Survivors of childhood trauma, what grounds you? What puts you in your body, gives you joy, reaffirms your strength? It changes for me, depending on the day, the mood, the weather within and without. It suddenly occurred to me that I needed a pair of ballet shoes. When I was young, my dance teacher demanded our ballet slippers be tight, too tight. They hurt until they broke. The good thing about being an adult is that you can choose your own shoes.

When was the last time you listened to yourself breathing? It is a difficult task for me, someone who suffers from C-PTSD. When people in your life who are supposed to care for you abuse you, treat you as if you are not worthy of care, it is challenging to correct this perception, even within yourself. But I am finding as trauma, a recurring tidal wave, threatens to drown me, that self-care is the beginning of healing. It is the foundation for recovery.

What violence we are capable of while thinking well of ourselves! We wish no harm to others, but if harming others makes us feel good (or at least, less bad) we do it without remit or remorse. As someone with takeout food in my belly and a ticket in my pocket, I recently sat in the audience of Wallace Shawn’s play, “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” at Greenwich House Theater in New York. It is not lite entertainment, a rousing, uplifting story of human triumph.

The knots that have tied me for the last several years have been undone. Trauma recovery. A brand new day. Goodbye to the liars, the bullies, the bastards, the frigid maidens, the mechanical sadists. I feel like grabbing the hand of Diana Ross and singing with her, “Ease On Down the Road,” from The Wiz. I feel like rejoicing with the dancers of Louis Johnson’s extraordinary Liberation Ballet in the 1978 film to the tune of Luther Vandross’ “A Brand New Day.”

It doesn’t work. Punishing people into perfection. I did not have the misfortune of being abused by world-class abusers, men in the restaurant industry, the ballet stratosphere, or the film industry. My abusers were small-town people with big dreams and few skills. They could scream, bully, pinch, and hit. They could tell you were nothing unless you worked harder, submitted more devotedly, conformed to the ideal they imposed upon you but were so far from themselves.

I thought my experience was rare. During my first cancer, my parents ensured I received the medical care, the pills, and the nutrition I needed to stay alive. Physical, but not emotional, survival. But decades later, I see that repression to the point of cruelty is common. During my second cancer, I watch as healthcare providers act like decapitated beings, robots with salaries who still eat and drink. But I am neither meat nor machine. Cancer survival: We are more than bodie

Recovering from trauma, I use hatred not as a vehicle for hurting others, but as a vehicle for changing myself, for changing the world. Eventually, hatred will be displaced by joy and curiosity.

I keep living into the same answer. It is the same answer because it is the same question. I give people millions of chances. I don’t start from cynicism. I make allowances for mistakes, fatigue, and frailty. And still I am disappointed. I am hurt, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood. Time after time, I reach the same conclusion of midnight desperation: No More.

Invincibility. It doesn’t exist among humans, but I love invincibility as masquerade, as defensive strategy in cancer and trauma...

There are many ways to kill people without physical violence. All it takes is obedience. A willingness not to think or care. A vulnerable person might cringe as the faces harden, and the backs turn into impenetrable walls. The sanctuary turns into a collapsing house of cards, where someone is always going to end up crushed at the bottom. I offer this writing as an incendiary and hope that the flames give warmth and light to those looking for relief from the cold and the dark

Perhaps I shouldn’t have had the massage. It had been almost two years since a professional had touched me in a compassionate, and not a clinical, way. My chemotherapy for breast cancer had finished, and I was trying to reconnect with my body and find some physical relief. My cancer recovery had begun. But massage releases both the angels and the demons within.

We are still mired in disease-centred care. As to being seen as a whole human in the healthcare system, you are out of luck.

Having long been gaslighted by authority figures, I tend to gaslight myself, but I am done. Believing myself is healing, is health.

I didn’t have a PTSD episode while awaiting my colonoscopy to annoy my gastroenterologist, but annoyed he was. He is a busy, important...

A survivor of multiple cancers reflects on her relationship with panic, how PTSD has shaped her life and her character.

Medicine as transaction. I suppose I am not suited for it. But I ask myself, what are these startling realities calling me to do?

Recent revelations about author Alice Munro cause this writer to reflect on her own childhood

While Gabor Mate in his new book, The Myth of Normal (https://drgabormate.com/), explicitly forgives parents who inflict their trauma on...

I shall close the long and gruesome history of gaslighting in my life with the following fact: my psychiatrist of almost 20 years lost...

Not allowed to speak my thoughts or show my feelings, I was driven by my family of origin into art. More like, taken, tied, threatened,...