Threads of Trauma
A note before reading: This piece includes discussion of C-PTSD, childhood self-harm, eating disorders, traumatic loss, domestic violence, and physical and emotional abuse. It also includes a photograph taken during a moment of emotional collapse. Some of what follows may be difficult or triggering to read. Please take care of yourself and read only if and when it feels right for you.
My life is woven together by threads of trauma.
A few weeks ago, someone asked me, “When was the last time you were really happy?”
My mind went blank. I couldn’t recall a relatively recent time— and by recent, I mean the last 40 years. Sure, I’ve had glimpses of joy, moments of deep, profound gratitude and even glimmers of happiness…but the deep down happy that you feel from the bottom of your toes to the top of your head— the kind that makes you glow from the inside out— the one that makes you walk a little lighter and brighter? It’s been a while.
“When was the last time you were really happy?”
“When I was five-years-old,” I say.
She looks at me in a mix of shock and disbelief.
But it was true. The five-year-old who believed in unicorns (and stills does), who bathed in the summer sun and ran through sheets of laundry hanging from lines in the yard as they wafted through air, who found joy in just being…that’s when I was last truly happy.
Most everyone is familiar with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD— often associated in popular culture with a single catastrophic event or experiences like combat.
Complex PTSD is different. It can develop in response to prolonged or repeated trauma, particularly trauma from which escape feels difficult or impossible. And when trauma is woven through years of your life rather than confined to one event, sometimes it becomes difficult to separate what happened from everything your brain and body learned in order to survive it.
Complex PTSD is a different beast. And it’s not just that it’s “worse” or it’s “complex” by nature of some deeply devastating tragedy. Complex PTSD is far more complex and destructive because it’s trauma that’s been repeated and prolonged, sometimes over the course of many years, making it harder to isolate the triggers and move past them.
I was telling my therapist recently that I’m beyond my “threshold of tolerance” (as she likes to refer to it). I can’t think straight. My head is foggy. I can’t make sense of anything. I’m constantly on edge and also so damn exhausted that I could sleep for a decade. How everything, especially and from the last two years, has worn me down. I didn’t know what was wrong with me or why I felt this way. I told her I had come across an article recently that talked about Complex PTSD and how so many things within that article resonated with me.
I’ve had many labels assigned to me over the years in the mental health realm of things, most given to me without ever really fitting or telling the whole story: depression, anxiety, anorexia, eating disorder not otherwise specified (my personal favorite because of its ambiguity). All of these felt foreign. Something not mine, given to me, to make the paper trail easier for the next therapist down the line.
So when my current therapist shared that her diagnosis for me was Complex PTSD, I felt seen. For once, there was language for something I had spent most of my life trying to outrun, override, intellectualize, work through, or simply call “fine.” And while I’m grateful for the diagnosis, I hate the fact it involuntarily suggests something about me. Being told you have Complex PTSD suggests that something has happened and whatever it is, it hasn’t been good.
In so many ways, I had relegated my own trauma to the back drawers of my mind. I would often joke that my life has been one tragedy to another trauma, listing my threads of trauma as if I was reading from a grocery list:
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- At six years old I held a knife to my neck after coming in second at a local beauty pageant.
- For my childhood and most of my early adulthood my father was a violent alcoholic.
- In third grade my baby sister Heather died when she was two days old.
- As a high school freshman I was bullied by the seniors on the track team.
- In my sophomore year of college I fractured my C2 vertebrae playing soccer.
- In my senior year of college, my brother Tim died in a car accident at the age of 18.
- Most of my late 20’s were spent battling the throes of an eating disorder that nearly killed me.
- In January 2022, I lost my spiritual teacher and friend, Patricia Moreno.
- The last 7 years were spent living inside an abusive marriage.
- I lost the job that gave my life meaning and purpose— and the one that would have provided financial freedom to leave said abusive marriage.
My life is woven together by threads of trauma.
Some of these threads are volatile enough to cause PTSD; but it’s the impact of all of these combined that’s landed me in the world of Complex PTSD.
If nothing else, I can at least rest assured that I’m still an overachiever in even these murky parts— I mean, if we’re going to have trauma, might as well have it with a capital “T”.
And so, I joke about it. Because joking about it is easier than telling you I learned to listen to footsteps, to read how a door opened and to hear the subtlety in someone’s tone changing when I was six years old so I could adjust myself accordingly and become smaller. I didn’t know the word hypervigilance then. I only knew that paying attention could help me stay ahead of what might happen next.
I joke about it because saying, “I’m fine” when I’m the furthest thing from fine is exhausting. I’ve been “fining” everything since I was six. I learned quickly at a young age to say I was fine, that I would never hurt myself again; but really what I learned was that love, approval, safety, and worth could all feel conditional— that my worth and enoughness was tied to how I looked and performed.
I joke about it because the dark humor coats the grief and makes it slightly more palatable. It makes it easier to swallow loss, to contain it, to keep going and be the “strong one” wearing resiliency as a badge of honor.
Most days, it feels like I live two parallel lives.
I can be exceptionally competent and articulate. I can lead teams. I can stand in front of rooms full of people and teach hour after hour. I can travel. I can make plans, solve problems, take care of people, create things, and have meaningful conversations.
I can look completely fine.
And I can also have days when getting out of bed feels impossibly hard. Where I forget things. I lose words. I stare at walls. Messages that should take thirty seconds to answer sit unanswered because somehow even thirty seconds feels like more capacity than I have.
Sometimes I don’t explain what is happening because I don’t have enough energy to explain it.
Sometimes I don’t explain because I don’t understand it yet myself.
Sometimes I am trying to protect other people from the parts of me that feel frightened, overwhelmed, angry, exhausted, or unreachable.
That is one of the hardest things about C-PTSD: what is happening internally can look completely different from what someone sees externally.
Not much is needed for things to go haywire. A scent, a sound, a change in tone.
C-PTSD feels like I’m a seismometer needle measuring an earthquake. A machine of constant motion drawing out patterns, pointing out slightest alteration. The data feed is never-ending, the threshold to declare exceptional circumstances is low. Even when things are calm, the needle keeps going. It never stops.
The needle is too tightly wound. Slightest change in the norm causes a jump, draws multiple peaks, valleys, dead drops in between. Not much is needed for things to go haywire. A scent, a sound, a change in tone.
I try to reason with the needle. There’s nothing to be afraid of. But my heart keeps bashing against my ribcage. My thoughts display all scenarios imaginable and unimaginable, lived and non-existent, so nothing surprises me. A constant safety check you didn’t consent to is exhausting but has its own logic: If I only remain one step ahead, nothing bad will ever happen.
That is one of the strangest parts of trauma: knowing intellectually that you are safe and trying to convince a body that learned otherwise.
This week as I was deleting photos on my phone, I came across this one. My stomach dropped. It was December 2nd 2025, a week from the year anniversary of losing LifeTime. The cumulative weight of everything was too much and I literally fell apart (though I’m pretty sure I still made it to Alchemy Yoga to teach that night and per usual was “fine”).
At the time, I did not know this was being taken of me— and worse, it was sent to other people to “show” how broken I was.
What is the most striking thing to me about this photo is that it captured one moment of collapse. It did not capture everything that had brought me there. It did not show the years of trauma I had carried. It did not show the abuse inside my marriage. It did not show the fear, confusion, grief, shame, or exhaustion that had accumulated until my body could no longer hold all of it upright.
I was grieving the loss of a career, an identity, and a community I loved while also living inside an abusive marriage.
I was trying to survive what had happened to me professionally while also trying to survive what was happening behind the closed doors of my own home.
Eventually, there was nowhere left for all of it to go.
So I ended up on a bathroom floor.
A picture of my body in collapse. A picture taken of me without my consent.
There is something incredibly strange about having lived both sides of that image.
Being the woman on the floor.
And later, being the woman looking at her.
Maybe that is why the photo bothers me so much.
Because when you have lived through abuse, so much of it leaves no evidence.
There aren’t photographs of someone screaming inches from your face. There isn’t a camera running when you’re pinned to the ground crying, when something gets thrown across a room, when you’re prevented from leaving, or when you’re trying to determine from someone’s face or voice what is about to happen next. So much of it happens in rooms where no one else is watching. And afterward, you are left with memories.
Sometimes memories so visceral you can still feel them in your body. You are left trying to explain something that happened in private to people who were not there. You are left wondering whether your own account will be believed. And when something has been denied, minimized, reframed, or explained away enough times, there is something about having tangible evidence that says:
No.
Look.
This happened.
I was there.
That is what this photograph is for me.
Not proof that I am telling the truth to anyone else.
Evidence for the part of me that spent too long being taught to question my own reality.
Looking at it now, I see what it looks like when a human body has been holding too much for too long.
bodies stop asking permission before they tell the truth.
I see a woman who had been surviving one thing after another without enough time, safety, or support to process any of it.
I understand the woman on that floor differently now than I did when I was her.
She wasn’t there because of one job. Or one argument. Or one terrible day.
She was there because grief, fear, shame, loss, and abuse had converged in one body that had spent a lifetime trying to keep functioning.
She was exhausted from surviving things she had not even begun to understand yet.
And eventually, bodies stop asking permission before they tell the truth.
My life is woven together with threads of trauma, and as I begin to look at it through the lens of Complex PTSD, it’s easier to extend compassion toward the versions of myself I used to judge.
The child who thought she had to be perfect.
The girl who swallowed her grief.
The young woman who tried to disappear inside an eating disorder.
The adult who stayed too long because leaving did not feel possible.
The woman on the bathroom floor.
Including her.
Especially her.
I’m not going to pretend I have everything figured out. Far from it. Or that having a diagnosis means it’s easier to treat the trauma. It doesn’t. It is complex after all 😉
But maybe having a name for it gives me somewhere to begin.
Healing, for me, is acknowledging that the past happened and that the things that hurt me were real.
It is learning that acknowledging what happened is different from allowing it to define what happens next.
It is learning to recognize the difference between danger and memory.
It is learning that I can grieve what I lost without being ashamed that it mattered.
It is learning that I can be affected by what happened to me without being defined by it.
And maybe most importantly, it is learning to believe myself.
To believe the child who was scared.
The girl who learned not to cry.
The woman who knew something was wrong even when she was being told otherwise.
The woman on the bathroom floor.
I don’t know exactly what healing from all of this looks like yet…and maybe that’s okay.
Maybe healing doesn’t begin with having the answers. Maybe it begins with finally being willing to tell the truth about the questions.