Day Eight: Healing Through Divorce

“Your trauma makes you stronger.” That is a lie I’ve always believed. I have had an entire lifetime of trauma. I feel like I’m always stuck down in the pit and when I try to claw my way out, I get knocked back down even deeper than I was before.

My dad had an affair when I was 3 and my mom was 3 months pregnant with my little brother. I remember screaming and crying for my dad when my mom moved us out and in with my grandparents. My parents tried to make it work, but he ended up having another affair (or maybe he never stopped, I don’t know) with the same woman. I didn’t see my dad much growing up. The woman he left us for came with her own daughter and my dad was hyper focused on this woman and her child that my brother and I were forgotten about. They had another baby 2 years later and then my brother and I were REALLY forgotten.

My mom always called us The Three Musketeers. She worked 2 jobs to make ends meet and we still struggled. I remember never having to go without as a kid, but she did. She would eat a bowl of cereal for dinner over the kitchen sink while my brother and I ate what she made for dinner. She always made sure we could have seconds if we wanted and had leftovers for the next day. I don’t think the woman ever slept. Her whole world revolved around my brother and I because my dad’s whole world revolved around his new family. My brother and I were cast to the side. We were there every 6 weeks because of his work schedule, but we still didn’t get much time with him. My dad was the first man I was abandoned by.

Which makes sense why I would continue to choose men who are just like my dad. Men who leave me. Men who made me believe I was the problem. Men who love bombed me and were absolutely perfect in every way and just the complete opposite of my dad. Only they weren’t the opposite. I fell in love with my first husband because he was perfect. He said and did all the right things, he bought me and my daughter things, he brought me coffee to work, he set aside time just for me and my daughter. He was everything I wanted and everything we needed and all at the same time was everything opposite of what he pretended to be.

He was abusive. At first it started as verbal/emotional abuse. Snide comments. Trying to tell me how I’m parenting my daughter wrong when I had been her ONLY parent for 5 years and he had no kids. Justifying why he was right in treating me like absolute crap. We got married in July of 2015 and I knew exactly 2 months later when I got pregnant with Levi that I didn’t want to stay married to him because he had broken me down so much in that short amount of time. He started to get violent and would throw things and tell me how I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t doing something good enough. He would constantly yell at me for the smallest things. He would yell at my daughter for the smallest things. We left more than once because I got scared it would turn physical. We tried marriage counseling. We tried counseling at our church. I worked hard to save that marriage. I changed things about me. If I were more of this or a little less of that, he wouldn’t get so angry and he would treat us better.

We left for good when it got physical. He went after my daughter and slammed me into the wall more than once because I refused to let him get to her. That’s when Corey came back into our lives. One would think that since I had JUST been love bombed and had someone that got me by saying and doing all the right things that him doing the same thing would have been the red flag for me. It clearly wasn’t. So I went through it all again, minus the physical abuse. So like I said the other day, trauma bonds are a real thing.

I saw a video on Facebook reels that was talking about trauma and how it doesn’t make you stronger and that’s when I realized the lie I had believed my whole life. My trauma didn’t make me stronger. My trauma turned me into a people pleaser. It turned me into someone who will absolutely break and fall apart to make sure that the person I’m with doesn’t. I will do what it takes to make them happy, even if it means I’m dying inside. My trauma made me believe all these years that I’M the problem. That I’m too much here and not enough there. It made me believe lies about myself and made me forget who I am. At the same time, I don’t know if I’ve EVER known who I am. I’ve always been trauma bonded to someone and I’ve never been able to figure out who I am.

It’s something I’m working on now. I get to decide who I am. I get to decide what I put up with. I get to decide what I like and what I don’t like based on my own opinions, not what others tell me I like and don’t like. I get to decide my worth.

My worth isn’t found in my dad or my ex-husbands. My worth isn’t even found in my own opinion of myself because at this point, my own opinion has been tainted by my past trauma. My worth is found in Jesus and who HE says I am. I am the daughter of a KING. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I am more precious than rubies. I deserve someone who treats me as such.

I didn’t cry at all today. I felt like I might a few times, but I didn’t. My anxiety has been a little high, but I didn’t cry. I thought about Corey a lot today. I still didn’t put my ring back on. I kept catching myself feeling for it and my heart would drop in a panic that I lost it, and then would remember I chose to take it off. I CHOSE to move on from that so I can work on my healing. Today has genuinely been good. The first day in almost 2 months that I haven’t sobbed for a reason or no reason at all. So here’s to day 8 of healing.

And no, your trauma doesn’t make you stronger.