My Healing Journey

I didn't know I had experienced trauma.

I got sober when I was 27 years old. After I'd been sober for 7 months, I had an emotional collapse at the grocery store where I was working. I didn't know what was happening and neither did anyone else. A sober friend rushed me off to a chemical dependency treatment center where I spent the next 28 days.

During my time there, I had my first experience with a counselor who asked me how I felt about being there. He finally gave up and stopped asking when I answered by telling him what I thought repeatedly. In other words, I didn't realize there was a difference between thinking and feeling so his question didn't make sense to me. I never did find out what happened to me in the grocery store but I never experienced anything like that again and I stayed sober.

Now, all these years later, I suspect that the emotional pain I had been numbing surfaced and bubbled over with such intensity I couldn’t stop it. It seemed to come on out of the blue with no obvious provocation. I hid under a desk in a backroom office for several hours, emotions running out of control until my friend took me to the treatment center.

After I'd been sober for a little over 2 years, I went to my first Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting. Other meeting participants told stories of dysfunction, violence, neglect, and abuse. Some (like me) told their stories with little or no emotion. Others wept and raged openly as they shared about their childhoods. I learned that what I experienced as a child wasn't normal or healthy. I just didn't consciously FEEL anything about it.

But inside was a ticking time bomb that manifested as impatience, anger, depression, fear, and anxiety. I was a mess inside. I hated myself. My marriage was in trouble - I had been insecure and controlling since our first date. I wanted to act and feel different but couldn’t figure out how to change. My wife and I had been together for about ten years at that point.

After reading The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov, I searched for a Primal Therapist but couldn't find one. I found a Bioenergetics Therapist instead and joined a group that met once a week in Vancouver, Washington. I stayed in the group for about 6 months. We twisted towels, beat pillows, and threw tantrums on mattresses while screaming and growling. It felt ridiculous. But I was desperate to change and believed that if I could release the energy trapped in me from early childhood trauma, I might heal.

And it worked!  After ten years of uncontrollable insecurity, something shifted. I was no longer suspicious and distrustful. I no longer tried to control my wife. IT JUST STOPPED without any effort on my part. I wasn’t managing myself. I simply noticed that something inside had shifted. My wife died of a brain tumor about three years later.

Now nine years sober, despite the profound healing, I was still a mess. Within days of my wife’s funeral, I got involved in the first of several disastrous codependent relationships. This went with five women over a two year period of time before I married my second wife whose internal wounds matched my own.

After tolerating her verbal assaults for about nine years, I left, afraid if I stayed I would kill her. Now I sober seventeen years, I was more of a mess than ever. No real healing had occurred yet with the exception of my experience with bioenergetics. I felt desperate to fix whatever was broken in me.

After a couple of years I found the Work of Byron Katie and learned how to question my own thoughts. Finally, I had found a method for challenging my own thoughts. Using The Work (www.TheWork.com) over the next twelve years, attending therapy sessions, participating in Landmark Education weekend seminars, and reading countless books, I continued to attend 12-step meetings, and stayed sober, I began to heal.

I was committed to becoming someone capable of having a healthy relationship. Over twelve years, I dabbled with some dating but stayed out of committed relationships with the exception of a four month disaster that convinced me I had a mountain of work left to do.

When I met my current wife, I'd been doing The Work for about eight years and had, apparently healed enough to have the capacity for a healthy relationship. We've now been together for almost 13 years.

I began seeing a few clients as a life coach the same year I met my current wife.  At the time, I was working full time as a home loan officer. I didn’t really enjoy that work but it paid the bills. In 2015, I quit my loan officer job and devoted myself fully to life coaching. I used The Work with my coaching clients with great results. But after a one-year coach training program, I lost all my confidence and returned to therapy to try and get it back.

Fortunately, my therapist was trained in IFS which helped immediately. Over the next three years I became more and more Self-led. I entered Level 1 training in 2019, became a Certified IFS Practitioner in 2021 and continued to do my own IFS work privately, with a therapist, and with fellow practitioners.

Occasionally, when my hurt and vulnerable exiles are activated, my angry Firefighter emerges. When this happens, I do my work again. I was just activated again this week. I experienced a low-level activation all week but it came to a head yesterday in a team meeting, making it clear that I needed to do some more work. I reached out for help and was supported by coaches, an IFS practitioner, and an IFS therapist.

It makes sense to me that we all have different healing journeys. Each of us has had unique wounding experiences and have developed strategies to survive those wounds. Eventually, the strategies no longer serve us. Some of us are fortunate enough to find the help we need to heal and update the parts that helped us survive the past.

The pace of our healing and recovery reflects the degree of wounding and the extreme roles our parts have taken to help us survive. Our past stories are as diverse as our recovery journeys.

If you find yourself as discouraged and confused as I was, I encourage you to stay the course. Find a healing modality that works for you and continue to increase self-awareness.

Every step I took out of trauma was a step in the direction of healing and recovery and has resulted in an ever-increasing experience of my true Self.