#9 - That Time I Found Faith as a Trauma Survivor

“Hi God. Can you hear me? I’m not entirely sure how this works, but I wanted to let you know that I’ve decided to kill myself. I can’t do this anymore. I have tried everything and I just can’t see the point in living anymore. Everyone else is so happy, but I feel dead inside.”

I was sitting on a beach in sunny Los Angeles, but my heart felt dark with hopelessness and despair. As the cold waves crashed on my bare feet, I found myself praying to a God that I didn’t believe in for a sign or really any reason to continue moving forward with my life.

Three years prior, a close friend of mine, Michael Dolan, died unexpectedly.  Michael’s death broke my heart and also shattered the false reality I had built up around myself. There was life before Michael’s death, and life after his death. The difference within me was stark.

After his death, I couldn’t function. I felt suffocated by my feelings and my old coping strategies, like drinking and drugs, no longer kept my inner demons at bay. Now they were screaming at me thoughts like, “I should have been the one to die.” I wasn’t there when my friend died, it was in no way my fault, yet I kept wishing and even praying to be the one who had died.  I felt so unsettled and I couldn’t escape the feeling of hopelessness and thoughts of death.

A few months after Michael’s death I took a trip with friends to New York City. This trip was supposed to distract me from my grief, but instead I continued to drown in it. I drank too much. I started fights with my friends for no reason. I even debated jumping off the roof of a building. I was at rock bottom and finally realized I needed help.

Having no idea where to start, I decided to try therapy. I had tried therapy in my teen years and it had not worked, if anything it left me feeling abandoned, but I knew I needed to start speaking about the thoughts I was having rather than letting them drive me insane. This therapist was different from the last one. The one in my teen years tried to fix me through long lectures, and eventually left me when she realized I wasn’t “curable”. This new therapist said close to nothing in our sessions. She let me talk in circles until I reached my own conclusions. This was the first time in my life when someone listened to me without judgement. Through my sessions, I realized that my friend’s death had devastated me, but there was also something else, something hidden under the surface that was holding me back. It felt elusive. What was I not seeing? I began the process of going down the rabbit hole.

The first thing I had to see was that the childhood I labeled as “perfect” may not have been as perfect as I had led myself to believe.  At first I was defensive, no way was that part of my problems. But through months of sessions, I began to see things differently and was beginning to pick up breadcrumbs that led me deeper into my inner world.

This was also the first time I allowed myself to see that I wasn’t happy. I still had a hard time identifying exactly how I felt, but I knew it wasn’t happiness. Michael Dolan’s death had snapped me into the truth that life was short.  Tomorrow was never guaranteed. I didn’t want to be a passenger to life anymore. I wanted to feel alive, something I realized I didn’t feel at the time, but I felt like something was missing inside me. I felt frozen in place while everyone else seemed happy, what did they know that I didn’t?

After grappling with this for months, I decided to move across the country to Los Angeles to be an actress. I realized that every major decision in my life was what others wanted me to do and not what I had wanted for myself.  I believed Hollywood had the answer to my prayers. Who wasn’t happy in sunny LA?

When I moved to Los Angeles, my grief did not immediately disappear like I thought it would, but after one year in Los Angeles, I no longer spent all my time thinking about Michael Dolan…but I still wasn’t happy.

I was surprised. Shouldn’t I be happy? Hadn’t I done all the things? Hadn’t I healed? Hadn’t I chased my dreams across the country? Wasn’t I in the best shape of my life? Wasn’t this where happiness lived? I kept asking these questions for months until I finally received my answer to what was still keeping me frozen for so many years. An answer that I never expected.

It all began with a series of nightmares that led to a moment of me remembering being sexually assaulted in my childhood. On the day I remembered, I woke up from a very graphic nightmare and shot out of bed and sobbed hysterically while saying, “I was touched, I was touched, I was touched.” I fell out of bed and crawled to the bathroom where I threw up. My body accepted the truth long before my mind did.

For the next six months, I could not shut it off. Images, sensations, and feelings returned and it was all I could think about. I felt like a ghost among the living. I waded through life and watched everyone smiling and laughing, and I felt dead inside. Something horrible had happened to me and now that it was out of the box, I could not shove it back down. For six months I did not get better, I got worse. I felt hopeless.

This is when I found myself on the beach in the middle of the day. Praying to God was my last-ditch effort.

Three nights later, I received my sign. It’s hard to explain, but I awoke in the middle of the night and began laughing hysterically. I felt pure bliss. I felt a divine love for myself and a sense of liberation that had been missing for so many years. I even thought about my friends death and being raped and I just kept laughing. At that moment, my traumas felt so insignificant compared to the truth of who I am. I stared out my window and felt hope for the first time in a long long time. It was a miracle. At that moment I knew that healing from trauma was possible. I felt it in my bones.

I fell back to sleep.

I woke up in the morning with a smile on my face, but then the trauma came back. I was bombarded with thoughts of being touched inappropriately when I was a child. I felt the depression settle into my body.

But also, there had been a shift in me. That hope that healing was possible still lived in my bones. I now had a new found faith in the future. These were things I had not had before. My prayer had been answered.

With my new found hope, I decided to try again. I looked for professionals who specialized in child sexual assault. I found a support group for survivors. I leaned into my faith. Faith that it would get better. Faith that healing was possible. Faith that my heart truly did hold the roadmap for my personal happiness. Faith in a Higher Power.  I felt like I was on the right path for the first time in a long time.

I wish I could say life got easier from here. It didn’t. It actually got darker and harder. I had so much more to grapple with, accept, and process than I ever could have imagined. But, from this point forward I always returned to the hope that healing was possible and faith that things would continue to get better. 

If I had known at the beginning all the trauma that I would spend the next five years grappling with, feeling, and processing, I don’t think I would have done it, but I now know that’s why I repressed the horrors I survived. I didn’t repress them consciously. I repressed them because they were horrific and overwhelming experiences that I did not have the tools to process when I was a child and teenager. 

I feel as though the years prior to my repressed memories returning were like I was walking around the rabbit hole and glancing in and wondering if I was really willing to go all the way down to the bottom. I feel as though that day at the beach I gave a part of me permission to dive in head first. If the other option was death, a part of me decided, what the hell let’s see how far down the rabbit hole really goes.

One of the most common questions people ask me is – after everything you’ve been through, how do you still have faith? My answer is that I don’t know how to heal without faith. For a long time I believed my midnight miracle led me to faith, but as I have reflected I realize I had faith before that moment. That day at the beach when I prayed, I opened a door to faith. I made a choice to ask for help. I knew I didn’t have all the answers, and even in my skepticism, I opened myself up to the idea that there was a power greater than my human mind and that allowed a miracle to occur.

It hasn’t always been easy. As the memories of what I survived became darker and the emotions more painful, I tried to throw away my faith. But time and time again, I would pause and listen to the small voice of my heart. This voice often encouraged me to lean into vulnerability and to face my terrifying past with compassion and love for myself. It assured me I didn’t need to have all the answers, and I was stronger than I realized. I just needed to continue one step at a time. And each and every time, as I listened to the small voice of my heart and looked at the things that I feared most, the pain eased and I began to feel better.

Throughout this journey I also finally learned the truth about happiness. Happiness is an emotion, it does not last forever, it comes and goes like all other emotions. I also learned that I spent so many years of my life in the freeze response, and being frozen from trauma kept out so much of the pain I experienced, but it also blocked the good emotions, like the happiness I was so desperate to feel. I couldn’t have one without the other, I finally realized I had to feel it all in order to truly feel alive.

I left sunny Los Angeles years ago and now live in the desert, but when I do get the chance to go to the beach, I take a moment to put my feet in the sand, listen to the ocean, take a deep breath, and thank God that I am alive.