality, and my hopes and dreams, on something so fickle? 

I realised that in my story I had been focussing on one thing: me. How what this person did affected me. How this person betrayed me. How this awful thing happened to me, and then this thing, and then this thing, and how it ruined my life and made me mentally ill and unable to function normally.  

But.. what about everyone and everything else? Why were people acting in this way? What if they weren’t trying to hurt me, they were just trying to get to something for themselves, and I was accidentally in the way – in the wrong place at the wrong time? 

Why have I spent my life throwing away any hope I ever had of repairing my relationship with my family members, because of stories I’ve been telling myself?  

That’s when I decided to rewrite my story – before I’d even written it.

I’m going to write it once in the way I have been telling it to myself my whole life.

Then, conduct a series of interviews with my family, brainstorms and meditations by myself, and rewrite it, the way I choose to write it.  

My first port of call is to talk to my mum, ask her why she abandoned me, and find out who the fuck she is. Wish me luck.