UNCOVERING A HIDDEN TRAUMA IN MY LIFE

When I ended my last blog I said I had no clue who I was and it was a true statement. I had never experienced the feeling of such loss as I did when I sat in my car during lunch those first few weeks at my new job. It was as if my whole world had come collapsing down on me.

If you are a reader of my blogs you know Rick and I got married August 11, 1990. We had great things continue to happen for us. His work was good and the boys, Alan was doing well and graduated high school. Now, Brandon is another story. He continued to have problems that I will share about soon. We built a new 2500 square foot home in a very nice area in Rome. Rick actually did the framing and lots of other work on it. We probably had been in it around a year when I got the promotion to this new job.

At the time, I got the promotion I didn’t even think a second thought about not taking it. Rick and I spoke at length and he wanted to be supportive of my career path. I didn’t even really consider that I would be so lost without having my family to focus on. There was also a terrible family tragedy the previous December before my promotion in May 1993. It’s so profoundly effected me too. I thought that moving might help me deal with that loss as well.

We loss three young children in my family that December 27, 1992. My sister’s 21 year old daughter, her 16 year old stepdaughter, and my brother, Jimmy’s 12 year old daughter were all killed instantly in a car accident. They were hit by a driver under the influence of drugs and alcohol. This event here had a tremendous influence on me then and the following months and has for the remainder of my life even still today. I have even been shown that I am to write a book specifically about this experience within my family. It wasn’t even the first time this type of thing had happened either. In the Winter of 1984, my oldest sisters two oldest children, Dawn and Bryan hydroplaned when hitting a large area of standing water while on their way to school and their small car hit head on into a very large tree. Dawn was 17 and a senior and Bryan was 16 and a junior in school. Dawn died instantly and Bryan succumbed to his injuries just a few hours later.

So you can see there was so many emotional things going on all at once that it was the imperfect, so to say, storm that lead me to the crisis of identity. Which sent me into a deep dive of unearthing a major hidden trauma in my life that was a big part of why I was the way I was in my relationships with others.