The resignification of my Trauma

 

This is a story that I have been trying to tell for 9 years, and I think I am ready now. This is a story of the most important and valuable moment in my life so far. It is probably a story that I will regurgitate in many ways in future posts, and I will often make reference to this experience, so I feel like I should try to get if off my chest early on in this blog’s life.

The day was the first of April 2015, just ten days after getting married to my husband, Dave. We were newlyweds and on top of the moon, having just returned from vacation and we had been invited to a friend’s house for a barbecue. It was to be our first time out with friends as a married couple, and I remember how excited and happy I was to introduce my new husband to many friends who had not yet met him.

I remember the sunset as we drove over the hills to my friend, Daena’s (Daena Weeks – go check her out on SoundCloud, she is an incredible musician) house. The most beautiful sunset that I have ever seen. The clouds all had a spectacular golden lining as the low sun hit them from behind. We had a wonderful evening. Great food and company, with friends that I had not seen in a long time, as I had been living in the UK for 6 months before we got married back in Namibia. Another of my best friends, Dominic, had brought his ukulele and they were jamming music as we drank and ate and had a merry, carefree evening.

Towards the end of the night, when people started heading home, a few of us decided to continue the fun, and take the music into town. The idea was to have an impromptu performance outside one of the clubs in town. Dominic drove in a first car, Dave and I in the second, and Daena and Marco in the third. There is a hill that one has to drive over to move from our suburbs into the city. Dominic was a few minutes ahead of the rest of us, as Daena and Marco were following behind me and I drive like a snail.

I had driven over this hill a thousand times. But this night, as I drove over the hill and the nose of my car crested over the peak, out of nowhere, arms and legs crashed into the windshield in front of Dave’s face.  I slammed on the brakes as I screamed and watched the tiny crumpled body fly off my car and land in the road in front of me. I continued to scream as I jumped out of my car and ran over to the lump in the road. I continued to scream as I checked for a pulse in the body of the little old lady that was crumpled up in a ball in front of my car. I continued to scream and scream as I realised that she was dead, and I continued to scream as I called the police and my father.

I continued to scream as I sat next to the road, and I waited for the police. Daena and Marco were in the car behind me, so they had stopped immediately when I did and were trying to comfort me with Dave. My father was there in 5 minutes, as our house is very close. Some people that were driving past, stopped. I remember a taxi stopping and asking if he could take the 6 pack of beer that was on the back seat, as it wouldn’t look good when the police arrived. I remember another lady, Marai, also stopping. She had been a stranger to me at that point, but she stopped and cared and held me for a while, while I continued to howl and scream. Everyone tried to comfort me, but what could anyone really say, when the reality was really that bad? Nothing. I was inconsolable. The reality was that I killed someone. I killed Magdalena.

I don’t know how long we waited for the police to arrive, but when they did finally arrive, I had to do a breathalyzer. I knew that I wasn’t drunk, as I had only had the welcoming drink and one beer the whole night, since I was always the designated driver, as I had a car. What I didn’t consider was that my body is pretty small, and one beer and the welcoming drink may actually place me over the limit. I blew on the machine, and it tested exactly on the legal limit. They made me blow again – spot on the legal limit. The officer commented that they could probably prosecute me if they could do blood tests immediately, but driving to the hospital for blood tests would also take time and it would be more likely that I test even lower. They ended up taking me to the police station to open the case, instead of to the hospital for blood tests. By God’s grace, I was saved from spending the following years in jail for murder. If the police had arrived any sooner, I may have tested over the legal limit and the result would have been a culpable homicide charge. Regardless if I ended up there or not, I fully believed that I deserved to be in jail for what I had done.

I would like to preface my healing journey by saying that prior to this event, I had already been diagnosed with BPD (borderline personality disorder), also known as EUPD (emotionally unstable personality disorder) or EID (emotional intensity disorder). This has had a lovely collection of impacts in my life and how I function, but that is a story for another time. For now, I want to focus on one of  the main result of this personality disorder – which is to feel emotions extremely intensively and deeply, with an inability to emotionally regulate properly.

My inability to regulate my emotions became evident over the following months. Of course, I suffered from PTSD, and would constantly see people jumping into the middle of the road in front of my car. For a long time I was too scared to drive at night, and too scared to cross over that hill. For the first few months, I screamed out in grief, randomly and uncontrollably and I spent hours crying every day. I didn’t want to see any people. I thought everyone judged me. I judged me. In the beginning I hated myself so deeply. I wanted to exchange places with Magdelena and I wished that I was dead instead of her. I thought I was cursed by the universe. I questioned why me? Why did I decide to go? Why did I drive that road?

I received trauma counselling in the first week after the accident, and it was explained to me that I would be going through the phases of grief, and it could take many years, but that my heart will lighten with time. I didn’t believe my heart would lighten. But actually, I didn’t want my heart to lighten. I felt that I deserved all the grief that I was experiencing and more. I deserved to be dead in the road instead of her... There was no denial for me, I skipped that phase of the grief cycle and went straight into bargaining. I was bargaining with myself for forgiveness. I was considering what I could do to make up for this atrocity that I had committed by accident. Accident or not – What happened happened, and I knew that Magdelena’s family would hold me responsible and would hate me for the rest of my life and nothing that I could ever do, could ever bring their mother/grandmother back.... But I continued to bargain for forgiveness with my heart.

Daena said something to me, about Magdalena being free from her old limiting body, how she was stretching out her wings to take of and soar high above the mountains like a bird. This sparked me to get a tattoo of a colourful bird on my arm. I wanted to have a reminder to carry her with me everyday, in a place where I could easily see her while I was driving. She would remind me never to drink and drive, and to be extra mindful and cautious at all times while my hands were on my steering wheel. I asked Norman, my tattoo artist, just to draw a random, nonspecific colourful rainbow bird on my arm. And he did the design directly on me with sharpies and spent 4 hours realising it in ink.

Dave was my rock. He once joked that there is nothing that brings a couple together like shared trauma, and I don’t know if that runs true, but having him there and having him feel me and understand me on that level, was vital for me continuing further. He held me and supported me through a million breakdowns. The following year, around the same time as the accident date, I started feeling unstable, and it turned out I was pregnant. What should have been nothing but joy and happiness, gave me deep pangs of guilt. How dare I feel joy. But regardless of the guilt, I had a little boy, and he taught me the meaning of happiness. I thought I would never be able to feel true happiness again. But there it was, in the form of a tiny little body named Sylvain. He was my little lifesaver. Every time I have ever felt like I was drowning. Every time I have ever felt depressed or even suicidal – I carried on walking for his sake.

I carried on walking through the years, and every day Magdalena was with me. I could feel her in my heart. I could see her on lying on the street. The images burned into my memory. Spontaneous crying is my specialty. I think about her family. I think about her friends and loved ones.  and every year around the same time, I would have a period of mental and emotional instability. For someone with with my cocktail of personality disorder, it meant that I was having bouts of mania, depression, rage, dissociation and self harm. I was blowing up friendships and relationships and just generally suffering from guilt, insecurity and self hatred.

2020 was the 5 year mark, and when I started becoming unstable in March, I just put it down to pandemic anxiety. Humanity was suffering a global trauma and I immediately recognised the trauma response initiate in people. My family lost our income and my own anxiety levels skyrocketed. I knew something huge was coming, but I didn’t know what. During this time, I started trauma counselling people, because so many people were in such a desperate state, but I think I was subconsciously also reminding myself because I was also in an absolutely desperate state. I decided that I would get some qualifications after the chaos died down, so that I could learn to help myself and the people that I interact with, better.

At some point towards the end of March, I woke up one day, and started feeling like I was having a new and profound perspective on everything that I thought about. It started with me waking up one morning and observing a mosquito, landing on my hand. I lifted my other hand, about to kill her, when I saw the mountains behind her, which were green and luscious. In that moment, it dawned on me that Dave had told me that male mosquitos, just like bees, are vital pollinators that make the grasses and the trees green, and here I am, about to kill her, but her job is so vital for the health of the Earth. I will definitely write more about mosquitos, how we wouldn’t have chocolate without them and many other realisations that I had during that time, in future blogs.

 I don’t quite know how to express or explain my perspective shift, besides that it felt like there were windows in my mind and the curtains were finally opened; I could understand what the world really looked like for the first time. The more things I thought about, the more clarity I gained and the more I understood. As a result of feeling such amazing mental clarity and understanding, I stopped sleeping, because my mind refused to stop thinking and considering more things. Initially I tried to sleep, but there was no stopping the thoughts I was having and there was no way for me to calm my mind down. In the first few days, I tried to take sleeping pills, but when I still couldn’t fall asleep I just surrendered into being awake. My mind felt like it was expanding. I felt like capacity for understanding was growing.

 Around that time, I was also working on an art design, as I had entered and been accepted into a group art exhibition. The design was a big triangle fractal that I had enjoyed many times, represented as a giant 3D stained glass sculpture. I will add a picture at the top. My mind rolled over the meaning of fractal geometry and what that means for us. What that makes us within the bigger picture of everything. I thought smaller and smaller than I had ever considered. First the atom, just a dot buzzing with energy from our perspective, to the millions and billions of atoms that make up a cell, and then the millions and billions of cells and microorganisms and make up my body, and then the millions and billions of plants and organisms, including me, that it takes to make our host, the Earth. I continued this expansion by thinking bigger and bigger than I had ever imagined, until I could see the Earth as nothing but a point buzzing with energy like an atom within a cell, and the universe being nothing but a cell within the body of whatever is everything that we are all a part of... Take a breath...

Yes, I had to consider myself deeply. I was raised within the Christian religion, but I had turned away from my religion in my early 20’s, as there were some critical points that I could not accept or agree with within religion in general. Mostly I couldn’t understand and agree or support anything that would preach love and acceptance and peace, but that would cause and create so much death and conflict over the ages... That is another story for another day, but the point is that I left religion behind, exchanged for science and fact and math. Now all of a sudden, my favourite geometric fractal was showing me that we are in the body of something?! In the body of God?! Afterall, in Christianity, I learned that God is Almighty... ALL MIGHTY.... That means GOD IS EVERYTHING. How did I not understand this before? Do my cells know that they are in my body? Or are they just trying their best to do their job as best as they can? How did I never recognise the body that we are all a part of?

And I guess that is a little taster for you of what my head was doing to me. I carried on thinking and thinking, and staying awake and not sleeping. By the night of 5 days of being awake and hardly eating, I remember I had made peace with death and the fact that everyone will die, and that it is totally fine.  I decided that I want to run away from home into the nature, so that I can sit and think myself to death and reconnect to everything that we are a part of; just surrender into the clarity and understanding and connection that I was feeling. My energy or frequency was so high, I remember feeling my body and skin vibrating. The pressure built up and built up and at the exact time of the accident, all the tension and energy in my body felt like it exploded through my being, my soul, my cells – up my spine and out into everything. I looked at the time and saw the date and finally understood what was happening to me was related to Magdalena and the accident, though I still had no idea what was happening.

Needless to say, my family and friends were very worried about me. I was chatting to a doctor living in Germany at the time, and he recognised that I was off my rocker, so he kept stressing out and checking in. On the 6th day, my brother checked me into a psychiatric hospital. They said due to the lack of sleep, I was experiencing a psychotic breakdown. I was telling my best friend that her daughter was going to die, and it was okay. I was completely delusional, and by the time that I went to the hospital, I thought that I was going to die if I went to sleep, so I was fighting with the nurses who wanted to sedate me. I did sleep though. Sleep was good. The sleep was so incredibly good. The hospital was so quiet, and with the medication they gave me, I slept so easily.

At the hospital, we had a full schedule everyday of exercise and different therapies every day. It was at the hospital that I learned about mindfulness and mindful meditation, which was the beginning of my meditation journey. I met some lovely souls while there, and I believe we all impacted each other positively. Life was very easy in the hospital and I didn’t have to worry about anything. When I came out of the hospital three weeks later, The first shock that I encountered, was that my best friend and my brother had completely cleaned out and reorganised my space in the house. It threw me off in the worst possible way, but the downward spiral was inevitable. I had been allowed to understand the point and purpose of everything, but I didn’t understand the point and purpose of myself within it all.

It threw me into what some might call a darkest night of the soul. The deepest darkest depression I have ever felt. I felt a desolate, disconnected abandon from the beautiful connected purposeful truth that I had felt and understood, just a few weeks before. I wanted to die more than ever. I wanted to let go of this separated, individualistic experience on earth, and reconnect to everything that we are a part of. Reconnect to the unconditional and almighty Love that is God.

 
As if she was called, a deadly Datura plant, bloomed in my backyard. Datura is also known as the Devils Trumpet or Hells Bells and is very poisonous, common plant that grows wild here during the rainy seasons. That devils trumpet sure did tempt me. It called me in the night when I would lie in bed crying about my existence. I remember sharing a poem about my temptation and desires to die on Facebook, and a dear friend called Morne that I had not spoken to in many years, reached out to me out of the blue. He said that he sensed that I needed to join the meditation workshop that he was about to offer. I didn’t have any money, but he said it would be a gift that I could pay forward to three people in the future. (Email namibseed@gmail.com to contact Morne Venter, for anyone that may be interested in taking his meditation journeys.)

The Journey Together, was a journey into ourselves. It was a 4 week workshop, in which we were guided to create spaces within our subconscious. Spaces where we could go to process and experience certain things. Spaces where we could go to ask questions and find meaning and understanding within ourselves. He called it inner child healing, and it is some deep shadow work. The first guided meditation was regarding Earth, during which we did grounding exercise of turning into a tree and sourcing love and energy from within the heart of mother Earth. The next one was for water, the element of emotion, in which we were guided to where we were to release pent up emotions. The following was air, and we climbed our highest mountain, were I could speak to our soul and ask questions.
 I asked my question – “What is my point? What is my purpose on this planet? “
Soul answered me – “Your point is Love. Your purpose is to love everyone, love every experience, love every moment, love everything. Your ultimate purpose is to Love openly, freely and deeply.”

This was the answer the answer that I needed to hear in that moment. I felt like my life had gained a purpose in that instant. The workshop continued and the final week was called the cave of treasures, and was regarding the element of fire. In this final meditation, we met a dragon, that presented us with a gift of an egg, which we could absorb into our third eye. The moment that egg went into my third eye, the gift that I gained, was a vision from a different life, as vivid and real as any memory that I have had in this life... In this vision, I had nothing. I was dressed in broken bits of cloth and I was laying on the side of the street and people were walking past me, and I was dirty  and hungry and I had nothing. Even though the me that was laying on the floor had absolutely nothing, I could feel love beating in my heart. I could feel love coursing through my veins. I could feel my purpose of love, being alive, even in that wretched state, and the love in my heart made everything okay. Everything was okay. Every experience was okay, because that is all it is. It is just an experience. Every experience was being had, every possible experience, and it is all ok, because through it we learn and we grow. It is all okay, because ultimately we are all a part of the same almighty one being that is made from unconditional love.

Through this guided meditation journey and the subsequent spiritual healing journey that I have been on since, I learned to accept myself and to love myself with all of my flaws. I learned to accept and love myself in spite of the accident I had... I learned that every experience has value and purpose and I understood the value and purpose that Magdalena had on my perception and understanding and experience of this world. I could reach a place where I could thank Magdalena for being there in the road that night, and I can be grateful that I was blessed with such a difficult and lifechanging experience here on earth and I can freely say that I love my experience and I love it even when I am depressed or heartbroken. I am learning to love everything. 

It has been 4 years since 2020, and that first meditation journey, 9 years since the accident. My entire life has changed. My entire way of experiencing reality has changed. Now I live to embrace every day with light and love. I wish happiness into every interaction. It is not surprising that the bird that Norman drew on my arm, looks so much like a phoenix, because she is that for me. When she died, in that moment, a very big part of me died with her and we were reborn together in someway. I feel her with me, everyday. Through the process of healing and feeling her death. Allowing myself to feel and grieve her death fully... I managed to learn so much gain such a beautiful new perspective and purpose in life, that my entire future reality will be infinitely better regardless of what I may face in life. Facing the grief and walking through it has given me new direction, perspective, purpose and drive in my life. I follow my intuition completely now and I have had to give new recognition to thoughts and practices which I would have blindly dismissed in the past, due to a lack of science. In the last two years I have studied life coaching, hypnotherapy, Akashic reading, meditation facilitation, Reiki and I am in process of a bunch of other courses and learning how to throat sing. Everything I do today is in preparation for tomorrow and I am shaping my future in some way that I don’t even know yet. My intuition just tells me what to do and what to learn, and that is what I am doing.  

The worst experience of my life has become the most life-changing and important. The most powerful medicine is found inside your darkest moments. By facing them, allowing yourself to feel and experience the grief, so that you may heal from it, you are healing yourself and your lineage. By directing your mind to consider your darkest experiences as something that you can learn so much from. Something to grow from. Something that will make you strong and prepare you for your future You can make the positive and lasting changes in your life that can break the cycles and empower your existence.