Days Without Incident: Two

Please don’t forget to read the trigger warnings and avoid posts as neccisary! Reach out if you need a trigger-less summary of today’s story.

Trigger warnings: divorce, incest, molestation

When it comes to psychological or sociological studies performed during the early 90s and 2000s—when mental health was finally getting the spotlight it deserved in our medical industry—the patient's relationship with their mother was used quite often as a variable for research. Mothers play an integral role in shaping our relationship with our emotions as well as our attachment styles. Our relationship with our mothers can alter our cognitive development, teach us about resilience (or the lack thereof), and contribute to our overall well-being, setting us on a path that will directly impact our future development, relationships, and even our mental and physical health (Lee, 2025).

I’m sure you’ve heard of the three basic attachment styles: anxious, avoidant, and secure. When the caregiver in question is unable to put their own issues aside when raising their children, and they rely on their kids to provide some sort of help during difficult situations like divorce, domestic disputes, economic struggles, and so on, the attachment style becomes “disorganized.” The child relies on the mother for basic caregiving necessities, but simultaneously seeks to avoid them to protect themselves from the pain or stress. This doesn’t just apply to abusive parents. This can be applied to any parent who is too wrapped up in their own past traumas to offer proper comfort and protection for their kids (M.H. Van Ijzendoorn et al, 1999). 

My mother relied on me a lot when I was a kid. To this day, her greatest argument as to why I should put aside my own thoughts and feelings and break the silence is that “we have always been so close” or she has “always been able to rely on me.” So then what changed? When I started reading more about disorganized attachment and the effects it has on all aspects of life including my relationships and my own mental health, I started to feel resentful. If my mother had been able to navigate her divorce without twelve-year-old me’s help, do you think she would have cared a little more when my therapist told her that her new boyfriend’s kid was molesting me on a nightly basis?

Seeing as she urged me not to press charges, as it would negatively affect her new relationship, I’d say no, probably not. I didn’t have an outlet to find comfort in. I continued to bear this nightly pain until eventually my step sister went to high school and moved in with her mother across town. By then, I was already finding solace from my profound depression, confusion, and anxiety by engaging in bizarre self-harming behaviors. My experience had left this empty hole inside of me, and I didn’t have the vocabulary or the support to properly deal with these intense feelings of bewilderment—not understanding the barrier between love and terror—all taking place within a home I no longer felt safe in.

  For every soldier serving in an active war zone abroad, ten children are endangered in their own homes. Oftentimes, these children are left hurt and confused—unable to protest—wondering if they are now considered a victim or a willing participant (D.G. Kilpatrick and B.E. Saunders, 1997). 

I have seen many different healthcare professionals in my twenty-five years of life, but I don’t think I ever told another therapist about what happened to me in my childhood house. Traumatized by the immediate disregard from my mother, I chose to bury those memories deep within the floor-to-ceiling shelves of my mental library: The Hub of Repressed Memories. It wasn’t until August 2022 that I began to realize not only were these memories still buried within me, but they still have profound impacts on my daily life. August 2022, I had to face my step sister again for the first time since 2017 at my mother’s murder trial. Everything came to a boil, and I started having dreams, flashbacks, and much more. When my fiance would brush his hand across my leg or try to initiate intimacy, I would become outraged. Why couldn’t he understand that being touched in that way was triggering something inside me? It took a lot of long conversations for us to work through this period. But that can be a story for next week.

Let’s get back to August of 2022. It didn’t help that my mother only conveniently remembered my traumatic events once she realized she could use them to her benefit. Three days into my mother’s murder trial—again, we’ll get to all of this in due time, just bear with me—she called from the jail she was being held in. She sounded desperate, and she kept going on about how worried she was with the jury, the judge, her shitty lawyer, and so on. I just gave my one or two “uh huh”’s to hurry the fifteen minutes along, but she said something that made me freeze. I remember literally feeling ice cold. 

“You know, since your step brother is taking the stand as a character witness, you should really consider doing that for me. Maybe you could even bring up how your step sister used to molest you? That could discredit their claims against me and make them look bad.”

I remember calling my dad afterwards. He had no idea about any of it. We both sat on the phone and cried for a few minutes—maybe it was hours—before he told me that I don’t ever have to do a damn thing that would make me relive those memories. I believe that’s when I started to examine my relationship with my mother in a new light. 

I got COVID that same December and was bedridden for three months. I had ear infections in both ears, and I had developed two masses on my neck. This was when my battle with my physical health began, along with my journey to understand my body’s relationship to trauma. You see, attempts to maintain control over intense physiological reactions can result in a lowered immune system, a plethora of different physical symptoms, and make you susceptible to other autoimmune diseases. Trauma treatment must focus on both the body as well as the mind. Our nervous system flows through our entire bodies, which means our organs are in constant contact with the most damaged part of our body: the brain (Harmon, 2025). 

Once we understand our relationship to the traumatic event, we can begin learning how to interact with our thoughts and emotions in a healthier way. As it stands right now, these emotions still have a heavy grip on my body and soul. It is going to take some serious work to reorganize my neural pathways and create new connections that will produce a more positive outlook. It may feel like we’ve taken a few steps back, but one must in order to understand the past and move forward into the future. I’m not asking you to retraumatize yourself. And if these stories do retraumatize you in any way, I urge you to stop reading, or at least consult the trigger warnings at the top of each post. This is my path to awareness, not self-pity. 

Let’s hear it for day two! 

Works cited:

Lee, 2025 https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/mother-child-relationships-and-child-development#:~:text=The%20mother%2Dchild%20relationship%20also,support%20their%20child's%20educational%20endeavors.

M.H. Van Ijzendoorn, 1999 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16506532/ 

D.G. Kilpatrick and B.E. Saunders, 1997 https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/prevalence-and-consequences-child-victimization-results-national-survey 

Harmon, 2025 https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/psychoneuroimmunology#:~:text=Psychoneuroimmunology%20(PNI)%20is%20a%20scientific,help%20it%20ward%20off%20sickness.