Caterina’s Story, Part 4: Talking About Trauma

When we talk about our trauma we have the opportunity to examine the beliefs and behaviors that were born from it. Often these beliefs and behaviors, which may originally keep us safe, hurt us later in life.

Allowing our trauma to speak gives us the opportunity to heal it. My trauma speaks through my inner child. In the middle of May, I began to ‘hear’ my inner child. She spoke freely as I wrote and wrote, filling 100s of pages of journals. She told me many, many stories of the trauma she’s endured both as a child and as a previously unseen and unheard child trapped in my adult body.

Hearing my stories in her voice began to allow me to better understand my behavior and thoughts, in particular the protective patterns and toxic/limiting beliefs that I have, which, sure enough, hurt me now.

As a child, these behaviors and beliefs were crafted to protect me because I had no control over my environment. But now, as an adult, surrounded by people who love me, they keep me isolated and feeling powerless and afraid instead of safe. I call them my CAGES, a term coined (as best I can tell) by Glennon Doyle.

My belief that ‘HELP HAS A PRICE’ and my resulting behaviors, especially ‘NOT ASKING FOR HELP’, is a cage I created as a child to keep me safe, which I am now learning to BREAK FREE from. This is a story about why I built that cage. It was told to me by my inner child...

In Grade 3 I was transferred from a public school to a private one after my teacher threw a desk. I don’t remember being afraid. The new private school is called Montessori and it’s housed in a walk-up apartment building.

I don’t remember the first teacher there but I remember the second. He is a big man with a reddish mustache and my parents are friends with him and his wife, a small Asian woman. Sometimes we spend Saturday evenings at their home. They have one daughter. I don’t remember anything about her.

But I remember him.

Not at first. At first, I block him out. I block him out because when I walk to the front of the class to ask for help he touches me. I learn that when you want something from a man you have to let them touch you. Help has a price.

Later he takes many of the kids at the school out for a walk at the beginning of spring to play on a snow pile in a parking lot. I remember seeing him with an older blonde girl. She is not pretty. It doesn’t matter though because he has his arm around her shoulders and his hand down her shirt. I know instinctively that I cannot tell. So I forget.

But then in Grade 4, a new girl joins my class and everything changes. One day behind the school in the alley she tells me that she has told her Mom about what he does and her Mom is very angry.

I feel sick.

She tells me her Mom is calling the school and amidst my sickness I am confused.

Later that day, or maybe that week, I am called to the office. They are interviewing all the girls I am told and it is my turn.

I am terrified and I don’t want to go.

I am crying before I even reach the office.

He is there with the office woman, and we are in a dark room, like a large supply closet with a desk and a printer. He is standing and leaning against the desk with his arms across his chest.

He says he doesn’t understand why these things are being said and I know that she believes him and not us. He wants to know what I will say. I do not know what I tell him through my tears.

I don’t remember anything after that, there are no more pictures in my head.

Allowing our trauma to speak gives us the opportunity to heal it. I can heal now.