Somebody’s Child

By Amy Smyth Miller

My therapist asked me to make a timeline of the events of my life, both the good and the bad. I asked her, “What if I can’t remember any good ones?” She told me to write down the ones I could remember. That was my first experience with trauma therapy, Lifespan Integration Therapy to be exact.

I was a therapy veteran. I’d had almost thirty years of therapy off and on—mostly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I’d worked my way through two divorces and struggled with work relationships and friendships. We rarely spoke about my childhood in those early years of therapy, focusing on the here and now, and I was fine with that. I’d been running away from my yesterdays for as long as I could remember.

I preferred to keep my shameful past to myself; that was until it came leaking out around the edges of my life. I’d finally managed to find “the one,” and I began to realize that something from my history was threatening to destroy everything I’d built. It was time for something different. That’s how I ended up googling “trauma therapy” and how I ended up in my therapist’s office.

I didn’t understand then about emotional flashbacks. I thought my overreactions were a character defect, something I needed to be able to control, but somehow couldn’t manage to find a way to do. My therapist confirmed what I’d begun to suspect; I had complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The timeline unraveled the pieces of my life I’d been hiding for over fifty years: a father with antisocial personality disorder, a mother with suspected borderline personality disorder, moves across seven states that included periodic homelessness, twenty different schools by the time I was fourteen, and parental addiction. I may have been a child, but as the oldest daughter of seven children, I didn’t get to be one.

The timeline also revealed large blank spaces because dissociation had become a way of coping with the trauma. That was the most difficult thing for me to accept: that there were pieces of my life that I truly could not remember. By the end of trauma therapy, most of those had been filled in, but I know now that some will be lost to me forever—not a sign of weakness, but a sign that my brain intuitively knew that those memories were too much, and that keeping them from conscious memory was a way of keeping me safe. 

One of the best results of trauma therapy was the positive memories I was able to retrieve. Stilling the pervasive anxiety and fear that I encountered daily helped me to create space for those happy childhood memories that helped shape the person I am today—friends, caring adults, and special times that I can now recall and that remind me that I deserved the good things in life, and I was worthy of them because it didn’t matter who my parents were, I was somebody’s child.

Every child has potential, if only we give them the nurturing, the environment, and the emotional support they need to grow and thrive. Some of us have to go back and reclaim the children we were, and nurture them forward so we can heal. It’s difficult work, but it’s worth it.

About the Author

Survivor Amy Smythe Miller is nationally recognized educator with a bachelor's degree in special education and a master’s degree in counseling, working in Washington State. Her essays have appeared in The Muleskinner’s Journal, Women on Writing, Persimmon Tree, Whatcom Writes Anthology: Legacies, and The Healing and CPTSD Chronicles. Her book may be purchased from Bookshop.org.