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Trauma

Finding the Courage to Heal My Complex Childhood Trauma

I found emotional freedom by thoroughly revisiting my painful memories.

My parents’ psychiatric struggles, hospitalizations, and incarcerations filled my childhood with loss, poverty, and other hardships. Although I became a high-functioning adult, I easily cried during movies and songs about loss, felt homesick whenever I traveled, and often felt lonely despite being happily married. I was easily startled. I cried when thinking about death eventually separating me from my wife and daughter. I often had dreams of being alone, lost, and unable to find my way home. My last post describes how I recently uncovered my buried PTSD memories.

A year of self-reflection and thoroughly facing my trauma memories led to an amazing personal transformation, marked by profound joy and vibrant energy. Using a scientifically supported approach called prolonged exposure, I stepped into my fear and grief and allowed them to flow through me.

I wrote highly detailed stories of my trauma events, repeatedly listened to recordings of them, and reenacted them at the actual places where they occurred. I also repeatedly watched many videos of orphans, children dying, and parent-child separations until they no longer made me cry. As expected, I felt much worse before I felt better. For the first two months, I felt much more sad, heavy, and fatigued most of the time, my sleep was worse, and I felt depressed.

My worst trauma was at age 7 when my father drove me to Mexico during his psychotic manic episode. On Google Maps, I found the exact locations by scanning the close-up images of the entire main highway between Mexicali and the Sea of Cortez. I found the large salty lake where we were stranded overnight (marked with a red dot on the map), the small store where I was separated from my father (marked with double arrows), and the farm where I was rescued (yellow circle).

 Google Maps
Map showing where my trauma occurred.
Source: Google Maps

To recreate this trauma, my wife and I went to an authentic Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood that resembled where my father and I had spicy tacos and tequila, and we prepared the Mexican cashier to help. I gave her every dollar in my wallet, and she gave me change in pesos. To access my key fear thoughts, we had her say to me, “You don’t have much money left. You’ll be hungry soon. How will you survive?” While waiting for my food, I thought about running out of money and possibly starving. After finishing the tacos and tequila, my wife said “Stay here and I’ll be back in a bit” and then walked away and did not come back. After a few minutes, I walked home pretending that I was lost and on my way to the Mexican farm, as I listened to my full Mexico story and my loss songs. These reenactments made me vividly remember running out of money and worrying we would starve and possibly never see each other again. My tears flowed but less each time we went back to the restaurant.

 Google Maps
Where I was lost and rescued in Mexico at age 7.
Source: Google Maps

We repeated this exposure at the actual locations in Mexico. After eating tacos, my wife walked away, and I walked alone two miles to the farm as I listened to my full Mexico story. The farm gate was locked and nobody ever appeared, and we eventually gave up. A month later, I returned to Mexico by myself. I drove the same route as in 1980 and spent the night at the salty lake just like when my father and I were temporarily stranded there. The sign at the entrance read “Caution. Danger of death.” Both then and now, I had no pillow, no blanket, and no food. Again, I went to bed hungry, not having eaten any food all day. Being there made me vividly remember sleeping in our car alone, our engine not starting, and feeling hopeless about finding our way out of the desert.

Soon after sunrise, I drove to the farm, but again, nobody was there. The neighbors tried to call the family for me, but there was no answer. I mailed a letter thanking the family for feeding me and taking me to the police station. Their reply was short and sweet, “You have nothing to thank us for. It is more than enough that you keep those beautiful memories in your mind and remember that a family from the country helped you when you needed it the most.”

I also did prolonged exposure for my memories of going into foster care at age 9. To access my abandonment feelings, I recorded my mother reading these lines that I wrote: “In your childhood, nobody made you a priority. You were invisible and you didn't matter to anyone. So many times you were passed around from house to house... and when you were in the foster home, nobody called or came to visit you. Nobody cared enough to put in more effort. You were an abandoned child.” I faced these abandonment memories by spending two hours at the foster care facility where I abruptly lost everything in 1982. I walked through the abandoned property, repeatedly listening to my story, my mother’s abandonment comments, and my loss songs. My wife and I re-enacted the conversations and events. I tried to cry as much as possible.

Soon after these exposures, I noticed that my head and body felt profoundly light, energized, and refreshed—the best sustained positive feeling I’ve ever felt in my entire adult life. This shift was so striking that it became clear that I have been carrying a heavy weight of fatigue on me for as long as I can remember, and this heavy weight was now lifted off of me. My thoughts about future loss and death became much lighter and were much less frequent, and I felt much less distressed when I saw child-parent separations in movies. My waves of grief and anxiety keep coming, but now they are much smaller and bother me much less. I am so grateful to have figured out the key to fully unlocking my well-being. It’s never too late to heal.

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