A few weeks after I had finished more than 180 handwritten pages of childhood memories, I began, for the first time, to comprehend how profoundly my abused childhood had influenced my life. More importantly, I was finally able to feel.
When I say understand, I mean that I was finally able to make connections. I found words for what I felt. For more than forty-three years, I had reacted instinctively without knowing why. My actions and reactions had been almost mechanical.
Through writing, I felt as though I were removing a blockage that had shut down part of my mind at the time of the abuse, freezing memories in time and space. As I became conscious of those memories and emotions, I began to experience what felt to me like a spontaneous process of healing after years of repressed pain.
My husband was away from the house for much of the day because he was still working for the State of California. This allowed me to divide my time between writing and remembering. Slowly, and without realizing what was happening, I withdrew from ordinary daily activities. At first, I did not even recognize how disinterested I had become in my everyday life.
About three months later, my handwritten pages had been typed. I revised them again, shortening chapters and removing material that, at the time, did not seem essential. Finally, in 1993, individual scenes and memories began to fall into place, and the first draft of my manuscript was completed. A new friend helped me translate it from German into English.
Every time I worked on the manuscript, the scenes returned like a movie in which I was playing the central role. When I was alone, I sometimes felt hopeless. I struggled with the pain and began sleeping for hours during the day.
Yet whenever my present life demanded my attention, I had to switch quickly back to it. After all, I was newly married.
As a child, I had been trained to perform—to act normal, fulfill my duties, and do what was expected of me. Following that deeply ingrained pattern, I ignored my symptoms and my longing for peace and quiet. I continued with my daily chores while suppressing the overwhelming desire to be left alone.
I began imagining our house surrounded by a ten-foot wall, separating me from people, noise, and the outside world.
When the pain became unbearable during the day, I locked all the doors and retreated to my bed. I had no difficulty falling asleep, although sometimes I awakened shortly afterward to the sound of my own screaming. This was the beginning of vivid nightmares connected to my childhood. They continued, often leaving me exhausted and weakened.
One Friday evening, my husband came home from work and, shortly after dinner, left again for choir rehearsal. That evening I experienced, for the first time, what felt like the enormous power my mind could exert over my body.
I remember standing in the kitchen behind the counter when Alex left at six o’clock. I remember almost nothing after that. He later told me that when he returned at eleven that night, I was still standing in the same place. Concerned, he brought me upstairs to the bedroom.
It felt as though a dam inside my mind had broken open, releasing emotions that had been trapped behind the walls of early trauma. Thoughts and feelings flowed together like water rushing into channels that had finally opened. In my imagination, this vital energy began nourishing an emotional desert within me.
As the movement continued, more areas of thought and feeling seemed to awaken. Loose ends began connecting. Parts of myself that had existed separately for years suddenly seemed capable of communicating with one another.
I experienced this as a process of self-healing.
The memories were overwhelming, and the pain connected with the abuse sometimes seemed unbearable. Yet somehow, I endured it.
I imagined that my already overloaded childhood mind had shut down not because it wanted to die, but because it was trying to survive. Now I pictured that same extraordinary organ regenerating, reorganizing, and thawing layers of long-disconnected feelings and pain.
In vivid images, I saw loose ends of neurons searching for one another until they found their matching connections and came alive. With every imagined connection, another gate seemed to open, revealing new pathways and neglected areas of my inner world—places that appeared to me like plants withering in a desert, waiting for water.
Then came a powerful feeling of becoming whole, accompanied by the hope that the process would not stop until my mental desert was blooming again, as I imagined it had before the abuse.
Within this extraordinary inner movement, I found validation for feelings I had carried for decades. Past and present began to connect. I could see where some of my wounds had originated and how abuse had shaped them. I felt the terror and helplessness of the child I had been, while at the same time realizing that these experiences were parts of a larger picture—a whole person.
Me.
I remember almost nothing about the rest of that weekend.
By Monday, I found myself sitting in a psychologist’s office, listening to my husband explain that I did not want to eat and did not want to leave my bed. He told the psychologist that when he asked whether I wanted to get up, I had answered, “Let me be. Let me die here.”
I understood his concern. At the same time, I was deeply upset because I believed that he had interrupted an important process taking place within me.
By then I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Sitting in the room with two people who seemed to have already decided what was best for me, I felt powerless. I agreed to see a psychiatrist immediately because I was told it was necessary for my safety and protection.
But I did not experience their intervention as help.
I did not want someone else’s interpretation of what healing should look like imposed upon me. I wanted to be heard and included in decisions about my own mind and body.
Instead, I felt that I was expected to become “normal” again as quickly as possible because there was concern that I might harm myself.
The irony was painful to me. I did not see myself as the source of the injury. I saw the years of childhood abuse as the source. And at the very moment when I believed I was finally confronting that pain, I felt that the process had been stopped.
I remember the psychologist saying that he would “feel safer” if I took medication. I experienced those words as being directed to my husband rather than to me, even though I was sitting in the room. I felt as though I were no longer regarded as competent to speak for myself.
From my perspective at the time, medication did not heal what had happened to me. Instead, I experienced the following years as a period of emotional numbness. Whether my understanding of what was happening in my brain was medically correct or not, the experience itself was real to me: I believed that an intensely personal process had been interrupted before I could discover where it might lead.
In 1999, I decided that I wanted to feel fully again, and I chose to discontinue the medication with the intention of reclaiming an emotional life that I felt had been altered by it.
Since then, frequent and vivid dreams have replaced the intensity of that earlier experience of recovery. I have never again encountered my inner world with quite the same force or immediacy.
I still wonder what might have happened if that process had continued uninterrupted.
I also recognize the seriousness of what others witnessed in me at the time. My withdrawal, refusal to eat, prolonged sleeping, altered awareness, and statement that I wanted to be left to die understandably caused alarm. What I could not accept was the feeling that concern for my safety had eliminated my voice from decisions about my own care.
This experience left me with questions that remain with me today.
What do we mean when we call someone “normal”?
Who determines the boundaries of acceptable human thought, emotion, and behavior? At what point does protecting a person become controlling that person? How should medical professionals balance their responsibility to prevent harm with an individual’s need for dignity, autonomy, and participation in decisions about treatment?
And how much do we truly understand about the ways a traumatized mind attempts to survive and recover?
Perhaps our knowledge of healing is always incomplete. Perhaps what appears from the outside to be illness can, in some circumstances, contain elements of adaptation, memory, survival, and attempted recovery. At the same time, experiences that feel meaningful from within can appear dangerous to those witnessing them from the outside.
That tension remains unresolved for me.
I cannot know what would have happened had no one intervened that weekend. I can only describe what the experience meant to me: I felt that something long frozen inside me had begun to move. Memories, emotions, and parts of myself that had been separated for decades seemed to be finding one another.
For the first time, I was not merely remembering what had happened to me.
I was feeling it.
And, in feeling it, I believed I had begun to heal.