**Trigger warning-Complex trauma and Trauma with a big T"

It's not an exaggeration to tell you I had to learn to regulate with a knife held at me.

That was trauma with a big T, and I've had a good amount of it. But I've also carried trauma with a little t, the kind that doesn't make punchlines but accumulates quietly in the body until one day you realize you've been bracing for impact your whole life. I want to come at this from the other side. Not a trauma dump. A reckoning. An understanding that there is hope, and peace, and real joy on this side. I've worked hard for all of it.

I grew up in a large, interracial family with varying abilities and a whole lot of chaos. I've always been open-hearted, the kind of person people tell things to. That started young.

I had enough life experience by the time I was ten. I was like, yup, this is enough for me.

I had heard enough, lived enough, held enough for several lifetimes. And yet there was more coming. There is always more coming when you grow up the way I did.

I never felt seen or cared for in the way I actually needed. The things I was interested in were ignored. No one explained anything to me, not really. No one was patient enough to make sure I understood, to check that I was okay, to ask what I needed. I spent a lot of my young life feeling like I was doing everything wrong and not knowing why, which is its own particular kind of loneliness.

I remember spending hours on a project for a high school class called Comparative Civilizations. I researched in the library, typed everything up, cut and pasted it all together by hand. I thought I had done a great job, until someone else walked in with a perfectly printed, properly formatted essay and I didn't get a great mark. I didn't understand the expectations. Not because I wasn't intelligent, I am, I can wrap my head around almost anything. But no one had ever shown me what "done properly" looked like, and I didn't even know how to ask the right questions to find out.

The other student had two highly educated parents at home. She understood what the teacher wanted and knew how to deliver it. I went home to a single mother who was doing her best with what she had. I still made honour roll. But I always knew I was smarter than the grades I was getting, and that gap, between what I was capable of and what anyone bothered to show me, followed me for a long time.

When I was fifteen, my mother's boyfriend was making death threats. He was a very abusive drunk, and the hardest thing about abusive drunk people is that they are often genuinely lovely when sober. It's a Jekyll and Hyde situation. That's the trouble with most people in that kind of pain: they have such incredibly redeeming qualities. They could be beautiful human beings, if they had the right support. But abuse is abuse, and death threats are terrifying, no matter how charming the person is when they're sober.

One night he was crying in the kitchen. My trauma response, already well trained by then, was to console and help. So I went to him. I listened. I even hugged him. When I turned to go back to bed, he grabbed a chef's knife.

For one split second I thought he was holding it up to me. The world slowed almost to a stop. Then he brought it down onto his own forearm. He tried to kill himself right in front of me. That is approximately where my brain hit its limit, because everything after that goes blank.

The next morning I went to school, pulled my best friend out of class, and cried with her in the hallway. I almost didn’t do that. My intention was to “be strong” and go to class. But when I got there, a little late, I froze. It was all I could do to pull her from class. And I didn’t know I would break down in that hallway.

That's what survival looked like at fifteen. You go to school. You find your person. You cry in the hallway. And then you go to class. And then at the end of the day, you walk back into the same house that that just happened in.

You don't grow out of trauma like this. One trauma stays forever. Every trauma stays forever. But you can teach your nervous system that it's safe now.

The knife moment has looped in my head for most of my life. Knives became a trigger. My brother used to wave one in my face for fun, because that's what happened in my world, and the freeze response that created in me was profound. I was in high school, trying to hold myself together, while so many of my peers were just able to focus on homework and extracurricular and themselves. I was surviving. Not knowing what was coming night to night.

Complex trauma for me was living in a household that was inconsistent. There was laughter and joy and there was terror and anxiety. Which one I would come home to varied. Which kept my nervous system in hyper-vigilance all the time. I spent up into my mid-twenties as a walking panic attack. No one knew, of course, and then I would erupt, and then came the shame spiral, and I lived like this for a long time. The moments of peace I found, I worked diligently to integrate.

The most intense thing I think a lot of people don’t understand is that when you erupt, it’s on your safe people. This hurts a lot of relationships for ND people. They don’t quite understand, and then the shame spiral can make you pull away. But we need those people. We need to explain to these people, that we love them and we feel safe, and we hold too much. It’s part of the healing process.

I hesitated to put this in a blog. Even now, writing it, my eyes are rimmed with tears and my heart is doing something irregular. But I put it here because I know I'm not the only one who has carried something like this. And the people carrying it need to know that the carrying doesn't have to be permanent.

I have worked for peace. Really worked for it. On my nervous system, on my triggers, on teaching my body that the world it lives in now is not the world it grew up in. That work is some of the most valuable healing I have ever done. And it is doable. It is available to you.

My husband likes to joke about how terrible I am in the kitchen and how I never use the correct tool. I definitely prefer a paring knife to a chef's knife.

But now I can pick up the chef's knife and know it's okay. I can hold it and feel calm. Some people don't get there. They don't know how, or they don't get the help, or they believe that their responses are permanent and unchanging. And so spiral on and on.

They're not. You can retrain your nervous system, your breathing, your body that it's safe now. You can’t do it alone though.

The other side of this work holds more peace and more love than I had in the entire first half of my life. I want that for you too. That's why I'm writing this at all. Because I can now walk into the kitchen, still be terrible at cooking, but not in a panic attack. Let's create this kind of healing so that hopefully one day every teenager just gets to be a teenager.

Much love,

Kat