As a child I remember living in a fog for several years. I was there, but nothing really made sense, drifting from place to place, mostly feeling untethered, lost, in a haze.

I was an uncoordinated child too.

I broke both my arms when I fell off the monkey bars doing a death drop.

The death drop: Hang upside down in a knee bent over bar position, swinging to gain momentum so that if executed correctly you release your knees and land on your feet. I did not execute this death drop correctly and landed in the dry, red desert dirt on my wrists, breaking them.

Around the same time, I had persistent plantar warts on my feet. No treatments worked. I had to go under anaesthesia to have them surgically removed -all 31 of them. I had constant unexplained blood noses. Multiple times my nostrils were cauterised to stop the bleeding. Imagine burning your nostrils to stop bleeding! I remember seeing a Chiropractor, a Naturopath, and always going to the GP with one thing or another. I broke my ankle next. Away on a school camp, I fell awkwardly and snapped my ankle while ice skating, and ended up in emergency with my teachers singing, “I feel better now, so much better now”.

The stories we find to mask the pain.

I always thought these were a series of unfortunate childhood accidents and illnesses. Now, I understand it was my little body screaming because I had no words to describe what happened to me, or how I felt.

I lived in a small desert town called Woomera, in South Australia. In the school holidays we would go and stay with my auntie and uncle in Port Augusta so my parents could work. My aunt ran a family day care centre from their home. Her daughter, my cousin, was 6 years older than me and not only was she the sole source of my entire wardrobe of hand-me-down clothes, she was the only older girl I had to look up to.

I was 7 years old.

I was walking home with my cousin through the streets of Port Augusta. I remember being stopped by a group of teenage boys. I remember my cousin being there, but I don’t know if she was actively participating, or if she was being held down against her will too. I remember silhouettes of boys standing over me watching, while another would be on top of me, thrusting. Rhythmic pounding. My ankles held down. I look away and I see red dirt and a straggly tree nearby. I was 7 years old and could not make sense of what was happening to me.

Now, when I think about it, I see a crack in the fabric of reality and through it, the infinite cosmos, and I imagine that’s where I went. I want to believe that’s a kind of Grace that is given to humans experiencing the unbearable, but I don’t know for sure.

A more practical explanation: When we are in danger, the stress response gets activated. If we can’t run, or if we get exhausted, or overpowered in our fight, then the freeze response kicks in. Our body’s last attempt to survive. It worked. It kept me alive.

I’m not sure when my psyche decided to block this memory. I don’t know how I got back to my aunt’s house. Why did my mum not know about this? I remember that my aunt took me to get my ears pierced, maybe it was on that trip. My cousin had her ears pierced so it was something I desperately wanted. My mum, however, did not want that for me. This created drama; and perhaps a helpful distraction or cover for whatever had happened.

**See, I still don’t have the full, cognitive memory of what happened after blacking out, but my body remembers.**

As an 11 year old and through my teens, I sometimes wished I had been raped. I would judge myself for that thought - how weird it is to wish for something so horrible. I guess I wanted something to match the feelings, to explain why I felt the way I did. Overpowered. Unsafe. Trapped.

I hit puberty early and was hypersexual from a young age, which is not unusual for sexual abuse victims. I used to put it down to more hormones in the chickens and such. At 12, I found erotic novels and would read them. I was obsessed with talking about sex. I remember my first boyfriend was convinced I was ‘experienced’ because sexual energy must’ve been oozing out of me. Isn’t that every teenage girl though?

When I had sex for the first time (with my first real boyfriend) I remember preparing for pain and expecting something called the ‘hymen’ to break. I thought it was weird that it never happened to me. There was no pain, no break, and pregnancy was more of a concern so I didn’t give it much more thought...

Hyper-sexualism is a desirable trait in our society in many ways. A raging libido, desiring sex as much as or more than your male partner, being able to orgasm; these are far more desirable trauma responses than alcoholism, drug addiction and violence. I put this abundance of sexual energy down to being a Scorpio and while I attracted a few less-than-ideal scenarios, my good girl Christian values and shame meant I had to get my fix in several long-term relationships. I believed I was just one of the lucky women who genuinely enjoys having a lot of sex, and was grateful I didn’t have any abuse or hang ups that got in the way of that...

Fast forward 30 years.

It was after leaving my partner of 14 years - that’s another story - that I began dating, and I met Eddie. That was 3 years ago. We dated on and off for a few months while I wrestled with the confusion of unfamiliar dynamics. I didn’t recognise these healthy, conscious ways of relating. Why doesn’t this man just want to get in my pants right away? Is he even interested? There’s so much connection but where is that chemistry that sends a chill up my spine?

One weekend, when I had decided we would just be friends because I couldn’t continue this yoyo with his heart, I visited Eddie with a friend of mine. We went for a walk in the bush, had lunch and relaxed in front of the fire, flopping into bean bags. For the first time in my living memory, I felt safe enough to completely relax. I can’t even describe how unfamiliar it felt to relax like that. To melt into a bean bag, in front of the fire, and feel every muscle soften. For the first time, there was no need to be vigilant, scanning the room, attending to the needs of others. Habits I’d adopted to guarantee my own safety, habits that had become so ingrained, they felt normal, just who I am.

That weekend I surrendered to the love and went all in and over the coming months, while I whole-heartedly embraced this new relationship, I was not only learning new ways of relating, but expanding the capacity of my nervous system as I pushed myself out of my comfort zone with breath work, wintery ocean dips, ice baths. Exposure to new people, new places and plants grew my awareness.

My sexual energy was getting leaky again though, and I was righteous about it. I would say things of a sexual nature that made others uncomfortable. I had a sneaky, unconscious desire to be naked. To expose myself. I mostly kept it under wraps, but the nature of leaky energy is that it leaks. I had no idea at this point that I had ever been sexually abused as a child. I tried to explain my feelings and behaviours with, “I just am like this,” or, “I’m body confident, it’s your problem”. The only framework I had to explain it was that I was a sexual being in a repressed society (not untrue, but also not the whole story).

This all culminated in a memory regression while in a deep meditative state during a plant medicine ceremony. In the regression, I sobbed and wailed. I was there, IN my 7-year-old body, transported back through time. The cells in my body had held that memory for 30 years, and I believe I had finally enough inner resources and enough external support for my psyche to reveal this information to me. I relived the experience in all its horror. It was shocking and unexpected and yet, it was undeniable, and it all made sense.

I came out of the memory and immediately, my first thought was, “hurt people hurt people”. Without a thought for much else, I had an easy compassion for the people who did this to me and I wanted to help them. So, I dove back in. Travelling back to the red dirt, the tears on my face, being held down, and laying there, with my spirit, I began peacefully wrapping ribbons of pure white love around these forgiven boys. I took all of their pain that had manifested in this abuse and pulled it into a dark, thick blob that seemed to be evil at the core, losing its power as countless generations of pain were transformed. It dissolved within the ribbons of light I wrapped around it.

I sat up and moved outside for fresh air. The medicine was still working with me. As I sat on a stone bench, I felt an intensified maternal love course through me with so much force that I had to brace myself to hold its power. Then one by one, a line of boys appeared in front of me, looking forlorn and sad, each taking their turn to hop into my lap, to be held and loved. I held my arms open, wiped away their tears, smiled into their pleading eyes. After the briefest of moments that felt like hours, they would then clamber off and joyfully skip away. It seemed as though hundreds of these boys came and yet I could see no end to the line. I had the sense that this was important work being carried out on another energetic plane. Mysterious work in the multiverse...

**The work wasn’t over though.**

In the process of remembering, I forgot to go back and look after my 7 year old self. For the next six months, as the world plunged into a pandemic, I wrestled with PTSD-like symptoms, disassociation, and the deepest distrust of my own mind.
How could I believe *any* of my memories if I had hidden something so significant from myself for 30 years? What else could be hiding? What about the missing pieces of that day? My mind became unsafe, my body unpredictable. I searched desperately through memories for clues, I gently reached out to my cousin who I hadn’t seen for 15 years, hoping she could help fill the gaps, but she denied it all and blocked me.

My partner, Eddie held me through every trauma release, convulsive fit and tremor state. Alongside breath work, meditation, ocean dips, journaling and riding my bike I just barely managed to maintain a grip on reality. During the lockdown with no access to a psychologist, separated from the social networks that provide so much support, I worried how I would keep functioning - I had a job and children to look after and provide for - but felt I was on the edge of my mind becoming completely broken, unhinged, detached from reality, and that I would wake up in a psych ward.

That explains it…

When I had this memory regression, it was like a missing piece of the puzzle of my life was found, one I didn’t know was missing. As I learned more about the nature of childhood traumatic experiences, and its impacts, so many other pieces of my life began to make sense and finally fit together, creating a clearer picture of who I am, and why.

Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score was incredibly insightful, not only because of the case studies and research he shares in the first half of the book, but also the variety of treatments and approaches he describes that have been shown to be helpful for those recovering from traumatic experiences.

Trauma undeniably changes us. It changes the way the brain develops, the way we respond to stress, and has lasting physiological impacts. Childhood sexual trauma tears apart a child’s developing map of the world, removes any notion of implied safety, and can fill them with shame, guilt or self loathing that they then carry through life. When they have no one supportive or safe to talk to about their abuse, they can create distorted meanings about themselves and the world, and this can lead them down pathways to escape the pain.

It’s fascinating to me how these traumatic experiences result in establishing neural pathways - subconscious patterns of behaviour - that are attempts to keep us safe, but more often keep us trapped, hypervigilant, and ironically repeating familiar scenarios, like dodgy knock-offs of the original experience.

Some of the researched and documented impacts of childhood sexual trauma that resonated with me from Van Der Kolk’s book were:

Early onset of puberty and sexual activity.

Impaired decision making capacity, and inability to commit to important decisions. I had started university studies three times, but always allowed other people and situations to get in the way of completing them.
Developing healthy relationships with peers and romantic partners is affected. Inability to trust others, to connect to the body’s signals, to understand or recognise healthy relationship behaviours. Instead being triggered by otherwise innocent or minor actions and expressing big behaviours in a subconscious effort to feel protected.
Memory repression - there were studies of girls with hospital records documenting their abuse, that showed many of these same women, as adults, could not recall a memory of the abuse, and even some denied it happened. It’s not uncommon for the psyche to shut out this memory, and there is a hidden culture of secrecy, disbelief, and denial in families and our society that supports this repression. We don’t want to believe that this kind of abuse of a child exists and yet that very aversion to acknowledge it, allows it to perpetuate,

Reading about the effects of trauma triggered episodes of disassociation, as I recognised so much of what he wrote in my own personal biography.

I could have easily adopted a victim mentality and perhaps for a time I did without realising, but in time, these revelations allowed me to have a new level of self acceptance for the choices I made, and a sense of resolution around the consequences I’ve lived through.

There were many things that helped me find that resolution and regain my footing after this regression knocked me about.

Developing an understanding of Gabor Mate’s work on trauma provided a compassionate lens and greater emotional awareness. Listening to recordings of Ram Dass provided a philosophical and spiritual framework for me to ascribe a more benevolent meaning to what happened. Ultimately, it was a combination of psychological, spiritual and physical approaches that helped me; intellectually learning and understanding, as well as somatically feeling and releasing emotions in my body.

Integrating the shadow.

When I was struggling the most, a friend asked me, ‘do you wish you hadn’t remembered?’

Honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. Having this information has helped me understand so much more of myself. Making the decisions I did and behaving the way I behaved through some significant stages of my life. I wouldn’t even want to take away that experience that my 7 year old self had to endure.

In my search for meaning and understanding of this experience, I’ve learnt about trauma, the ways we respond to trauma, and how it can have long lasting effects as current experiences reactivate old responses. I’ve learned how we can process trauma in a myriad of ways. And, how important somatic healing is, alongside psychological therapies, when we don’t have a complete cognitive memory to work with. The desire for a deeper understanding of my own story from a soulful perspective has opened me up to a more spiritual connection, a more empathetic sensitivity, and a new source of inner power.

No one gets out of childhood without trauma of some sort.

In the months that followed my memory regression, I tentatively shared my story with others, and it allowed them to share theirs. So many women, and a few men, shared that they too have experienced childhood sexual trauma. For most, it wasn’t sexual trauma but other experiences that had left their mark.

I was inspired to draw the portraits of the adults I spoke to, from photographs of them as a child. I made the portraits realistic, and, in the background I had intended to add some colour to the otherwise grey portrait, but what came through was a loose, messy, demonic creature. Next a black dog. A serpent. A long-legged monster. As I showed some of these finished paintings to the men who had initially given me their photos, they were moved to tears. “That’s the demon that’s been chasing me my whole life”. Another’s pensive response: “The black dog, hmmm.”

Now, as I create more portraits connecting adults to their inner child, I’m seeing transformative healing taking place in the most unexpected ways. Recently, for my 40th, I asked guests to send me photos from their childhood and then as a surprise I drew their portraits, hung them around the space and then invited them to get in touch with their inner child and paint over the portraits.

Since receiving their portrait or taking their collaborative piece home, people have shared stories with me from their childhood that they have never told another person. Others have received unexpected apologies from siblings for the way they were treated as a child by family members. I’ve heard admissions of feelings and desires that have never had a voice. Some have felt waves of grief as they remember pets and loved ones that have passed, or nod knowingly as their inner child reminds them of passions that were lost and now want to be reignited. Mostly though, people have reminisced about the joys of childhood, and discovered a deeper appreciation for that time in their life.

Through it all, there is a thread of connecting to the true essence of who we were before the reality of this world set in.

Remembering.

I have been strongly guided to create The Little Ones, an inner child art project of at least 100 childhood portraits which has felt more like a soul assignment. One I’m completing with my own inner child overseeing the painting elements! As I write this today, there are 15 completed. Fifteen stories told in a new way, fifteen joyous, moving and healing reunions between adults and their inner child.

If you’re feeling the potential within the process of connecting to the essence of you, that piece that your inner child holds for you, I invite you to contact me or head right over to purchase a commission and your inner child could feature in one of the 100 portraits that are coming through.

You can also follow me on instagram where I will share the completed pieces and announce workshops where you’ll be able to collaborate in creation of the portrait, painting on behalf of your inner child, over my hand drawn portrait.

How are you feeling?

I’ve spent months deciding if and how to share, and with this journal piece my intention is to inform and inspire through storytelling, by sharing my personal experience.

If reading this has triggered something in you or you notice things coming up in the coming days or weeks, please know there IS support available to help you no matter what is surfacing for you.

If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs help now, call triple zero (000). You can also call Lifeline on 13 11 14 — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Visit your GP for a mental health check up or to access a Mental Health Care Plan, and know that there are many trauma-informed practitioners available to help you with countless therapies - Compassionate Inquiry (Gabor Mate’s approach) and psychosomatic therapies like EMDR to give just a couple of examples, are available through trained practitioners.

Drawing out the inner child in me