Hope Architect

Welcome. I am so glad you are here. Before we get started I’m going to preface this story with a trigger warning.
This story will cover the following topics:

– Abandonment
– Childhood trauma
– Family Trauma
– Suicide
– Suicidal Thoughts
– Obsessive thoughts
– Pictures of dogs

That last line was a joke, but your mental health is not. If you feel as though any of this story makes you feel uncomfortable please take an adult time out and stop reading. This story will always be here, it might just not be the right time for you to read this, and that’s okay!

The following story will take place through my eyes at different ages, ranging from three all the way through to my current ripe old age of twenty-six. This story isn’t going to be a beautifully crafted masterpiece, if it was it would’ve taken me a whole year to get this out! I do include some references to my therapeutic model (Internal Family Systems) I have used for the last five years all throughout this article, initially I wanted to pull it out, but I knew that it wouldn’t honour the hard work I have done.

I am feeling a range of emotions as I make this story public but what I feel the most of right now is just proud. I will no longer hide my story in the darkness, instead I’m going to put this out there and hope that someone reads this when they are in a time of need and it gives them the courage they need to keep going.

Lets do this.

three years old…

I’m walking with my mum into the local hospital in Brisbane, its just like any other day, I’m 3 years old and everything is so interesting! Why are all the old people in here unable to move very quickly, what’s happened to the young man who was staring at me as we walked through the hospital? I can see doctors in the distance, I’m so excited I can’t wait to play with the thing around their neck and listen to my heartbeat, last time I did this it was so much fun! I hear the sound of my Mum’s voice as she turns to me and takes me into a room, she says “Kierin can you please sit here on this bed and wait for me to come back”, “Of course I can!” I reply. I see her walk off into the hallway and disappear. Not a minute has passed and I am already so distracted, there’s a machine with numbers on it, I have to touch it so I run over and press the button and it makes a loud beeping noise, how cool! About 15 minutes pass and I’ve already gotten bored of touching everything in the room, where’s my Mum? I know she will be back soon because she said she would be.

A nurse walks into the room and asks me “Are you here by yourself?”, “I’m just waiting for my Mum she told me she will be back soon”I reply. I see the look on her face change from the smile that she walked in with to an odd look, she lets me know she’d be right back and walks out the door. After what felt like an eternity had passed the same nurse returned to the room with a doctor right behind her, and the best bit was he was wearing that hearing device around his neck, my attention span didn’t last long on that device though because he had brought lollies with him! I was so distracted I’d forgotten to ask the most important question. I looked him in the eyes and asked “Where is my Mum?”. He looks me straight in the eyes and in the saddest voice tells me “ I’m sorry kiddo but your Mum has left you here, she cant take care of you anymore, I’m going to have to ask you to wait here until I find someone to come and get you”. I can feel my face getting warm and the tears beginning to stream down my face as I come to the realisation that the one person who was supposed to always be there for me had left me behind.

My Mum never came back, and I didn’t see her for a number of years. Completely unknown to my younger self the above events were the first of many abandonment wounds that would sit under the surface until rising up in a variety of ways in my teenage years. The below two paragraphs will take you through a triggering event I had at 19 years of age, the point where the constant chatter in my head and the overwhelming fear that everyone would leave me rose to the surface.

19 years old…

I’ve just lost one of my childhood friends to suicide, I’m really struggling in coming to terms with the loss and I am in the midst of starting a new relationship with someone. At this point the little voices in my head start as they did with all of my previous relationships I had as a teenager “What if I don’t love her?”, “What if she leaves me?”, “Why would she want to be with me?”, “What if she doesn’t love me?”.  The panic is beginning to set in, I’ve had these thoughts in the past and they’ve never gone away instead they generally become worse. I know that I’m not going to be able to shake these thoughts and I’m scared I’ll forever be stuck in this thought pattern again. I’m ready to call it quits, I just lost someone I absolutely adored, I feel completely alone in Sydney and I don’t have many friends. I have limited relationships with most of my family and I feel like I’m not going to be able to start this relationship because I wont be able to shake the obsessive thoughts I know are just about to regain their power over me. A small part of me has always wanted to die, maybe it’d be easier if I just leant back into that and end things so I don’t have to experience the thoughts. However having just lost my friend to suicide it’s really made me start to think about whether or not that’s the best way to go, I sit down with my partner and have a very vulnerable conversation with her, this is the first time I have ever told anyone whats going on inside of my mind.

After this conversation I make an agreement to seek help, the first avenue I choose to seek help from? Doctor Google of course! I am hammering out google searches all the while trying to find contact numbers for anyone that will help me, surely my mind won’t always be this bad, will it? Will I always feel like the people that love me don’t really love me? Will I always feel as if I’m not worthy of anybody’s love? Will I always feel like I should die? Will the voices in my mind always sound like they hate me? Will I ever feel like I can love myself? After two weeks of searching I find a counsellor who I had completed one session with about a year before, I had run away after that first session because it was so scary and getting home to only have the voices inside of my mind get louder wasn’t what I wanted. I make a commitment to myself that I will do this for six months and see if I notice any difference.

I’ll cover the process I went through to seek help in another story, this was difficult and I know that it generally is for everybody.

At 19 years of age it was quite scary to feel as alone as I did and have no safe place to go, not even in my own head. I know that this is a reality for a lot of people and I was really fortunate to get help the way that I did, I worked really hard for a number of years on working on what may seem like quite simple things to people but were really just not known to me. I learnt how to become assertive, how to start to speak about my needs when they weren’t been met and I learnt how to stay grounded whenever a part of me wanted to dissociate me from my body. Throughout all of that time I was with someone who helped me grow in ways that I never thought were possible, sadly though some relationships don’t make it when you are re-building the foundations in your mind and learning about what your values are in life. This was one of them.

24 years old…

It’s February 14th 2017 and just three months ago I ended a relationship of almost 4 years. A relationship that to me was my saving grace and had so much meaning to it, but it was a relationship of two people who just had very big differences in the way they saw the world. Throughout the six months prior to ending the relationship I had sat with a tremendous amount of guilt & shame for a mistake that I’d made. A mistake that I couldn’t talk about with my partner as I just didn’t have the courage, instead I decided to try and hold onto it internally. The pain of holding onto this and looking into her eyes was tearing me apart, I couldn’t do it anymore, so I made the choice to leave. Throughout the last three months I haven’t felt much, until today I had been quite numb, almost as if everything was buried beneath the surface. We went out to dinner for valentines day and she told me she no longer wanted anything to do with me. The reality of everything is setting in, the voices in my mind begin to grow louder but this time because of the work I’d done in therapy I had some tools to use to help me understand what was actually going on in my head. Today was an interesting day because for the first time a voice that usually scares the hell out of me came to the surface quite aggressively and instead of running from it I made a u-turn and faced it head on and befriended it.

This part of me had a role throughout my entire life to make me feel numb in order to block loneliness from coming to the surface. It had been triggered today because of the realisation that my ex-girlfriend was never coming back. After spending time with this part of me and really hearing what it had to say, it showed me that it protected severe memories of pain and was still living in the hospital my Mum had left me in all those years ago. I walked towards that pain and I bore witness to the events of Mum leaving me at three years old, I saw the distraught little boy who was completely lost without his mother. Instead of running from these memories I entered the memory as me at my age now and asked him what he needed from me while also letting him know that he didn’t deserve what had happened to him, he let me know that he needed someone to take care of him and never leave him. I looked him dead in the eye and told him that for the rest of his life he will always have me, I will never go anywhere and anything he needs from me he will always get. We cried together for about an hour, and he let go of the pain he was holding onto and joined me in the present moment with a new role, a role where he would spread love throughout my internal system. The part of me who was numbing also let go of his role and opened the flood gates to the rest of my emotions that had been buried beneath the surface.

The previous two paragraphs highlight one of the biggest turning points of my life, for so long I had run away from the thoughts and emotions that would come to the surface. Taking that first leap and hitting it head on with compassion and love gave me access to an energy that I had only ever felt in snippets. You know that energy you get when you are doing an activity that you really love? Where you feel as though you don’t even have to think about what you’re doing as your body is just doing it for you? Where your mind is flowing and you feel free? I had gained access to an energy that felt just like that, I all of a sudden knew what I had to do to take care of myself without exerting any energy.

26 years old…

As a 26 year old it’s beautiful to finally sit down and watch a Mum give love to their kid and not feel the pangs of abandonment or the forthcoming feelings of my mind trying to dissociate from my body so I don’t have to feel the pain. Parts of me had some incredibly painful roles growing up, they protected me from so much pain and I am grateful for what they used to do for me. I’m equally as grateful to those parts that now play very different roles, such as the one that’s helping me write this with fluency and giving me creative words to use and different ways to structure my sentences, to the part of me that sees a person on the street who looks upset and stops them in their tracks to ask if they are ok.

Throughout my time in therapy I have done a lot of work on restructuring the way I see the world, the 19 year old kid who walked into therapy barely able to talk about any of his pain would be so proud of the person that is now typing this story. My journey of recovering is always ongoing, I know that one day my time in therapy will come to an end, but between now and then I still have a lot of work to do. The biggest achievement I have ever made in my life is to befriend the voices inside of my mind and give love to the places inside of my body that had never felt love. For the most part of my life now my mind is quite clear, I have relationships with my friends that are so pure and full of love. I have a relationship with my Mum that is as deep as I know it can be, she has suffered from schizophrenia for almost twenty seven years and I accepted the reality that the close mother-son relationship I wanted with her would never come to fruition, but I could still build something that would be what I needed and that allowed me to move on with my life. I am surrounded by strong women, be it at work or in my personal life and they have given to me the motherly touches that I missed out on. I am forever grateful to the people in my life who are always here for me. I couldn’t have done this without all of you.

Who’d have known, as soon as I started to ask the painful feelings why they felt the way they did that my life would change so much.

Kierin