She's 25.

Months of Parts Work Therapy has been integral in my trauma response evolvement

I put my hand on my stomach and take slow, measured breaths.

My stomach hurts in a way that’s intimately familiar. I panic. We’re in the middle of a child’s birthday party and have an afternoon full of plans. I can’t disrupt everything. I can’t be an inconvenience. I don’t want to disappoint my daughter.

I step outside and feel the sun on my face. It’s only April but today it feels like summer. I exhale.

She’s 25 - the part of me that’s activated, the version that’s caused tears to form in the corners of my eyes. She’s immediately triggered. She’s spent the last two years getting sicker and sicker, perpetually vulnerable, and acutely aware how her maladies have interrupted her family’s lives.

She’s afraid of saying she has needs, ones that have just come up, ones that she couldn’t plan for, ones that will cause a tiny tidal wave in a loosely planned day.

She’s afraid of what it means to have needs, period.

In my mind I can picture her, sitting in a booth at an old diner no longer in business. Across from her were her grandparents, beside her was her mother, all of them asking the same questions - why can’t you just wait it out? Why do you have to run to the bathroom? Why hasn’t this been fixed yet? As if the undiagnosed autoimmune disease festering in her small intestine was something she asked for, something she caused, something she wasn’t trying desperately to treat.

That poor girl. They fractured what was left of her until her outsides splintered to match her insides.

She was alone then.

Today I am not her. It’s been 14 years since I was made to sit at that table.

In present day, I remember that I’ve built a life with people I’ve chosen and they are filled with compassion and understanding. They make space for me to have needs, even when those needs feel to me like an inconvenience or a hassle.

They ask me to acknowledge my needs, and then articulate them.

I exhale again, hand still firmly on my stomach, and I remember that I am here, today, and that I know how to make it through this moment without it derailing everything, without it derailing me.

I feel intense gratitude to the medicine and the people who have helped me get to this point - to be able to stop and observe and identify and connect. To remain neutrally present with the version of myself that panicked and upset.

I can do this.

I return to myself in this moment with new perspective, with understanding, with patience. It’s not her fault, 25 year old me. She was living inside a desperately unhealthy framework and had not yet learned how to resource or ground. She just knew how to survive - because they told her she had to.

Today I’m thankful she survived.

I’m thankful I survived.

It was close there for a while.