Empty to Awesome

The End and the Beginning “To live it the body of a survivor is to never be able to leave the scene of the crime. I cannot ignore the fact that I live here.” Blythe Baird I knew, as soon as I heard the phone ring, something was going to shake my world. I just knew something was drastically wrong. You know you have that feeling that wells up in you with a sense of dread? The feeling that you have no control, and that you are defenseless in every aspect. It was with time that I understood just how that one phone call would take away who I was for three years. This was definitely the end of the glorious days I was fortunate to have had, and the beginning of the terror that gripped me in an unbreakable vice. I am not going to go into each trauma, as this is not the vehicle for that. This book is about how I coped, or didn’t cope, and how I came to write this book to support other high functioning females deal with the complexities of trauma. Trauma One: That one phone call shattered every part of me. I felt like I had just had my soul ripped out and the universe was playing a massive part in abandoning me. I was left dangling by a thread, a very tenuous thread. It was as if the universe was taunting me, trying to break me. I mustered every ounce of courage, but to tell you the truth, there was little to access. I had to be strong, but how can you be strong when multiple crises hit you time and time again. I had no one to talk to, no one to confide in, no one on my side. It was during this time that I went searching for the resilience that I had always relied upon. I had always prided myself in taking knockbacks well, and bouncing back quickly and easily with a vengeance! It was second nature to take a hit, realizing that this was just the stepping stone for something more powerful from me. The difficulty was, this was nothing like I had experienced before. I had always had control; a way to maneuver the situation to create something even better than before. But in this state of fight/flight my reptilian brain had taken over and my prefrontal cortex had left the building so to say. All of my energy was being diverted to keeping me aware of the environment and my high functioning prefrontal cortex was unable to focus. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that in absolute trauma, following on from years of uncertainty and negative situations, sometimes your brain doesn’t function the way you know it can. I have always been a cerebral person, and love the way the brain works. That is where my love of neuroscience came in. I knew that answers were in my brain, and the strength I had normally had were residing in me, but there was no way of accessing either of these. In trauma, my high functioning self, became full of darkness. I would search and search for support or answers, only to find…nothing.