The last ten years of my life have been extremely chaotic and most of it is probably because of all the trauma I suffered in my childhood – my mother got diagnosed with cancer when I was only 9 years old and my father was an alcoholic who was physically, psychologically and sexually abusive. When my parents got divorced two years later, I took care of my mother while also going to school.
Then one day, when I was 15, my mother died.
My life changed again. The little bit of childhood I had, disappeared. For the next 2 years, I went to live with my father’s aunt and then I moved out to live on my own. This is when things changed for the better – I met the man who would become my husband and I was determined to live my new life ‘normally’. I went back to school and managed to get my degree 2 years later.
That achievement made me think I had it all under control but sadly, my demons were catching up with me. Things changed from great to really bad. After a few months, I was hospitalised.
The violence I had suffered from my father was coming back in the form of flashbacks, nightmares and physical pain that invaded my body.
I thought I was going crazy.
I had seen my father being violent with my mother, but now I had memories of his violence against me.
I attended several sessions of Tipi emotional regulation, which allowed me, as time went by, to calm these memories down. After each regulation, I had the impression that I could see better, hear better, listen better, and feel better. I was living a new presence in the way I wanted to.
One of the regulations that I remember very well was about noise. The noises in the hospital room, I just couldn’t manage them.
The worst noise was the radiator. It brought me right back to a scene from the past. It was so horrible.
Delphine, the person who helped me to regulate my emotions, asked me to focus on the moment when the emotion was at its strongest. I’ll never forget it because at that moment I zoomed in on the noise of the radiator and with it, my father’s violence came back in droves.
Then Delphine asked me to close my eyes and express what physical emotions I was feeling at that moment. I told her that my heart was beating fast, I felt nauseous, I had a knot in my throat, I felt agitated, and I was breathing abnormally fast.
We went through this process three times in a row, with me experiencing different sensations, until finally my body was calm.
When I went back to my hospital room, the radiator was turned on but for the first time the noise only disturbed me slightly and no scenes from the past came up.
I was finally able to get rid of something that kept taking me back to the past against my will.
Thanks to Delphine and learning to regulate my emotions, I can now get on with my life with the confidence that traumatic memories will never take hold of me again. Despite my father’s violence and my mother’s absence, I feel alive and am living in the moment. I feel like I want to feel.
This bottomless pit took away my life for 16 years – no more. I can now live my life and it is thanks to discovering of how to regulate my emotions.
All I want to say is THANK YOU!