The Deepest Pain From The Wrong People: Story 27

“Some of the deepest pain in my life didn’t come from strangers, it actually came from the very people who were supposed to love me.

I’ve experienced dysfunctional family relationships, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, manipulation, triangulation, enabling, blame, people protecting the person who caused the most harm rather than acknowledging the person who was hurt by them.”

 

About Me

Hi, I’m Jessica Jones. I’m a mother, wife, survivor, a Somatic Bodyworker and Trauma Educator. But, for a long time, I was just a woman trying desperately to survive a life that taught me, from a very young age, that the world wasn’t always a safe place.

I’ve thought about writing my story so many times and every time I’ve started, I have wondered where I’m supposed to start.

 

Do I start with the child I was, the things I saw, the things that happened to me, the years I spent trying to make sense of the people who hurt me, the relationships that broke so many pieces of me, the losses, hospital rooms, anxiety, abandonment, depression, the times I didn’t want to be here anymore or do I start with the woman I am today.

Because the truth is, you can’t really understand the woman I’ve become without understanding the little girl who had to survive first, and I don’t want to tell this story to make people feel sorry for me because I don’t need pity.

 

What I needed for most of my life was someone to look at me and say that they believed me, that it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t deserve that or that I don’t have to carry all of it anymore.

So, that’s why I am finally telling it, because somewhere, there may be another person sitting with their own story, wondering whether anyone could ever understand and I want them to know that I understand.

 

What No Child Should Ever Experience

I grew up around things that no child should have had to understand.

There was domestic abuse, shouting, screaming, abandonment, sexual abuse, fear, alcohol, instability and adults struggling with their own pain while I was still learning what childhood was supposed to feel like.

I saw violence and people I loved hurting each other so I learnt very early on that someone’s mood could change the entire atmosphere of a room.

So I watched, listened, noticed footsteps, voices, facial expressions, doors opening and closing, the silence that came before something bad.

 

I was incredibly good at reading people, I could feel when something wasn’t right, I could sense changes in someone’s energy and I could tell when someone was angry before they even spoke.

At the time, I didn’t know the word hypervigilance, or that my nervous system was constantly scanning for danger.

I thought I was just more sensitive than other people, I thought I was just good at knowing people, but now I understand that sometimes what looks like intuition is usually a nervous system that became skilled at detecting threats.

When you grow up in an unpredictable environment, you learn to stay one step ahead, anticipate and prepare, because being unaware can feel dangerous.

 

 

Becoming Aware of My Surroundings

I slowly stopped being a child and became a watcher, listener, peacekeeper and the person who felt responsible for things that were never mine to carry.

I experienced sexual abuse and sexualised behaviour during my childhood, I’m not going to describe those experiences graphically because I don’t believe I need to expose every detail of my pain for you to understand what it did to me.

There are some things a child should never have to carry and there are some memories that stay inside the body for years after the mind tried to put them somewhere else.

 

 

Carrying the Weight

For years, I carried shame, confusion, fear, guilt and a deep sense that there was something wrong with me which is one of the cruelest things trauma does to us.

It makes a child look at what an adult did to them and decide that it must be because of them.

I carried this belief into adulthood. It followed me into relationships, friendships, work, family, motherhood and I didn’t even realise how much it had shaped me.

I became good at surviving. From the outside, I probably looked like someone who could cope with anything.

I worked all hours, I looked after people, I gave advice, I listened, I helped, I forgave, kept going, kept smiling, made myself useful and I became the person that people could always lean on.

But there’s a difference between coping and healing. I didn’t know that then, I just thought being strong meant needing nobody, that being independent meant never asking for help, being kind meant continually giving pieces of myself away.

 

I thought keeping the peace meant swallowing my own feelings, if I could just be understanding enough, be patient enough, helpful enough or good enough, then maybe people wouldn’t hurt me anymore, but my body knew something that my mind hadn’t understood yet.

I was exhausted, my jaw was tense, my shoulders were always raised, my chest could feel tight, my stomach would react to stress, I struggled to switch off, struggled to feel safe, struggled to trust and sometimes I didn’t even know why.

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Things Starting to Take Their Toll

Eventually, everything caught up with me and there were periods of anxiety, depression, feeling overwhelmed, panic, intrusive thoughts and I was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression.

There were times when I felt completely disconnected from myself, when getting through a normal day felt like I was climbing a mountain and there were moments when I reached a place so dark that I didn’t want to keep living.

I had suicidal thoughts, I felt exhausted by the weight of everything I had carried and there were moments when I genuinely wondered whether life would always feel this painful.

I don’t say that lightly and I don’t say it for sympathy. I say it because I want the person reading this who’s currently in that place to understand that the version of you that wants the pain to stop isn’t necessarily the same thing as the part of you that wants your life to end.

Sometimes you don’t want your life to disappear, you just want the suffering to stop, the fear to stop, the memories to stop and your body to stop feeling like it’s fighting a war every day.

I know that place and if you’ve never been there, I hope you never have to understand it.

But if you have, I want you to know that I am living proof that the darkest chapter doesn’t have to be the final chapter.

 

Losing Five Children

Pregnancy loss became another enormous part of my story and I lost five babies, five pregnancies, five little lives that I had already loved and there’s something uniquely painful about grieving for a person the rest of the world may never have had the opportunity to meet.

There were birthdays that never happened, names that were never called, plans that disappeared, dreams that had nowhere to go and grief that didn’t just live in my mind, but in my body.

 

Pregnancy, hospitals, medical procedures, waiting, fear, uncertainty, examinations and loss all became connected.

Medical trauma was a part of my story too because there were so many times when I didn’t feel completely safe inside my own body and I think that’s something a lot of people don’t understand.

You can be medically fine and still not feel emotionally safe, you can understand something logically and still have your body react like it’s happening all over again.

Your heart races, your stomach drops, your breathing changes, your muscles become tight and you want to escape. Your body remembers the vulnerability.

 

Taking Care of Myself

In 2024, I got to a point where I knew I needed to step away from work and focus on myself because I was struggling with my mental health and I needed some time to breathe, this is where something changed and I started healing in a way I never experienced before.

 

I started learning about trauma, the nervous system, the body, breath, Somatic Bodywork, grounding, meditation, trauma release exercises and I started listening to my body rather than constantly fighting it.

For the first time, I started to understand myself, the reactions I spent years judging weren’t random, the hypervigilance wasn’t weakness, the anxiety wasn’t me being dramatic, the freeze wasn’t laziness and the exhaustion wasn’t failure.

My body was always trying to protect me, it had been doing its absolute best with everything it had learnt and that realisation changed everything for me.

 

History Repeating Itself

Just when I thought I’d finally reached a safer place in my life, something happened that I never imagined would happen to me again and I was sexually harassed by my own manager at work.

At first, I couldn’t believe it, I tried to rationalise it and told myself I was probably making it bigger than it was.

That familiar trauma response returned and I kept thinking that maybe it’s just me, but the comments continued and eventually my body couldn’t pretend anymore. I left work after another incident and sought help, I reported what had happened and then came another difficult part of the experience which was that the investigation acknowledged that the comments had been made.

But because he said he hadn’t intended them in the way I experienced them, the situation was not treated in the way I believed it should have been which felt devastating, because I know what it feels like when someone says that they didn’t mean it that way, while you’re left carrying everything it caused.

 

It reminded me of something I learnt through so many experiences. Intention doesn’t erase the impact.

A person can say that they didn’t intend to hurt you and you can still feel hurt. I opened up to my manager about my own struggles and trusted him with pieces of my story because I wanted him to understand me as a person. Instead, I felt like my vulnerability had been seen as weakness.

 

Every Cloud Has Its Silver Lining

But through that experience I learnt something. I’m not weak because I’m vulnerable. I’m strong because I can keep an open heart after everything that tried to make me close.

Some of the deepest pain in my life didn’t come from strangers, it actually came from the very people who were supposed to love me. I’ve experienced dysfunctional family relationships, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, manipulation, triangulation, enabling, blame, people protecting the person who caused the most harm rather than acknowledging the person who was hurt by them.

One of the hardest things to accept was that sometimes people know something’s wrong, but they don’t want to face what acknowledging it would mean because if they admit the truth, they may have to admit they enabled it, they may have to apologise, change their relationship with someone or accept that keeping the peace came at somebody else’s expense.

 

So instead, I used to hear: “That’s just how they are, you just have to accept them, don’t make things worse – they’re still your family.”

I started to realise that sometimes ‘keeping the peace’ means asking myself to stay silent again and I couldn’t do that anymore, not just for myself but certainly not for my children.

 

Becoming A Parent

My children changed my life, they didn’t magically heal me or take my trauma away but they gave me something I always needed which was a reason to keep choosing life.

I looked at them and realised that I had the opportunity to create something different, I could give them the childhood I never had, I could comfort them, listen to them, believe them, apologise when I got things wrong, teach them that emotions are allowed, that boundaries are healthy, that they don’t have to earn love, that their bodies belong to them, that home should feel safe and the most profound lesson of all was that they taught me that I could become the adult my younger self had always needed.

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Sometimes I look at my children and think about the little girl I once was and I wish I could go back and tell her that one day, you’re going to have children of your own, and you’re going to love them so fiercely, you’re going to protect them, you’re going to build a home where they can breathe and you’re going to become everything you need right now.

 

Safety In Relationships

I feel incredibly fortunate to have a husband who became one of the safest people in my life, he has seen every version of me. The strong one, the angry one, the exhausted one, the frightened one, the grieving one and the woman who sometimes feels like she can’t carry another thing and he doesn’t make me feel like I have to hide those parts.

He’s held me when I couldn’t hold myself, he reminded me to rest, gave me space to breathe, he doesn’t make my vulnerability feel dangerous and there’s something profoundly healing about being loved by someone who doesn’t use your wounds as weapons.

For someone whose nervous system spent years expecting danger, safety in a relationship can feel like learning a completely new language.

I am still learning it.

For years, I wanted to fix my mind but now I understand that I also needed to listen to my body. Somatic Bodywork taught me that healing isn’t about forcing yourself to release the trauma.

 

Learning How to Heal

It isn’t about making yourself relive what happened, or chasing some dramatic emotional breakthrough. Sometimes healing is quiet, it’s noticing your feet on the floor, feeling your breath move, allowing your shoulders to drop, noticing your jaw, feeling your stomach, recognising when your body’s activated, recognising when you’re shutting down, learning when you need space, when you need connection, that you can say no, that you can stop, that you can rest and that your body doesn’t have to be at war with you.

 

Through breathwork, EMDR, Somatic Bodywork, grounding, meditation and trauma release exercises, I was able to develop a relationship with my body that I’d never had before.

Not one of control, but one of curiosity, compassion, listening and safety.

For a long time, I thought healing meant becoming the woman I used to be but now I realise that I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to become the woman who stayed silent, who apologised for everything, who carried everybody else’s emotions, who thought being needed was the same as being loved, who ignored her own boundaries, who believed she had to survive everything alone or who didn’t understand why her body was screaming.

I don’t want her life, but I have enormous compassion for her because she did the best she could. She survived things she didn’t have the words for, she kept going when she didn’t understand why, she protected herself in the only ways she knew.

Eventually, she led me here.

Healing has taught me something I wish someone would’ve told me years ago, that you don’t have to become who you were before trauma. You can be someone who knows themselves deeper because of what you’ve survived.

You can be softer without being weaker, you can be stronger without being hard, you can be compassionate without abandoning yourself. You can love people without giving them unlimited access to you, you can forgive yourself without forgiving what happened to you.

You can grieve people who are still alive, you can mourn the childhood you never had, you can be angry, tired, have setbacks, still have triggers and you can still be healing.

Healing isn’t linear, sometimes you’ll feel like you’ve come so far and then something happens, a smell, a voice, a place, a conversation, a relationship, a memory – and suddenly your body’s back somewhere you thought you’d left behind.

That doesn’t mean you’ve failed, it just means that you’re human.

 

My Sincere Advice

If you are reading this because you recognise yourself somewhere inside my story, please don’t decide that your current chapter is the whole book. I know what it feels like to believe that life will always feel this way, what it feels like to wake up exhausted before the day has even begun, what it feels like to smile at people while feeling completely broken inside and what it feels like to wonder whether anyone would notice if you disappeared.

But I’m here, and I want you to know that the person you are today isn’t the limit of who you can become because there’s a version of you that hasn’t met safety yet. The version of you that hasn’t laughed freely yet, the version of you that hasn’t learnt what it feels like to breathe without bracing. The version of you that hasn’t discovered how powerful your voice can be and the version of you that hasn’t realised that you’re allowed to choose yourself.

Please don’t give up on meeting them, you don’t have to heal your entire life in one day, you don’t even have to know how you’re going to heal it.

 

Sometimes you just have to get through today. One breath, one safe person, one small decision, one moment where you choose not to abandon yourself and eventually, those moments become a life.

I’ve lived through enough experiences to know that trauma doesn’t always look like what people imagine, sometimes it looks like the woman who’s successful but can’t relax, the man who jokes constantly because he doesn’t know how to talk about pain.

The mother who’s exhausted because she’s spent her whole life caring for everyone else, the person who can’t sleep, who can’t trust, who keeps going back to relationships that hurt because familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar peace. The person who drinks to quiet their thoughts, who looks completely fine, who’s desperately trying to survive another day.

I know these people because I’ve been many of them and that’s why I share my story, because I want people to feel less alone, I want people to understand their bodies, to stop hating themselves for survival responses that protected them, to understand that trauma isn’t a character flaw, that anxiety isn’t weakness, that depression isn’t laziness, that hypervigilance isn’t attention-seeking, that needing support doesn’t make you incapable and that your past doesn’t get to decide what your future has to look like.

 

I’m still healing and I still have difficult days. I still have moments where old parts of me surface, but something is different now because I listen, pause, breathe, notice, choose, have boundaries and I have people who love me.

I have children who’ve shown me a kind of love I didn’t know existed, a husband who makes my nervous system feel safer, work that allows me to turn some of the pain I experienced into purpose and I have a voice.

A voice I once thought I’d lost.

So if you ask me who I am now, I’m not the woman who survived everything, I’m the woman who survived and decided her life would become more than what happened to her.

I’m the little girl who lived through things she never should have had to live through, the teenager who didn’t understand why she felt so different, the woman who felt lost in a dark place, the mother who found another reason to live, the survivor who finally stopped blaming herself, the body that learnt how to breathe again, the voice that learnt how to speak, the soul that kept searching for meaning and the woman who finally realised that she doesn’t have to spend the rest of her life surviving.

She’s allowed to live, love, laugh, rest, create, feel, be seen, take up space and have peace.

The most beautiful part of all is that I don’t want to go back to who I was because I finally understand her.

She wasn’t weak, broken, too sensitive, difficult or unlovable.

She was a little girl doing everything she could to survive a world that didn’t yet feel safe and I am so incredibly proud of her because she kept going even when she didn’t know why, even when she couldn’t see the future, even when she thought there wasn’t one.

She kept going and because she did, that’s why I’m here, and now it’s my turn to make sure she never has to feel alone again.

I hope that you know you have that same strength within you too, to pull yourself out of the darkness and walk forwards to find the light.