If you’ve experienced trauma as a child, you are not alone. More than 70-percent of us have. However, you may not know that. I didn’t.
I felt as if I lived in a swirly world where words came at me that I didn’t understand. Those words did not match what I was seeing in my life. I imagined that was what Alice in Wonderland must have experienced after tumbling down that rabbit hole.
The first three and a half years of my life felt glorious, enhanced by the love of four adults in a splendid New York City apartment on the upper west side. My grandfather’s Stradivarius violin-playing filled my world with rapture. My first word, in fact, was violin, although I reportedly said it “eyin.” When he passed, and my true dad vanished, replaced by another man who would later adopt me, we moved to a new home. And there, the terror began.
How does a four-year old make sense of violence? Books became my steady friends. And while speaking out became dangerous, I pursued the answers to the questions that elevated above my confused state of being. Books, yes.
Decades later, while working as a news anchor, one of my radio colleagues came rushing in. “I double-booked, and I have to go cover another assignment. I’ve got an author coming in. Can you interview her?”
I looked at her, stunned, “How can I interview an author if I haven’t read the book?”
“It’s okay. She’s an astrologer. You can handle it.”
I laughed, agreed, and within the hour, it happened.
In walked Diana Stone, boldly wearing the first name we both shared, and rock-solid as her last name in who she was. Diana confirmed the perfection of this new path that had serendipitously appeared for me. My books and this avenue of self-discovery aligned with my chart. She also discovered my rising sign was not Sagittarius, but on the cusp with Scorpio more in charge of my destiny, highlighting secrets.
Secrets. That is, childhood exposure to evil, trauma, abuse, adversity, and often buried over by the adults in the picture who may not want to acknowledge what is truly occurring.
In the child, that can later emerge as PTSD, the now familiar Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, numerous psychological issues including suicidal ideation, or resiliency which transforms survival into thriving.
The way out can include flipping the script, to choose another ending to your life story.
I shared what I’d gone through with the author of The Wonder of Girls, Michael Gurian, an expert on childhood issues. He shifted my life story, drawing in a similarity to Cinderella. He reminded me, in an interview, to see Cinderella as a heroine. Gurian pointed out how Cinderella is all alone and abused, but she keeps moving toward the magic, the honor and the integrity of her life, and in the end, she gets it.
When I interviewed a physicist, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf about his book Time Loops and Space Twists, I asked about an occurrence that had twice seemed impossible. It happened when I was five and when I was in my fifties.
When, as a five-year old and life seemed really tough, I wondered if I was going to die. At that moment, as magical as Glenda the Good Witch appeared to Dorothy, a beautiful woman appeared before me. She told me her name was Diana, and through her smile, she told me everything was going to be all right.
That simultaneous memory also met me as the grown woman being hypnotized. My real childhood memory and this moment stood face to face in my consciousness. The experience zoomed, like when you hold two mirrors apart from each other, and the image goes back and forth and back and forth, and you really don’t know where it started. Both are true. Dr. Wolf explained that quantum physics says the past is not perfectly determined, and that there is wiggle room in the past to adjust things.
I chose to embrace the airy-fairy, New Age, magical way of looking at life. And you know what? Science is catching up.