I was out walking my chihuahua, Tiny this week. As soon as I got out my sun hat and long sleeve shirt, Tiny knew it was time for a walk. He eagerly jumped up on my wheelchair and rode through the neighborhood. I often use our walks as time to think about the day, pray or ponder the meaning of life. But that day, I just couldn’t get myself together. My thoughts drifted to a neighbor who wanted me to do something for them. So irritating.

I’m writing this blog in time for Thanksgiving. The opening salvo for the holiday season. Narcissists take the opportunity to turn what ought to be a time of renewal and fun and make it a time of joyless misery and infernal obligation. Never is the narcissist’s anger and manipulation more on display than at the holidays. For those of us who grew up in homes like that, holidays can trigger the terrible experiences of our past and remind us of all we have lost. For those who are still in situations in which we must spend time with our family of origin, the holidays are a source of dread.

The bright rays of the Sonoran Desert sun filtered down through the fronds of the palm tree growing in my front courtyard. I closed my eyes and let it warm my face. How I wished it could burn away the insistent anxiety that had popped up yet again. Like the ridiculous children’s arcade game, “wac-a-mole,” no matter how hard I pounded my rubber hammer, anxiety always managed to pop back up again. For me, anxiety was rarely triggered by a real crisis. No, it was the small day to day bumps that set me off.

The guy was going to rob the store. I knew it in my gut. Watching the situation unfold from the back, I took note of the “customer’s” dirty clothes, unkempt hair and age. He was young and the fact that he was asking questions about the cost of very expensive blow dryers and curling irons behind a locked cabinet did not add up. Why would he want anything like that? And the questions he was asking did not make sense.

It’s the middle of October which puts me in the mood for Autumn leaves, pumpkin spice and Halloween. When I was a child, Halloween was my favorite holiday next to Christmas. Back then, trick or treating seemed more innocuous than it does today. You dressed up, went to a kids party and spent time driving from house to house to collect candy. (We lived in the country. There were no subdivisions to walk through.) A party would be given at school and included a costume contest between cats and hobos. There were no zombies and if someone chose to be a vampire they were usually more friendly than scary.

What is truth? The same question was asked two thousand years ago by the Roman governor tasked with judging Christ. Dr. Eric Gentry in his book, “Forward Facing Freedom,” calls the damage left by childhood trauma a moral wound. He too, draws a line in the sand about truth. In this day and age people talk about “my truth” or “your truth” but I’m not talking about relative truth. Abusers use the idea that truth depends on their own opinion as a way to convince you to live in a lie. Wherever you find one person trying to dominate another you will not find truth.

Why is making a change so difficult? New Year’s resolutions are notoriously broken. Have you ever tried to lose weight? It’s one of the hardest things to do. Any kind of change is difficult, but when I speak about making a change in the way you respond to childhood trauma, I’m talking about change of a different sort.

How do you live beyond trauma? How do you get to the point where trauma symptoms stop running your life and just what does that look like? This next series of blogs entitled, “Living Beyond Trauma,” starts with challenges. Without acknowledging challenges, it is hard to know where to begin and how to continue without becoming discouraged. The first challenge is one of the most difficult—your family system.

I really think I’ve cracked the code. After researching and applying new techniques to cure insomnia for the last few months, I am finally seeing real progress. That’s the good news. The bad news is, it takes time. Remember, I’ve had insomnia for nearly fifty years. Habits that have gone on that long aren’t going to change overnight. But they are changing and that is what matters. I wish I had found this information years ago. Like everything in my life, childhood trauma has an impact. The previous three insomnia blogs have been about the why and how insomnia is connected to childhood trauma. It is finally time to deal with ways to cure it.

I looked at my sleep therapist in irritation as she valiantly tried to be encouraging. “One goal with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia is for you to learn to catch the negative thoughts and change them before they can have an impact.”

That was all well and good, I thought, but just how do you change a negative thought? Do you repeat a positive mantra over and over? Do you simply tell yourself it isn’t true and ignore the sick feeling in your stomach? As I worked with my therapist using CBT-I I had become more aware of my negative thoughts about sleep, and I could catch them earlier on, but all that did was make me feel worse because I couldn’t change them. I still felt the same way. Taking away naps did not make a dent in falling asleep. In fact, I now felt so ill I didn’t know how much longer I could go on.

Hyperarousal is a primary symptom of CPTSD or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One of a host of symptoms for long term childhood trauma survivors, hyperarousal is one of the top reasons for insomnia. And as I have been personally working on insomnia this summer, hyperarousal has gotten in the way. In a big way! Hyperarousal occurs when a person’s body suddenly kicks into high alert as a result of past trauma. Also known as fight, flight, freeze or fawn, it is an automatic response. Even though there may be no present danger, pathways laid down in the early years of life continue to operate. How do I explain this? Let me begin with a story from my own childhood.

I am in the process of leaving behind my life as a vampire. Staying up all night, snoozing during the day. It’s hard becoming human. I’ve lived as a vampire so long, I hardly noticed it. But now, as I seek healing, I’m seeing just how difficult it is to change. For decades, I stayed up nearly all night until exhaustion forced me to pass out the next day. My brain interpreted the setting of the sun as a cue to churn. Sometimes I could last as long as 4AM. Other times I’d finally pass out around 2. Waking multiple times in the night, nightmares, panic attacks all added to the fun. During the day, if I got quiet at all or sat down to read or watch TV, I fell asleep. I lived in a permanent haze of jet lag.

So I’m driving down the road on the way to Wal-Mart for a pick up order. Avoiding the traffic out front, I drove around back and parked in spot #1. I pressed #1 on my iphone parking graphic and sat back to wait. Looking up, I noticed an odd bit of graffiti I had never seen before. Across from the parking lot was a train track lined by a chain link fence and across from that was a red brick wall. I had parked in this same spot a thousand times. There had never been any graffiti on that wall before. But there it was emblazoned in black spray paint.

“I wish I could sing.”

How do you find a healthy connection to the past? One reason childhood trauma is so difficult is the unique relationship we have with what has gone before. It is extremely complicated. Due to the nature of abuse, events become frozen in time, as if they are still happening in the present. Trying to make sense of what has happened is like picking through a knotted ball of yarn the size of a house.