“Do you know how hard it is to be friends with a person who wants to kill themselves then 5 minutes later they’re ok? It’s draining. Well, I am that person. The struggle impacts me daily, however, last Saturday I had an epiphany that I’ve been working on and the days seem to be getting better.”
“Shortly after the trauma, I started to isolate myself from the world. Experiencing anger with just about everything and everyone. Those closest to me sensed something was wrong. I knew something was wrong. But I was not able to identify what it was. Nor could anyone else. I continued to spiral out of control.”
Helped by:
Reinventing yourself
“At 16, I found my drug of choice, methamphetamine, which I began shooting up at 17. I had a few years of somewhat reduced drug use for the first years of college, then slid back due to a multi-assailant rape and abusive boyfriend. I lived in increasing misery until I was 32.”
“After a while, I decided to try psychotherapy. But eventually the therapist used sexual abuse as his “therapeutic intervention,” and my suicidal desires came back in full force. I lived on the sharp edges of suicide for several years. The only thing that stopped me from taking my own life was my love for my children.”
Helped by:
Self-awareness
Therapy
“When I was 12 years old, my parents moved into their own place, along with my brother and sister. They left me with my grandparents. I could only see my family on weekends, and on Sunday evenings I would go back home. I was not able to build a normal relationship with my brother and sister. I even thought at one point that I was adopted, which was against all logic.”
Struggled with:
Abuse
Childhood trauma
Helped by:
Journaling
Self-improvement
“At 22 years old, I knew that I was dying of alcoholism. I accepted that. The trauma symptoms I experienced were too overwhelming to stop drinking. When I was sober, I would sometimes experience 30 to 40 body memories of being sexually assaulted–again and again in succession. I drank to feel numb.”
“I never mentioned the accident to anyone until I met my future husband at 22. He was sympathetic and supportive, and helped me understand the enormity of what I had been through.I still have not talked to my siblings about it.”
Struggled with:
Abuse
Depression
Eating disorder
Suicidal
“Then something happened. On about day 3 or 4, the group spoke and I realized that their way of thinking around food, their rituals, and their tendencies, were all the same as the things I would do. It was wild because I thought I had made these things up myself and here I was with a room full of people who did the same things.”
Struggled with:
Abuse
Depression
Divorce
Eating disorder
PTSD
“My mother said she wanted to end it in bloodshed and she waited for him to come home from his late-night meeting. She thought better of it when he was late arriving home. She was overwhelmed with thoughts of her in prison and me in foster care. To say that she made the right decision in achieving the goal of a good life is an answer I struggled to answer for many years.”
Struggled with:
Abuse
Anxiety
Childhood trauma
CPTSD
Depression
“As my anxiety levels grew, I turned to alcohol and then combined that with Vicodin to fend off the bad feelings. I would drink to the point of blacking out on a regular basis, sometimes never knowing how I got home.”
Struggled with:
Abuse
Addiction
Childhood trauma
CPTSD
Helped by:
Reinventing yourself
Therapy