Monday, November 18, 2024

Is there a time limit for the effects of childhood trauma?

Profile photo for William Lee Weeks Sillyman

In my humble opinion, if anyone (doctor or individual) says they can cure you of childhood trauma, then I have some swampland to sell you in Death Valley.

Is there a time limit? No. I believe one of the most critical aspects of learning to deal with childhood trauma, and that is admitting that it happened. To many people, do these statements sound familiar?

Programs can differ, but some typical steps in the 12-step process include the following:

  • Admitting you are not in control of your addiction (abuse/trauma)
  • Recognizing a higher power can give strength.
  • Examining past mistakes/recognizing the trauma was not your fault.
  • Making amends to yourself.
  • Living a new way of life. Through counseling and support, you can live a better life.
  • Helping others, sharing your story.

I was abused as a child. Dysfunctional is not strong enough to describe what I went through. I had felt it was my fault for being unwanted for most of my life. I cannot count the number of times I was told I would never amount to a damn thing because I was too stupid to learn anything.

I had no self-esteem, and I would degrade myself to feel physically as low as I felt mentally. I had love, my beautiful wife, and two children, yet I felt like a failure. I am not going to go into the depths of depression I went into when my wife died in 2015 after forty years of marriage.

I had attempted suicide when I was ten years old by hanging, and I could not even do that right. When my wife died, suicide crossed my mind again. So many things had happened in my life, and I took the blame for all of them because I felt too stupid to stop them.

I have written many times about knowing I was different, as young as six years old, to discover the reason I felt different was that I am gay, yet in 1968, I could not say anything. Delilah (adoptive mother) would find my secret when I was sixteen in 1970 and would damn near beat me to death. Knowing I could never be that person, I had to bury who I was. I vowed never to let that person come out. Delilah had outed me to the family, and the condemnation was magnified.

I was so terrified of these people I dared not cross them in any way; even if I lived over a thousand miles from them, they still had control of my mind. I let them because I did not know how to stop them and was too scared to try. Do you want to talk about conditioning? There, it was in full display.

Over time, the “family” began dying off one by one. Delilah died in 1993, yet her threats were still alive (only I did not know it). She had written a letter to my wife before she died. In this letter, she viciously told my wife what she thought of her, what she thought of my children (she hated her grandchildren), and finally outing me and gloated about the number of beatings she had done to me, especially the one when she discovered I was gay. It was her last ditch effort at destroying me, and it damn near worked.

Another thought of suicide crossed my mind. When only a couple of adoptive relatives left, I decided to pursue my dream of getting a college education. Those still living said I would never finish, let alone graduate with good enough grades. I was fifty-two when I started college, and I would finish when I was sixty, with two undergraduate degrees in Criminal Justice and an MAED in Special Education, all with 3.5 GPA and seven times on the dean’s list. I did not prove it to them; I proved it to myself.

Nine months after I earned the MAED, my beloved wife died from complications of diabetes at fifty-nine years of age. The haunts of the abuse came rushing back. I had done so well keeping it at bay for so long. My wife, before she died, told me to open up that deeply buried closet and begin to embrace the real me. I had no one to threaten me anymore.

I openly came out gay in March 2015, a month after my wife died. I was talking to another gay man, and he asked me an interesting question; “If your life was a movie, who would play you?” That simple question has led me to write eleven books published on Amazon/Kindle. I also began receiving mental health help. Since I am a veteran, all my MH treatment and medications are through the VA.

I have four books about my life, yet to understand the depth of dealing with childhood trauma and abuse, I would recommend you read “Erased and Unwanted” and “A Midwestern Gay Boys Story: A Lifetime of Lies.” This last book is about living and dealing with when the war on homosexuality began in 1952, and I was born in 1954. It is historical, yet I infuse my personal experiences into it.

I am almost seventy years old, and I have discovered there is no time limit on dealing with childhood trauma. You can be living just fine, then something will happen, and it can trigger a memory. Childhood trauma is for life. It is what you do about it that matters most.

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